A study by acclaimed French economist Thomas Piketty and his team, titled ‘Indian income inequality, 1922-2014: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?’ claims inequality in India is at its highest since 1922. This has made development economists and policy makers anxious about whether India is on an appropriate growth trajectory.

Let’s consider the state of affairs through the looking glass of those at the bottom of the inequality pile.

In village Lakhmir Gadhi, Bulandshahar, five tractors are parked outside Thakur Hamendra Pal Singh’s capacious house. A big zamindar in pre-Independence times, the family imported a tractor in 1947. Less than a mile north of the Thakur house lies a large mango orchard with 200 trees.

Close to the Thakur house live 45 Dalit families, who once worked for the Thakur clan only. In terms of house sizes, land ownership and other assets, Dalits are still far behind, too unequal to merit any comparison with the upper caste families. Most Dalit families live in tiny houses, landholdings are smaller.

None owns a tractor, nobody owns a mango tree, leave alone mango orchards. Wealth, income, asset based inequality between Thakurs and Dalits remains huge. What however has transpired during the past 70 years, in particular following the 1991 reforms, is beyond the critical capabilities of thinkers like Piketty who are born in caste-neutral societies.

Dalit women around Lakhmir Gadhi village don’t visit Thakur homes, leave alone work for them. Dalit men trek to nearby Khurja town each morning to find work in the pottery industry. Dalit children crowd school buildings. “They are free now,” says Thakur Hamendra.

Freedom apart, Dalits in the vicinity have acquired new food sources. Millets are history. “We eat the same wheat, same pulses, same rice that Thakurs eat,” says Narendra Kumar, a Dalit with a PDS shop. “We too wear dresses that Thakurs do.”

Some 500km east of Bulandshahar, in Naya Gaon Panchayat in UP’s Sitapur district, there are identical tales. Thakur Suresh Singh has a house, built in 1802, that is large enough to house a dozen Dalit families.

The 50 Thakur households own most of the farm land. Any wealth based inequality count between Thakurs and Dalits would be capacious indeed. But as in Lakhmir Gadhi village, Dalits in Naya Gaon have crafted a different trajectory.

Men take local trains to Lucknow and Sitapur daily. Women step out only to work in their farmlands. Children go to schools. The fact that the Thakur hamlet, once home to over 400 bullocks, has none today is because the Dalits who tended to them and tilled their land have alternative employment. “They no longer need us. There is no difference in what we wear and eat as them,” rues Thakur Suresh Singh.

Three hundred km east, in a village in Azamgarh district, there’s an identical narrative. “Thakur women began sobbing before us,” recalls Delhi based academic Shubha Parmar. “Because the Dalit women no longer work for us, we have to sweat it out,” a Thakur woman told her.

A seminal study led by Devesh Kapur of the University of Pennsylvania, published in 2008, found a massive positive change in the lives of UP Dalits. For the study field work, we covered 19,087 Dalit households in Bilariaganj block of Azamgarh (east UP) and in Khurja block, Buland Shahar (west UP).

We found that only 0.1% Dalit households in Bilariaganj, and 0.2% household in Khurja block worked as halwahas, a job where families would be tied up with landlords on an unending basis. Also, in both the blocks, over 99% Dalit families had stopped eating millets. In other words, Dalits in both the blocks had acquired food source equality.

In a society like India, income, asset, wealth based index of inequality means very little. The traditional indices ignore crucial social indicators such as caste regulated humiliations and indignity. Even worse, the income based indices of inequality may in fact be undermining the freedom argument.

For instance, inequality gap between a landlord and his workers may be far narrower than inequality gap between a billionaire and his workers. Howsoever unequal workers under a capitalist boss may be, they are freer than their counterparts in the countryside working for landlords.

Worse even more, reverse this inequality logic to craft an equality index for Dalits. A Dalit hamlet, let’s say of 100 families, work for the village landlords. Given their occupations, wage payment pattern, and incomes, the entire Dalit hamlet may be more equal than unequal in living conditions, shared agonies, distress levels and unfreedom. At this point let’s say five Dalits from the hamlet escape their landlords, and land jobs in the cement factory nearby. Suddenly, income of the five Dalit households shoots up, but inequality has also been created, a split has taken place in the Dalit hamlet. Because five households are richer and freer than the rest 95.

A rising Gujarat based Dalit leader argues, almost on these lines, that the rise of enterprises amongst Dalits can result in rise of inequality among Dalits. For centuries Dalits have faced discrimination on grounds of social status, food sources, clothing, occupations and lifestyles – for example, not being allowed to grow pointed moustaches. To Dalits, thus, freedom from social subjugation and caste dominance is more important than income, wealth based equality. In fact, freedom from caste order may pave the road to income based inequality.