“Can a Dalit individual cease to be a Dalit after accumulating a certain amount of privilege and choosing to stop articulating their lived experience of victimhood? Dubbing his account as ethnographic-myopia, doesn’t Mr. The second article was published in The Tribune, titled ‘ Undoing Dalit movements ’ by Raja Shekar Vundru, who attacks Yengde’s NRI privilege and his methodological approach of critically analysing the anti-caste discourse of the Dalit middle class and salaried Dalits.Īs a response to both the articles, Prateek Khobragade’s RoundTable piece ‘In Defence of Caste Matters ’ asks important questions: They assumed that the book is ‘anti-constitution’, and also exhibits the ‘commercialisation of the Ambedkarite Movement’. The effect of this (mis)understanding can be seen in two critiques of the book: the first is on RoundTable, titled ‘ Why “Radical Dalit” Yengde is Anti-Ambedkarism ’ by a group of Jawaharlal Nehru University scholars. Instead of attacking the constitution, Yengde is questioning the constitutionalism that Dalit communities have been relying on to secure socio-economic justice.

The excerpt was titled ‘ Relying on the Constitution is not enough ’ by the newspaper editor – which reads to me like a selective and deliberate Brahminical gimmick, designed to raise controversy. Suraj Yengde’s book Caste Matters has generated striking debates and discussion among intellectuals, specifically when The Hindu published a book excerpt on July 14, 2019.

Caste matters