For An Informed Ambedkar Age
V. Ratnamala The history of the press in India is the history of the freedom movement in the country. To a great extent, the Indian National Congress owed its popularity and position to the Indian press (Mazumdar, 1993). The history of the freedom movement happened to be the history of Congressmen. Hence the …
Gail Omvedt (An excerpt from her book ‘Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India’) Less than two months after the huge conversion ceremony, Bhimrao Ambedkar was dead, found on the morning of 6 December, slumped over the papers he had been working on late at night. His death was followed by outpouring of grief as great as …
Gail Omvedt (First published in May, 2002) The publication of a collection of English translations of the writings of Jotirao Phule, the nineteenth century social radical, by LeftWord publications marks, hopefully, a transition in the attitude of the left towards the struggle against Brahmanism. It also marks an increasing recognition of the importance of Phule, …
Gail Omvedt & Bharat Patankar Continued from here. The Rise of Dalit Movements Though attempts were begun by the dalit castes from the late 19th century to organise themselves, the various sections of the dalit liberation movement really began to take off from the 1920s, in the context of the strong social reform and anti-caste …
Gail Omvedt & Bharat Patankar [First published in February 1979. This is the first part of a pathbreaking article on the Dalit movement in the mainstream media. It was pathbreaking because mainstream discourse had until then consistently denied or tried to studiously ignore the existence of the Dalit movement and its vital role in Indian …
Gail Omvedt (First published in September 1990) Any caste based reservation system, in this case the Mandal Commission, has to be judged in terms of what it can do and not in terms of what it is not supposed to do—and in this case its goal is the limited but important one of ending caste …
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 …
Kancha Ilaiah [This article was first published in two parts, ‘A paradigm shift called Kanshi Ram’ and ‘Dalits and the horizontal ladder’, in 2003; we have combined the two parts into one single piece of writing. We, along with our readers, celebrate the memory of Manyawar Kanshi Ram on his birth anniversary- Round Table …
by Kanshi Ram (Released on 24th September, 1982, on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Poona Pact) ~~~~~ Dedicated to Mahatma Jotirao Phule Whose initiation of cultural revolt in colonial India, later taken up by Babasaheb Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy and many other rebellious spirits brought us …