The violence against marginalised students by a teacher at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur is intrinsically related to the Brahminic cultural psyche of elite higher education institutions in India. It stands as testimony that post-independence India’s modern secular education has failed to replace caste as an institution to build “character” in terms of the capacity for living with others. The vitality rather than the ideology of caste is the subject of this analysis, tracing the historical and social formation of these elite institutions and caste in them.
In this episode, we speak to Ankit Kawade about the exclusionary character of higher education curriculums, and the implications of institutionalising Dalit Studies.
The Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Bill, 2020 is the most recent attempt of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the state to make for harsh cow slaughter laws, which have been used in the past to disproportionately target Dalits and Muslims across the country. The bill is poorly drafted and offends notions of rule of law and procedural justice, raising questions on whether it is even intended to be applied as a law or is just a tool of state-sanctioned violence.
Empirical data from the last two-and-a-half decades tells stories of upper-caste hegemony and lack of lower-caste representation in Indian media. After the advent of digital media, and especially after the proliferation of social media and content-sharing platforms, Dalit–Bahujan professionals and many amateur journalists started their own websites and video channels, and Dalit–Bahujan intellectuals have their footprints on social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. The rising phenomenon of Dalit–Bahujan media in the digital space and their success or failure in democratising Indian media is examined.
The contribution of Dalit journals is virtually undocumented in the history of Tamil print media, and the only historiographic trends that have received scholarly attention so far are the Brahmin nationalist perspective and the non-Brahmin Dravidian perspective. Based on colonial records and journals, this article attempts to construct a history of Dalit journals in colonial Madras by analysing the sociopolitical contexts and the content of 42 journals published from 1869 to 1943. The wide-ranging conversations in these journals suggest that Dalits were not only active agents in creating a modern identity, questioning their marginalisation, but were also involved in knowledge production in an otherwise restricted public sphere.
Changes in the incidence of vegetarianism across time are sought to be analysed by identifying the specific trends at the level of region,caste and class. Divergence in the attitude towards vegetarianism across these axes points towards deepening divides linked to socioeconomic status and cultural-political power inequalities.
This paper examines the role of 'Hinduism' in the course of socio-historical development in the Indian subcontinent, how there has been a gradual process of construction of a 'Hindu', community and one of rendering it increasingly militant.
It is one of the tragic dilemmas of the colonial situation that the national revolution and the social revolution in a colonial society tend to develop apart from one another, Jyotirao Phule represented a very different set of interests and a very different outlook on India from all the upper caste elite thinkers of the so-called Indian Renaissance who have dominated the awareness of both Indian and foreign intellectuals. The elite expressed an ideology of what may be described as the "national revolution"; it was the nationalism of a class combining bourgeois and high caste traditions. Phule represented the ideology of the social revolution in its earliest form, with a peasant and anti-caste outlook.
