Dalits and Non-Brahmin Consciousness in Colonial Tamil Nadu

Voice of Dalit, 2011

Dalits are still at the bottom of Indian society. They are a heterogeneous ensemble of the traditional untouchable castes. They are not a homogeneous category in their backwardness, disabilities and deprivations. Their emancipation and empowerment efforts also vary from region to region, and state to state. Keeping this in view, this study will focus on a single state against the all-India. It will, first, provide some idea of the efforts against caste-based social oppression and suppression of dalits and for their social and political mobilisation, emancipation, and empowerment. All of these have contributed in some way to the incorporation of the special provisions for SCs and S'Ts into the Indian Constitution. Thereafter, the article will document the post-independence phase in Tamil Nadu. 1. Dalit Emancipation efforts in Tamil Nadu: The Pre-Independence phase R. Srinivasan was one of the first persons from the DCs in Madras Presidency to receive higher education as early as in 1892. He formed an association of the DCs, the Pariah Mahajana Sabha, which was renamed later as the Adi-Dravidar Mahajana Sabha.

This article examines the development and early politics of the Dalit Panther Iyakkam (DPI), or Dalit Panther Movement, of Tamil Nadu, India. Established in 1982, the DPI advanced a political program that petitioned state authorities qua democratic citizens. By submitting formal appeals through official institutional channels, DPI organisers lobbied government bureaucrats to fulfil their professional obligations and advocated an impartial administration of law, delivery of rights, and equitable access to social and economic development. This article examines the earliest phase of Dalit Panther politics in Tamil Nadu through its own documentary evidence, drawing upon DPI Chairman A. Malaichamy's personal letters, written appeals, received correspondence, political pamphlets, and rally handbills. Countering interpretations of subaltern assertion that accentuate 'illiberal' techniques as its primary form and state welfare its principal target, I demonstrate that legal advocacy served as a core feature of early DPI politics. When state institutions proved unresponsive, movement organisers began to consider alternative forms of political practice and came to regard the public sphere as a more conducive arena for making claims on state authority and demanding recognition as democratic citizens.

History of Dalit politics in Utter Pradesh has been a fascinating topic for academic and public imagination in the recent past. As a part of this process this paper attempts to capture the Dalit politics by examining the ides and activities of associations established by Dalits and for Dalits in colonial and post colonial Utter Pradesh. The main proposition this paper advances is that Dalit collectivist activism was actively promoted by several caste associations established by Dalits in Utter Pradesh. It was this process that actively promoted the identify formation process of caste and class among Dalits. This duel identity process remained to be centrality of Dalit politics in colonial and post colonial India. In sort, this paper attempts to trace the plurality of Dalit politics in Utter Pradesh.

Outlook India, 2023

Dalit politics in Kerala didn't arise during colonial modernity, rather it has been around for centuries. Since the medieval period, it has encountered and resisted Brahmanism. Dalit politics waged a war against Brahmanism and white colonialism in the last century and continues to do so. Though there aren't enough records about other Dalit movements before the nineteenth century, there are several literary works, including Pachalloor Pathikam and Chenganooraathi Paattu, which give us an explicit idea about cultural resistance against the Brahmanical societal system. However, in the long history of Dalit resistance and politics, it was the movements started during the last decades of the nineteenth century led by Mahatma Ayyankali and Poykayil Appachan that wreaked the most havoc on the Hindu system of social inequality. Unlike other contemporary social movements, these were fundamentally systematic, strong and concerted.

Journal of South Asian Development, 2007

CASTE / A Global Journal on Social Exclusion

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 Breuck, Sambaiah Gundimeda, Gopal Guru, Rajkumar Hans, Chinnaiah Jangam, Surinder Jodhka, P. Sanal Mohan, Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana

Dalit journals in colonial Madras 1869 1943, 2020

The contribution of Dalit journals is virtually undocumented in the history of Tamil print media, and the only historiographic trends that have received scholarly attention so far are the Brahmin nationalist perspective and the non-Brahmin Dravidian perspective. Based on colonial records and journals, this article attempts to construct a history of Dalit journals in colonial Madras by analysing the sociopolitical contexts and the content of 42 journals published from 1869 to 1943. The wide-ranging conversations in these journals suggest that Dalits were not only active agents in creating a modern identity, questioning their marginalisation, but were also involved in knowledge production in an otherwise restricted public sphere.