Seeking Begumpura

Seeking Begumpura
Author: Gail Omvedt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2008
Genre: Bhakti
ISBN:

Study of the socioeconomic perspectives of the eminent anticaste intellectuals; some articles analyze Bhakti movement and Hindu nationalism over a period of five centuries.

Ambedkar

Ambedkar
Author: Gail Omvedt
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2017-04-17
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9351180883

Born in 1891 into an untouchable family, Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar is the acknowledged modern Indian leader of the struggle against social injustice. In this concise biography, eminent scholar Gail Omvedt presents the inspiring story of how Ambedkar got educated, overcame the stigma of untouchability and gradually rose to become a lawyer of international repute, a founder of a new order of Buddhism and a framer of India’s Constitution. She contextualizes Ambedkar’s argument with the elite nationalists, particularly Gandhi, that India could never be truly free without the liberation of its most oppressed sections.

Buddhism in India

Buddhism in India
Author: Gail Omvedt
Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-04-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9788132110286

SAGE Classics is a carefully selected list that every discerning reader will want to possess, re-read and enjoy for a long time. These are now priced lower than the original, but is the same version published earlier. SAGE`s commitment to quality remains unchanged. This fascinating book constitutes a unique exploration of 2,500 years of the development of Buddhism, Brahmanism and caste in India. Taking Dr Ambedkar`s interpretation of Buddhism as its starting point, Dr Gail Omvedt has researched both the original source of the Buddhist cannon and recent literature to provide an absorbing account of the historical, social, political and philosophical aspects of Buddhism. In the process, she discusses a wide range of important issues of current concern. Dr Omvedt maintains that the revolutionary audacity of Dalit leaders such as Dr B,R. Ambedkar, despite their often subversive reinterpretation of the Buddhist tradition, is in tune with the basic ethos of original Buddhism. Ambedkar found his own middle way by avoiding both the straitjacket of the Marxist ideological response to suppression and the tame reformist within the fold of Hinduism. Since there has always been a struggle of hegemony between competing religious systems, the author argues that given the ascendant position of Buddhism from the 4th century BC to the 6th century AD, ancient India should actually be described as ‘Buddhist India’ and not ‘Hindu India’. Providing an entirely new interpretation of the origins and development of the caste system, which boldly challenges the ‘Hindutva’ version of history, this book will attract a wide readership among all those who are concerned with the state of contemporarty India’s policy and social fabric.

Author:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 131602122X

Understanding Caste

Understanding Caste
Author: Gail Omvedt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Buddhism and politics
ISBN: 9788125045731

"Understanding Caste approaches the historical issue of caste and anti-caste movements from a position of insightful inquiry and rigorous scholarship. Critiquing the sensibility which equates Indian tradition with Hinduism, and Hinduism with Brahmanism which considers the Vedas as the foundational texts of Indian culture and discovers within the Aryan heritage the essence of Indian civilisation it shows how even secular minds remain imprisoned within the Brahmanical vision. And so it looks at the alternative traditions nurtured within dalit movements, which have questioned this way of looking at Indian society and history." --Synopsis on back cover.

The Trauma of Caste

The Trauma of Caste
Author: Thenmozhi Soundararajan
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2022-11-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1623177669

Instant Amazon Best Seller and Hot New Release For readers of Caste and Radical Dharma, an urgent call to action to end caste apartheid, grounded in Dalit feminist abolition and engaged Buddhism. “Dalit” is the name that we chose for ourselves when Brahminism declared us “untouchable.” Dalit means broken. Broken by suffering. Broken by caste: the world’s oldest, longest-running dominator system...yet although “Dalit” means broken, it also means resilient. Caste—one of the oldest systems of exclusion in the world—is thriving. Despite the ban on Untouchability 70 years ago, caste impacts 1.9 billion people in the world. Every 15 minutes, a crime is perpetrated against a Dalit person. The average age of death for Dalit women is just 39. And the wreckages of caste are replicated here in the U.S., too—erupting online with rape and death threats, showing up at work, and forcing countless Dalits to live in fear of being outed. Dalit American activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan puts forth a call to awaken and act, not just for readers in South Asia, but all around the world. She ties Dalit oppression to fights for liberation among Black, Indigenous, Latinx, femme, and Queer communities, examining caste from a feminist, abolitionist, and Dalit Buddhist perspective--and laying bare the grief, trauma, rage, and stolen futures enacted by Brahminical social structures on the caste-oppressed. Soundararajan’s work includes embodiment exercises, reflections, and meditations to help readers explore their own relationship to caste and marginalization—and to step into their power as healing activists and changemakers. She offers skills for cultivating wellness within dynamics of false separation, sharing how both oppressor and oppressed can heal the wounds of caste and transform collective suffering. Incisive and urgent, The Trauma of Caste is an activating beacon of healing and liberation, written by one of the world’s most needed voices in the fight to end caste apartheid.

Tools of Justice

Tools of Justice
Author: Kalpana Kannabiran
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 521
Release: 2013-02-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 113619875X

In the years since independence, the Indian subcontinent has witnessed an alarming rise in violence against marginalized communities, with an increasing number of groups pushed to the margins of the democratic order. Against this background of violence, injustice and the abuse of rights, this book explores the critical, ‘insurgent’ possibilities of constitutionalism as a means of revitalising the concepts of non-discrimination and liberty, and of reimagining democratic citizenship. The book argues that the breaking down of discrimination in constitutional interpretation and the narrowing of the field of liberty in law deepen discriminatory ideologies and practices. Instead, it offers an intersectional approach to jurisprudence as a means of enabling the law to address the problem of discrimination along multiple, intersecting axes. The argument is developed in the context of the various grounds of discrimination mentioned in the constitution — caste, tribe, religious minorities, women, sexual minorities, and disability. The study draws on a rich body of materials, including official reports, case law and historical records, and uses insights from social theory, anthropology, literary and historical studies and constitutional jurisprudence to offer a new reading of non-discrimination. This book will be useful to those interested in law, sociology, gender studies, politics, constitutionalism, disability studies, human rights, social exclusion, etc.

A Storm of Songs

A Storm of Songs
Author: John Stratton Hawley
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2015-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674425286

India celebrates itself as a nation of unity in diversity, but where does that sense of unity come from? One important source is a widely-accepted narrative called the “bhakti movement.” Bhakti is the religion of the heart, of song, of common participation, of inner peace, of anguished protest. The idea known as the bhakti movement asserts that between 600 and 1600 CE, poet-saints sang bhakti from India’s southernmost tip to its northern Himalayan heights, laying the religious bedrock upon which the modern state of India would be built. Challenging this canonical narrative, John Stratton Hawley clarifies the historical and political contingencies that gave birth to the concept of the bhakti movement. Starting with the Mughals and their Kachvaha allies, North Indian groups looked to the Hindu South as a resource that would give religious and linguistic depth to their own collective history. Only in the early twentieth century did the idea of a bhakti “movement” crystallize—in the intellectual circle surrounding Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal. Interactions between Hindus and Muslims, between the sexes, between proud regional cultures, and between upper castes and Dalits are crucially embedded in the narrative, making it a powerful political resource. A Storm of Songs ponders the destiny of the idea of the bhakti movement in a globalizing India. If bhakti is the beating heart of India, this is the story of how it was implanted there—and whether it can survive.

Capturing Caste in Law

Capturing Caste in Law
Author: Annapurna Waughray
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2022-05-11
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1317613635

This book is about the legal regulation of caste discrimination. It highlights the difficulty of capturing caste in international and domestic law, and suggests solutions. Its aim is to contribute to the task of understanding how to secure effective legal protection from and prevention of discrimination on grounds of caste, and why this is important and necessary. It does this by examining the legal conceptualization and regulation of caste as a social category and as a ground of discrimination, in international law and in two national jurisdictions (India and the UK), identifying their complexities, strengths, limitations and potential. Adopting a broadly chronological approach, the book aims to present an account of the role of law in the construction of caste inequality and discrimination, and the subsequent legal efforts to dismantle it. The book will be of value to lawyers and non-lawyers, academics and students of human rights, international law, equalities and discrimination, descent-based and caste-based discrimination, minority rights, and South Asia and its diaspora. It will be a resource for legal practitioners and those in the public and non-governmental sectors involved in the implementation, interpretation and enforcement of equality law in the UK – the first European country to introduce the word "caste" into domestic equality legislation – and in countries with South Asian diasporas such as the USA.

The Evolution of Pragmatism in India

The Evolution of Pragmatism in India
Author: Scott R. Stroud
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2023-03-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 022682389X

The story of how the Indian reformer Bhimrao Ambedkar reimagined John Dewey’s pragmatism. In The Evolution of Pragmatism in India, Scott R. Stroud delivers a comprehensive exploration of the influence of John Dewey’s pragmatism on Bhimrao Ambedkar, architect of the Republic of India’s constitution. Stroud traces Ambedkar’s development in Dewey’s Columbia University classes in 1913–1916 through his final years in 1950s India when he rewrote the story of Buddhism. Stroud examines pragmatism’s influence not only on the philosophical ideas underpinning Ambedkar’s fight against caste oppression but also how his persuasive techniques drew on pragmatism’s commitment to reconstruction and meliorism. At the same time, Stroud is careful to point out the ways that Ambedkar pushed back against Dewey’s paradigm and developed his own approach to challenges in India. The result is a nuanced study of one of the most important figures in Indian history.