Memoirs of a Dalit Communist

Memoirs of a Dalit Communist

Author: Satyendra More

Publisher: Leftword Books

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 9788194077800

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Translation of: Dalita va kamyunisòta calavalica saâskta duva.


Caste

Caste

Author: Isabel Wilkerson

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2023-02-14

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 0593230272

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.


Revolutionary Desires

Revolutionary Desires

Author: Ania Loomba

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-07-24

Total Pages: 601

ISBN-13: 1351209698

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Revolutionary Desires examines the lives and subjectivities of militant-nationalist and communist women in India from the late 1920s, shortly after the communist movement took root, to the 1960s, when it fractured. This close study demonstrates how India's revolutionary women shaped a new female – and in some cases feminist – political subject in the twentieth century, in collaboration and contestation with Indian nationalist, liberal-feminist, and European left-wing models of womenhood. Through a wide range of writings by, and about, revolutionary and communist women, including memoirs, autobiographies, novels, party documents, and interviews, Ania Loomba traces the experiences of these women, showing how they were constrained by, but also how they questioned, the gendered norms of Indian political culture. A collection of carefully restored photographs is dispersed throughout the book, helping to evoke the texture of these women’s political experiences, both public and private. Revolutionary Desires is an original and important intervention into a neglected area of leftist and feminist politics in India by a major voice in feminist studies.


The Shudra

The Shudra

Author: Jalalul Haq

Publisher: HarperCollins India

Published: 2022-01-28

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9788194865483

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Vedic literature has the same word for both man and God--purusha. The Vedic seers ritually sacrifice Purusha, the God, thereby also killing purusha, the spiritual-cultural man. This births the 'caste-man', who is not man at all. The caste-man is either higher or lower. A handful are superhuman: gods, priests, Brahmans. And the masses are subhuman: the Shudra. In The Shudra, Jalalul Haq conducts a philosophical autopsy of ancient Indian texts, meticulously reading between the lines to uncover the early history of caste. He shows how inequality pervaded Buddhism, Jainism and other heterodox sects, even as they tried to counter the hegemony of Brahmanism. In this clash of gods and demons, Haq attempts to extract the human.


Interrogating My Chandal Life

Interrogating My Chandal Life

Author: Manoranjan Byapari

Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited

Published: 2019-01-17

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789381345139

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Winner of The Hindu Prize 2018 (Non-fiction) Shortlisted for the 3rd JIO MAMI Word to Screen Award 2018 If you insist that you do not know me, let me explain myself … you will feel, why, yes, I do know this person. I’ve seen this man. With these words, Manoranjan Byapari points to the inescapable roles all of us play in an unequal society. Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit is the translation of his remarkable memoir Itibritte Chandal Jivan. It talks about his traumatic life as a child in the refugee camps of West Bengal and Dandakaranya, facing persistent want—an experience that would dominate his life. The book charts his futile flight from home to escape hunger, in search of work as a teenager around the country, only to face further exploitation. In Kolkata in the 1970s, as a young man, he got caught up in the Naxalite movement and took part in gang warfare. His world changed dramatically when he was taught the alphabet in prison at the age of 24—it drew him into a new, enticing world of books. After prison, he worked as a rickshaw-wallah and one day the writer Mahasweta Devi happened to be his passenger. It was she who led him to his first publication. Today, as Sipra Mukherjee points out, ‘issues of poverty, hunger and violence have exploded the cautiously sewn boundaries of the more affluent world’, rendering archaic the comfortable distances between them. Despite ‘Chandal’ explicitly referring to a Dalit caste, this narrative weaves in and out of the margins.


The Thinnai

The Thinnai

Author: Ari Gautier

Publisher: Hachette India

Published: 2021-08-25

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 9389253489

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If there was anything our neighbours envied us, it was our thinnais. The working-class district of Kurusukuppam is not the Pondicherry of tourist brochures. Here, residents are a bewildering mix of Creoles, colonial war veterans, proud communists and French citizens who have never left India's shores. It is a place of everyday tragedies, melodramatic occurrences and stubborn, absurd hope. But life in Kurusukuppam is upturned by the arrival of a curious tramp, Gilbert Thaata, a wizened Frenchman who has clearly seen hard times. Settling down on the narrator's verandah, his thinnai, Gilbert Thaata begins to earn his keep by recounting the tale of the rise and fall of his family's fortunes as the custodians of a mysterious diamond, the Stone of Sita. The fanciful story that unfolds is one that stretches across centuries and encompasses the history of France's colonial legacy in India. As entranced as they are by the raconteur, his listeners cannot help but ask - just who is this old man and how did he fall on such misfortune? Masterfully translated from the French original by Blake Smith, Ari Gautier's The Thinnai offers a panoramic view of Pondicherry's past, the whimsical eccentricities of its present and shines a light on the quirks of history that come to define us.


Fractured Freedom

Fractured Freedom

Author: Kobad Ghandy

Publisher:

Published: 2021-09-13

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9788194969167

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Born in the cradle of upper-middle-class privilege in a Mumbai Parsi household and educated at one of India's finest schools, Kobad Ghandy's life and career could have scaled heights in the bustling world of corporate finance. Only it did not. Instead, he chose to become an activist working for the oppressed of the country. Shocked by the racism he witnessed in the UK as a student and learning of the horrors of colonial rule in India, he determined to serve those struck the harshest by the cruel inequalities of his country. Fractured Freedom takes you through the journey of an honest man and his partner, Anuradha's, to a difficult destiny. Here is the story of two people who dedicated their lives in the service of the marginalized, and who believed that true revolution required direct action for a more human and just society. Part memoir, part prison diary, Ghandy bares it all looking back at their lives, love, loss and politics, so intrinsically tied together. Having languished in Indian prisons for over a decade, he tells of his long incarceration, of his fellow prisoners, and of the Kafkaesque experiences with the Indian legal system. This is the candid and unfiltered account of how an unjust system breaks the brave and bold-hearted. A story of life in extremes - the height of privilege and the depth of despair, a story of our times, of a path many would shy away from.


Writing Gender Writing Self

Writing Gender Writing Self

Author: Aparna Lanjewar Bose

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781003081968

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Life Writings/Narratives and studies in gender have been posing critical challenges to fetishizing the manner of canon formations and curriculum propriety. This book engages with these and other challenges turning our customary gaze towards women especially marginal, enabling us to interrogate the established pedagogical practices that accentuates the continuing denial of their agency. Reproduction of the cultural modes of narrativization based on memory and experience becomes a mode of reclaiming the agency. These challenge the homogenising singularity of communitarian notions besides dominant gender constructs using visual, textual, popular, historical, cultural and gender modes enabling one to rethink our received theoretical frameworks. This edited volume brings together 21 essays on life writings produced by both well-established and emerging writers in the field of literature written by scholars from countries like India, Pakistan, China, USA, Iran, Yemen and Australia, to name just a few. Many of the essays in this book focus on how the progress of the self is often impeded by the society it finds itself in. With an enlightening foreword by Dr. E.V. Ramakrishnan and a detailed, critical introduction by Aparna Lanjewar Bose, this anthology is useful for all those who wish to learn more about this genre of writing.


An Early Communist

An Early Communist

Author: Suchetana Chattopadhyay

Publisher:

Published: 2012-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9788189487935

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Muzaffar Ahmad, 1889-1973, Indian revolutionist and leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).