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Reading Homes without Windows, I frequently experienced flashes of deja vu. Although unlike Chandu Maheria, I grew up in a village setting in Maharashtra, the experiences of Dalits are essentially not very dissimilar. In addition, I was well acquainted with places and most people that figure in the book. It evoked memories of my own encounters with caste and communal violence in Gujarat.

One episode returned vividly to mind: during the anti-reservation riots of 1981, while I was a student at IIM Ahmedabad, I found myself trapped by a mob in Bapunagar. The IIM campus was an elitist island that remained insulated even when the city around it burned. Yet the social activist in me often ventured into working-class neighbourhoods to understand events first hand. I had befriended several Dalit activists across Ahmedabad and regularly attended their meetings.

One afternoon, in the thick of the riots, riding my Vijay scooter towards the Buddha Vihar in Bapunagar, I was stopped by half a dozen men armed with sticks and wearing the ferocious expressions of a riotous mob. When I told them where I was headed, they began manhandling me and seized my scooter. For a few moments, I genuinely thought I might become the next day’s newspaper headline. Suddenly, however, a group of 15 to 20 Dalit youths, blue scarves tied around their foreheads, emerged from a nearby basti. The attackers quickly dispersed, and I was saved.

More importantly, I witnessed first-hand the transformation in Dalit consciousness that the reservation riots had produced. That awakening was extraordinary. Gujarat’s Dalits, despite belonging to the old Bombay Presidency, had remained only marginally touched by Ambedkar’s movement, except in a few urban pockets. Even the Dalit Panther movement, which travelled from Maharashtra and survived here longer than in its birthplace, remained largely confined to Ambedkarite circles.

The anti-reservation riots changed that. The assertion, anger and self-respect they generated became visible in the massive Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations of 1982 and in the growing embrace of Ambedkarite politics across Gujarat.

It is against this background that Maheria’s memoir assumes particular significance.

Chandu Maheria (translated by Hemang Ashwinkumar)Homes Without WindowsJuggernaut (May 2026)

Over the past decades, Dalit autobiographical writing has emerged as one of the richest literary traditions in India. Inspired in part by the Marathi Dalit literary movement, writers from many linguistic regions have narrated experiences of caste oppression with remarkable power.

Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan is perhaps the best-known example in Hindi, but many others, such as Bama’s Karukku in Tamil, G. Kalyan Rao’s Antarani Vasantam in Telugu and Balbir Madhopuri’s Chhangiya Rukh in Punjabi, have contributed substantially to this body of literature across the country. Maheria’s Homes Without Windows deserves a respectable place within that tradition.

The book vividly portrays life in the Rajpur, Ahmedabad slums where the author grew up. The very first chapter, ‘The Mayor’s Bungalow’, takes its ironic title from a modern public toilet built in the settlement. After painting, in a tragi-comic manner, the inhuman conditions in which the residents of Rajpur and the surrounding slums lived, Maheria introduces this toilet as a symbol of “development”. Yet the facility remained largely unusable for the poor because it operated on a user-fee basis that none in the slum could afford.

For the residents, it stood less as a public amenity than as a monument to a model of development that was ostensibly meant for them but........

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