Kuffir Pratap Bhanu Mehta wants to break down the ‘tyranny of compulsory identities‘. Shouldn’t reservations be the last place to begin then? Reservations happen when the state finally decides to pay attention to what caste has done to a lower caste individual. A whole life precedes it: a life spent facing and struggling against, …
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 …
Caste isn’t efficient or capable
Kuffir Aakar Patel explains why Brahmins and Vaishyas dominate India’s corporate boardrooms: My view has long been that these are our only two capable castes. It is largely from merit that they dominate. Pitted against such sheer unabashed racism, the arguments of the Sangh Parivar ideologue Gurumurthy, who has long been an advocate of caste …
It’s caste policing, not plain ‘moral’ policing
Kuffir An article in The Times of India a couple of days ago, titled ‘Missing the point on policing the moral police‘, expresses anger over the fact that instead of commiserating with the victims of the recent attack by Hindutva goons on a private party in a resort in Mangalore ‘a section of society …
What can a ‘sincere’ upper caste person do?
Pardeep Attri It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won’t even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes …
Untouchability and Satyamev Jayate
Pardeep Attri Few days back, I watched the episode “Untouchability – Dignity For All” on the Satyamev Jayate show on 8th July, 2012. Many people rated it as a ‘great’ show but I don’t accept it as a ‘great’ show. It was just another show made with the intention of earning profits and TRP. There …
The Reservation Debate and the Hypocritical Misuse of Article 335
Devi Dayal “Article 335 of our constitution states that the claims of the members of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes shall be taken into consideration, consistently with the maintenance of efficiency of administration, in the making of appointments to services and posts in connection with the affairs of the Union or of a …
Cartoons, Caste and Epistemic Violence
Nilesh Kumar ‘These upper-caste authors who are forever miles away from reality and who can only make ceremonial and meaningless speeches in big meetings, can never understand what we the shudras and atishudras have to suffer and what calamities we have to undergo. All this is not entirely unknown to the high-caste …
The Cartoon Controversy: Inside the Mind of one ‘fanatic’ Dalit -II
Continued from here. Anoop Kumar When I saw the cartoon – and at the time I googled, there were only 3 images available – I spontaneously recoiled at the violence in the cartoon. I had to check again and again to confirm if it was indeed the controversial one because the cartoon was …