By — Siddarth Poola
Abstract
Indian queer spaces like to describe themselves as “casteless,” which is roughly as believable as a landlord describing himself as anti-property. This essay is a slightly irritated, completely sincere analysis of how caste survives inside queer community by rebranding itself as desire. Dalit and Bahujan queer people are not usually shown the door outright. They are let in on suspiciously specific terms: tough, “authentic,” edgy, and useful for a panel discussion. Drawing on existing research and activist writing, Being fetishised is not a smaller, cuter version of being accepted. It is cast with better lighting.
Introduction
Indian queer politics has a lot of performative progressiveness the way a school choir performs the national anthem. Pride marches and dating apps describe themselves as “safe spaces.” There are also court judgments that find time to quote European poets. And somewhere in between all of this, caste lets itself in, finds a chair, and nobody thinks to ask it why it’s there. For a lot of lower caste queer people, the rejection they grew up with does not stop the day they find a queer community. It just learns a new disguise. Which would be lovely, except for what is actually being flattered, and why.
This isn’t a case of simply adding “caste” to “queer” and calling the total intersectionality, as if identity were a maths worksheet. Caste actively shapes how someone experiences belonging, visibility, and desire, and these attachments continue to decide who is let into spaces that advertise themselves as free of hierarchy. Wanting and being wanted are supposed to be the nice parts of being human. That holds up fine until you notice that what’s being wanted is a stereotype standing where a person used to be. Dalit and Bahujan queer individuals are frequently treated less like people and more like a genre: gritty, “real,” rebellious, conveniently spicy. Their identity becomes a flavour you can order, rather than a fact about a life they are actually living.
This essay sits with that discomfort rather than glancing away from it, mostly because looking away from caste is something Indian queer spaces have turned into a national pastime.
The RSVP Might Let You In
Mainstream Indian queer discourse has, for a long while now, been steered largely by urban people, fluent in English, and, let us not dance around it, upper caste. The natural result is that caste gets treated as a side note instead of a foundational pillar. There is no shortage of conversation about decriminalisation, marriage equality, or corporate inclusion policies. There is a noticeable shortage of conversation about why everyone leading those conversations seems to share suspiciously similar last names. This is not an accident. Caste remains thoroughly woven into queer organising, friend circles, and leadership, regardless of how inclusive the press release sounds. Caste also decides who gets an English-medium education, a financial cushion, a flat in the ‘good end’ of town, and the general social padding required to be visibly queer without it costing you everything. An upper-caste person coming out over dinner and a Dalit person coming out in a one-room home are not living the “same” moment just because both technically fit the label “coming out.”
Dalit queer people get invited to the panel. They are invited considerably less often to actually decide anything once the meeting starts. Their presence becomes evidence that the room is inclusive, while their actual critiques of caste privilege quietly receive less attention. This kind of selective inclusion is basically a warm welcome mat laid out for fetishisation. The moment someone’s caste identity becomes useful chiefly as decoration, they stop being a person in the room and start being a symbol that the room can admire from a polite distance.
Oppression with a Personality
Attraction likes to present itself as instinct, something pre-political and entirely biological. Sociologists have spent a fair amount of time explaining, patiently, that this is not true. Who we find attractive, who we approach, and who we swipe right on is shaped by the same hierarchies shaping everything else about our lives. We just don’t enjoy thinking about that part while we’re doing it.
There is a real gap between attraction and fetishisation, even though the two can feel identical from the inside of the experience. Attraction takes in a whole person. Fetishisation zooms in on one trait and mistakes it for the entire person. Several Dalit individuals have described being approached based on assumptions tied directly to caste: toughness, hypermasculinity, easy availability, a generalised “edge.” Centuries of structural violence, it turns out, can be repackaged as a personality trait with very little effort and even less self-awareness.
Dalit men are imagined as aggressively masculine and dominant by default. Dalit women get cast as combative before they’ve said a word. Dalit trans individuals deal with additional layers of exoticisation stacked directly on top of existing stigma, which is an impressively efficient way to compound disadvantage. None of this disrupts caste in any meaningful sense. It just hands a costume and calls the costume a “type.”
Swipe Right for Stereotypes
If you want to watch caste adjust to new technology in real time, dating apps are a fairly efficient demonstration. They are sold as places where old boundaries dissolve, where anyone can match with anyone, where the algorithm supposedly doesn’t care what your surname is. In practice, caste makes the jump from the family group chat to the smartphone screen without losing its footing once.
Questions about surname, hometown, “family background,” mother tongue, and education are rarely small talk. They are casting detection, wearing a friendly tone. Preferences that present themselves as purely personal taste frequently reflect much older social structures. The interface is new. The sorting logic underneath it is not.
What makes the digital version of fetishisation especially smooth is how convenient categorisation has become. Apps train people to sort other people into types and filter the same way one sorts a grocery list. A lower caste queer person can end up reduced to a searchable tag instead of someone with a family, a history, and an actual life that exists outside the chat window. The irony, if it still counts as irony at this point, is that the technology marketed as liberating has mostly just made the old sorting system faster and considerably easier to miss.
Cited, Studied, Rarely Asked
Fetishisation does not stop at romance and dating. It shows up in representation as well. Dalit queer individuals are increasingly visible in media panels, research papers, diversity statements, and the occasional well-intentioned documentary. Visibility, however, is not the same thing as authority. Their stories tend to get narrated by someone else, framed by someone else, footnoted by someone else, frequently someone from a dominant caste institution who is thrilled about “centering marginalised voices” in their own paper’s introduction.
Intersectionality gets cited everywhere in academic and activist circles. Everyone nods along that caste matters, in theory. Far fewer people seem willing to check whether their own friend group, organisation, or dating history is shaped by caste privilege in practice. Agreeing in the abstract is free. Self-examination is the part nobody wants to put on the invoice.
The result is an odd setup where lower caste queer people are constantly discussed, studied, and quoted, while remaining underrepresented among the people actually setting the agenda or holding institutional power. Being a frequent topic of conversation is not the same as being heard inside it.
Conclusion
The fetishisation of lower caste queerness points at something Indian queer politics would rather not examine too closely. Caste does not need to vanish to coexist comfortably with a rainbow flag. It just adapts, the way it always has. Lower caste queer people keep landing in the same uncomfortable spot: overlooked when leadership and resources get distributed, suddenly very visible the moment someone wants a dose of “authenticity” or rebellion. None of that visibility amounts to empowerment. It is simply erasure wearing better clothes.
Taking this seriously would mean accepting that desire is not automatically liberating just because two queer people are involved in it. It would mean asking uncomfortable questions about who gets desired, why, and what assumptions are doing the desiring on their behalf. Until queer spaces are willing to sit with those questions, lower caste queerness will keep occupying the same strange position.
About the Author
Siddarth Poola is an undergraduate student doing law in Jindal Global Law School, with a deep interest in Water Sports and a Compunctious regard for Sports Law.
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