Rethinking untouchability: The political thought of B. R. Ambedkar (Racism, Resistance and Social Change)

✍ Scribed by Jesús F. Cháirez-Garza

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 255
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book examines the transformation of untouchability into a political idea in India during the first half of the twentieth century. At its heart is Ambedkar’s role and the concepts he used to champion untouchability as a political problem. Ambedkar’s main objective was to comprehend the numerous avatars of untouchability in order to eradicate this practice. Ambedkar understood untouchability beyond aspects of ritual purity and pollution by stressing its complex nature and uncovering the political, historical, racial, spatial and emotional characteristics contained in this concept. Ambedkar believed the abolition of untouchability depended on a widespread alteration of India’s political, economic and cultural systems. Ambedkar reframed the problem of untouchability by linking it to larger concepts floating in the political environment of late colonial India such as representation, slavery, race, the Indian village, internationalism and even the creation of Pakistan.

✦ Table of Contents

Front matter
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Series editors’ foreword
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
A politics of ventriloquism: the politicisation of untouchability in late colonial India c. 1900–1930
Fighting inferiority: Ambedkar, Franz Boas and the rejection of racial theories of untouchability
Touching freedom: Ambedkar, untouchability and liberty in late colonial India
Touching space: the village, the nation and the spatial features of untouchability
Ambedkar and the left: theory and praxis
Nobody’s people: Pakistan and the erasure of untouchable politics
The internationalisation of untouchability c. 1939–1947
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index