The Invisibles: Outlook Chronicles How Caste Shapes India

The recently held Bihar assembly elections proved once again how entrenched caste is in Indian society.

For Outlook, telling stories of the oppressed, going to the remotest part of the country to report on the most powerless people, and bring to the readers the most inhuman and violent atrocities on the Dalits have always been a very important area to cover. When the bright, young Dalit student Rohith Vemula couldn’t take the insults and injustices anymore and took his own life leaving behind a moving letter of all that he suffered from the upper caste colleagues and faculty, Outlook dedicated a cover to him. We have put Babasaheb Ambedkar on the cover on various occasions whenever his agitation and activism have been either used or questioned by the ruling regimes at the Centre and states. We have also reported on how the OBCs (Other Backward Castes) are not a homogenous group, but there are fissures within and fight for hierarchy. Recently, we celebrated 100 years of caste warrior Periyar’s Dravidian Movement and how it dictates politics in Tamil Nadu even today.

The Dignity in Self-Respect: How Periyar and the Self-Respect Movement took shape in Tamil Nadu and why the state has done better than the rest of the country on many social, civil and public parameters

This Godly Delusion: Is the controversy over the Ambedkar cartoon warranted? Can’t we laugh at our revered?

To Conquer or Conserve?: The caste census is generating heated debate, but even its most ardent proponents are not able to articulate a plan about how to use the resulting data

Civic Muck: It is not the lack of civic sense, but caste pride that is responsible for the Indian cleavage

The Global Dalit, the Indian Black: Indian scholar Suraj Yengde and his mentor, the African-American philosopher and public intellectual, Cornel West, talk about the robust tradition of Dalit-Black solidarity

Not Quite an End Note: In the end, the system got Rohith Vemula. He died thinking he could not win the caste battle, little knowing that he had started a war

This article appeared as 'The Invisibles' in Outlook’s January 01, 2026, issue '30 years of Irreverence' which commemorates the magazine's 30 years of journalism. From its earliest days of irreverence to its present-day transformation, the magazine has weathered controversy, crisis, and change.