South Asia Center presents: Ramnarayan Rawat - A Dalit Lexicon of Liberty and Equality in 20th Century Northern India

South Asia Center presents: Ramnarayan Rawat - A Dalit Lexicon of Liberty and Equality in 20th Century Northern India

Ramnarayan Rawat, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Delaware, Newark

Dalit actors and organizations deployed a specific set of concepts to define, describe, and personalize the politics of liberty and equality in early 20th century India. Rawat argues that the terms used in Dalit political and literary activism were a product of very particular intellectual and religious traditions. The heterodox (non-Hindu) religious practice known as Nirgun Bhakti (devotion to a formless divinity) constituted a crucial resource for Dalit engagements with the ideas and practices of liberal politics being worked out in late colonial India. This talk traces the intimate connections between vernacular concepts, modern democratic institutions, and Dalit intellectual challenges to caste inequality.

Sponsored by the South Asia Center at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs