‘Lower-caste’ thinkers made a crucial intervention in the conceptualization of modern India by claiming that there could hardly be any discussion of colonial India without a critical interrogation of the caste system. Dalit Intellectuals: Ideas, Struggles and the Vision is an exploration of a range of interpretations of Dalit intellectual traditions through contributions which emerged from a special panel on Dalit History and Politics. Dedicated to Professor K.N. Panikkar, who introduced the study of intellectual history of modern India, these essays explore Dalit intellectual thought—beginning with Ambedkar’s re-envisioning of modern India to the Adi-Dravida movement in colonial Tamil Nadu, the emergence of Kanshi Ram from obscurity to prominence as a public intellectual, autobiographies that led to the making of Dalit intellectuals, and lastly, the late emergence of Dalit intellectual traditions in Bengal.

This volume brings to the fore a new intellectual journey, revolutionizing social categories which had hitherto remained outside the domain of respectability and scholarship, and steering the wheel towards newer methods of history writing.