A person reading Caste and Partition in Bengal: The Story of Dalit Refugees, 1946-1961 would think that Dalits have never done a caste analysis of partition, which is absolutely untrue
Despite calls for a caste census ringing out from several corners of the country, why is the BJP government so adamant in its refusal to carry one out?
The author of one of the most celebrated books of the past year will Wednesday be at the center of an interview that kicks off the Nantucket Book Festival’s 2021 virtual and live programming.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, whose 2020 book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent” has been on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for 36 weeks, will sit down for a conversation with NPR journalist Diane Rehm in what festival organizers call “an event we have dreamed of for a long time.”
The festival describes “Caste” this way: “Wilkerson argues for a new way of understanding racial inequalities in America through the lens of a rigid caste system. She uses her own personal experience, and also reaches across continents and through history to demonstrate how humans create artificial divisions to justify who has power and who doesn’t in a society.
The Problem of Being a Dalit in the Communist Movement
R.B. More was a bridge between Dalit and communist politics and tried to change the communist party leadership s stand on the caste question.
R.B. More, c. 1937. Photo: Unknown/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Rights07/Mar/2021
As recalcitrant subjects in Indian history, Dalits were always a problem for the status quo and the politics and ideas that attempted to transform it. True to their outlier position in caste Hindu society as stigmatised beings, they endure abject poverty, and their condition is incomprehensible even to the well-meaning caste Hindu. Yet at times, they become problems for themselves and the people around them because of the swirling stigma and economic deprivations that bog them down and corrode their dignity.