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.
Author: Ashish Dhar (Ashish Dhar)
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The Fall and fall of the Shudras
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.
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Caste and the discourse of Casteism
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.
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Dharma, Ecology and Development
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.
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On Sabarimala
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.
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The textbook vision of Indian History
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.
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The prism of class
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.
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The inertia of symbols
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.
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The shadow of colonialism
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.
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Beef against beef
The discourse on the issue of beef ban in various states of India and the ensuing political war is strangely negligent of the ethos behind the enactment of these laws.