“I never knew caste mattered in an intimate relationship. I had been living a casteless life back at home in Ranchi (in the eastern Jharkhand state). Even though caste discrimination was rampant there, my parents hid the reality of caste from us,” said Renu (not her real name) who met me in the campus of Ambedkar University in New Delhi. “I never had any close friends, perhaps because our family was the only Shudra family living in a colony of Brahmins and Kshatriyas. We would be invited very late to social gatherings, if at all. We used different surnames, like Choudhury, Sinha, or Singh to hide our caste,”
