My five years of stay in Europe and America had completely wiped out of my mind any consciousness that I was an untouchable and that an untouchable wherever he went in India was a problem to himself and to others. Bu.t when f came out of the station fin Bawd(?) my mind was considerably disturbed by a question, "Where to go? Who will take me?" I felt deeply agitated. Hindu hotels, called Vishis, I knew, there were. They would not take me. The only way of seeking accommodation therein was by impersonation. But I was not prepared for it because I could well anticipate the dire consequences which were sure to follow if my identity was discovered as it was sure to be.
– BR Ambedkar in Waiting fora Visa
Unwilling also to impose on friends — one a caste Hindu and the other a Brahmin- Christian — a young, scholastic Bhimrao did take recourse to impersonation. He faked a Parsi identity to take shelter at a Parsi inn, and was unceremoniously turned out when discovered. Humiliated by stick-wielding Parsis, Ambedkar said, "It was then for the first time that I learnt that a person who is an untouchable to a Hindu is also an untouchable to a Parsi".
Not much has changed in India since that time in 1918 even for an educated, urban dalit. A dalit continues to face the prospect of getting booted out of public spaces; but more shameful still, even today, a dalit is under pressure to pass for a non-dalit. As much became evident to those of us not otherwise bothered by this at a seminar in Pune on 'Caste arid Discourses of the Mind'. Overseen by Sushrut Jadhav, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist of dalit-chambar origin, currently at University College, London, and Pune-based Bhargavi P Davar, a Tamil-Brahmin researcher on women's issues in mental health and director of the Bapu Trust, the two-day seminar (14-15 December 2002) put caste on the couch. Dalits, brahmins, non-brahmins, Americans, Europeans and a Japanese grappled with the issues at hand. The seminar was, ironically, partfunded by a trust that takes its name from Sir Dorabji Tata, a Parsi.