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Facing systemic exploitation and discrimination, India’s lowest castes have barely been acknowledged on the big screen. Now independent, mostly non-Hindi language filmmakers are challenging attitudes with powerful stories of injustice to give them a voice.
Many of the directors are from the (...)
The Suriya-led legal drama is based on an actual incident of police brutality in Tamil Nadu.
Tha Se Gnanavel’s phone has been ringing non-stop ever since his movie Jai Bhim started streaming on Amazon Prime Video on November 2. “I thought people would say this is a good film, but the response (...)
This paper attempts to understand the larger meanings that interlink social spaces of Dalits women and COVID-19. It tries to foreground the following questions.
How does it determine the realm of social distancing? Does it lead to a new world of caste and precarity? One of the central (...)
The first sustained resistance to colonial rule from the toiling people of India came from adivasis. Bourgeois nationalist historiography tried to marginalise these struggles, and when that was no longer viable, to portray these as somehow ‘primitive’ and therefore not worthy of being considered (...)
The month of January is marked by the birth and death anniversaries of Rohith Vemula. Five years ago, after he was pushed to take his own life at the University of Hyderabad—in what Dalits aptly described as an institutional murder—I reported on the defiant politics of Vemula and the Ambedkar (...)
Driven to a frenzy over purported statements given by Maoist sympathisers, Andhra police have arrested several human rights activists from Andhra Pradesh and Haryana.
Hyderabad: Athram Suguna, a 38-year old school teacher of the Gond tribe from Telangana’s Fakrigutta in Adilabad district, has (...)
An excerpt from the forthcoming book ’Civility in Crisis’ explores how Yadav’s rule evoked feelings of dignity among the Bahujan majority in the state.
The ongoing electoral campaign in Bihar has seen three-term Chief Minister Nitish Kumar needing to remind his audiences about the alleged “jungle (...)
PUCL Maharashtra condemns the caste-based brutal rape and murder of the young Dalit woman from Hathras, UP, by upper caste men and the deliberate mishandling of the case, including delayed FIR, medical examination and burning of the body and destruction of evidence by state authorities.
PUCL (...)
Both ‘The Discreet Charm of the Savarnas’ and ‘Mr. Misunderstanding’ warn us of caste travelling and dominating through liberal-progressive Savarnas – locally and globally.
Two films released this year mark the beginning of an anti-caste genre in English language Indian films. In the past few (...)
The new Bill proposes to make the law banning manual scavenging more stringent, but remains blatantly quiet on the issue of caste.
News on COVID-19 and headlines around the gut-wrenching Hathras rape together obscured a new proposed Bill. The contents of the proposed Manual Scavenging (...)
Castes are not always at war in villages, nor do ex-untouchables face physical violence every day. Caste power also operates through peace and politeness.
Recurring cases of caste violence against Scheduled Castes in rural India bring to the fore the fragile nature of rural peace. As part of (...)
Dalits who converted to Islam and Christianity continue to be outside the fold of affirmative action benefits. This needs to change.
This month marks 70 years from the passing of the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, which aimed at ensuring that Dalit communities would be able to (...)
Under the pretext of education, many Adivasis are taught that their culture, customs, language and habits are ’inferior’.
New Delhi: Gondi, one of the most ancient languages of India, is on the verge of becoming extinct. This is despite the language being the mother tongue of millions of people (...)
The Indian state has imprisoned the Dalit intellectual Anand Teltumbde on trumped-up charges of terrorism and subversion. His activism and writing on caste and class are needed more than ever in the struggle against both casteism and capitalism.
Review of Anand Teltumbde, Republic of Caste: (...)
The migrant labour crisis offers fertile ground for political change but the will to execute it is missing
As the plight and precarity of migrant workers take centrestage, a pertinent question is about its political bearings. The fact that an overwhelming majority of those precariat are (...)
The surge of Hindu nationalism in India can be seen as a revolt of the upper castes against the egalitarian demands of democracy. The Hindutva project is a lifeboat for the upper castes in so far as it promises to restore the Brahminical social order.
The recent upsurge of Hindu nationalism in (...)
While India observed Republic Day, people at various places read out the Preamble to the Constitution and unfurled the National Flag, the adivasi people of Niyamgiri were reminded once again that mining corporations like Vedanta are the real owners of the country.
The tyranny of the Manubadi (...)
A fact-finding team has found that tribals in Khunti and their pathalgadi movement has been dealt with severe repression and torture.
New Delhi: The Jharkhand Janadhikar Mahasabha, an overarching network of multiple social movements and organisations, has asked the state government to (...)
When Scheduled Castes weren’t given 33% of agricultural village common land, as required by an old regulation, they decided to fight for it.
“Our struggle is not just about money,” said Paramjit Kaur, standing at the door of her kitchen in Sangrur, Punjab, rolling a dough ball to make chapatis. (...)
While the conflict is generally reduced to just two sides – the government versus the Naxals – Alpa Shah’s book centres a third group: the Adivasis.
At a time when human rights activists are dubbed ‘urban Naxals’ and incarcerated, actual Naxalites remain poorly understood. Many Indians see them as (...)
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