Makers of Modern Dalit History: Further Thoughts (2/2)

 Earlier I wrote my initial thoughts on the book.  Earlier I had read only the Introduction and the chapter on the first maker Ayyankali. Now I have read about Babu Jagjivan Ram, Dakshyani Velayudjan, Gurram Jashuva, Guru Raidas, Sant Kabir, Kanshiram, President KR Narayanan, Sant Nandanar, Jhalkaribai, Jigendranath Mondal, Adikavi Valmiki, Ved Vyas. Who remains are Sant Janabai, Phule, Soyarbai, Saheed Udham Singh and Babasaheb. There is also a 20 page conclusion which I cheaters ahead and have already read. 

The initial impressions of being a non scholarly work is further cemented. I might have not even heard about many of them, but could not see the complete lack of any sort of negative feedbacks on the more recent political figures like Kanshiram and Narayanan. 

One will never get to know that this is the Kanshiram of मिले मुलायम कांशीराम, हवा उड़ गए जयश्री राम fame. It is not merely that Guru Prakash is not showcasing his pro-BJP bias he holds as a spokesperson of the party elsewhere, the thing is that even the most neutral observer will have to accept that this slogan is a defining moment for Kanshiram. Hiding this is not the truth, it is white washing (or Saffron coating as some of Kanshiram's most hardcore and fanatic followers may argue) of history. This does not benefit anyone. This does not suit anyone. This is just plain disrespectful to the reader. This is just, bad. Too many examples of this in the book, and that too from the limited ones I know. I am afraid what unknown unknowns are out there. I really wanted to learn of Babu Jagjivan Ram. He is indeed much undercredited, his caste was perhaps a big reason for that. Emergency (2025) (my review here) made him a cartoon villain. But the authors made him a saint. The truth is for no one it seems. The other most glaring omission is that when President Narayanan gave an award to Ang San Sui Kuu when the relationship with the Military Regime in Myanmar were excellent and it caused an diplomatic spat resulting in suspension of joint anti terror operations. One may argue (and in my view naievly, but still can't) that this is an example of his idealism, him being a working president and commitment to compassion all of which have been argued in the book but without any example to show us. Talk of don't show, tell. Or perhaps the fact that he had a Myanmari wife could have been mentioned as that may have influenced his actions. But, alas, the authors have no time for such critical thinking. As they don't have the same for editing or a second reading. There are still random bits and bots about completely unrelated things in many a biographies. And chronological order is still amiss. They love to randomly insert tangentially related Swami Vivekanand quotes (Theu have got the complete works and now must justify costs it seems). The only good is that they finally managed to cite Badri Narayan (in relation to Kanshiram). The choice of people is also very confusing. Why Ved Vyas or Valmiki are here, I have no idea. I have not read the chapter on Saheed Udham Singh but am prettty sure the being Dalit is not the main market of identity for him.

And then comes the conclusion. Oh boy. I should have started with the conclusion to see how bad the book actually is. It ends with a 4 point life lesson !!!! Clearly I can only take life lessons from a book only if the authors make a 4 point summary of such. There are also further some more biographies of contempt Dalit leaders. Here too, Bahin Mayawati is not to be found nut you can find Meira Kumar. The nepo daughter of Dy PM is clearly more inspiring than a nothing to CM Kumari Mayawati story. Perhaps the only part where I can feel that the political leaning may have affected it. Meira Kumar is a non factor, but Mayawati is a sleeping elephant. And if you aren't the Mahawat, don't let people like the elephant.

 Anyway I would not be doing a third party of the review here. Only a short non detail review on GR. It is just not worth the effort. 

Initial Thoughts on Makers of Modern Dalit History

 Many many years ago, I used to watch Caravaka Podcast religiously. Originally, during the pandemic and just afterwards. It was from here that I first came to know of Guru Prakash Paswan. He was a fresh voice in the Dalit discourse, BJP leader and dyed in Hindutva. Like something Badri Narayan talks about in his Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation (My GR Review here, the book should be read despite the low rating). It was from this podcast that I came to know of Guru Paswan's books, which I started yesterday. Only recently I have started to look into myself from a caste angle (which is OBC in some states, SC in some, but GEN is what I use on forms).

But the book doesn't really hold up as of now to my impression of the author (No offence to Ramabadran but I don't have much knowledge of or opinions about him and will sometimes use the author to refer to Guru Prakash only). And to be fair, I have just read the introduction and a small first chapter, my opinion may or may not change as I progress with the book. 

This book is no academic tome, sharp criticism or groundbreaking research and makes such explicit in the introduction itself. At the end of the day it is but to familiarise a general audience with these great figures. But still, the book is amassing citations on Google Scholar. I can only hope that the derived works' authors are aware of the book's scope and citing in keeping that in mind. But I have seen worse, and will expect such.

Before proceeding, I would justify why I should write a review (critque?) at this stage when I do plan to cpmplete the book. I think a GR review puts it best:

पुस्तक से परिचय कराते हुए लेखक ने एक लम्बी भूमिका तैयार की हुई है, जहाँ आपको पू:री पुस्तक का परिचय हो जाता है। यदि आप आगे न भी पढ़ें तब भी आप पुस्तक के बारे में ठीक ठीक जानकारी प्राप्त कर लेते हैं।

The 30+ page introduction is the longest and most important part of the book, dare I say, Bahujan of the Book. So lets get started. 

On page (viii), it clearly states that

we would like to state that profiles that the reader will find in the book are a combination of historical facts, stories that people have told about them over generations

So yeah, not an academic tract. Which, by itself, should be no problem. But then they go on and cite people like Suraj "Afro-dalitism" Yedge. No thank you. I prefer not to cut copy paste critical studies from halfway across the globe to study my own society. To be fair, some Subaltren Studies language has been adopted too. But given the political background of the author, I find the omission of  Badri Narayan intresting. The introduction tries to paint a broad painting as well as supplement it iwth data. But it didn't really gel well here. On the data front, the fact that during land the biggest, most glaring injustice to us have been that less than 0.5% of land redistributed agricultural land was given to SCSTs. In an land obsessed, non georgist society where agriculture is a mollycoddled tax free activity where the supposedly divine "Annadatas" (Only type of producers that the Nehruvian morality can tolerate) are showered upon my honest taxpayers' money, this means that this chunk of society prettty much lost on this part of the social welfare schemes. Combine this is what next to non existent land market, means that these misdeeds comitted 70 years ago can't be corrected now. This leads be to wonder if my own views on laws that restrict sales of land like those in Jharkhand needs updation? I am all for free market treating land as any other commodity, but quite evidently one side lacks market power here and a case for government intervention can be made. But that is another issue, and I don't know much about it at hand so let's drop that. 

The passages on Dalit litrature, expression and capaltilism where intresting and I did learn a lot from them, and had to add even more references to my TBR. Eleanor Zelliot is mentioned but thankfully the misconception that she was the first to do a PhD on Ambedkar is not repeated. I really disliked that the author couldn't decide if every Dalit is severely oppressed, fearful even to walk on the road (Knowing Guru Prakash, he himself is an exception to this rule and must be self aware of this fact) or an increasingly being accepted into the mainstream society. There is no need for hyperbole in the oppression olympics commentary when the reality itself will appear hyperbolic. This is just not done. You push away people like this. 

Finally moving to the first chapter. It's about Ayyankali from Kerala. Never heard of him, so yeah, great. Will actually learn something. But the writing is like of generic biography, there is no "voice". I needed to reread it to finally gasp that he was born in 1863, one can skip that line and willm never know what time period are we talking of. He is from the Pulayar castes, which were basically in a system of chattel slavery. They were porbabited from using "I" is conversation with so called forward castes. Casteism errors the very shelf of the depressed. They are made to belive they are less than human. This is not something I ever heard of. While there is a decent refrence section, I found the actual writing of the chapter amateurish and in need of editing. I double checked that it's a Penguin book and still can't belive noone flagged writing of the chapter. Events and even sentences are repeated in 2 or 3 paragraphs. Thrice is Ayyankali nominated to the Sree Moolam Popular Assembly (while its powers and structure are never even hinted at) for the first time across four paragraphs. And we never find out how he actually broke the shackles of slavery cum casteism. But there is all the time for quating Mandela and even a paragraph about  Y.B. Satyanarayana's memoir about casteism being present in India. What a shocker! And the author that the audacity to preface that with 

To understand the significance of his contribution, it is vital that one understands the circumstances under which Ayyankali fought for the rights of the oppressed. (Pg 3)

 This comes exactly a page after saying that status of the Pulayars were literally that of slaves. But yeah we need a vague sentance from a memoir set in Hyderabad about placement of houses to understand the circumstances. 

These things somehow diminished the seriousness that could have been there. Especially when the chapters are short, this one beging 6 and a half pages excepting the refences.

I will continue with the book, it is not a heavy read anyway but don't have much high expectations. But perhaps I am being more critical than I need to be, afterall this did lead to me writing this post, I am debating by priors on the caste based restriction on land sales as well the how-in-the-world-did-I-even-not-know of Pulayars' condition. Anyways, will read it. 

Also happy birthday to me I guess. 

Review: I Was a Teenage Slasher

I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Gave up around page 150. Did not expect supernatural events to be such a big part of the story, which was offputting. I liked the raw, rambling, digressing, diary style of writing, like the protagonist was trying to tell too many stories at once, his chaotic voice not being able to fit into the linear flow of narration, jumping topics time and space at will. The action (murder) sequences felt emoionless, one does not even register they witnessed a brutal end to a fictional life should one's attention waver a bit.

I would have read the book stripped of the slasher and supernatural elements, it would just have been an interesting memoir of a man facing a middle age crisis reminiscing about growing up in a small town in West Texas in 1989 (which the author feels the need to remind us at least 1989 times).

View all my reviews

If you call yourself an analyst, you have to play with mud

 

So I am taking this Advanced PDE course this semester, which, perhaps unexpectedly, has been the most fun and useful course. Well the fun part was not perhaps unexpected due to it being taken by R Sir. He is perhaps the best teacher I have ever had. He will go lengths to make things rigorous.  Evans' PDE may be such that it has a reputation that if " you want to follow on with a more rigorous one, you can't beat Evans" according to one fellow (or as R Sir would put it, Chap) on Stackexchange, but it is but the most unsatisfactory for him. But since, as per him, basically every PDE book is shamelessly copied from Evans, he does the heavy lifting himself and basically writes 500 pages of notes just to teach us. Fortunately he also taught us PDE and before it Real Analysis (or is it called Metric Spaces?) in the first semester. Add to this that he is basically like Sheldon in the clip below. 

I initially (the idea came to me during class) thought I would not write stuff about him here as it would anger him, but then I thought:

1. Nobody I know reads this.
2. Its very very funny.
3. Nobody at all reads this.

Edit: Initial thoughts win.

He has this British accent and looks somewhat British too. But is cent per cent Bengali and son of an IPS babu on top of that. But he does have a very classy way of speaking and drops many bangers in class that I duly note down.

No, nothing should convice you   - R Sir 9/9/25

Or one that highlights his attention to detail,

 This is very boring torture, but needs to be done. If I did not do this, it will be cheating.  - R Sir 4/9/25

 This was when talking about the translation of convolutions of distributions and Swaqrtz class functions (ignore the terms should they mean nothing, then mean nothing to a majority of people, you will need a much lower amount of maths knowledge to know stuff where I actually need you to know maths). 

In short, his classes are the best. Still sometimes advanced PDE can feel like a slog. Our primary textbook is  Kesavan's Topics in Functional Analysis and Applications (which, despite the name, is a PDE text, I mistakingly bought it earlier but now can use it) and many a lectures are just an endless seige of statements of theorems and lemmas and propositions interleaved with some small Red Cross supplies consisting of Sir's motivations behind those. But I like to get my hands dirty, bring out those $\epsilon$ and $ \delta$.  Then only can I feel my wounds from the statement heal. That only fortifies my mind. 

So we were discussing Trace Theorem (Theorem 2.8.1 in the 3rd edition) for some days and today we finally reduced it to a statement about the density of smooth functions with compact support in $L^p$. And even further we were down to provinf that if $u \in L^p (\mathbb{R}^N)$ then $$ \int_{ \vert x \vert > k} \vert u \vert^p \, dx \rightarrow 0 $$             

Now, being who I am, I just took the interval as an indicator function and it followed with a simple DCT argument which is standard. But how Sir saw it was illuminating. He saw the problem as tail of a series. Now I know this from the Good Kenrels, but this was even finally putting that motivation into words. And in class I thought "hmm, series convergence should have a DCT argumnet htne too". After all summation is but integration with the discrete measure on natural numbers. And voila it is indeed, it works, This is no great discovery, but Sir and I saw the problem thorugh diffrent lenses, and then I find of pullbacked my meathod into's his. Thats the beauty of maths.

To the every abest reader, I was initially going to write only about the theorem and it does sounded much more grand in my head at that time, but putting it into works makes it sound meh. But still you will find i intresting if you look deeper., Anyway life is what it is and I will just end with another of his quotes from today itself about this proof:

If you call yourshelf an analyst, you have to know this. If you go outsidem you need to play with mud. 

 

 

Lauva Bhaat Exodus

Every year everyone

Of us, embark on an happy exodus.

Train, bus, flight or run

"Can't come" isn't something to propose.

Sharda Sinha and the rest 

Fills our loneliness on the way.

Super dense crush load, but mood is best

Such in a train journey before the lauva bhaat day.

Angika, maithali, ahomiya or Gawari

Everyone must find solace in Bhojpuri

For its the Chhath, minds our free

Nothing divides, if you are a Hindu Purbi.