When a joke lands well, it is meant to elicit laughter. But in the case of standup comedian Manjeet Sarkar, his funny vignettes often stun the audience into complete silence. A YouTube video from one of his live gigs has him recount a time from his childhood, when he went to drink water from a hand-pump in his village in Odisha. “This lady came [out of nowhere],” he says in Hindi, “Let’s just call her b****h. She started throwing stones at me. I felt really bad and stood aside to watch what she was doing... she took some gangajal, and started cleaning the hand-pump with it. I am a ha***i. I went and touched the gangajal.” Sarkar breaks into laughter, but his audience is clearly hesitant. The Dalit comedian serves humour with a dash of reality check.

Bengaluru-based Sarkar will be visiting Mumbai soon, as part of The Untouchable Tour, which is coming to the city for the third time. His thought-provoking jokes on caste dynamics in the country have won him fans across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Delhi.