This special issue of Social Scientist coincides with the first anniversary of the death of the young Dalit scholar, Rohith Vemula. Though not intended as such, this issue attempts to probe some of the questions that his death brought to…
I do not have any hypothesis or speculative imagery to offer with respect to B.R. Ambedkar’s line of thinking in syncopation with his intellectual formation; whether a line of maturation, a broken line – broken by an intellectual caesura or…
The relationship between caste and language in South Asia is a contentious topic of research today. Many have studied how modernity constructed language and caste as political categories in India. Writing that contests caste in modern times, especially after the…
The latest upsurge in the nationwide Dalit protest, while unprecedented in the sense that it is far more connected and making inroads into cities, towns and even into the villages (thanks to the growth of internet-led social media), is also…
This paper is an attempt to arrive at a theoretical understanding of caste violence. Structured in three sections, it engages with three different sets of materials, namely Social Science, Literature and Philosophy. The second section begins by posing the question…
The caste system is rooted in, and constitutes a further proliferation of, the four-varna system of ancient India comprising the brahmins (priestly class), the kshatriyas (warrior class), and the two classes of workers recruited largely from conquered tribes: the vaishyas…
I knew Javeed Alam for over forty years. We were introduced to each other through our professional membership of the Political Science fraternity in India as well as our mutual interest in Marxism. I remember the first time we had…
Javeed Alam was a close friend and intellectually combative interlocutor from the time I first met him, when both of us were Visiting Fellows at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, in the mid-to-late 1990s. What drew me…
In the past weeks so many persons around the world are together in remembering John Berger – as though he were a friend, almost as though we are all friends. As though in this mourning there is some elation reminiscent…
John Berger’s television series Ways of Seeing famously began with him setting a knife to Botticelli’s Venus and Mars. Flouting all rules of television performance, he stood with his back to the camera that instead faced the framed painting hung…