Om Prakash is in his sixties. For much of his working life, he laboured in the fields and homes of Nagar Brahmin families in his village in Madhya Pradesh, fixing kitchen sinks and carrying firewood, all the while keeping his gaze and voice lowered. He did not object to this, for it was, as he understood it, the arrangement. Though what he could not, and still cannot, bear is that even the youngest daughter-in-laws of Nagar Brahmin households called him by his first name, a gesture symbolising deliberate disrespect according to Indian customs. Being over thirty years their senior, the act, he said, made him feel like “a non-man.” Between 2022 and 2023, I conducted a series of interviews with Dalit people in a village in Madhya Pradesh (exact location and participants’ names have been anonymised to protect their identities) and in the United Kingdom as part of my master’s research on caste and masculinity. I wanted to understand what Brahmanical patriarchy does not just to Dalit women, whose suffering has found some space in mainstream feminist discourse thanks to the persistent efforts of Dalit feminists and activists, but also to Dalit men, whose affective and psychosocial experience of gender-based degradation has received little attention. I went in expecting resistance and instead found a story of negotiation: men who had spent their lives carefully calibrating how much of themselves they were permitted to be. The phrase “non-man” is worth sitting with. Om Prakash was not describing economic deprivation or physical violence, although he had known both. Rather he was describing something more intimate and insidious – the reality of being denied the basic social recognition that ‘manhood’ in the Indian society is supposed to confer. A casual address by a young woman in a culture where age commands deference had the power to unmake him, making him believe that the entire social order had been arranged in a way to ensure that men like him could never fully achieve ‘manhood.’ Dalit masculinity sits at the centre of a contradiction that rarely gets named. The physical violence enacted upon Dalit men is widely discussed and documented, however, the particular affective violence and masculine erasure enabled by Brahmanical patriarchal order remains comparatively under-examined. Understanding it requires looking carefully at what Brahmanical patriarchy does to the men it simultaneously fears, desires and degrades. Too much man, yet not enough“We are not even allowed to speak to girls belonging to the good part of the village,” a 17-year-old from the same village said, “If we are seen talking to them in public areas like schools or cinema halls, their brothers threaten to beat us and tease our sisters ‘to teach us a lesson.’ How can I then fall in love with one of them, let alone think of marrying these savarna girls?“The teenager said this in response to a question about B.R. Ambedkar’s argument that inter-caste marriage is the most radical tool for annihilating caste. His answer was practical and devoid of any ideological optimism. He had already done the calculation: crossing a social boundary carried retribution and his sisters would bear a share of that cost. Brahmanical patriarchy, as Uma Chakravarti argues in her seminal 1993 essay “Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India,” is a system that places caste honour in the bodies of women. Brahmin women serve as gatekeepers of lineage purity, their sexuality controlled and marriages governed by endogamy. The corollary is just as significant – the Dalit male is constituted within this system as a permanent sexual threat. Every savarna anxiety about ‘caste pollution’ runs through his body. And, so he must be controlled, humiliated and kept in his place, while the same order holds him accountable for protecting the women in his community. “While I can openly talk about my queer identity in gay circles in the city, I do not feel the same level of comfort discussing my Dalit identity,” a 23-year-old Dalit man from rural Madhya Pradesh told me. “Some [dating app] profiles clearly mention phrases like ‘No Chamars, Dalits and Valmikis required.’ Proclamations like ‘Proud Brahmin’ and ‘Proud Kshatriya’ deter me from approaching most of these guys as I fear rejection, and even worse, casteist violence at their hands. I have heard stories of my friends being forced into degrading sexual acts after their Dalit identity was discovered. One of them was even asked ‘Don’t you guys like doing such dirty stuff?’“This is where the paradox becomes most visible. Dalit men are desired and debased simultaneously. They are hyper-sexualised and cast as animalistic, uncontrollable and a threat to the social order who must be disciplined and contained. At the same time, the Brahmanical framework strips them of conventional masculine social standing, economic power and personal dignity. Too much man, but not enough. Under this order, Dalit men are feared as sexual beings, yet dismissed as social ones. The morning queue and what it costs to be a manConsider what the ‘breadwinner ideal’ requires of a man in the normative social context: stable employment, economic security for his family and the capacity to protect women from external threats. In India, these are the very terms on which masculinity is granted or withheld. And, these are also the facets that caste-based labour market exclusion makes systematically unavailable to Dalit men.Ranu, a 55-year-old woman from the same village, married a factory worker in Indore. In the beginning, she said, he was kind. Then he lost his job and took up casual construction labour, showing up at the market every day at 7 am in the hopes of being picked up for work. “He earned whatever dihadi (wages) he could and started to drink almost all day. He would not bring home any money,” she recalled, “This only stopped after he went back to his salaried factory job.” Ranu’s account traces a specific mechanism. Here, the loss of stable work produced a masculine crisis alongside financial stress, one that expressed itself through alcohol and withdrawal. When the factory closed, the ‘respectable man of the house’ script he had been handed became impossible to perform. The drinking, in this case, should be read as a response to that failure, rather than a reflection of character. This story exists across households. However, it carries particular texture when read through caste. In their landmark study Scheduled Castes in the Indian Labour Market (Oxford University Press, 2023), Sukhadeo Thorat, S. Madheswaran and B.P. Vani document the discriminatory workings of a labour market that is anything but neutral to Dalit men. In 2017-18, the unemployment rate among scheduled caste workers stood at 10.5%, compared to 8.3% for other castes. The study found that 57% of the wage gap was due to the differences in education and socio-economic standing, with the remainder attributable to caste discrimination, an effect more pronounced in the private sector where SC workers face a glass ceiling that prevents upward mobility regardless of qualification. Manual scavenging, the cleaning of human waste from open drains and dry latrines, remains a disproportionately Dalit occupation. Multiple studies confirm that workers in these roles consume large quantities of alcohol to numb themselves to the deplorable conditions they are forced to bear. This is a response to degradation and the system’s failure and not a reflection of individual traits. Caste shapes your income and determines your body’s worth, dictating what the body must endure to earn its keep. The stereotype of the ‘lazy, alcoholic Dalit man’ is a perfect caste operation – it takes the wound and relabels it as the intrinsic attribute of the wounded. The man drinking to survive the degrading daily labour becomes evidence of ‘Dalit degeneracy,’ when the reality clearly points to an inherently unjust system. Dalit masculinity and why it matters Dalit masculinity has largely been studied as a footnote to two larger conversations: as a site of caste-inflicted violence or as a vehicle for anti-caste political assertion. Both framings matter, but between them, the interior life of Dalit men gets lost. The masculine precarity and the psychic cost of an impossible script delineated by the Brahmanical order needs to be examined, rejected and replaced by a radical politics of Manuski (humanity).Om Prakash understood this. His insistence on keeping his gaze lowered or on addressing Brahmin women young enough to be his granddaughters as “Bibi“, were the careful steps taken by a man to preserve what little dignity was afforded to him. He was fully aware that any deviation from the prescribed posture of subservience could bring violence upon the people he loved. So did the 17-year-old, whose first instinct, when asked about the possibility of inter-caste marriage, was to think of his sisters. Brahmanical patriarchy emasculates Dalit men by weaponising the masculine imperative itself, turning the duty to protect into a permanent reminder of the protection they cannot provide.To study Dalit masculinity seriously is to insist on a more honest accounting of what caste actually engenders. It is to acknowledge the nuanced reality that caste operates not only through the spectacular violence of atrocity, lynching, rape and dying in a drain while manually scavenging, but also through the slow and routine erosion of a man’s self-esteem. Think of the Dalit man standing in the morning queue at the construction market. He is a stark reminder of the gap between the man he was told he should be and the man the system allowed him to become. Insisting on seriously engaging with Dalit masculinity as an analytical category does not sideline the struggles of Dalit women. It only makes the full picture visible. Intra-community relations within Dalit households and political spaces cannot improve without an honest reckoning with how Dalit masculinity is formed and what it has absorbed from the very order it seeks to resist. A Dalit politics that ignores this aspect will keep reproducing the same impasses: men who reproduce the hierarchies imposed on them and women whose struggles remain peripheral. Manuski and a new politics of manhood Dalit men carry burdens the dominant discourse has been slow to name. The more pressing question is how these burdens are borne and what tools men are given to cope with them. The Brahmanical society offers one answer – perform whatever version of masculinity is available to you and direct the frustration of your degradation downward. The corrosive power of Brahmanical patriarchy lies in how thoroughly it shapes even the language of resistance. When the protector role becomes the primary language of Dalit masculine assertion, it signals how deeply the Brahmanical logic has taken root. The mere impulse to resist ends up organised around the same terms the oppressor sets. Ambedkar and Jyotirao Phule gestured toward something different and so do the younger Dalit voices today. The Brahminical masculine ideal is built on exclusion, hierarchy and the control of women’s bodies. Rejecting it entirely, rather than striving to finally access it, is where a different politics begins. ‘The breadwinner ideal,’ the protector role, and the hierarchical manhood Dalit men are always meant to fall short of were never roles worth aspiring to begin with. These ideals were designed to exclude them. The goal is to build a politics of Manuski, as Ambedkar envisioned it, one that affirms Dalit manhood on its own terms. Dignity is not something one inherits from a system, nor is it something to strive towards within a hierarchy that was designed to destroy the very personhood of the oppressed. It is something everyone, regardless of caste, is born with and can embody beyond the hierarchies of the Brahmanical order. Om Prakash, at the end of his interview, mentioned how he now has a small farm of his own. He no longer works for Brahmin families and there is no need to lower his gaze. “Keeping one’s dignity and respect is more important than money to me now,” he said.It is a modest statement. However, in a social order that spent decades engineering his sense of himself as a “non-man,” it is also deeply radical. His exit was, ultimately, personal. Most men standing in the construction market’s morning queue have no such exit available, something that the politics of Manuski has to reckon with. One thing my study made evident is that Dalit masculinity is varied and a deeply unique positionality. It will, in time, produce its own formulas for taking back what has always been there, provided we stop viewing it through the same Brahmanical framework designed to diminish it. Vaishnavi Manju Pal is a London-based researcher of caste and lecturer in Social Sciences. She holds a Master’s degree in Gender Studies and her research specialises in caste, gender and nationalism, with particular attention to masculinities and modes of radical Dalit assertion.