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This paper attempts to demystify the antagonistic relationship between modernity and tradition as construed by Ashis Nandy. As a prominent voice in postcolonial scholarship, Nandy saw modernity as a colonial conception of rights, self, and society. Nandy's critique of modernity laid the grounds for several projects that rejected the modern consensus for its colonial origins. Juxtaposing Nandy's reiteration of early anti-modern nationalist thought with a multi-dimensional reading of colonial modernity in contemporary Ambedkarite scholarship, this paper explores the ambivalences of negotiating modern liberalism in a postcolonial order of hierarchical group identities. Despite the close imbrication of modernity with the imperial centre, Ambedkarite scholarship demonstrated how B.R. Ambedkar, synthesized a middle ground, where he incorporated the promise of modernity to liberate the 'individual' without dismissing the 'communal' collective self, construed by traditions. While postcolonial scholarship is heterogeneous, following Nandy, huge postcolonial melancholia has conflated modernity with coloniality. How do we rethink postcolonial theory from its current culturalist posturing to (re)claim the emancipatory potential of both modernity and tradition? Could it be that Nandy's anxiety and discomfort with modernity fail to 'contemporise theory'? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 article examines the way caste is captured within the dominant and popular scholarly tradition of post-colonialism. It will also explore how Ambedkar's anthropological emphasis on the centrality of sociocultural relations for understanding caste dynamics opens up the limitation of a post-colonial understanding of caste. In doing so, the paper is oriented to advance a Dalit-centric historical anthropology of caste. The focus on the relationship between competing discourses on the histories of caste will provide critical insights into how Dalit movements negotiate with various politics of knowledge to develop varied pathways of progress for Dalits and other marginalized communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will argue that B.R. Ambedkar attacked the social law of Hindu dharma for legalizing and legitimizing Brahminical sovereignty in the form of a birth-based caste order centred around the ambivalent sacrality of untouchability. Although Ambedkar inaugurated postcolonial India's transformative constitutional project, its juridical language of secular legality was not powerful enough an antidote against the social customs of caste and untouchability. Since these practices were ultimately grounded in a Hindu theology imputing responsibility for action to a fixed immutable being, Ambedkar sought to unsettle and destabilize it by proffering a counter-theology of Buddhism that delinked action from any substantial being, and thereby opened up sovereignty as an empty place of political power. His Buddhism though, was less a religion of selfless renunciation, and more a religion of rupture mediated by the political law of fraternal freedom, actualized in the excessive subjectivity of the Dalit community of converted Buddhists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the complex nature of untouchability by examining its connections to space and racialization in Ambedkar's political writings, including his experiences of using movement through space as a counter-hegemonic strategy. For Ambedkar, untouchability rested on a perpetual threat of violence which pushed Dalits to "self-racialize" or adopt bodily markers which gave away their caste status in specific places. This permitted the organization of caste hierarchies in space and its constant reproduction through time. Ambedkar became aware that places like the village facilitated the racialization of certain bodies as touchable or untouchable. Yet, the connections between space and racialization were not fixed. Ambedkar's memories of untouchability were linked to "in-between spaces", such as train stations or hotels, where the racialization of Dalits could not be assumed a priori. Such spatial indeterminacy allowed Ambedkar to challenge the behaviour Dalits were supposed to conform to in dominant caste spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frantz Fanon and BR Ambedkar as theorists of the marginalised communities belong to the so-called 'global south'. A comparative reading of both the thinkers aim in bringing them together in understanding their respective experience, personal history, and theorisation around the formation of the oppressed subject-hood. Experientially, Fanon and Ambedkar have a lot in common. Their thinking emanating from lived experience and an active life of learning and working diligently in their vocation, find sincere convergence. In the discussions around the formation of oppressed identity and subject-hood we find that Fanon and Ambedkar give due place to the socio-psychological diagnosis of racism and casteism. They have devoted a great amount of study into the genesis of these oppressive structures. This paper particularly looks at Fanon's and Ambedkar's prescription for emancipation of that oppressed identity and subject-hood. [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 essay compares key essays on Buddhism by B.R. Ambedkar and Jürgen Habermas vis-à-vis the issue of Buddhism, wealth, and privilege, and the respective statements again to what the Buddha taught, from a Theravada perspective. In doing so, it can be seen that Buddhism does not indeed endorse privilege in this world—but what seems to be privilege and inherited wealth are actual merits from a former life. Since these come with their own dangers, viz. attachment and not putting wealth to good use, wealth may be nice but not more. That someone is better than someone else because of birth and inheritance rather than action is, however, established as completely non-Buddhist, again and again, even by the Buddha himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Known primarily as the architect of the constitution of India, Babasaheb Ambedkar was also a human rights lawyer, an economist, a social justice advocate, and a polymath. Yet his story is often overlooked in favor of national leaders such as Gandhi. This study highlights Ambedkar as a visionary who called for a radical and new psychology of self that was anchored in ideas of social justice, equity and full participation. Furthermore this study fills the gap in the field of psychobiography which rarely reflects the cultural lives and experiences of the Global South. Methods: This study follows the psychobiographical method and uses memoirs, essays, speeches, and biographies as data. Results: Three "turning points" in Ambedkar's life are examined: (1) Early childhood experiences of being an "untouchable"; (2) Returning to India for employment after completing his doctorate in the U.S.; (3) Converting to Buddhism in later life. Using a decolonial theoretical lens, we analyze the multiple ways that he experienced being colonized and dehumanized. Conclusion: As he defied the caste structures within his own culture and resisted colonialism, Ambedkar developed a syncretic politics of resistance that emphasized the creation of a decolonized Dalit self and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the importance of 'public conscience' in B. R. Ambedkar's political thought. Ambedkar consistently defended public conscience as a democratic value in his writings and speeches. Public conscience referred to collective responsibility, social justice and the public deliberation of what constitutes the social good. Ambedkar consistently expressed the unequivocal belief that public conscience would bring about a moral transformation in Indian society through a collective ethical stance against all forms of social oppression. He conceptualized public conscience as a method by which a democratic and ethical Indian society could come about and flourish. This article interrogates his ideas concerning public conscience through a detailed reading of his works, focusing particularly on his 1943 speech, Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nagaloka Centre in Nagpur, Maharashtra is a community centre for local members of the Triratna Buddhist Community. Nagaloka hosts the Nagarjuna Training Institute (NTI) which provides free training and Bachelors' degrees in Buddhism and Ambedkar Thought to Indian students from disadvantaged social backgrounds. In offering these courses, NTI's administrators aim to build a pan-Indian Buddhist network and hope to eventually enact Prabuddha Bharat, 'enlightened India.' In their view, Prabuddha Bharat will be an India built around the principles of dhamma as Ambedkar understood them. Nagaloka serves as an important crossroads for intra- and international Buddhists to debate and demonstrate their vision of India as Prabuddha Bharat and is a vital location from which SC, ST, and OBC Indian Buddhists are in conversation with international Buddhists to (re)claim India as a Buddhist homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a notable surge in scholarship on the life and thought of B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956). This essay contributes to this literature by uncovering heretofore underemphasized aspects of how Ambedkar theorized the relationships between caste oppression, democracy, and state action. The essay demonstrates that, particularly in the period from 1936 to 1947, Ambedkar closely attended to the pathological imbrications between caste society and representative institutions in India; that he theorized an alternative, ambitious conception of democracy that encompassed the social and political spheres; and that he framed the state, and Dalit presence within the state, as a uniquely appealing instrument to transition from the former arrangement to the latter. In addition to filling gaps in the scholarship on Ambedkar, this interpretation offers important resources for contemporary democratic theory—in particular by countering perspectives that remain overly skeptical of the state's capacity to move against social oppression in ways that enable, rather than inhibit, collective self-government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers three interlocking ways in which we can understand the concurrence of antiracismand anti-casteism in the Indian diaspora. First, at the level of experience--ofUKactivists and campaigners--it has been found that the concurrence of anti-racismand anti-casteismis not conclusively determined at this level. Second, by a juxtaposition of the conceptual apparatus of 'caste' and 'race' the article considers the fault lines--illuminating or obfuscating--that appear in conceptualising anti-casteism as a form of anti-racism. Here, the sociality of caste is found to be important, the operation of racialisation underpinning anti-racist practice. Finally, by considering the legal apparatus available in a given jurisdiction (UK), the article evaluates the feasibility of measures thatmight facilitate the actualising of anti-casteism as a form of anti-racism through the practice of litigation to allow a pragmatic capturing of the experience of casteism as a form of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marr's critique of Indo-European philology is analysed in the light of contemporary postcolonial theory, showing how Marr considered "Indo-Europeanism" to be something very close to a Foucauldian discourse of power/knowledge. It is suggested that here one finds both the strengths and weakness of Marr's ideas, which alerts us to certain problems in much postcolonial theory today. Genetic connections between Marr's ideas and contemporary postcolonial studies are revealed. Marr's ideas are then compared to the critique of the ideology of the Aryan supremacy developed by the Indian anti-caste intellectuals Phule and Ambedkar, in which the symbiotic relationship between imperial philology and brahman domination over the lower castes were revealed and subjected to critique. Important continuities are identified, and it is suggested that an approach to the interaction between European powers and colonial peoples' needs to pay particular attention to the social divisions among the latter and the complex modes of dialogue that accompanied colonialism and its aftermath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]