WHEN RADHIKA, a 23-year-old Dalit trans woman, was growing up in a slum in the western part of Delhi, India’s capital, she never thought she’d move beyond her neighborhood to become part of the city’s queer elite. Her home, barely 25 Gaj of space (equivalent to 225 square feet), which housed twelve members of her extended family, is situated in a colony near a sewage drain in an area dominated by caste-marginalized people.
“Very early on, I realized that I am in a losing battle owing to my trans queer identity, marginalized caste, and economic class group,” said Radhika, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym to protect her identity. “So growing up, for the longest time, I had to strive harder to hide my sexuality, along with the caste I was born into, to jell with people, whether it was in school or in my neighborhood, until I reached college. I think I still feel the exhaustion from trying harder to perform masculinity or have any money.”
The Indian caste system is a centuries-old social hierarchy that divides people into rigid, hereditary groups based on birth, traditionally determining their occupation, social status, and access to resources, with marginalized castes facing systemic discrimination and exclusion. The people from historically oppressed and excluded groups under the caste system are called “Dalit.”
Radhika studied hard to secure admission into Hindu College, India’s top-ranked institution of higher learning, working several jobs from an early age to pay for her education. However, Radhika hadn’t always been excellent at her studies. “I was in fifth grade when I stopped going out to play with other kids who bullied me because of my girly posture. I realized if I didn’t step out of the house, the bullying would stop. That was the first year I came first in my class,” she recalled, adding that she soon realized that to escape bullying she would have to overcompensate through hyper-masculinity. And if she had to escape caste-induced poverty, she needed to perform well at her studies, get into a better school, and take up small jobs to pay for her education. Radhika was about thirteen or fourteen when she got her first teaching gig.
But reaching college didn’t turn out as Radhika had imagined either. Stepping into that institution meant stepping beyond the realm of her ghetto. While the two areas are in the same city, they are vastly divided by visible and invisible identity disparities. Her college, located in one of North Delhi’s poshest areas, was filled mostly with upper-class, upper-caste students. The weight of this disparity defined her college experience. While she was able to articulate her sexuality, learn about the queer community, and come to terms with her trans identity in college, her caste and class location pulled her down. Woke student circles spoke loudly against casteism yet sidelined her from the discourse because of her plain and modest appearance. In upper-class queer settings, where fashion often signals queerness, anyone who’s not eye-catching is quickly pushed aside.
She believes upper-caste people’s progressiveness towards caste is performative—restricted to social media stories and public speeches, while their words seldom translate into any deep connections. For Dalit trans people, this double bind is sharper—their gender nonconformity already makes them hyper-visible targets of scrutiny, while their caste location and modest means make them invisible within elite queer and progressive spaces. Even at queer community events, Radhika’s caste identity made her feel excluded: “I was so excited to go as it was my first queer event where I was going to meet other gender minority people, but they were largely elite, as the event was happening in a buzzing South Delhi venue. No one came to talk to me that day, and it made me feel so confused that now I’m at a place where I should have felt comfortable, but even here my caste and class marginalization commanded my existence.”
Radhika’s experience lays bare the layered exclusions that caste, class, and gender identity together enforce, even within spaces imagined as liberatory. Her journey from a cramped ghetto home to an elite Delhi college reflects resilience but also reveals how marginalization mutates—moving from overt bullying in her neighborhood to subtle yet persistent alienation in India’s queer and progressive circles. What emerges is a sharp reminder that queerness alone cannot undo entrenched caste hierarchies.
§
For Dalit trans people, the promise of safe spaces often remains conditional, fractured by the same structures of privilege they sought to escape. Mapping a city through these identity markers reveals a lot about how the geography of a city is sharply marked by who gets to live where and navigate which places, and how those who try to break into places not originally meant for them are treated with disdain. This is one reason why the movement of Dalit trans people across urban spaces is that much more important and even urgent.
It is with this thought of mapping and reimagining Delhi through the lens of trans people belonging to Dalit Bahujan communities that Dalit queer activist and geographer Dhiren Borisa curated and edited, along with Dhrubo Jyoti, Prateek Draik, and Project Mukti, Across the Nala [Sewage Drain]: A Queer Dalit Bahujan Zine of Stories from Delhi. The zine explores a complex range of queer imagination and desires of Delhi while sharing a range of vulnerabilities that Dalit queer people feel in different parts of the city.
“Across the Nala attempts to think of queerness from the otherwise,” said Borisa, an assistant professor at the Jindal Global Law School who teaches courses on gender and sexuality studies. “It is about imagining spaces of freedom and negotiating queer cartographies through a lower caste and working-class migrant background. What the city offers them in terms of desire and what it does to that desire. It also explores if cities are also aspiring bodies like us and if they are sexy, then who within it gets to be sexy?”
Historically, the Sahibi River was a natural, seasonal (rain-fed) river originating in Rajasthan, flowing through Haryana, and entering Delhi before merging with the Yamuna. The zine says that people seek respectability and access to expressing their queer desires by shunning their association with the Sahibi, claiming instead that they live in affluent areas like Rajouri Garden and Punjabi Bagh. “These are not mere queer negotiations of the city,” the text of the zine says. “These parts of the city saturate with the sounds of police sirens, disputes, violence, and theft—elements that etch a narrative of criminality onto the bodies of Dalits, shaped by the colonial legacy of caste and carcerality.”
India’s legacy of discriminating against the Dalit trans people dates back to the colonial era. The British regime criminalized the gender-nonconforming people who were from marginalized caste groups under various laws, including the Criminal Tribes Act Amendment (1897), which specifically targeted the Hijra community, a group of trans, intersex, or eunuch people who are acknowledged as a third gender. Under this law, Hijras were criminalized merely for existing in public spaces, stripped of the right to wear feminine clothing, perform, or engage in livelihoods like badhai (ritual blessings at births/weddings).
Of course, the caste system long predates the arrival of Europeans, but colonial codification of caste hardened its divisions into law, which was reinforced by a Victorian morality that pathologized both caste-marginalized livelihoods and non-normative genders and sexualities. Consequently, Dalit trans feminine people were doubly targeted, as we have seen in the case of Radhika.
Although pre-colonial South Asia had ambivalent but recognized spaces for gender-variant communities (Hijras, Jogappas, Aravanis, etc.)—who were often tied to temples, ritual economies, or localized patronage systems—colonial modernity dismantled these communities, which were criminalized and labeled as “immoral.” And these violent markers of targeting trans people continue today. It hasn’t been long since the colonial law criminalizing homosexuality was turned down by the Indian Supreme Court, in September 2018.
§
While the layers of marginalization endure, one visionary from India’s freedom struggle is credited, and for good reason, with fighting against caste and gender oppression: B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956). In an article for The Scroll, writers Swarupa Deb and Aniket Nandan write that Ambedkar believed in socio-political transformations that could overhaul an exclusionary and oppressive social structure. For him, a just society ensures equal opportunities, social justice, and dignity for everyone, irrespective of caste, gender, or ethnicity. Ambedkar also co-wrote India’s constitution with other visionaries and pushed for caste-based reservations that continue to benefit and uplift oppressed people from Dalit communities to access education.
However, the intersection of sexual and caste identity continues to evade mainstream discussions. The zine not only brings this crucial discussion to the fore while outlining the urban spaces that clearly divide people by caste, gender and class. It also brings together ten Dalit Bahujan queer people and, through examining their experiences of moving around in Delhi, builds a stark imagery of the complex expressions of self, guided by the spaces they occupy in the city. Their stories sketch out their discomfort and comfort within queer circles, the absences of caste discourse, and how it channels desire and sexuality for them. For example, on dating apps, some upper-caste men flaunt their status and explicitly discourage men of lower castes from applying. For many Dalit Bahujan queer and trans people, caste shame continues to overshadow desire and sexuality.
Dhiran Borisa, curator of Across the Nala, talks about his own experiences of being a Dalit gay man and how he has had to hide behind his professorship even to access accommodations in the city, where he would be asked intrusive personal questions. “These questions haven’t been either-or questions of queerness and caste respectability, but they are enmeshed into each other,” he said. “They are reminders of the fact that I’m able to navigate these spaces because of the kind of life journey I have had and the position I have come to embody now.” But he adds that he also knows that it’s all fragile: “The way in which the wokeness and the progressiveness or even queerness of the city invites us into spaces, it is equally humiliating when it wants to show you the door.”
Another journal that brings together essays on trans experiences of urban spaces is Urban Kaleidoscope by the People’s Resource Center. Its associate editor, Krishanu, an upper-caste queer and neurodivergent person, shares a fresh perspective on navigating the city, with all its friendliness to their appearance. Their larger challenge was that navigating life in smaller towns and cities while growing up didn’t allow them any space to understand their sexuality. Moving to Delhi gave them that space, freedom, and agency to be as they are while dealing with the economic and environmental challenges of this city.
“This is the only city that I have lived in for as long as ten years, and every locality I have been to, I have always found friendly neighborhoods,” they said. “It’s probably because I am a trans femme person, I receive a fair amount of love from strangers. While I don’t want to discount the discomfort and the violence I have also faced, I just don’t want violence to define my experience of the city.”
They say city residents have a familiarity and a greater comfort with trans femme people. “As a trans femme person, existing in different public places has meant everything to me because people also share with you in ways that is very satisfying,” Krishanu said. “The many ways of existing for gender variant communities has been around historically, and that widens the sense of acceptance for me in society.”
The experiences of Radhika, Borisa, and Krishanu give a sense of the complex terrain that Dalit trans queer people must navigate in urban India—a landscape in which liberation and exclusion exist in uncomfortable proximity. While cities like Delhi offer unprecedented freedom for gender expression and queer identity, they simultaneously reproduce the very caste hierarchies that progressive spaces claim to challenge.
Poorvi Gupta, an independent journalist based in New Delhi, writes on sociopolitical issues from a gender lens for such outlets as The Polis Project, Al Jazeera, Devex, and LGBTQ+ Nation.
