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This paper explores the concept of knowing in caste-ridden Dalit lives using the analogy of seeing in the context of the Black African-American racial society, where race is identified primarily through skin colour. Thus, the 'Black body' is marked by the act of seeing. A Dalit body, however, is usually discovered through knowing caste. Knowing is a complex mediated by caste, class, race, religion, occupation, spatiality, language and other forms of placement. Knowing is imperative in the context of a representative democracy to ensure social justice and the equitable distribution of government services. But does knowing someone's identity lead to equal treatment and equal respect, which constitute the substantive measures of democracy? I argue that knowing is a mode used to perpetuate caste, based on everyday ways in which Hindus live their lives. Pursuing this question, I problematise the concept of knowing in the trajectory of Dalit lives. I then take Ambedkar's 'Waiting for a Visa', situated in the genre of Dalit autobiographies, to illustrate the concept of knowing. Finally, I ask: given the politics of knowing, how do Dalit lives matter when practising caste? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how queer/feminist practices and articulations—by offering critical perspectives on the intersections of caste, labour and sexuality—have tried to draw attention to the marginalisation of people expressing non-normative genders and sexualities. Adapting lessons from the women's movement, which resonates with some of the principles of an Ambedkarite vision of democracy, queer and feminist activists adopt and practise a transversal politics in continuing their struggle for solidarity and justice. Specifically, the paper addresses how queer/feminists use the transversal dialogic political space to highlight contentions around sexual labour, from the 2005 ban on bar dancers to the 2017 Chalo Nagpur campaign. The practice of this politics draws upon the experience of queer and feminist collectives in western India, and finds resonance with Ambedkar's radical conception of democracy via a steadfast commitment to learn and engage in politics under changed circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses Ambedkar's challenge to racial theories of untouchability. It examines how Franz Boas’ ideas about race, via Alexander Goldenweiser, influenced Ambedkar's political thought. Ambedkar is situated as a thinker aware of larger changes taking place in Western academia in the early twentieth century. During his time at Columbia University, Ambedkar familiarised himself with ideas that rejected the fixity of identities and racial hierarchies; following Boas, he rejected the idea that the untouchables’ place in society was determined by their supposed racial inferiority. Instead, he argued that untouchability was a cultural problem that could be stamped out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how untouchability was framed as an ethnographic problem largely through a racial and Brahmanical perspective by looking at some of the main interventions made by British and Indian social scientists on this topic, such as H.H. Risley, G.S. Ghurye and Radhakamal Mukerjee. Dalit traditions, knowledge and theories about their origin were discarded and suffered an epistemicide. Reassessing the history of untouchability as an ethnographic concept is critical as the influence of these theories can still be perceived not only in common understandings about the origin of Dalits but also in the way sociology and anthropology are practised in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the way in which B.R. Ambedkar attempted to internationalise the problem of untouchability in the years prior to Partition. The move towards the international was an attempt to secure a political space for Dalits as a consequence of the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan. Unable to reach an agreement with the likes of Gandhi and Jinnah, Ambedkar looked beyond India for support. His plight gained the attention of disparate people, including Winston Churchill, Jan Smuts and the members of the Indian Conciliation Group. By exploring these events, this article seeks to rescale the history of untouchability and Partition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of what constitutes the content of civility even as we seek to empty it of rigidly conceptualised Western understandings remains important. An interesting possibility is to reanimate the idea of civility with the notion of trust, but that again begs the question: 'what is trust?' My thinking on this subject is framed by constitutional values, and from that perspective, I perceive the 'civility–trust' dyad as being the social evocation or impression of the constitutional value of fraternity about which Ambedkar spoke in the Constituent Assembly. He suggested something of a content to fraternity which can then be employed to think through our understanding of civility. Against this backdrop, I listen to the voices of Tamil-speaking Dalit Christians and activists and the ways in which they try to come to terms with and struggle against the forms of incivility and 'second-class' citizenship they are up against, and how they make any sense of this with regard to constitutional values and Christian ones, both of which they should be able to lay claim to, but in which they are denied full participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay attempts to open up a conversation between M.K. Gandhi and contemporary ecological thought. Unlike ecologists, who think through the human and then reach for a wider post-human ecology, in the 1930s, Gandhi journeyed in the reverse order, arriving at an emphasis on human withdrawal into nothingness after initially thinking through the withdrawal into nothingness of an infinitely extended, non-human, celestial being. The essay explores Gandhi's emerging anthropocentric conception of the piety of nothingness in the context of a household plan designed for him in 1936-37 by Madeline Slade, in the village of Segaon in Maharashtra. The essay draws out the architectural and political entailments of Gandhi's anthropocentrism and his emphasis on varnashramadharma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay tries to frame one question, which at its most abbreviated can be posed thus: why does Ambedkar convert to Buddhism? Given Ambedkar's militant secularism, to ask this question is also to ask: what assumption of responsibility does that conversion enable which exceeds secular responsibility? This essay tracks how Ambedkar's religion questions both the liberal concept of minority, and the dissolution of the minor that is staged in Marx's critique simultaneously of religion and secularism. Buddhism becomes in the process a religion of the minor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]