Ooru (Uru): A Village, A Town. All Non-Dalit Castes-From The Brahmins And The Land-Owning Castes To The Service Castes Like The Barbers-Live In The Ooru, And It Contains The SettlementýS Main Temples. Keri(Kýri): Keri Is The Ward Where The Dalits Live; It Is Separate From The Main Body Of The Village. Keri Also Means A Street. This Book Attempts A New Imaging Of The Dalit Personality.

Government Brahmana is the English translation of the Kannada autobiography of Aravind Malagatti. The autobiographical narrative is in the form of a series of episodes from the author s childhood and youth. These episodes function as what G.N. Devy calls epiphanic moments in a caste society. The author reflects on specific instances from his childhood and student days that illustrate the normative cruelty practiced by caste Hindu society on dalits. We encounter all the tropes of (male) dalit life: is isolation in school where even drinking water is an ordeal; life in the village where dalits perform the filthiest tasks but are denied access to common wells, lakes, where they cannot step into shops and therefore have their purchases thrown at them, where they have to cut their own hair because no barber would touch it; consuming dead-animal meat and innards; doomed love affairs with `upper caste women. A painful, disturbing, thought-provoking memoir, this text is conversely full of vitality, even tenderness. In its structure and purpose as a series of notes towards a dalit autobiography Government Brahmana appears to be anticipated by Ambedkar s own autobiographical sketches.

‘Caste is Race in Ancient Times, Race is Caste in Modern Times, Untouchability is an Aryan Construct. They said God has not created Untouchables.’ Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd goes on to say, ‘Many people from the Brahmin–Baniya castes have written about their own greatness in their autobiographies, in English and in the regional languages. But I have not seen even a single autobiography of a person born and brought up in the shepherd community’. He adds that it is in writing about themselves that people gain a sense of self-respect. Shepherd’s evocative memoirs reveal the struggle for education and dignity that a great majority of Indians undergo. As a little boy herding sheep and goats, he and his brother were the first to go to school. The author writes of his long and often interrupted journey to becoming a writer and an intellectual, without support and having to overcome adversities.

Omprakash Valmiki describes his life as an untouchable, or Dalit, in the newly independent India of the 1950s. "Joothan" refers to scraps of food left on a plate, destined for the garbage or animals. India's untouchables have been forced to accept and eat joothan for centuries, and the word encapsulates the pain, humiliation, and poverty of a community forced to live at the bottom of India's social pyramid. Although untouchability was abolished in 1949, Dalits continued to face discrimination, economic deprivation, violence, and ridicule. Valmiki shares his heroic struggle to survive a preordained life of perpetual physical and mental persecution and his transformation into a speaking subject under the influence of the great Dalit political leader, B. R. Ambedkar. A document of the long-silenced and long-denied sufferings of the Dalits, Joothan is a major contribution to the archives of Dalit history and a manifesto for the revolutionary transformation of society and human consciousness.

Light from the fire burning afar mingled with the moonlight in Kurukshetra to create a terrible twilight. Scattered corpses ... broken chariots ... sporadic death cries ... prowling scavengers ... the battlefield stretched endlessly.The victorious Pāndava camps burst into deafening cheers amidst burning funeral pyres. The Great War was finally over. But soon enough, when everyone learns the truth about the hated enemy, Karna, that towering figure with the golden glow, another battle starts. Everyone stands stunned, forgetting to even cry. Torn by the guilt of fratricide, Yudhishtira becomes a recluse. Draupadi becomes restless: her tryst with reality begins. What seemed a justifiable end to an ignominious character completely overturns. Her pride for her husbands’ valour erodes. Life as she had understood slowly begins to lose meaning. This Malayalam classic centres on Karna, the most criticized yet admired character of the Mahabharata, treacherously killed by his half-brother Arjuna. His life story unfolds through the eyes of Draupadi, in flashbacks and tales she hears from those around her in the aftermath of the battle of Kurukshetra.

UNIT I Introduction, UNIT II Dalit Literature, UNIT III Tribal Literature, UNIT IV African American Literature, UNIT V Aboriginal or Indigenous Literature, UNIT VI Comparison and Similarities of Dalit and African Literatures, UNIT VII Comparison and Similarities of Tribal and Aboriginal Literature.

The Work On This Book Is Based Upon Vyasa Bharatha,The Author Has Recreated The Characters And Incidents Independently. The Author Created Of His Own A Parallel Concept Revolving Around Draupadi And In Those Imaginary Threads He Fastened The Petal Of KarnaýS Story. The Soliloquies Of Draupadi Are Innovated Imparting To It A New Philosophical Dimension And Giving A Tragic Depth In This Work.

The Tamil Brahmans were a traditional, mainly rural, high-caste elite who have been transformed into a modern, urban, middle-class community since the late nineteenth century. Many Tamil Brahmans today are in professional and managerial occupations, such as engineering and information technology; most of them live in Chennai and other Tamilnadu towns, but others have migrated to the rest of India and overseas. This book, which is mainly based on the authors ethnographic research, describes and analyses this transformation. It is also a study of how and why the Tamil Brahmans privileged status within a hierarchical society has been perpetuated in the face of both a strong anti-Brahman movement in Tamilnadu, and a series of wider social, cultural, economic, political, and ideological changes that might have been expected to undermine their position completely. The major topics discussed include Brahman rural society, urban migration and urban ways of life, education and employment, the position of women, and religion and culture. The Tamil Brahmans class position, including the internal division into the upper- and lower-middle classes, and the process of class reproduction, are examined closely to analyze the congruence between Tamil Brahmanhood and middle classness, which as comparison with other Brahman and non-Brahman groups shows is highly unusual in contemporary India."

South Asia is a rich and fascinating linguistic area, its many hundreds of languages from four major language families representing the distinctions of caste, class, profession, religion, and region. This comprehensive new volume presents an overview of the language situation in this vast subcontinent in a linguistic, historical and sociolinguistic context. An invaluable resource, it comprises authoritative contributions from leading international scholars within the fields of South Asian language and linguistics, historical linguistics, cultural studies and area studies. Topics covered include the ongoing linguistic processes, controversies, and implications of language modernization; the functions of South Asian languages within the legal system, media, cinema, and religion; language conflicts and politics, and Sanskrit and its long traditions of study and teaching. Language in South Asia is an accessible interdisciplinary book for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, multilingualism, language planning and South Asian studies.