Ten years ago, a student at a workshop I conducted at the University of Hyderabad worked on a film about his life experiences.

His parents sent him away to the city, following an anti-Dalit massacre in his village. He did well at school and applied for a course in communications. When he checked the admission list he found a star next to his name. “The star indicated my admission was in the SC/ST quota, assumed on the basis of my identity, when actually I had got in through the ‘regular’ entrance criteria. I felt intensely conflicted,” the young man explained. On the one hand the perception that a Dalit student could only get admission via quotas made him indignant. On the other, saying “I got in on merit” felt like a betrayal of the intellectual, emotional and political history tied to his identity, which he valued. He did not want to erase his Dalit identity, but rather to define it as he saw it rather than be constricted by another’s definition. To be both — where he had come from and where he was going to. Not just star or dust, but stardust as Rohith Vemula wrote in his suicide note.