Untouchable

It is an irony that even after seven decades since independence; our country is striving to put a stop to the most inhumane activity- manual scavenging. It is a matter of national shame that thousands of people are still working as manual scavengers and still collect human excrement from „dry latrines‟, carried on their head and cart it away for disposal at the outskirt of the settlement. The authors, through this paper, seek to illustrate the issues faced by manual scavengers and the reasons for the persistence of manual scavenging in the country. This paper critically analyzes the efforts that are made to stop this practice and seeks to highlight the failure of the state instrumentalities in ensuring the rights of the scavenging community. The authors, through this article, have suggested remedial measures and progressive steps to bring the scavenging community into the mainstream of our country.

Mulk Raj Anand is one of the most eminent personalities in the History of Indian writing in English. Almost all of his writings deal with the life of lower class people. He basically projects such ordinary people as the protagonists of his books. By depicting this he appears as a great sympathizer to the people of this marginalised section. His famous novel Untouchble depicts the pathetic condition of the Dalits. He projects their pain, agony, sufferings at the hand of so called upper caste people with great sympathy. We are stirred by this heart rending descriptions. But at the same time we can feel that his description is somehow far from the actual set-up of the untouchables. We assume that Anand’s writing is governed by the perspective of the upper class people as he belonged to that class. He is directed by the prejudiced notion of the upper caste people about the lower caste people.  He failed to penetrate into the hut and heart of the Dalits to dig their innermost thoughts, feelings, anguish and longing. In this respect a charge of artificiality can be brought against his writings. Hence my paper will illustrate how his writings are dictated by the upper caste mentality and how his depiction is different from the actual thoughts of the Dalits which is presented in the writings of the Dalit people.

This study explores the religious advocacy of the " untouchable " reformer, Bhimrao Ambedkar, during the 1950s to expand what we know about the nexus between religion, force, and the quest for social justice. Unearthing the sources of Ambedkar's early references to John Dewey and pragmatism, this study argues that Ambedkar evinced an abiding concern over the role of force and violence in reform efforts. In his final years, Ambedkar addressed international audiences reconstructing Buddhism as an alternative to communism, a move that posited compassionate persuasion as the pragmatist answer to his early concerns over using force in pursuing social justice. [forthcoming in Journal of Religion 97 (2)]

What is caste? How is it different from class, race, and other forms of social identity, hierarchy, and difference? In this course we will formulate answers to these questions and more, looking within South Asia and at the diaspora.  We will begin with how caste came to be central to government institutions through the development of British rule, how it intersects with gender, class, tribal identity, religion, and what it is to be outside of caste. We will examine how social boundaries and hierarchies has been and continue to be enforced through caste-based prejudices, violence, and the threat of violence. We will focus on how resisting and denouncing caste has been central to questions of ‘progress’ from the colonial period, through the independence movements of the early 20th century, to the present.  In this course we will examine caste from its supposedly ancient beginnings to the present, not as fixed, but as ever-changing, contested, and contingent. Through studying all these aspects we will understand not only the many faces of caste, but also the history of the region and the people.

The paper seeks to offer a critical study of Mahesh Dattani’s unpublished, but performed play ‘Untouchable’. First performed on 17 April 2020, ‘Untouchable’, like most of Dattani’s plays, is a critique of the contemporary urban Indian society. In this short play, Dattani makes a brilliant fusion of social realism and his immensely gifted artistic faculties. Within the limited span of a short play of about 10 minutes duration, Dattani has brilliantly mingled fact with fiction and touched lives with an extraordinary insight that goes deep into the unexpected areas of human consciousness. This study is an attempt at exploring the dexterity and depth with which Dattani negotiates the issue of untouchability prevailing in the aftermath of the pandemic by linking it to the issue of class and caste-based discrimination prevalent in our society since time immemorial. An effort has been made to trace how words like ‘touch’, ‘untouchable’, ‘smell’, ‘inhale’, and ‘distance’ assume larger implications in the context of the futuristic setting of the play in the post-pandemic world as well as in the context of the existing negative vibes of social discrimination.

After I had read his books Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981) and Letters on India (1942) in early 2004, I became very keen on knowing whether Mulk Raj Anand was still alive. I approached some postcolonial experts and found them equally in doubt about his survival or death, or about his exact whereabouts. Finally the news of his death at 8:30 in the morning on Tuesday 28 September 2004 ended all my curiosities, as it also buried my faint hope of meeting this literary colossus some time in the near future. He chose to spend his last days quietly in the remote Indian district of Pune (near Bombay), where he died of pneumonia in Jehangir Hospital. He is survived by his wife Shirin Vajifdar and by his daughter Sushila Anand.

This article reads Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as a cautionary tale of the totalitarian ideology. Drawing on the work of Laura Frost, it argues that Huxley’s Brave New World alerts the readers of the nightmare of the totalitarian ideology critically portraying a dehumanized world that not just restricts civil liberties but also controls individuals’ body and mind through Pavlovian conditioning, promiscuous sexualities, and institutionalized propaganda. Scholars have long interpreted that the novel warns the readers about the unchecked advancement of science and technology, which can pose a significant threat to humanity. Besides, some scholars interpret the novel as a document of the abuse of the lower classes by the powerful elites who control science and exploit the masses using its power. Moreover, some historical critics interpret the novel as a Utopian vision of Huxley. This paper, however, challenges these interpretations because they overlook a significant exposure of the...

"Cette méthode d’occitan donne à voir toutes les variétés (ou dialectes) d’occitan. La première partie de l’ouvrage présente le languedocien standard – une variété qui permet de comprendre assez aisément la plupart des autres dialectes occitans puisque l’aire languedocienne occupe le centre géographique de l’espace occitan. La méthode revient ensuite sur les six principaux dialectes de l’aire occitane (auvergnat, gascon, languedocien, limousin, provençal, vivaro-alpin) parlés dans trois pays (France, Espagne, Italie) et donne également accès à l’occitan médiéval sur une série de leçons. Les acteurs locaux, très actifs dans la promotion de leur langue, ont été partie intégrante de cet ouvrage à la fois par le biais des relectures et des enregistrements.
Cet ouvrage a été publié avec le soutien de la Direction Générale de la Langue Française et des Langues de France (Ministère de la Culture) et de l’Union Latine. "