Every once in a while we come across a book whose value is greatly enhanced if seen in a context other than the one for which it is explicitly written. David Edmonds’ ‘Caste Wars’, claims to be no more, and no less, than a philosophy of discrimination. It focuses on the ethics of treating people as if they are parts of groups.
Let me concede at the outset that Dilip M. Menon has forcefully presented the cause of dalits and their right to live in the caste-ridden in India. Caste violence has not received much attention of the social science scholars compared to the attention given to the study of communal violence.
Those of us who live in cities, especially in metros like Delhi, would have come across ‘problems’ posed by ‘domestic helps,’ – those people living in our society bearing this nomenclature of our middle class ‘humanist’ coinage.
We are living at a time when dalit literature is fast being assimilated into the mainstream of Indian literature which also implies a potential loss of its power to provoke and disturb the status quo.The spurt of translations of dalit poetry, fiction and autobiography in English
Indian democracy has seen the mobilization of the subalterns in the later half of the 1980s culminating in the enthronement of a third front called Janata Dal both at the Centre and in Uttar Pradesh, a state which gives direction to national politics.
This book is about the social movement of an untouchable caste – the raigars, a caste whose traditional occupation has been disposal of the dead animals, tanning and dyeing their hide.