Hermeneutical injustice operates in caste through the lack of available language or conceptual frameworks to describe and articulate the experiences of people from DBA communities. Dominant cultural narratives and discourses do not have adequate means to capture their experiences and this makes it difficult for them to express themselves or be understood by others. Also, most of the scholarship on caste oppression is mostly written by the oppressor castes with a savarna gaze that portrays the oppression in a completely different light. The knowledge and cultural practices of oppressors are always considered classical, and the cultural and artistic products of DBA are relegated to the bottom. The discomfort and suffocation that a DBA individual feels when they enter savarna dominated spaces like academia or media is mainly due to the erasure of identity and cultural shock they experience by not being able to connect or articulate in the language or assimilate into the culture of savarnas. The way to battle hermeneutical injustice is by questioning the language, culture and scholarship created by savarnas, and expanding the vocabulary to be able articulate the experiences of DBA by more inclusion of marginalized groups into academia, media, journalism, law etc.
Pranav Jeevan, ‘Epistemic Injustice: Does Knowledge have Caste?’, Round Table India