This book is a welcome contribution to the body of literature generated by the 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act (CAA), a historic piece of legislation adopted in 1992, giving a new impetus to democratic decentralization.
B.R. Ambedkar christened his first political party as ‘The Independent Labour Party’ (ILP). He seemed to be particular about the title (read category) by which the party was to be known. He did not want it to be an exclusive political party of the Scheduled Castes.
Structurally the centuries old village with all its rigidity and unequal power relations is live and kicking, at least in south India. The book under review captures this reality in one of such Indian villages. The age old draconian social structure in the village becomes alive with the lucid and effective description by the author of the book.
This book comes at an opportune moment for our understanding of caste in India, and particularly of the experience of belonging to an intermediate caste. The last year has been marked by debates, protests and court rulings on the issue of a central government reservation for ‘Other Backward Classes’ – a category of intermediate castes ranked above the Scheduled Castes.
The world ‘dalit’ or “crushed underfoot” in the contemporary period has replaced the world “untouchable”. The term “dalit” owes its origin to the writings of Jotirao Phule in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Reading through *Turning the Pot, Tilling the Soil *my mind raced back several winters. I had landed up at a tribal farmer’s house in western Maharashtra, accompanied by a group of Delhi school students who were there for a rural exposure camp.