Six Latest Titles on Ambedkar and Dalit Studies

Abstract

In recent years, we have been witnessing a proliferation of English-language books related to Dalit Studies in general and Dr B R Ambedkar in particular. So much so that, for the benefit of the academic world, a frequent survey of the newly published books has become imperative. With this objective in mind, I intend to offer a short survey of some of the latest titles published in early 2020. Overall, these books make a crucial contribution to the field and need to be brought to the immediate attention not only of the experts but also the general reading public.

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ALL ABOUT AMBEDKAR:
A
JOURNAL ON THEORY AND
PRAXIS
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1
31 December 2020
ISSN 2582-9785
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Liberatory Visuality: Some Reflections on Sanjib Mondal’s
Art
PINAK BANIK
Debrahminizing Decolonization: Imagining a New
Curriculum
KARTHICK RAM MANOHARAN
Specters of Babasaheb: Unleashing the Pluralities of
Ambedkarite Discourse
SUBHAYU BHATTACHARJEE
Reservations and the Complexities of Judicial Remedy
DIGANTA GHOSH
Evils of Untouchability and the Question of Dalit
Liberation: Revisiting “Mahad Satyagraha”
SRIJANI PURKAIT
Ambedkar’s Vision for India: A Critical Take on Nation and
Democracy
TIRTHA CHATTERJEE
Locating Freedom of Self in the Community: On Reading
Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke
ATREYEE SENGUPTA
Ambedkar and the Literature of Brahminism:
Understanding the Historicity of Sacred Texts
DWAITA MONDAL
A Conspectus of Inequities in Ambedkar’s “Grievances of
the Scheduled Castes”
SAGNIK GHOSHAL
BOOK REVIEW, FILM REVIEW
Six Latest Titles on Ambedkar and Dalit Studies
MAHITOSH MANDAL
Iraniyan: An Anti-Caste Communist Hero
KARTHICK RAM MANOHARAN
https://www.allaboutambedkaronline.com/
GENERAL ISSUE

All About Ambedkar: A Journal on Theory and Praxis
Volume 1, Number 1, September-December, 2020, pp. 72-76
ISSN 2582-9785
Six Latest Titles on Ambedkar and Dalit Studies
MAHITOSH MANDAL1
______________________________________________________________________________
In recent years, we have been witnessing a proliferation of English-language books related
to Dalit Studies in general and Dr B R Ambedkar in particular. So much so that, for the
benefit of the academic world, a frequent survey of the newly published books has become
imperative. With this objective in mind, I intend to offer a short survey of some of the latest
titles published in early 2020. Overall, these books make a crucial contribution to the field
and need to be brought to the immediate attention not only of the experts but also the
general reading public.
The first book for discussion is Aakash Sing Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble: A Secret
History of the Constitution of India published by Penguin Books in January 2020. The book
excavates some hitherto unknown facts to explain the exact role Ambedkar had played in
drafting the Constitution of India and emphasizes how the Preamble is, in fact, an
“Ambedkarite” discourse insofar as it was almost singlehandedly authored by Ambedkar. If
the Constitution of India is the body then the Preamble, as some use the metaphor, is the
soul. Hence, the author argues, to understand the nuances of the Preamble, and thus the
core values enshrined in the Constitution of India, one needs to carefully read Ambedkar’s
writings and speeches. To this end, Rathore divides his analysis into six chapters which are
titled after the six key terms from the Preamble, namely, Justice, Liberty, Equality,
1 Mahitosh Mandal (mahitosh2020@gmail.com) is Assistant Professor and Chair at the Department of
English, Presidency University, Kolkata.
Copyright © 2020 This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International License

All About Ambedkar: A Journal on Theory and Praxis 1.1(Sept.-Dec. 2020)| 73
Fraternity, Dignity and Nation. While he annotates, interrogates and explores the broader
semantic and thematic dimensions of these terms, his study brings to the fore the immense
contributions of Ambedkar as a revolutionary thinker.
The second book for review is Luis Cabrera’s The Humble Cosmopolitan: Rights,
Diversity, and Trans-state Democracy published by Oxford University Press in January
2020. Cosmopolitanism cannot just be a set of moral principles for the individual, there
should also be institutional mechanisms to correctly implement its claims. Partly in light
of this idea, Cabrera discusses Ambedkar as a “humble cosmopolitan” who, as he mentions
in the Preface, “drew on the universal principles of equality and right in striving to
transform a domestic system oriented to segregation, exclusion and inequality.” If
cosmopolitanism is thus to be institutionalized then the “institutional global citizenship”
could become a reality only through a new form of democracy, a “trans-state” democracy
as Cabrera calls it, meant to undermine the arrogance of national sovereignties for the sake
of humble protection of global and local rights. According to Cabrera, Ambedkar is an
extremely important thinker in the sense that his ideas offer cues for the building of global
democracy. This book, based on extensive field-work in India, UK, Turkey and Belgium, is
ground-breaking research in political philosophy.
Divided into ten chapters, the book engages with Ambedkar by way of bringing in
both academic and activist perspectives. There is an entire chapter devoted to the role of
the National Campaign of Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) in promoting the cause of the
Dalits and how its global outreach is obstructed by the Hindutva ideologues. On the one
hand, the book takes up a popular slogan about Ambedkar from the Dalit activists, i.e., “We
are because he was,” to critique the legacy of Ambedkar in contemporary India. On the
other, it critiques the rise of Hindutva politics in India and engages with the question: what
is so bharatiya about the Bhartatiya Janata Party? Discussion of Ambedkar includes analysis
of the competing discourses on inclusion from Gandhian and Ambedkarite perspectives,
theorizing Ambedkar’s views regarding “arrogance of caste” and “fiction of equality,”
reading Ambedkar with Immanuel Kant on the questions of “civilizational hierarchy and
paternalism,” and critiquing his views in conjunction with idea of cosmopolitanism

All About Ambedkar: A Journal on Theory and Praxis 1.1(Sept.-Dec. 2020)| 74
conceptualized by Martha Nussbaum. The book also theorizes global democracy with
reference to the policies adopted by the UK Independence Party (UKIP), by the European
Union based in Brussels, and the contemporary political situations in Turkey. The author
informs us that all the royalties of the book would go to the non-profit organization
GiveWell. Nevertheless, some readers, particularly some young researchers from India,
might find this immensely valuable book slightly overpriced.
The third book for consideration is titled Hindutva and Dalits: Perspectives for
Understanding Communal Praxis which has been edited by Anand Teltumbde and brought
out by Sage Publications in January 2020. The book was originally published in 2005 by
Samya at the backdrop of the Gujarat massacres of 2002 when the Hindutva forces
strategically manipulated the Dalits in joining hands with Hindutva goons in their
genocidal attack on the Muslim minority. One must be careful here and not essentialise
the Dalit response to Hindutva as one of blind acceptance of the same insofar as not all
Dalits had been “interpellated” by BJP. During Gujarat riots, as Teltumbde points out, many
Dalits participated in the communal violence but many others also sheltered and saved
scores of Muslims. However, even if a tiny section of Dalits turns to Hindutva this is,
nonetheless, a matter of grave concern and is a sad commentary on Dalit politics which has
theoretically been defined as an anti-Hindutva discourse. We may remember Ambedkar,
in this context, who categorically rejected Hinduism and converted to Buddhism because
he was convinced that reformation and annihilation of caste would be impossible from
within the Hindu fold which would always retain its supremacist dimension in the form of
Brahminism. To make sense of the appropriation of the Dalits by BJP, the book thus
engages in an analysis of how the Hindutva forces, even with a past of having attacked the
Dalits en masse on the issue of reserved seats in 1981, had successfully wooed the Dalits and
made them “foot soldiers” of BJP – not just in Gujarat but nation-wide. The book contains
a total of sixteen extremely important essays authored by Meena Kandasamy, Anand
Teltumbde, V Geeta, and K S Chalam, among others. Given the continuous attempts by the
BJP government in contemporary times to victimize the Muslims and even strip the
Muslims off their citizenship, the book uncannily evokes the possibility of a nation-wide

All About Ambedkar: A Journal on Theory and Praxis 1.1(Sept.-Dec. 2020)| 75
reproduction of the Gujarat riots and thus immensely contributes in understanding how
the Hindutva forces have managed to achieve not just a series of electoral victories but a
continuous hegemonic expansion as well.
The fourth book for discussion is titled Guja-ratri: Reflections on Moditva by
Ambedkar Age Collective, published by Shared Mirror Publishing House in January 2020.
According to the editors, the term “Guja-ratri” is derived from a Telugu poem – titled
“Nenu" (literally, "I") written by the poet-activist K. G. Sathyamurthy – which is based on
the 2002 Gujarat riots. The book is a collection of critical essays containing Bahujan
perspectives on the rise of the right-wing leader Narendra Modi. Against the backdrop of
the teachings of Dr Ambedkar who had repeatedly claimed that Hinduism was ideologically
opposed to the democratic principles of liberty, equality and fraternity and who considered
Hindu Raj to be a menace for India, the book engages in passionate reflections on
“Moditva.” However, the authors of the book – many of whom are engaged in ground-level
activism – are careful to not consider the Gujarat massacres as the only defining moment
because the roots of Hindutva, as they claim, go much deeper. In my view, this book, like
the previous publications from The Shared Mirror, promises to be an eye-opener for the
reader.
The fifth book for review is The Famished Gods: Speaking Selves in Akkarmasi edited
by Praveen Kumar Anshuman and Ravi Prakash Chaubey, published by Pharos Books in
January 2020. Divided into eight chapters authored by eight different contributors, the
book offers critical observations on Akkarmashi (The Outcaste), the famous autobiography
of the Marathi Dalit writer Sharan Kumar Limbale. The phrase “famished gods” refers to
the Dalits who function as the life-force for the Brahminical society and yet starve to death.
As such, the book explores the significance of the motifs of food and hunger that pervade
Limbale’s autobiographical narrative. Although the book contains some editorial flaws, it
might be of use to the students of Dalit literature.
The last book I would like to mention here is Alexander Lee’s From Hierarchy to
Ethnicity: The Politics of Caste in Twentieth-Century India published by Cambridge
University Press in January 2020. The book thoroughly examines the issues of identity

All About Ambedkar: A Journal on Theory and Praxis 1.1(Sept.-Dec. 2020)| 76
politics and identity activism from within a historical framework and traces the conceptual
trajectory of caste-based politics of identity in India. Lee argues that this trajectory involves
an increasing possibility of reading the discourse of caste in India in conjunction with the
discourse of ethnicity in other parts of the world.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to my friend Kuffir Nalgundwar for providing me with information and
clarification regarding the poet-activist K. G. Sathyamurthy.
Works Cited
Ambedkar Age Collective. Guja-ratri: Reflections on Moditva. Shared Mirror Publishing
House, 2020.
Anshuman, Praveen Kumar and Ravi Prakash Chaubey, eds. The Famished Gods: Speaking
Selves in Akkarmasi. Pharos Books, 2020.
Cabrera, Luis. The Humble Cosmopolitan: Rights, Diversity and Trans-state Democracy.
Oxford University Press, 2020.
Lee, Alexander. From Hierarchy to Ethnicity: The Politics of Caste in Twentieth Century
India. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Rathore, Aakash Singh. Ambedkar’s Preamble: A Secret History of the Constitution of India.
Penguin Books, 2020.
Teltumbde, Anand, ed. Hindutva and Dalits: Perspectives for Understanding Communal
Praxis. Sage Publications, 2020.