Dalit Intellectuals: Ideas, Struggles and the Vision

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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.

Yagati Chinna Rao is Professor and Chairperson at the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Some of his earlier works include Writing Dalit History and Other Essays (2007); as well as edited volumes, The Pasts of the Outcastes: Readings in Dalit History (with Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, 2017); and Perspectives on Social Exclusion: Essays in Honour of Professor Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (2019).
Raj Sekhar Basu is Professor in the Department of History, University of Calcutta, Kolkata. His earlier publications include Nandanar's Children: The Paraiyar's Tryst with Destiny, Tamil Nadu 1850-1956 (2011); as well as edited volumes Narratives from the Margins: Aspects of Adivasi History in India (with Sanjukta Dasgupta, 2011); and Medical Encounters in British India (with Deepak Kumar, 2013).

The present volume is an outcome of a 'Special Panel on Dalit History and Politics' that focused on 'Dalit intellectual tradition', held under the aegis of the Indian History Congress 2018. This special panel was instituted in 2016, and the present volume is the third in the series. The contributions provide a fresh perspective on intellectuals and political leaders who have shaped historical consciousness. The contributors have focused on the following historical personalities-B.R. Ambedkar, B. Shyam Sundar, Diwan Bahadur Rettamalai Srinivasan, Dakshyani Velayudhan, Kanshi Ram, and Bhagwan Das. Some contributors have also looked at the Dalit intellectual tradition in the context of Bengal and south India, and intellectual history based on autobiographies.
We dedicate this volume to Professor K.N. Panikkar who pioneered the study of intellectual history in modern India.
We thank all the contributors for their enthusiastic response to our invitation and prompt submission of respective research papers. In addition to contributors, we are indebted to Professor Ishrat Alam, the then Secretary of the Indian History Congress for making it possible to hold a special session of this kind.

Intellectual history or tradition is an unusual discipline, eclectic in both method and subject matter and, therefore, resistant to any single globalized definition. It is the study of intellectuals, ideas and intellectual patterns over time. It continues to reflect the broader historical emphasis on politics. Over the past three decades, historical profession has seen a dramatic shift-away from social and political history, and towards the study of a greater variety of themes and topics, broadly termed as 'cultural history'. Cultural history today also reflects the impact of French theoretical models in structuralist anthropology and literary theory. It has specially adopted many of the broader insights and methods developed by the French social theorist Michel Foucault. Cultural historians can often write about the same topics as intellectual historians do. The difference is chiefly methodological: whereas an intellectual historian may investigate a given date for its own sake, a cultural historian is more likely to examine the cultural circulation of that idea, its diffusion beyond the confines of an intellectual elite and into the wider sphere of society. Historians have dealt extensively on the political elites but the roles of intellectual, aesthetic, moral and religious elites have not been adequately researched."