Aka Mainstream Savarnas vs Alternative Savarnas? Or mapping how caste haunts cultural participation for Dalit youth.
I come from the generation that didn't stream music, but watched music videos on Sun Music and 9XM, later downloaded songs from songs.pk or shared via Bluetooth or swapped memory cards. When I was 21, I asked my then-boyfriend if he could share any music he had on his phone. He said he didn't have any songs I would like. I felt challenged and asked him to play one. He played Led Zeppelin's Babe I'm Gonna Leave You.
At that time, I had two options to heal my bruised ego: tell him I loved the song, ie show that I was capable of enjoying something like this. Or tell him this was absolute trash and project that it's actually him with bad, unrefined music taste. I searched to see if there was a middle ground. I didn’t fall in love with the song. I fell into the pressure of having to love it.
This is the thing about growing up with a rural, lower-class, Dalit life. We don’t inherit the cultural hand-me-downs that others take for granted. We don't have cool uncles who went to college, partied hard, and discovered Guns N' Roses on a psychedelic trip, ending up with a large CD collection. We don't even have friends who can steal one or two from their father's music collection. Everything we like, we built brick by brick, with careful precision. One wrong move could make you seem foolish, irrelevant, or worse, problematic. Or you should have a strong political reason to actually enjoy something. You didn’t just have to like a song, you had to be able to defend it. Taste is experimented with, but also risky. This is the position "woke" young Dalits subject themselves to.
We often speak about knowing the right artists to justify our presence in cultural spaces and artistic conversations, to be taken seriously. But that "knowing" is a heavy word. In my experience, it's not simply about what you know and like, but also about why you like it. You must constantly prove you’re not just consuming culture, but interrogating it. You are a walking, breathing thesis on Dalit life to the spaces which grant you entry.
On the contrary, I grew up around uncles who loved modern interpretations of folk music. But most of the time, it sounded poorly recorded or barely arranged. My father even owned a CD of Karinthalakkoottam, the famous folk band from Kerala. But I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it. The CD felt like it was captured live in some open space, full of background noises and inconsistencies. I didn’t have the vocabulary then, but what I thought was bad production, I internalized as cultural inferiority. I assumed that this is just how folk music sounds. So I shamefully distanced myself from it.
Folk music often sounds “unpolished” because the artists don’t have access to fancy studios, sound engineers, or expensive equipment. Most of the time the music is recorded live, often on-site, with minimal editing or mastering. But instead of seeing this as a result of material inequality, we’re taught to hear it as a lack of refinement. What we call “bad production” is actually a reflection of structural exclusion, reminding us that caste and class dictate who gets to sing and who gets to sound good while singing.
This is one of the challenges Dalit youth face: having to dismantle the casteism we were taught to internalize. I thought I was just curating better taste. But really, I was trying to dissociate from what the world had already seen as ugly.
Now, when I see songs like Karinkaliyalle or Ellolam Thari (recent viral songs rooted in folk tradition) mocked online, usually with reels made by poor people with "cringe" edits, I smile sadly knowing ten years ago, I might’ve laughed too. Because back then, divorcing myself from the parts of my community that the world called "low" felt like a way to be accepted.
In school, I carried around a sense of cultural superiority because I listened to Bollywood music, watched Hindi channels and memorized song lyrics from TV. It felt like a mark of progressiveness and being modern. Because most of my classmates weren’t even allowed to watch Hindi channels, their parents found the way women dressed in those shows inappropriate and vulgar for teen audiences. But my parents, in their own way of "progressiveness," didn’t care much about that sort of thing. So I had access to cable, to music, to glossy colors and sound delivered to me as modernity. I mistook that access for refinement and more exposure. What I didn’t realize then was that even my idea of what was “better” was shaped by caste-coded media.
At the same time, I didn’t know that what I was consuming was just mainstream stuff, flat, formulaic, and looked down upon in so-called "cultured" spaces. I had no idea that there was something called counterculture, a world of independent films, music and artists that existed far away from the cable television which gave me access to what looked like modernity. I didn’t know that in elite circles, quoting Bollywood lyrics didn’t make you cultured, it made you cringe. So even as I basked in my early access to music and cinema, I was still outside the doors of cultural capital. I wasn’t part of the countercultural cool, I didn’t even know it existed. And once I did, I started shedding my love for the mainstream too, chasing a new kind of approval.
And now, social media is full of nostalgic reclamation. Everyone's suddenly looking back at old movies and songs, revisiting scenes we once mocked as "cringe" and reframing them as powerful, iconic or authentic. Even Ellolam Thari, a song once laughed at, has quietly started to receive appreciation. They're saying, we never hated the song, just the way it was used. But that’s not true. We hated it because poor people made reels with it.
It’s a strange cultural loop. Appreciate what is unpopular, condemn it once it becomes popular, and then reclaim it after the hype dies down. It’s never about the quality of the content. It’s about controlling the meaning of things, deciding what’s cool and what’s trash. And almost always, that control sits in the hands of the same people who’ve always defined culture.
Also, I often doubt whether we truly have a real counterculture in India. What we tend to call “alternative” or “underground” is, more often than not, just another version of savarna dominance dressed in cooler clothes, framed in grittier aesthetics, performed in smaller venues or posted on edgier Instagram handles. It’s one set of mainstream savarnas versus another set of underground savarnas. The players change, but the power doesn’t. The cultural capital remains firmly in the hands of the same caste groups, whether it’s in Bollywood, indie scenes, art spaces or film festivals.
I wonder, what culture do these “alternative” savarnas actually present? Because when you peel back the layers, it often feels like nothing more than a rebranding of the same savarna anxieties, desires and aesthetics. It’s the same stories written in different fonts. They champion “the margins” as long as they get to remain at the center of the curation, the conversation, the camera frame. Their culture often isn’t built from lived reality or community memory. They might reject Bollywood and commercialism, but rarely question how their own platforms and aesthetics still thrive on caste capital.
Real Dalit, Adivasi and queer voices, when they do emerge, are still treated as anomalies. They're platformed occasionally, often tokenized and rarely centered. They're expected to either conform to the taste of liberal savarna audiences or remain invisible. Even folk music, which should belong to the people who created and lived it, becomes most visible only after it has been reinterpreted and reproduced by alt-savarnas. What we often praise as “raw,” “earthy,” or “authentic” is still controlled and distributed by those who’ve always held the power to define what art is. There is a deep structural violence in that.
At this point, I don't even know what I like anymore, because I spent years trying to build taste. Now I don't even know what I personally like in the pursuit of trying to be a woman of culture. And then there come problematic artists, and you feel personally betrayed once you know what they did.
Can I, as everything I am, completely divorce myself from external validation and embrace internal authenticity? How much of internal authenticity is going to be externally validated? How much of external validation feels authentic internally?
Can I ever fully divorce myself from the desire to be seen? Does internal authenticity even exist without an external world to bounce against?