Fifty years after Indian independence and at the end of a momentous century, a puzzling combination of unyielding deprivation and successful self-assertion characterises that large section of the population known as Dalits (the erstwhile ‘Untouchables’). Despite growing awareness and considerable political organisation among them, the Dalits still commonly lack the resources to provide an adequate material life for themselves or even secure a better future for their children through education. This volume, the first in a new series, constitutes an important effort to understand the paradoxical situation of the Dalits and to capture the realities at the grassroots. The contributors describe the status of rural untouchable cases and study their efforts to challenge the daily humiliations they face. They reveal the vitality of Dalit movements and the contribution they are making to reshaping Indian society. By focusing, within a theoretical and comparative framework, on a series of contra
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