A collection of path-breaking and inclusive analyses of Hindutva, making invaluable contributions to current debates.

In 1987, a thirteen-year-old in Rajasthan joins the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Despite his untouchable status, he rises through the ranks. He hates Muslims. He joins the karsevaks to Ayodhya. He is ready to die for the Hindu Rashtra. And yet he remains a lesser Hindu. In this explosive memoir, Bhanwar Meghwanshi tells us what it meant to be an untouchable in the RSS. And what it means to become Dalit.

Fascinating Hindutva examines how, aided by other Hindutva forces like RSS and VHP, the strategies of BJP for mobilizing dalits rests on reinterpreting their Hindu past and unifying them under the metanarrative of Hindutva. It is an exploration of the fascinating tactics used by the Hindutva forces to politically mobilize individual dalit castes like the Nishads, Musahars and Dusadhs by saffronising their heroes.

The contributors to this major intervention into Indian historiography trace the strategies through which Dalits have been marginalized as well as the ways Dalit intellectuals and leaders have shaped emancipatory politics in modern India. Moving beyond the anticolonialism/nationalism binary that dominates the study of India, the contributors assess the benefits of colonial modernity and place humiliation, dignity, and spatial exclusion at the center of Indian historiography. Several essays discuss the ways Dalits used the colonial courts and legislature to gain minority rights in the early twentieth century, while others highlight Dalit activism in social and religious spheres. The contributors also examine the struggle of contemporary middle-class Dalits to reconcile their caste and class, intercaste tensions among Sikhs, and the efforts by Dalit writers to challenge dominant constructions of secular and class-based citizenship while emphasizing the ongoing destructiveness of caste identity. In recovering the long history of Dalit struggles against caste violence, exclusion, and discrimination, Dalit Studies outlines a new agenda for the study of India, enabling a significant reconsideration of many of the Indian academy's core assumptions. Contributors: D. Shyam Babu, Laura Brueck, Sambaiah Gundimeda, Gopal Guru, Rajkumar Hans, Chinnaiah Jangam, Surinder Jodhka, P. Sanal Mohan, Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana

This book is entirely different from books that have been written on Indian civil societal relations, spiritual character, political economy, philosophical foundations, scientific roots, cultural essence, and historicity. It takes a journey from tribals upwards and looks at the pyramid of the communities in an inverse order. This book is an excise in new methodology, pedagogy, analysis, and synthesization of knowledge. Every chapter in this book reads like a new innovation in Indian social anthropology. It draws a different map for the future of this nation and its intellectual history.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to dalits in India (who comprise over one-sixth of the country’s population) from the origins of caste system to the present day. Despite a plethora of provisions for affirmative action in the Indian Constitution, dalits are largely excluded from the mainstream except for a minuscule section. The book traces the multifarious changes that befell them during the colonial period and their development thereafter under the leadership of Babasaheb Ambedkar in the centre of political arena. It looks at hitherto unexplored aspects of the degeneration of the dalit movement during the post-Ambedkar period, as well as salient contemporary issues such as the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party, dalit capitalism, the occupation of dalit discourse by NGOs, neoliberalism and its impact, and the various implicit or explicit emancipation schemas thrown up by them. The work also discusses ideology, strategy and tactics of the dalit movement; touches upon one of the most contentious issues of increasing divergence between the dalit and Marxist movements; and delineates the role of the state, both colonial and post-colonial, in shaping dalit politics in particular ways. A tour de force, this book brings to the fore many key contemporary concerns and will be of great interest to students, scholars and teachers of politics and political economy, sociology, history, social exclusion studies and the general reader.

The idea that India is a Hindu majority nation rests on the assumption that the vast swath of its population stigmatized as 'untouchable' is, and always has been, in some meaningful sense, Hindu. But is that how such communities understood themselves in the past, or how they understand themselves now? When and under what conditions did this assumption take shape, and what truths does it conceal? In this book, Joel Lee challenges presuppositions at the foundation of the study of caste and religion in South Asia. Drawing on detailed archival and ethnographic research, Lee tracks the career of a Dalit religion and the effort by twentieth-century nationalists to encompass it within a newly imagined Hindu body politic. A chronicle of religious life in north India and an examination of the ethics and semiotics of secrecy, Deceptive Majority throws light on the manoeuvres by which majoritarian projects are both advanced and undermined.

For many years, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has been working towards social reconstruction in India, which is then used by the Bharatiya Janata Party for political benefit. Contrary to popular understanding, the RSS has transformed to become more technologically savvy and socially inclusive, making the message of Hindu nationalism appealing to a large section of Indians. It has been actively mobilizing Dalits, tribals and other marginalized communities to assimilate them into the Hindutva metanarrative. Instead of wiping out caste from electoral politics, the RSS plays up the identity of disadvantaged groups, which translates into votes for the BJP. Drawing on extensive field research in the heartland of Uttar Pradesh, this path-breaking book shows how through well-planned strategies of appropriation and social work, Hindutva forces are radically reshaping Indian democracy.

Dalit Visions explores and critiques 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 that even secular minds remain imprisoned within this Brahmanical vision, and the language of secular discourse is often steeped in a Hindu ethos. The tract looks at alternative traditions, nurtured within dalit movements, which have questioned this way of looking at Indian society and its history. While seeking to understand the varied dalit visions that have sought to alter the terms of the dominant order, this tract persuades us to reconsider our ideas, listen to those voices which we often refuse to hear and understand the visions which seek to change the world in which dalits live.

"The story of anti-colonial nationalism in India as told in mainstream literary and historical writings presents privileged caste Hindus as heroes and founders. Dalits have mostly been viewed as passive subjects. This book inverts the dominant nationalist narrative and brings to the fore the unacknowledged contributions of Dalits towards the collective imagination of [the] nation of India. By using colonial archives, Telugu Dalit writings, and their political activities, this book presents a Dalit perspective on nationalism.