Mahitosh Mandal “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” – Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) “In the twentieth century, we tried to change the world too quickly; the time is to interpret it again.” – Slavoj Žižek, “Don’t Act. Just Think” (2012) On the occasion …
Marxists Without Marx
Rahul Sonpimple “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” Marx wrote in 1864 as the first principle of the self-emancipation of the proletariat. He was convinced, however, Indian upper caste Marxists are still not. When Ambedkar pushed for the Poona Pact in 1932, demanding separate electorates for …
Cartoons, Caste and Epistemic Violence (Part 2)
Nilesh Kumar [This is the second part of his article on caste and epistemic violence. The first part explored how the Ambedkar cartoon in the NCERT text book was a metaphor for epistemic violence. Here, he tries to explain how the cartoon is just one more illustration of how entrenched violence is in academia; one …
Marichjhapi and the Revenge of Bengali Bhadralok
(First published in Insight blog in 2009) Anoop Kumar, Ajay Hela and Nilesh Kumar Exactly 30 years ago, Dalits, in West Bengal, came to realize the true nature of Indian state that is being dominated, in every sense, by a tiny section of population but at a great personal cost. It was in 1979, when …
Why Dalits in West Bengal are on protest
Manohar Mouli Biswas (First published in World Prout Assembly site in August 2007) Dalits are perhaps by their birth communist in nature. They are born in the graded inequality of the society and as a result what happens they have to face the lot of sufferings in their daily life. They are by birth …