Rethinking Untouchability The Political Thought of B. R. Ambedkar
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Jesús F. Cháirez-Garza is a Senior Lecturer of the History of Race and Ethnicity at the University of Manchester<p>CHOICE: Recommended<br /><br />'Jesus F. Cháirez-Garza’s extraordinary study of B R Ambedkar is the first extended work situating his oeuvre and career in the context early 20th Century political thought. Rethinking Untouchability gives us a clear sense of how and why Ambedkar’s thought should be taken seriously not just in India, but in relation to a range of other contexts. Rather than simply examining Ambedkar’s work in terms of advocacy for India’s most oppressed communities, Cháirez-Garza shows how his development of the category of ‘untouchability’ related to frameworks of race, space and debates with India’s political left. Connecting to a range of political, anthropological and sociological theorists including Boas and Dewey, Cháirez-Garza shows how Ambedkar framed his followers’ oppression as contingent and adaptable. As a history of political thought, Rethinking Untouchability is a tour de force, requiring us to take Ambedkar seriously in explorations of inequality and injustice both within India and beyond.'<br /><b>Professor William Gould, University of Leeds</b></p>
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Introduction
1 A politics of ventriloquism: The politicisation of untouchability in late colonial India circa 1900-1930
2 Fighting inferiority: Ambedkar, Franz Boas and the rejection of racial theories of untouchability
3 Touching freedom: Ambedkar, untouchability and liberty in late colonial India
4 Touching space: The village, the nation and the spatial features of untouchability
5 Ambedkar and the Left: Theory and praxis
6 Nobody’s people: Pakistan and the erasure of untouchable politics
7 The Internationalisation of untouchability circa 1939-47
Conclusion
Index
Rethinking untouchability sheds new light on the intellectual life of B. R. Ambedkar, one of twentieth-century India’s most important thinkers. Often in the shadow of Indian nationalists like Gandhi and Nehru, the importance of Ambedkar’s political thought has remained largely unexplored.
Ambedkar dedicated his life's work to the abolition of untouchability. Born into one of the most oppressed communities in India, he went on to earn doctoral degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, where he familiarised himself with the newest anthropological, political and sociological theories emerging at the turn of the twentieth century. Influenced by the thought of Franz Boas and John Dewey, among others, Ambedkar showed his followers that their condition of oppression was not the result of karma from previous lives but was fluid and malleable, and therefore could be changed.
By analysing untouchability and its links to religion and ideologies of racial supremacy, Ambedkar exposed untouchability as an economic, political and cultural system designed to oppress Dalits. He demanded political and educational rights to bridge the inequalities present in the lives of his followers. For Ambedkar, India required a social and political revolution beyond the scope of nationalist aspirations. At a time when inequality and injustice is still rampant in India and elsewhere, recovering the value of Ambedkar’s thought is paramount.