Anand Teltumbde

Anand Teltumbde was born on 15 July 1951 in Rajur, Yavatmal district, Maharashtra, the eldest of eight children in a Dalit farm-laboring family. He holds a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering (1973) from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, an MBA (1982) from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, and a PhD (1993) in cybernetic modelling from the University of Mumbai. He was later awarded an honorary D.Litt. by Karnataka State Open University. He is married to Rama Teltumbde, granddaughter of B.R. Ambedkar — a connection he has publicly stated he is careful not to trade upon, insisting his work must stand on its own intellectual merits.

Before entering academia, Teltumbde held senior corporate roles: Executive Director at Bharat Petroleum and Managing Director at Petronet India Limited. He subsequently joined the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur as a professor before moving in 2016 to the Goa Institute of Management as a Senior Professor, where he established a Big Data programme. He also maintained a long-running column, "Margin Speak," in the Economic and Political Weekly, and contributed regularly to Outlook, Tehelka, Seminar, and Himal Southasian.

Teltumbde is one of the most prolific and theoretically rigorous voices in contemporary anti-caste scholarship. His major works include The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India's Hidden Apartheid (2010), Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt (2015), Republic of Caste (2018) — a collection of essays assessing Dalit political life in India — and Dalits: Past, Present and Future. His intellectual project seeks a synthesis of Ambedkarism and Marxism, arguing that neither caste-only nor class-only frameworks are sufficient for Dalit liberation, and that the caste system must be annihilated rather than merely reformed. He has been sharply critical of symbolic Dalit politics and of the appropriation of Ambedkar's legacy by rival electoral parties.

In 2018, Teltumbde was implicated in the Elgar Parishad / Bhima Koregaon case, accused under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) of having links to the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and of involvement in an alleged conspiracy against Prime Minister Narendra Modi — charges he has consistently denied. He was first arrested and released on 3 February 2019. After the Supreme Court dismissed his anticipatory bail on 16 March 2020, he surrendered to the National Investigation Agency on 14 April 2020 from Rajgruha, Ambedkar's former Mumbai residence. He was held as an undertrial for 31 months at Taloja Central Jail in Maharashtra. A Pegasus spyware infection of his phone had been documented in October 2019. More than 600 international scholars signed a joint statement condemning the prosecution as a "witch-hunt." The Bombay High Court granted him bail in November 2022, finding "no prima facie evidence" to sustain the charges. His brother Milind Teltumbde, a Maoist insurgent, was killed by security forces during the same period.

Following his release, Teltumbde published The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir (Bloomsbury), documenting his incarceration, the conditions of Taloja Central Jail, the COVID-19 pandemic inside prison, and his fellow undertrial inmates. He also published The Caste Con Census (Navayana), a critical analysis of the arguments for and likely consequences of a national caste census. As of 2025–26, his bail conditions severely restrict his movement within India. In January 2024, the Government of Karnataka awarded him the Basava Puraskara.