Interrogating Key Notions
Krishna Swamy Dara
DALIT POLITICS IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA by Sambaiah Gundimeda Routledge, Abingdon: Oxon/New York, 2018, 330 pp., 995
January 2018, volume 42, No 1

Dalit politics in contemporary India is going through a reflective phase. From the demand at sub-categorizing in reservations to the critical questioning of some Dalits caste groups and individuals who dominate and usurp all the resources meant for Dalits in general. There is now in the academia a significant number of Dalits who are challenging the old Brahmanical hegemony that has entrenched itself into various ideological guises. Sambaiah Gundimeda in this book attempts to challenge the mainstream dominant hypotheses on Dalit politics. He cites his experience as a Dalit as one of the critical and hermeneutical tools to analyse the dominant articulations (or as he likes to say it—received ideas) on the nature of Dalit movement and politics. For this purpose, he looks at two States—Uttar Pradesh and erstwhile Andhra Pradesh (presently Telangana and Andhra Pradesh). He wants to compare these States from an Ambedkarite perspective.

One of his main concerns is the question: Why Dalits in Uttar Pradesh succeeded in gaining power while their counterparts in the south did not. He also questions the assumption that Dalits in the south, particularly erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, are more evolved in terms of their political consciousness than the northern Dalits. Apart from this, the book aims to ‘examine and analyze Dalit mobilization and assertion against caste-based injustice, sociopolitical and cultural domination of the upper castes and the ideological bases of that assertion.’ Further it attempts to ‘understand the impact of Dalit politics upon the Brahmanical social order and upper caste-dominated political order.’

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