Dalit art, music, writing and faith, long dismissed as lesser, asserted on Dalit terms as culture in its own right.
Walked out on as a boy poet in Vinukonda, the Telugu Dalit poet mastered the classical verse of the Brahmin pandits and used it to put caste on trial, from the church pew to the temple door.
I have two teachers – poverty and caste discrimination. One taught me patience, while the other taught me courage to rebel.
Dalit women writers gathered in Nallapoddu (2003), the anthology of Telugu Dalit women's writing edited by Gogu Shyamala.
Untouchability has never needed anyone to announce a motive. India's Scheduled Castes commission went looking for one in Haldwani.
But after my speech, you … tried to insult me by doing a purification ritual … you made me feel the sting of untouchability.
Of respondents to the India Human Development Survey (2011–12) who said they practised untouchability in some form.
From a Konkan village to Mumbai's women's movement, the Marathi-language writer has spent fifty years putting Dalit women, and the caste and patriarchy that bound them, on the page in their own terms.
My mother was an expert at weaving; similarly I also wove with words.
Roughly what a Dalit woman earned for a day of paddy transplanting in Mahatwar, Uttar Pradesh, in cash and rice, against the local daily wage for men.
Gurram Jashuva's Telugu poem turned a Sanskrit love-messenger poem into a Dalit man's case against caste, and it still cuts. Its faith in Gandhi's coming nation has aged worse than its anger.
The protagonist in Meghaduta was sentenced to one year, but my hero was sentenced from birth.
of taped conversations with her mother, transcribed by Gidla, became the basis of Ants Among Elephants.
From the stone thrown at the camera in Fandry to an Ambedkar Jayanti dance in a Bachchan film, the Marathi filmmaker has spent sixteen years putting caste in Indian cinema's blind spot.
Caste is the foundation of our society. It's a reality that you need to have a special talent to avoid. Bollywood has that talent, I don't.
The Mumbai artist known for archiving the Dalit Panthers' magazines makes work about who gets to picture Dalit women, and what even the anti-caste movement lets them be.
Art cannot just make us feel represented. It can't only give us images of Dalit women that confirm what we already know. It also has to push us to ask, 'What do we allow Dalit women to do?'
Mukta Salve's age, by Shridhar's account, when she published "About the Grief of the Mahars and Mangs" in 1855, the essay that Shridhar's series Educate starts from.
Dalits joined India's churches, often as whole communities, to leave caste behind. How caste followed them in, how they fought back, and why the state says it ended at baptism.
I am sorry to say that this (SC status) has been a demand from Dalit Christians for over 70 years. I hope the government understands the struggles (of Dalit Christians) and accords this status.
Dalit bishops in the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India in 2000, when Joji became the first Dalit archbishop. About 12 of roughly 180 in 2026, by one lay leader's count. (Christianity Today; UCA News)
Perumpalli's Dalits had been refused the common burial ground. When a 90-year-old man died, the question was who blocked the road and what the law required of the police who, villagers say, stood by.
Dalits joined India's churches, often as whole communities, to leave caste behind. How caste followed them in, how they fought back, and why the state says it ended at baptism.
He grew up at the edge of an Andhra Pradesh village and left school after Class 7. Now the first Dalit cardinal leads India's Catholic bishops, a body where Dalits remain a small minority.
Walked out on as a boy poet in Vinukonda, the Telugu Dalit poet mastered the classical verse of the Brahmin pandits and used it to put caste on trial, from the church pew to the temple door.
Gurram Jashuva's Telugu poem turned a Sanskrit love-messenger poem into a Dalit man's case against caste, and it still cuts. Its faith in Gandhi's coming nation has aged worse than its anger.
Her book Dalit Women and the Fullness of Life is sharpest on merit, allyship and who sets the terms. Its turn to joy as a political practice is braver than it is finished.
Ten years ago, an Australian poetry journal printed Dalit and Adivasi poems, and had Dalit and Adivasi writers carry Aboriginal poems into Marathi, Telugu, Hindi and Kunkana.
Tamil Nadu's SC/ST Commission has given Collectors a month to strip caste names from streets and settlements. For Dalits whose address told strangers their caste, the name is the point.
From the stone thrown at the camera in Fandry to an Ambedkar Jayanti dance in a Bachchan film, the Marathi filmmaker has spent sixteen years putting caste in Indian cinema's blind spot.
The journalist who hid her Dalit caste, then named it in public, now reports on caste in the diaspora and helps organise New York's caste-law campaign. She answers her Dalit critics in print.
The Telugu Dalit writer has turned the speech of Madiga women in a Telangana village into literature, and gathered eight decades of Dalit women's writing in Telugu into print.
He went from driving an auto-rickshaw in Chalakudy to about 200 films and folk albums that sold in the millions. Ten years on, his memorial is still, in his director's words, fallow land.
From a Konkan village to Mumbai's women's movement, the Marathi-language writer has spent fifty years putting Dalit women, and the caste and patriarchy that bound them, on the page in their own terms.
Gidla traced her Dalit Christian family's caste through mission schools, communist parties, a police cell and a New York subway job. Her newest writing turns to her mother.
A paper at this year's FAccT conference argues that auditing AI image models for caste bias one category at a time misses how caste works: as a ranking between groups.
The 1982 Tamil novel, read in English as Heat, follows a boy who kills a landowner. It is exact about who pays for that blow, and silent on caste.
The Tamil novelist, who died in July aged 79, spent five decades writing the black-soil south and the people at the bottom of its order. He rejected the "Dalit writer" label.
A new book asks what is left over when a story about a Dalit woman is neither an atrocity report nor an inspiration reel. That question is the book's argument before a single chapter is read.
The Mumbai artist known for archiving the Dalit Panthers' magazines makes work about who gets to picture Dalit women, and what even the anti-caste movement lets them be.
The Dalit Panthers' little magazines survived on their own people's shelves. Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar is scanning and translating them, arguments and art alike.
Tamil cinema's anti-caste filmmakers built their own institutions and audiences before Mumbai noticed — calling that a 'crossover' gets the story backwards.
