‘Lower-caste’ thinkers made a crucial intervention in the conceptualization of modern India by claiming that there could hardly be any discussion of colonial India without a critical interrogation of the caste system. Dalit Intellectuals: Ideas, Struggles and the Vision is an exploration of a range of interpretations of Dalit intellectual traditions through contributions which emerged from a special panel on Dalit History and Politics. Dedicated to Professor K.N. Panikkar, who introduced the study of intellectual history of modern India, these essays explore Dalit intellectual thought-beginning with Ambedkar’s re-envisioning of modern India to the Adi-Dravida movement in colonial Tamil Nadu, the emergence of Kanshi Ram from obscurity to prominence as a public intellectual, autobiographies that led to the making of Dalit intellectuals, and lastly, the late emergence of Dalit intellectual traditions in Bengal.This volume brings to the fore a new intellectual journey, revolutionizing social categories which had hitherto remained outside the domain of respectability and scholarship, and steering the wheel towards newer methods of history writing
