Dalit Visions

Dalit Visions PDF Author: Gail Omvedt
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
ISBN: 9788125028956
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Dalit Visions explores and critiques the sensibility which equates Indian tradition with Hinduism, and Hinduism with Brahmanism; which considers the Vedas as the foundational texts of Indian culture and discovers within the Aryan heritage the essence of Indian civilisation. It shows that even secular minds remain imprisoned within this Brahmanical vision, and the language of secular discourse is often steeped in a Hindu ethos. The tract looks at alternative traditions, nurtured within dalit movements, which have questioned this way of looking at Indian society and its history. While seeking to understand the varied dalit visions that have sought to alter the terms of the dominant order, this tract persuades us to reconsider our ideas, listen to those voices which we often refuse to hear and understand the visions which seek to change the world in which dalits live.

Dalit Visions

Dalit Visions PDF Author: Gail Omvedt
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
ISBN: 9788125028956
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dalit Visions explores and critiques the sensibility which equates Indian tradition with Hinduism, and Hinduism with Brahmanism; which considers the Vedas as the foundational texts of Indian culture and discovers within the Aryan heritage the essence of Indian civilisation. It shows that even secular minds remain imprisoned within this Brahmanical vision, and the language of secular discourse is often steeped in a Hindu ethos. The tract looks at alternative traditions, nurtured within dalit movements, which have questioned this way of looking at Indian society and its history. While seeking to understand the varied dalit visions that have sought to alter the terms of the dominant order, this tract persuades us to reconsider our ideas, listen to those voices which we often refuse to hear and understand the visions which seek to change the world in which dalits live.

Caste and nature

Caste and nature PDF Author: Mukul Sharma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199091609
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Rarely do Indian environmental discourses examine nature through the lens of caste. Whereas nature is considered as universal and inherent, caste is understood as a constructed historical and social entity. Mukul Sharma shows how caste and nature are intimately connected. He compares Dalit meanings of environment to ideas and practices of neo-Brahmanism and certain mainstreams of environmental thought. Showing how Dalit experiences of environment are ridden with metaphors of pollution, impurity, and dirt, the author is able to bring forth new dimensions on both environment and Dalits, without valourizing the latter’s standpoint. Rather than looking for a coherent understanding of their ecology, the book explores the diverse and rich intellectual resources of Dalits, such as movements, songs, myths, memories, and metaphors around nature. These reveal their quest to define themselves in caste-ridden nature and building a form of environmentalism free from the burdens of caste. The Dalits also pose a critical challenge to Indian environmentalism, which has, until now, marginalized such linkages between caste and nature.

Dalit Theology and Dalit Liberation

Dalit Theology and Dalit Liberation PDF Author: Peniel Rajkumar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317154932
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
In fulfilling the long-awaited need for a constructive and critical rethinking of Dalit theology this book offers and explores the synoptic healing stories as a relevant biblical paradigm for Dalit theology in order to help redress the lacuna between Dalit theology and the social practice of the Indian Church. Peniel Rajkumar's starting point is that the growing influence of Dalit theology in academic circles is incompatible with the praxis of the Indian Church which continues to be passive in its attitude towards the oppression of the Dalits both within and outside the Church. The theological reasons for this lacuna between Dalit theology and the Church's praxis, Rajkumar suggests, lie in the content of Dalit theology, especially the biblical paradigms explored, which do not offer adequate scope for engagement in praxis.

Popular Intellectuals and Social Movements

Popular Intellectuals and Social Movements PDF Author: Michiel Baud
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521613484
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
All forms of popular protest include a category of 'popular intellectuals', who reflect on social reality, speak in the name of popular classes and who articulate ideas that inspire collective action. This volume focuses on these individuals from an original angle: it looks at the experiences of popular intellectuals in non-western societies, who operate within social-movement networks that link local, regional, and international arenas, and connect to a global flow of ideas. Eight case studies on different societies in twentieth-century Asia, Africa, and Latin America highlight specific activist intellectuals.

Dalit Studies

Dalit Studies PDF Author: Ramnarayan S. Rawat
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
The contributors to this major intervention into Indian historiography trace the strategies through which Dalits have been marginalized as well as the ways Dalit intellectuals and leaders have shaped emancipatory politics in modern India. Moving beyond the anticolonialism/nationalism binary that dominates the study of India, the contributors assess the benefits of colonial modernity and place humiliation, dignity, and spatial exclusion at the center of Indian historiography. Several essays discuss the ways Dalits used the colonial courts and legislature to gain minority rights in the early twentieth century, while others highlight Dalit activism in social and religious spheres. The contributors also examine the struggle of contemporary middle-class Dalits to reconcile their caste and class, intercaste tensions among Sikhs, and the efforts by Dalit writers to challenge dominant constructions of secular and class-based citizenship while emphasizing the ongoing destructiveness of caste identity. In recovering the long history of Dalit struggles against caste violence, exclusion, and discrimination, Dalit Studies outlines a new agenda for the study of India, enabling a significant reconsideration of many of the Indian academy's core assumptions. Contributors: D. Shyam Babu, Laura Brueck, Sambaiah Gundimeda, Gopal Guru, Rajkumar Hans, Chinnaiah Jangam, Surinder Jodhka, P. Sanal Mohan, Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana

The Pariah Problem

The Pariah Problem PDF Author: Rupa Viswanath
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231537506
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Once known as "Pariahs," Dalits are primarily descendants of unfree agrarian laborers. They belong to India's most subordinated castes, face overwhelming poverty and discrimination, and provoke public anxiety. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, this book follows the conception and evolution of the "Pariah Problem" in public consciousness in the 1890s. It shows how high-caste landlords, state officials, and well-intentioned missionaries conceived of Dalit oppression, and effectively foreclosed the emergence of substantive solutions to the "Problem"—with consequences that continue to be felt today. Rupa Viswanath begins with a description of the everyday lives of Dalit laborers in the 1890s and highlights the systematic efforts made by the state and Indian elites to protect Indian slavery from public scrutiny. Protestant missionaries were the first non-Dalits to draw attention to their plight. The missionaries' vision of the Pariahs' suffering as being a result of Hindu religious prejudice, however, obscured the fact that the entire agrarian political–economic system depended on unfree Pariah labor. Both the Indian public and colonial officials came to share a view compatible with missionary explanations, which meant all subsequent welfare efforts directed at Dalits focused on religious and social transformation rather than on structural reform. Methodologically, theoretically, and empirically, this book breaks new ground to demonstrate how events in the early decades of state-sponsored welfare directed at Dalits laid the groundwork for the present day, where the postcolonial state and well-meaning social and religious reformers continue to downplay Dalits' landlessness, violent suppression, and political subordination.

Writing Resistance

Writing Resistance PDF Author: Laura R. Brueck
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231537565
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Writing Resistance is the first close study of the growing body of contemporary Hindi-language Dalit (low caste) literature in India. The Dalit literary movement has had an immense sociopolitical and literary impact on various Indian linguistic regions, yet few scholars have attempted to situate the form within contemporary critical frameworks. Laura R. Brueck's approach goes beyond recognizing and celebrating the subaltern speaking, emphasizing the sociopolitical perspectives and literary strategies of a range of contemporary Dalit writers working in Hindi. Brueck explores several essential questions: what makes Dalit literature Dalit? What makes it good? Why is this genre important, and where does it oppose or intersect with other bodies of Indian literature? She follows the debate among Dalit writers as they establish a specifically Dalit literary critical approach, underscoring the significance of the Dalit literary sphere as a "counterpublic" generating contemporary Dalit social and political identities. Brueck then performs close readings of contemporary Hindi Dalit literary prose narratives, focusing on the aesthetic and stylistic strategies deployed by writers whose class, gender, and geographic backgrounds shape their distinct voices. By reading Dalit literature as literature, this study unravels the complexities of its sociopolitical and identity-based origins.

Dalits in Modern India

Dalits in Modern India PDF Author: S. M. Michael
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761935711
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This second, revised and enlarged edition looks back at the aspirations and struggle of the marginalised Dalit masses and looks forward to a new humanity based on equality, social justice and human dignity. Within the context of Dalit emancipation, it explores the social, economic and cultural content of Dalit transformation in modern India. These articles, by some of the foremost researchers in the field, are presented in four parts: Part I deals with the historical material on the origin and development of untouchability in Indian civilisation. Part II contests mainstream explanations and shows that the Dalit vision of Indian society is different from that of the upper castes. Part III offers a critique of the Sanskritic perspective of traditional Indian society, and fieldwork-based portraits of the Hinduisation of Adivasis in Gujarat, Dalit patriarchy in Maharashtra and Dalit power politics in Uttar Pradesh. Part IV concentrates on the economic condition of the Dalits.

Understanding Caste

Understanding Caste PDF Author: Gail Omvedt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788125045731
Category : Buddhism and politics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Understanding Caste approaches the historical issue of caste and anti-caste movements from a position of insightful inquiry and rigorous scholarship. Critiquing the sensibility which equates Indian tradition with Hinduism, and Hinduism with Brahmanism which considers the Vedas as the foundational texts of Indian culture and discovers within the Aryan heritage the essence of Indian civilisation it shows how even secular minds remain imprisoned within the Brahmanical vision. And so it looks at the alternative traditions nurtured within dalit movements, which have questioned this way of looking at Indian society and history." --Synopsis on back cover.

Untouchable

Untouchable PDF Author: S. M. Michael
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9781555876975
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Exploring the enduring legacy of untouchability in India, this book challenges the ways in which the Indian experience has been represented in Western scholarship. The authors introduce the long tradition of Dalit emancipatory struggle and present a sustained critique of academic discourse on the dynamics of caste in Indian society. Case studies complement these arguments, underscoring the perils and problems that Dalits face in a contemporary context of communalized politics and market reforms.