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'The Shudras echoes Dr Ambedkar's question in Who Were the Shudras? that he asked in 1946. More than 70 years later, Kancha Ilaiah and his team of authors revisit this issue to give Shudras a voice again' -CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT The Shudras: Vision for a New Path weaves together multiple dimensions of the predicament of India's productive castes-in the spiritual, social, political, economic, philosophical and historical spheres. It reformulates their current position as well as future pathways. It strives to provoke Shudras-including regional political party leaders-all over India to realize their unique historical role in fighting unequal caste structures. And it gives a call to resist Hindut...
The Shudras echoes Dr Ambedkar's question in Who Were the Shudras? that he asked in 1946. More than 70 years later, Kancha Ilaiah and his team of authors revisit this issue to give Shudras a voice again' -CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT The Shudras: Vision for a New Path weaves together multiple dimensions of the predicament of India's productive castes-in the spiritual, social, political, economic, philosophical and historical spheres. It reformulates their current position as well as future pathways. It strives to provoke Shudras-including regional political party leaders-all over India to realize their unique historical role in fighting unequal caste structures. And it gives a call to resist Hindutv...
This book is entirely different from books that have been written on Indian civil societal relations, spiritual character, political economy, philosophical foundations, scientific roots, cultural essence, and historicity. It takes a journey from tribals upwards and looks at the pyramid of the communities in an inverse order. This book is an excise in new methodology, pedagogy, analysis, and synthesization of knowledge. Every chapter in this book reads like a new innovation in Indian social anthropology. It draws a different map for the future of this nation and its intellectual history.
‘Caste is Race in Ancient Times, Race is Caste in Modern Times, Untouchability is an Aryan Construct. They said God has not created Untouchables.’ Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd goes on to say, ‘Many people from the Brahmin–Baniya castes have written about their own greatness in their autobiographies, in English and in the regional languages. But I have not seen even a single autobiography of a person born and brought up in the shepherd community’. He adds that it is in writing about themselves that people gain a sense of self-respect. Shepherd’s evocative memoirs reveal the struggle for education and dignity that a great majority of Indians undergo. As a little boy herding sheep and goats, he and his brother were the first to go to school. The author writes of his long and often interrupted journey to becoming a writer and an intellectual, without support and having to overcome adversities.
One of twentieth-century India’s great polymaths, statesmen, and militant philosophers of equality, B. R. Ambedkar spent his life battling Untouchability and instigating the end of the caste system. In his 1948 book The Untouchables, he sought to trace the origin of the Dalit caste. Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men is an annotated selection from this work, just as relevant now, when the oppression of and discrimination against Dalits remains pervasive. Ambedkar offers a deductive, and at times a speculative, history to propose a genealogy of Untouchability. He contends that modern-day Dalits are descendants of those Buddhists who were fenced out of caste society and rendered Untouchable by a...
Hinduism is one of the world's oldest and greatest religious traditions. In captivating prose, Shashi Tharoor untangles its origins, its key philosophical concepts and texts. He explores everyday Hindu beliefs and practices, from worship to pilgrimage to caste, and touchingly reflects on his personal beliefs and relationship with the religion. Not one to shy from controversy, Tharoor is unsparing in his criticism of 'Hindutva', an extremist, nationalist Hinduism endorsed by India's current government. He argues urgently and persuasively that it is precisely because of Hinduism's rich diversity that India has survived and thrived as a plural, secular nation. If narrow fundamentalism wins out, Indian democracy itself is in peril.
In The Weapon of the Other: Dalitbahujan Writings and the Remaking of Indian Nationalist Thought, contends the projection of Hindu religious texts as sources of Indian nationalist thought since colonial times while the Buddhist scriptures, the Bible and the Quran, whose readers were far more numerous, are relegated to the periphery of discussions about nationalism. He explores Indian nationalism from a different perspective, and discusses the political core of liberatory ideas as well as modern thinker-activists.
This witty, tongue-in-cheek novel that laughs at the foibles and hypocrisies of Brahmins and upper castes across India begins with a crime. Paraiah, a dalit, is beaten to death for the crime of thinking about God, which might well lead to thoughts of equality ... Six men representing the remarkable Brahmins of India celebrate his death, Veda Shastry of Tamil Nadu (where the purest examples of exalted brahminhood are to be found) is the rightful leader. Namboodri of Kerala is a from a caste that created the most perfect system of discrimination that the world has seen; Krishnamurthy of Karnataka and Appa Rao of Andhra Pradesh are slightly moderate; Tilak of Maharashtra dreams of increasing discrimination while Banerjee of Bengal believes he is above caste. As the men take their leave of Shastry, the authors gaze follows them ironically. Lastly, comes Isaiah, an American black, who knows all about race, and journeys to India to find out about the non-violence movement that had inspired Martin Luther King, Jr and discovers much else besides.
Dalit Feminist Theory: A Reader radically redefines feminism by introducing the category of Dalit into the core of feminist thought. It supplements feminism by adding caste to its study and praxis; it also re-examines and rethinks Indian feminism by replacing it with a new paradigm, namely, that caste-based feminist inquiry offers the only theoretical vantage point for comprehensively addressing gender-based injustices. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, the chapters in the volume discuss key themes such as Indian feminism versus Dalit feminism; the emerging concept of Dalit patriarchy; the predecessors of Dalit feminism, such as Phule and Ambedkar; the meaning and value of lived experienc...
The Author Writes With Passionate Anger And Sarcasm On The Situation In India To-Day. Synthesizing Many Of The Ideas Of Bahujans, The Author Presents Their Vision Of A More Just Society.