Rudraneil Sengupta profile background image
Rudraneil Sengupta profile image

Rudraneil Sengupta

Freelance Journalist

Rudraneil Sengupta is a journalist and author based in New Delhi.

April 03, 2023

The hip-hop artist Arivu was in his final year of engineering college when it hit home that he was a Dalit — one of the "untouchables" in India’s deeply entrenched caste system.

He had led a relatively sheltered childhood, born and raised in a small Dalit-majority town called Arakonam, 70 km from Chennai, the capital of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.