For An Informed Ambedkar Age
Nidhin Shobhana This essay is a response to the on-going strike in FTII against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as the Chairman of the said Institute. I would contextualize the strike on a larger canvas called Brahmanism (not read as Hindutva1). In the essay I would make a modest effort to understand the term …
Anoop Kumar (His speech at the ‘The Colonization of Ambedkar: Caste Politics behind Roy-Navayana’s Appropriation of Annihilation of Caste ~ A Discussion‘ held on 21st December, 2014, at University of Mumbai) My name is Anoop and I am not an academician or a very accomplished speaker so please excuse me if I am not …
Yogesh Maitreya As part of my fieldwork, I had been assigned to spend a year studying one of the prisons in Mumbai. To study the criminal justice system more closely and to know its nuances, I had to attend court trials, visit police stations and localities where mostly Dalit-Bahujans reside. Wherever I went, I came …
Karthick RM With her new preface to Dr. Ambedkar’s ‘Annihilation of Caste’ Arundhati Roy, and the publishing house Navayana, have received criticism from Dalit activists and writers. Very compelling critiques have been put forth explaining how Navayana’s annotated version of an Ambedkarite classic is an act of appropriation. In the short essay that follows, …
Twish Mukherjee (This guest article tries to understand the protests by Bahujan students in JNU and other universities over Durga Puja and the demonizing of Mahisha and other Dalitbahujan personalities in Brahmanic mythology. These protests picked up steam around a year ago in JNU, and this article in Round Table India had covered the protests …
Kuffir An article in The Times of India a couple of days ago, titled ‘Missing the point on policing the moral police‘, expresses anger over the fact that instead of commiserating with the victims of the recent attack by Hindutva goons on a private party in a resort in Mangalore ‘a section of society …
Chandra Bhan Prasad (First pubished in April 2003) “How could Maya do it, without the cow-belt having undergone a cultural revolution?” the ecstatic D Shyam Babu, a new age Dalit scholar, exclaimed. We were analysing the BSP’s triumph in the UP Assembly elections and, sitting glued to the news channels, watching Brahman/Rajput/Bania MLAs pay obeisance …
Laura Smith-Gary (First published Equal Writes website in September 2009) Earlier this summer, in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and the home of over 190 million individuals, fury and small-scale violence erupted when a Brahmin (upper-caste) political opponent of the state’s Chief Minister appeared to suggest the Chief Minister, a Dalit woman …