Chuni Kotal

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Chuni Kotal was a Dalit Adivasi graduate student of anthropology at Vidyasagar University in West Bengal, India, from the Lodha Shabar community of tribals. She was continuously discriminated against and insulted by her upper caste Brahmin professors (like Professor Falguni Chakraborty and others) and university administrators (who refused to give her the requisite pass grades, despite her having fulfilled the criteria), who opined that a low-born person coming from a "criminal tribe" did not have the social privilege and pre-ordained destiny to study "higher discourse" like the social sciences. After graduating in 1985, she got a job as a hostel superintendent. However, the casteist and racist harassment continued and she committed suicide in 1991.

Her death became the focal point of immense political and social controversy in the media in West Bengal, and eastern India, where the discourse is traditionally Brahmin-Baniya dominated. However, her death did not receive the attention of Indian American social science professors as it did among Western social scientists who were studying the Indian caste system, like Professor Nicholas B. Dirks at Columbia University and Professor Jan Breman at the University of Amsterdam.

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