Reading Homes without Windows, I frequently experienced flashes of deja vu. Although unlike Chandu Maheria, I grew up in a village setting in Maharashtra, the experiences of Dalits are essentially not very dissimilar. In addition, I was well acquainted with places and most people that figure in the book. It evoked memories of my own encounters with caste and communal violence in Gujarat.One episode returned vividly to mind: during the anti-reservation riots of 1981, while I was a student at IIM Ahmedabad, I found myself trapped by a mob in Bapunagar. The IIM campus was an elitist island that remained insulated even when the city around it burned. Yet the social activist in me often ventured into working-class neighbourhoods to understand events first hand. I had befriended several Dalit activists across Ahmedabad and regularly attended their meetings.One afternoon, in the thick of the riots, riding my Vijay scooter towards the Buddha Vihar in Bapunagar, I was stopped by half a dozen men armed with sticks and wearing the ferocious expressions of a riotous mob. When I told them where I was headed, they began manhandling me and seized my scooter. For a few moments, I genuinely thought I might become the next day’s newspaper headline. Suddenly, however, a group of 15 to 20 Dalit youths, blue scarves tied around their foreheads, emerged from a nearby basti. The attackers quickly dispersed, and I was saved.§More importantly, I witnessed first-hand the transformation in Dalit consciousness that the reservation riots had produced. That awakening was extraordinary. Gujarat’s Dalits, despite belonging to the old Bombay Presidency, had remained only marginally touched by Ambedkar’s movement, except in a few urban pockets. Even the Dalit Panther movement, which travelled from Maharashtra and survived here longer than in its birthplace, remained largely confined to Ambedkarite circles.The anti-reservation riots changed that. The assertion, anger and self-respect they generated became visible in the massive Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations of 1982 and in the growing embrace of Ambedkarite politics across Gujarat.It is against this background that Maheria’s memoir assumes particular significance.Chandu Maheria (translated by Hemang Ashwinkumar)Homes Without WindowsJuggernaut (May 2026) Over the past decades, Dalit autobiographical writing has emerged as one of the richest literary traditions in India. Inspired in part by the Marathi Dalit literary movement, writers from many linguistic regions have narrated experiences of caste oppression with remarkable power.Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan is perhaps the best-known example in Hindi, but many others, such as Bama’s Karukku in Tamil, G. Kalyan Rao’s Antarani Vasantam in Telugu and Balbir Madhopuri’s Chhangiya Rukh in Punjabi, have contributed substantially to this body of literature across the country. Maheria’s Homes Without Windows deserves a respectable place within that tradition.The book vividly portrays life in the Rajpur, Ahmedabad slums where the author grew up. The very first chapter, ‘The Mayor’s Bungalow’, takes its ironic title from a modern public toilet built in the settlement. After painting, in a tragi-comic manner, the inhuman conditions in which the residents of Rajpur and the surrounding slums lived, Maheria introduces this toilet as a symbol of “development”. Yet the facility remained largely unusable for the poor because it operated on a user-fee basis that none in the slum could afford.For the residents, it stood less as a public amenity than as a monument to a model of development that was ostensibly meant for them but effectively excluded them.In that sense, the toilet becomes a metaphor for the neoliberal development that has shaped India since the mid-1980s, catering primarily to the aspirations of the emerging middle classes. Roads, flyovers, malls, multiplexes, corporate hospitals and elite schools may inspire pride and reinforce the official narrative of a rapidly advancing India, even an emerging superpower. Yet they are largely useless to the vast majority who remain excluded from their benefits.Public resources, generated by the taxes of ordinary people, are increasingly deployed to create islands of comfort, consumption and spectacle that those very people rarely access.The obsession with flyovers illustrates this logic. They are built to enable car owners to travel faster and more comfortably. More cars generate demands for more flyovers, which in turn encourage greater automobile dependence, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Meanwhile, those who rely on walking, cycling or overcrowded public transport – the majority who subsidise this infrastructure through their labour and taxes – remain largely invisible in planning priorities.Indeed, one of the great strengths of Dalit memoirs such as this is that they reveal social realities often missed by mainstream sociology. They provide an insider’s view of everyday life, exposing structures of exclusion, humiliation, adaptation and survival that rarely find a place in academic theories or policy discourse. Through lived experience, they generate sociological insights that formal research frequently overlooks.§One of the most interesting chapters in the book is ‘That Fellow, Gandhido’, where Maheria explores the deep hostility many Dalits feel towards Gandhi. For many Dalits, Gandhi’s opposition to separate electorates for the Depressed Classes and the resulting Poona Pact of 1932 symbolise a historic betrayal. The sentiment has become so strong that September 24, the date on which the Pact was signed, is increasingly observed as a Black Day in Dalit circles.This antagonism extends even to language. Many contemporary Dalits object to the use of honorifics such as “Gandhiji”. Maheria uses this debate to reflect on the politics of naming in India, where forms of address often carry ideological and social meanings.Yet, rather than reproduce the conventional anti-Gandhi narrative, Maheria offers a more nuanced assessment. He acknowledges Gandhi’s opposition to separate electorates but also reminds readers that Gandhi played a significant role in bringing the question of untouchability to the centre of India’s public life. He points to Gandhi’s decision to admit an untouchable family into the Kochrab Ashram despite considerable opposition, and to his attempt to forge a new social identity for untouchables through the term Harijan.Whether one agrees with him or not, the chapter stands out for its willingness to question settled orthodoxies and examine one of the most contentious episodes in modern Dalit politics with uncommon intellectual honesty. Photo: Public domain.Maheria observes that such aspects of Gandhi’s legacy are often ignored or dismissed in Dalit discourse.More provocatively, he revisits a largely forgotten feature of the Poona Pact itself. While the Pact replaced separate electorates with joint electorates, it also introduced a system of primary elections whereby Dalit voters would first select a panel of Dalit candidates before the final election in the joint electorate. This mechanism was intended to preserve a measure of Dalit control over the choice of their representatives while accommodating Gandhi’s insistence on a common Hindu electorate.Maheria’s point is not that the Poona Pact was free of flaws, but that many critics focus exclusively on the loss of separate electorates while paying insufficient attention to this safeguard and its possible implications.Whether one agrees with him or not, the chapter stands out for its willingness to question settled orthodoxies and examine one of the most contentious episodes in modern Dalit politics with uncommon intellectual honesty.§The chapter, ‘Creed, Conversion and Childhood’ is a nostalgic account of the pervasive influence of Christianity in Rajpur and the close cultural interaction between Dalit Hindus and local Christian communities. Far from being seen as an alien faith, Christianity formed an integral part of everyday Dalit life.The author traces this connection to his birth at St Mary’s Nursing Home, popularly known as “Mother’s Dispensary”, where newborns of all faiths were blessed in the adjoining church before being taken home. Such was Christianity’s influence that even the author’s atheist grandfather had a cross tattooed over the name “Rama”, while Dalits commonly used the word deval – usually associated with churches – to refer to Hindu temples, reflecting a remarkable cultural blending.The church also occupied an important place in the social imagination of local youth. Sunday Mass attracted not only worshippers but also Dalit boys fascinated by the confidence, style and social freedom of Christian young women and by the more relaxed interactions between the sexes.Christmas celebrations, especially the week-long Natal Garba, were the cultural high point of the year. Unlike the gender-segregated Navaratri celebrations in the chawls, Christmas Garba brought men and women together in public dance and festivity, captivating Hindu Dalits. The festivities culminated in the grand Natal Juloos, a colourful procession featuring Santa Claus, music, dance and public addresses to “Hindu brothers and sisters”.Through these memories, Maheria evokes a world where Christianity exercised a powerful cultural attraction not through conversion alone but through everyday contact, social openness and the promise of dignity and modernity, reminding readers of a time when religious boundaries were far more fluid than they are today.In another chapter, ‘Your Chappals, Our Skulls’, Maheria reflects on the symbolic place of footwear in Dalit life. While Gujarati has many words for shoes and sandals, the Dalit vocabulary condensed them into the loaded term khasadan, which came to signify humiliation, degradation and the threat of violence. His uncle’s oft-repeated phrase, “Your chappals, our skulls”, captured the everyday reality of caste domination, where Dalits were expected to endure insult and physical abuse as a matter of course.The chapter offers a chilling glimpse into the feudal order that persisted in rural Gujarat well into the 1970s. In some areas, caste power was so absolute that a Dalit man finding a pair of shoes outside his house understood it as a sign that a Darbar landlord was inside exercising a presumed sexual claim over his wife.Through such stark memories, Maheria conveys the extreme vulnerability, humiliation and powerlessness that shaped Dalit existence under the combined weight of caste and feudal authority.All 11 chapters of the book are rich in such sociological insights into Gujarati society. Behind the carefully manufactured narrative of Gujarat’s development lies the harsh reality of the lives of the majority of its people – a reality that strips away the myth of the Gujarat model and shows the state to be no better than many others in its treatment of the poor and the marginalised.§This is a truly remarkable book: a vivid, empathetic and often devastating portrait of Dalit working-class life in urban Gujarat. Maheria combines sharp observation with an understated literary elegance that allows everyday experiences to reveal larger structures of caste and power.The narrative is intensely visual. Schools, hospitals, public offices, community toilets, chawls, streets, festivals and neighbourhoods come alive through his descriptions. His recollections of food, monsoons, footwear, labour and childhood adventures are never merely nostalgic; they illuminate the social world of caste from within.Particularly memorable are his portraits of family members. His father emerges as a resolute Ambedkarite whose understanding of caste and Hinduism was forged through lived experience rather than academic study. His mother appears as a figure of extraordinary resilience, negotiating poverty and social exclusion with dignity and humour. These portraits are among the book’s greatest strengths, revealing how ordinary Dalit families preserved self-respect amid conditions of chronic deprivation.The memoir’s strength lies as much in its literary quality as in its social insight. Maheria blends humour with suffering and irony with indignation, producing a narrative that is deeply moving without lapsing into sentimentality. His prose is sharp yet compassionate, exposing oppression without bitterness or caricature.Hemang Ashwinkumar’s translation is equally commendable. Fluent and unobtrusive, it preserves the texture, idiom and cultural nuances of Gujarati Dalit life while reading with the ease of an original English work.Most importantly, the book uncovers a Gujarat often hidden from view. Beyond the familiar narratives of Gandhi, development, entrepreneurship or communal violence lies a society profoundly shaped by caste. Through his vivid account of segregation, humiliation and survival, Maheria takes the reader to the heart of that reality, producing a work that ranks among the finest examples of Dalit life-writing.If I have one regret, it is that Maheria does not dwell more extensively on some of the major political turning points that transformed Dalit consciousness in Gujarat. I had expected a fuller treatment of the anti-reservation riots of 1981, the remarkable political awakening that followed, the paradoxical participation of sections of Dalits in the anti-Muslim mobilisations of the mid-1980s and thereafter, and the 2002 carnage, which I too witnessed closely as a civil rights activist travelling frequently to Gujarat.These episodes marked important nodes in the socio-political transformation of both Gujarat and its Dalit communities. A more sustained engagement with them would have added another layer of historical richness.Yet this is not a criticism of the book so much as an expression of a reader’s desire for more. Every memoir is shaped by the author’s choices, memories and priorities. Maheria set out not to write a political history of Gujarat but to reconstruct a world of lived experience. In that task he succeeds brilliantly.Homes Without Windows is much more than a personal memoir. It is a social document, a cultural archive and a work of literature of considerable merit. It reminds us that the history of caste is not written only in laws, movements and political struggles; it is also inscribed in homes, streets, schools, toilets, festivals, friendships and family memories. Through humour, sorrow, irony and compassion, Maheria has given us an unforgettable account of that world.Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO of Petronet and professor at IIT Kharagpur and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.