LOHIA ON CASTE
Editor · Caste, Religion & Culture
Price: Rs. 270. The Indian people are the saddest on the earth. Caste is the most overwhelming factor of Indian life. Those who deny it in principle also accept it in practice. Ram Manohar Lohia ... "All politics in the country, Congress, Communist or Socialist, has one big area of national agreement, whether by design or through custom, and that is to keep down and disenfranchise the Sudra and the Women who constiture over three-fourths of entire population" Ram Manohar Lohia in 1964. Lohia's book on the Caste System is a discovery for me in my life-time endeavour to read literature on caste since 1980. Coming from a Bania social background and as a freedom fighter during the same time that Dr.B.R Ambedkar lived and fought, Lohia looked at caste from a different but liberation perspective. Like Phule and Ambedkar, Lohia saw the liberation of Dalits/Shudras and women as connected cultural battles. Reading this book informs us how one can still be a Bania or a Brahmin and yet join our contempo-rary battles against casteism and patriarchal structures with Dalit/Shudra and women intellectual forces." -Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd "Lohia's thoughts and words have a strikingly contemporary ring. In bringing them to a twenty-first century audience, SouthSide Books have performed an immensely valuable service." -Ramachandra Guha