Articles by Chinnaiah Jangam

The colonial experience in India, confronting the pre-existing caste system, did nothing more than create a peculiar order that was neither feudal nor capitalist in its manifestation. What this deformed system did, instead, was to assimilate the privileged castes into the ruling structure, while simultaneously unleashing multiple forms of oppression on marginalised sections of the population in India. This article attempts to narrate the lesser known stories of the unacknowledged Dalits who were inspired by the Marxist ideology of class struggle and used it to mobilise agricultural labourers and manual scavengers in the Telugu country.

Vamsee Juluri’s response to my article contains the puerile argument that the debate on the history curriculum in American schools can somehow preclude discussions on Indian history.

The central orientation of this article is organised around Dalit identity politics and their implications on the project of writing history in postcolonial India. It critically engages with the Subaltern Studies project as a school of postcolonial historiography that claims to represent the voice of the marginalised and yet stops short of acknowledging caste and caste-based oppression as worthy of historical analysis. In particular, it engages with Dipesh Chakrabarty's reflections on Dalit identity politics in postcolonial India and argues that Dalits, while demanding sociopolitical equality and a dignified identity, also challenge the epistemologies of the nation and demand its historical narratives to be egalitarian and inclusive.