The blame for the poverty and hardships faced by communities like Chamars and Mahars in present-day India is placed at the door of the 'caste system' and more specifically, the moral failings of so-called upper-castes (savarnas). A deeper and sincere investigation into the past and present of the global leather industry destroys the carefully crafted myth.
Reading Ambedkar's works in conjunction with the historical realities of his times provides interesting insights into the mind of the most revered historical figure of contemporary India.
There is an abundance of inscriptional and literary evidence pointing towards the high status of Shudra communities in pre-colonial India. Yet, academicians have never acknowledged, much less revised their erroneous theories to accommodate for the same.
Shudras in pre-colonial India were totally different from how they are seen in the popular imagination of modern India leading to a perverted discourse that looks for solutions to the problems of the marginalised sections of society in the vague past instead of the concrete present.
The ecological threat to shrines like Kedarnath due to ever-increasing tourist rush is real. While sustainable development is a great buzzword, it is unclear to most people what it actually means in terms of policy and economics.
The recent verdict on the entry of women in the Sabarimala shrine serves as a grim reminder of the wide gap between the colonial moorings of the modern Indian State and the spiritual aspirations of the Indian people.
The vision of history propagated by the school and college textbooks in India is a caricature of the real past, explicitly serving the political goals of Marxism.
Class is a useful lens for understanding caste but it could lead to misleading conclusions that do not account for a plethora of contradictory evidence.
Interpreting the symbolism of the cow in the contemporary Hindu worldview with the help of the Samkhya philosophy leads to interesting insights about the recent political outcry around the government regulations concerning cattle trade.
The grounds (meta-narratives) that inform the modern notion of caste all stand debunked. Yet caste-based politics seems to be perpetually on the rise.