Dalit Panthers

ON A WEDNESDAY EVENING in July 1967, two white police officers dragged a black man, John William Smith, into their precinct building in the city of Newark. Smith, a taxi driver, had just been arrested, for the alleged crime of improperly passing the officers’ car, and had been beaten so brutally that he could not walk. Residents of a housing project saw him dragged in, and a rumour set off: the cops had killed another black man. A crowd formed, and resorted to attacking the precinct building. For five days, violence tore through the city, with a toll of over two dozen lives. Some called it rioting—others a rebellion.

United States National Urban League leader, civil rights activist and labour organizer Lester B. Granger, while reflecting on global foreign policy programmes, invoked B.R. Ambedkar to describe the failing policies of peaceful coexistence and neutralism famous in the 1950s. This essay explores the historical intersectional struggle of Dalit rights in global politics. In order to understand it better, I suggest looking at the ideas of Ambedkar, one of the founding figures of modern Indian democracy, on national state formation. Various studies have commented on the international political imagination of Indian nationalist leaders, namely, Lala Lajpat Rai, Jawaharlal Nehru and M.K. Gandhi, alongside a stream of other privileged-caste leaders, M.N. Roy included. However, there is not a single study that analyses the international outlook of Ambedkar. The reasons have to do, perhaps, with ignorance about Ambedkar and the prejudice of the dominant privileged-caste academia.3 The Brahminical historiography of India as well as the country’s national narratives bears the responsibility for the egregious omission. This essay attempts to shed light on the global thinking of subalterns. With the story of Ambedkar, I wish to present the geopolitical thought process of marginalized groups to understand how under-represented groups envision(ed) their location in the international movements of human rights athwart civil and political representation.

Sharatchandra Muktibodh's essay "What is Dalit Literature" defines it as the literature that is born out of Dalit consciousness backed by authentic Dalit experience. Muktibodh contends that Dalit literature is objective in nature and aims at social transformation. These class notes provide a reading of the essay along with a bird's eye-view of the development of Dalit Literature in India.

The Dalit Panthers were formed on May 29, 1972 during a time of mass social movements across the world. The Civil Rights Movement had petered out, spawning a new era of Black Power in both the United States and Britain. It was this doctrine of Black Power which influenced a group of writers and poets in Mumbai to put theory into practice.
However, the Dalit Panthers were not the first political Dalit movement to exist. In the first half of the twentieth century, B.R. Ambedkar led a relatively successful movement that was focused on securing political rights and recognition for Dalits. The key difference between the Panthers and earlier Ambedkarite movement was the sphere in which they operated. Ambedkarites wanted to achieve change through the apparatus of legislation; the Panthers wanted to achieve change through revolution. Even so, there are clear parallels to be drawn between each movement. This means that in spite of the differences they were more like two sides of the same coin.

This is an article written and published online for the University of Manchester History Department's public history blog. It received a first-class mark of 76.

"Comme cette démarche se situe au coeur de réflexions sur le renouvellement
des formes d’écriture anthropologique (Laplantine, 2005, 2021 ; MacDougall,
2005 ; Pink, 2006, 2009), Sangharsh, le temps de la lutte mérite d’être considéré
comme un cas d’étude éminemment contemporain pour nourrir une foisonnante littérature d’anthropologie visuelle en dialogue avec les arts. Si mon entretien avec Jaoul a été conduit dans cette direction, j’ai également voulu rester au plus proche de sa démarche de réalisateur qui révèle, en premier lieu, comment sa relation aux images et aux sons a accompagné et transformé sa démarche anthropologique."

The Dalit political consensus is derivative of cross-class aspirations. The Dalit polity is deeply tied to the humanitarian issues of justice, equality and freedom.
Justice against inequalities heaped upon them for generations continues to haunt their existential reality. Generation after generation, the disenfranchised Dalit gentry tries to survive the mayhem caused by social, religious, economic, political and moral injustices.