For An Informed Ambedkar Age
Anjali Shreshth In April 2010, the Dalit members of Banka, a remote village in the Lakhimpur Kheri district of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, inaugurated a unique temple. The temple was symbolic not because of a mythical history attached to it but rather because it was symbolic of the reclaiming of agency—social and political—by the …
Srutheesh Kannadi The issue of caste faced by Dalits is too complex to explain in the context of post-colonial modernity. The structural existence of caste has attained much flexibility and transformed into the behaviour of an amoeba where it appears to not follow any pre-defined principles. This illusion of caste made it invisible but at …
Subal Meher Babasaheb said, “They cannot make history who forget history”. The term ‘Shudra’ is very difficult to understand. Who are/were they; how did they come to be known by this name? How did they become the fourth varna in the Indo-Aryan society? Many questions like this come up when one tries to understand the …
N Sukumar & Shailaja Menon The usual template in many a ‘mainstream’ Indian film in any language is similar. The standard star-crossed heterosexual lovers, dance around the trees in sylvan surroundings, facing family opposition, the stern patriarch, the simpering and cowering females and finally the great Indian wedding. The sole criterion is entering the …
Devesh Kapur, D Shyam Babu and Chandra Bhan Prasad Born to an indentured laborer father in a Dalit family where food mattered more than studies, Mannam Madhusudan Rao began as a construction worker. Today, he runs his own construction company that is completing a township worth Rs 250 crore. This is the story of …
By N Siddoji Rao (Founder, Help-Desk for Underprivileged) I am from a homeless background and belong to a Scheduled Caste. I lost my parents at the age of seven. I had nine siblings. I lost three sisters and two brothers to hunger. I studied in government schools and stayed at government hostels. In the …
Sukhadeo Thorat (M.N. Roy Memorial Lecture, March 24, 2012) I feel honored to have been invited to deliver the 2012, M.N. Roy Memorial lecture by the Indian Renaissance Institute and Indian Radical Humanist Association. M.N Roy was a great visionary, thinker and a visionary with a particular vision for India. Everybody knows about his contribution …
Gail Omvedt THE DRIVE for women’s political power had its beginnings in the rural areas. Even in 1975, when we had the first major feminist rally, a “Samyukta Stri-Mukti Sangarsh Parishad” in Pune, a group of rural women afterwards went back to their village and decided, with the help of some young male activists, to …