LGBT Community Center, Manhattan
January 30th, 2026
From Shadows to the Stars: Honoring Rohith Vemula’s Legacy
Ten Years After
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Rohith Vemula was a 26-year-old Dalit PhD scholar, who was institutionally murdered on January 16, 2016 for resisting casteist policies at his campus at Hyderabad Central University in India.
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Rohith Vemula’s life and legacy had an indelible impact on the global anti-caste movement. Millions of Dalit people around the world, including Yashica Dutt were galvanized to confront their own caste identity after encountering his heartbreak from fighting against an unjust system that Rohith left behind in his last letter. His life and legacy led to a new chapter in global awareness and visibility around caste, leading to caste protection policies across the US, UK and Australia.
Yashica Dutt, who wrote Coming Out as Dalit in part, inspired from Rohith’s life and legacy, decided to organize this event to honor his memory, and create a wider space for Dalit narratives in New York. -
In the tenth year since Rohith’s passing, New York City has witnessed an unprecedented coalition of South Asian political power with the election of the city’s first South Asian Mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Meanwhile, in India there is a renewed call for necessary protections against the deaths of Dalit students on Indian campuses like Rohith.
This event marked the legacy of a Dalit icon who deserves rightful recognition and announced the presence of Dalit political power as a formidable force in New York City.
Organized by Dalit author and journalist, Yashica Dutt
After reading Rohith’s letter, Dutt decided to reveal her own lower-caste identity and ‘Come Out as Dalit’ in a note, which also became the title of her award-winning book. Ten years after, it was only fitting that Rohith’s legacy be honored and remembered as the originator of a new chapter of anti-discourse around the world.
Dutt started planning for this event in 2025, and through the generous support of organizations like Ambedkar International Center, Ambedkar King’s Study Circle, Hindus for Human Rights, SACRED Chicago, Indian American Muslim Council and Shri Guru Ravidas Sabha of New York, she decided to create this historic tribute.
With volunteer support from Rutgers Anti-Caste Collective and friends, the event saw a massive attendance of more than 120 people, many of whom traveled from Philadelphia, New Jersey and Chicago to participate. NY State Comptroller candidate Raj Goyle spoke at the event about confronting the presence of caste within South Asian spaces in the United States.
Rohith Vemula’s institutional murder at the Hyderabad Central University in India in 2016 was a seismic event that shaped the modern global anti-caste discourse in more ways than one. As a deeply beloved student leader who lived his life based on the principles of Dalit iconoclast leader, Dr BR Ambedkar, Vemula’s passing sent shockwaves across India because it came after months of systemic casteist exclusion and discrimination from the same institution that had a pattern of abuse against Dalit and caste oppressed students.
Rohith Vemula’s last letter carried the burning indictment of a caste-afflicted state whose reckoning came through thousands of Dalit and caste-oppressed people across the globe confronting the exclusion lower caste individuals still face in South Asian spaces.
Dalit Storytellers
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Dalit Art
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Anti-Caste Music
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Documentary Screening
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Dalit Storytellers 〰️ Dalit Art 〰️ Anti-Caste Music 〰️ Documentary Screening 〰️
Rohith Vemula's Legacy
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Video Tributes
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Dalit political power in NYC
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Anti-caste community
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Rohith Act
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Rohith Vemula's Legacy 〰️ Video Tributes 〰️ Dalit political power in NYC 〰️ Anti-caste community 〰️ Rohith Act 〰️
Watch the entire event video
Dalit and anti-caste storytellers remember Rohith Vemula’s Legacy
Divya Malhari
Divya Malhari is a graduate student at Columbia University. Her work focuses on Dalit women in the southern part of India and examines the way their lives shape their language. Previously, she taught in India as an assistant professor of English and has been writing at datlitwriter.wordpress.com. She has previously written for The Wire, The News Minute, Vogue India and The Outlook.
Kshipra Uke
Kshipra Uke is a prominent Dalit political scientist who organized and led a protest rally of 10000 people to RSS headquarters in Nagpur on Jan, 30, 2016 under the banner of”Rohith Vemula fights back”.
Manohar Boda
Manohar Boda is a PhD student of Anthropology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick whose work focuses on the Anthropology of State, City, Caste, DNT communities, and Marginality. He has a long association with anti-caste movement, and currently coordinates The Global Anti-Caste Thought Graduate Working Group supported by Global Asias at Rutgers.
Yashica Dutt is a prominent Dalit leader and author of the award-winning Coming Out as Dalit, which was inspired in part by Rohith Vemula’s last letter. Dutt is also the festival director for From Shadows to the Stars: Honoring Rohith Vemula’s Legacy.
Yashica Dutt
PhD Student at University of Pennsylvania, founder and editor of The Satyashodhak, a digital publication focused on social issues and translation of tests from the anti-caste archive. Previously, he has worked with The Quint and EPW, contributed to The Hindu, The Caravan, The Wire, The Print, etc. writing extensively about the anti-caste movement.
Tejas Harad
Prachi Patankar
Prachi Patankar is a New York-based feminist and an anti-caste activist and organizer whose work whose links the local and the global, personal memory and political struggle. Prachi is currently working on a book of creative nonfiction that blends memoir and political essay, recounting Indian feminist and rural activism from the 1940s to today.
Video Tributes from Rohith Vemula’s Family and Friends
Dontha Prashanth, Rohith's friend and one of the five students suspended alongside him from HCU (left,top)
Radhika Vemula, Rohith’s mother (center)
Jignesh Mevani, Indian Politician, Founder of the UNA Movement that took place in the aftermath of Rohith’s passing (right, bottom)
Video: Members of the Rutgers Anti-Caste Collective closing the event with anti-caste music and slogans
Honoring Rohith Vemula Event Zine
Exclusive ‘Honoring Rohith Vemula’s Legacy’ Event Zine
A curated selection of essays, poetry, tributes and reflections from dozens of Dalit and caste oppressed folks, including several of Rohith’s close friends, about what his life and resistance has meant to them.
Zine Contributors
Ganthoti Nagaraju
Vijeta Kumar
Mimi Mondal
Bahujan Students
Front
Dontha Prashanth
Vikas Tatad
Rahul Sonpimple
Shalini K
Sessiah Chemudugunta
Swati Kamble
Aleena
Aatika Singh
Disha Wadekar
Thallapalli Praveeen
Vidula Songara
Amrutha Kosuru
Thunga Ramesh
The first-of-its-kind exhibit featuring multiple Dalit artists and performers
Shrujana Shridhar
Shrujana Shridhar is an artist and illustrator based in Mumbai. Her practice examines the intersection of caste, gender, and capitalism. Her practice honors the resilience of communities that fought caste and gender oppressions for centuries.
Rajyashri Goody
Rajyashri Goody’s art practice focuses on food and water politics, caste and religion, literacy and literature. She is interested in creating space and time for thinking through everyday instances of caste-based violence and Dalit resistance, and how elements like food, nature, and language are actively used as tools to enforce caste rules for generations.
Rahee Punyashloka
Rahee Punyashloka, also knowns as Artedkar, is an artist, writer, researcher, and experimental filmmaker based out of Bhubaneswar and New Delhi. Working across disciplines, he seeks to illuminate the vastly unrepresented/underrepresented artistic history of the anti-caste struggle and the Dalit identity.
Sri Vamsi Matta
Sri Vamsi Matta is a Bangalore-based interdisciplinary theatre artist whose work is grounded in lived experience, political memory, and anti-caste thought. Born into a Dalit community, his practice confronts the everyday and structural violence of caste, positioning art as a space for refusal, repair, and collective imagination.
Bhumika Saraswati
Bhumika Saraswati is an award-winning Indian journalist-filmmaker and photographer whose work documents lives and narratives often overlooked and erased. Her visual project Unequal Heat (@heat.southasia) documents how rising temperatures disproportionately affect marginalized communities, particularly women, in South Asia, exposing the unequal nature of the climate crisis.
Maulikraj Shrimali
(Theatrical Performance)
Maulikraj Shrimali (he/him) is a playwright, director, researcher and Dalit artist-activist from India. He is a third year PhD student at Northwestern, where he is a co-founder-president of “Ambedkar-DuBois Society”. He has founded the Whistle Blower Theater Group, where he has written, directed, and performed anti caste, anti brahmanical patriarchy plays.
Siddhesh Gautam
Siddhesh Gautam, popularly known as Bakery Prasad, a Delhi based Ambedkarite and visual artist. Born in 1991, Nagina Bijnor, India, he is a multidisciplinary mixed-media artist, designer, writer, poet, dreamer, storyteller and Ambedkarite. His work focuses on visual documentation of the anti-caste movement, global warming and gender equality.
Malvika Raj
Malvika Raj draws from a repertoire of heritage arts, stories and traditions as a Dalit, Buddhist and feminist. Hailing from Patna in east India, she deploys traditional Madhubani art forms that are conventionally centred around high caste Hindu narratives to depict instead Navayana (‘new vehicle’) Buddhist themes.
We Have Not Come Here to Die
(Documentary Screening)
Directed by Deepa Dhanraj (2019), ‘We Have Not Come Here To Die’ attempts to track the historic movement, which erupted in the wake of Rohith Vemula's institutional murder at Hyderabad University, that has changed the conversation on caste in India and beyond.
What People Had to Say About the Event
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“It felt great to recollect Rohith Vemula's fierce activism and his fight against injustice on his birth anniversary and also be among the people who have taken the mantle from him and are continuing that fight after him”
— Tejas Harad, founder and editor of the literary anti-caste publication, The Satyashodhak, and a speaker at the event
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“I am grateful to the event organizers for the care and revolutionary love they poured into this tribute, which felt like an antidote to the despair surrounding us”
— Shalini K, Dalit Feminist Organizer and Movement Strategist, Attendee
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“Today we stand in a New York that is finally beginning to see the true diversity of the South Asian experience. But we cannot celebrate South Asian prominence, experience and success, without acknowledging that caste discrimination remains a shadow that casts a pall, in our workplaces, in our campuses, in our halls of power”
— NY State Comptroller Candidate, Raj Goyle, Speaker