Based on her research at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, Rohini Shukla outlines the intellectual formations behind B.R. Ambedkar’s education at Columbia. This article explores the impact of Franz Boas, Raymond C. Knox and Wendell T. Bush on the shifting nature of the academic disciplines that Ambedkar studied, and demonstrates their impact on his essay “Castes in India”
Read MoreOn the 10th anniversary of The Caste Question, Anupama Rao speaks to Kelvin Ng about the questions that her book addressed and the debates it raised. They discuss how the book shifted the debate on caste from questions of social justice and the state to problems of personhood and Dalit subject formation; the way it drew from writing on slavery, anti-slavery and emancipation; Ambedkar’s anger at the unavailability of the Dalit subject in history; the dilemmas of competing minorities: the emergence of the Dalit subject and the unmaking of the Muslim subject in South Asia; different receptions to the book; the convergence of subaltern thought with global history; and contemporary Indian politics as a contingent and conjunctural process.
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