Shudras

'The Shudras echoes Dr Ambedkar's question in Who Were the Shudras? that he asked in 1946. More than 70 years later, Kancha Ilaiah and his team of authors revisit this issue to give Shudras a voice again' -CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT

The Shudras: Vision for a New Path weaves together multiple dimensions of the predicament of India's productive castes-in the spiritual, social, political, economic, philosophical and historical spheres. It reformulates their current position as well as future pathways. It strives to provoke Shudras-including regional political party leaders-all over India to realize their unique historical role in fighting unequal caste structures. And it gives a call to resist Hindutva, in which they have no liberated, equal space with the Dwija castes. At a juncture when the Shudra castes are regionalized and the Dwijas have become 'national', the fifth volume of the Rethinking India series, in collaboration with the Samruddha Bharat Foundation, seeks to bring home the real picture of their marginalized status in all key structures of the nation. It posits that the emancipation and progress of the Shudras are vital to sustain Ambedkar's constitutional democracy and move towards socio-spiritual equality.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd (Author)
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is former director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, and former head of the department of political science at Osmania University, Hyderabad. He is a social activist and has been writing in English and Telugu for forty years. His well-known books, Why I Am Not a Hindu, God as a Political Philosopher, Post-Hindu India and Buffalo Nationalism have played a critical role in shaping Shudra/OBC/Dalit discourse in India and abroad.

Karthik Raja Karuppusamy (Author)
Karthik Raja Karuppusamy is a first-generation graduate from a Shudra family. Currently a doctoral candidate and senior research fellow at the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, his research focuses on the political, legal and socio-economic interface between Dalits and OBCs in the Kongunad region of Tamil Nadu. His MPhil dissertation, 'The Nation in Historical Imagination', theorizes how secular and communal conceptions of the 'nation' are constructed, operationalized, and disseminated through state-sponsored NCERT history textbooks post-Independence.

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