For An Informed Ambedkar Age
Braj Ranjan Mani There is little awareness about a more or less institutionalised arrangement of normalising, if not glorifying, the oppressive past from which the privileged continue to derive profit and pleasure. Invented histories, myth-making, and armoury of stereotypes merge to create convenient narratives and myths which masquerade as the history of India. The …
In Knowledge and Power, Braj Ranjan Mani tries to comprehend the formation of a world with one million millionaires and one billion hungry children, and asks what went wrong: why do we in the twenty-first century continue to grapple with large-scale injustice, even as knowledge grows to dizzying heights with technology and democracy to …
Braj Ranjan Mani is the author of Debrahmanising History: Dominance and Resistance in Indian Society (2005). His latest major work is Knowledge and Power: A Discourse for Transformation (2014). Mani is a maverick non-institutional scholar, and he writes on a range of sociocultural issues from the perspective of the marginalized. In Knowledge and Power, …
Braj Ranjan Mani किसकी चाय बेचता है तू ~ ब्रजरंजन मणि अपने को चाय वाला क्यूँ कहता है तू बात-बात पे नाटक क्यूँ करता है तू चाय वालों को क्यों बदनाम करता है तू साफ़ साफ़ बता दे किसकी चाय बेचता है तू ! खून लगाकर अंगूठे पे शहीद कहलाता है और कॉर्पोरेट …
Braj Ranjan Mani There is no competing cultural vision from below for the mind and heart of India. Dalit-bahujans are still absent in the contest of ideas, policies and visions—the fundamentals on which democratic competition takes place.This paralysis of the mind is linked totheir systemic cultural, intellectual and spiritual destruction. Without reference to history …
Rajendra Yadav (1929–2013): Defying Dominance in Life and Letters Braj Ranjan Mani Rajendra Yadav, the leading Hindi writer and public intellectual, remained creative and combative till his 84-year-old body snuffed out his life. Irrepressible— editing (a popular monthly Hans), writing, dialoguing with friends and adversaries alike— till the very end, his name evoked a …
Braj Ranjan Mani Jotirao Phule, and his wife Savitribai, declared war on brahmanic-casteist culture and religion. This Maharashtrian couple presented the first major anti-caste ideology and led a mass activism against the ascriptive norms and values. Their distinct brand of socio-cultural radicalism was based on uniting all the oppressed, whom they would call stree-shudra-atishudra. (Literally, …
Braj Ranjan Mani The tyranny of capitalism in India cannot be grasped, let alone resisted, in isolation from its wider social context. Capitalism is far more dangerous in India than in the Euro-America because of the culture and economics of caste. Today, India (after China and the US) has the world’s third largest middle class …
Braj Ranjan Mani Intellectual compromise of the best gives rise to the worst. Amartya Sen’s sanitised, caste-blind perspective on social unfairness, Hinduism and Indian culture, despite the show of reason, eclecticism and inclusive sensibility, is a gross distortion of historical reality, and a classic example of the limitation—and danger—of elitist liberalism. Amartya Sen is India’s …