Description
Combative,however partisan, beguilingly playful, these essays, many translated from the Tamil for the first time, bring Ravikumar’s concerns to a wider audience. Ranging from the centrality of caste, the logic of communalism, ideas on culture, the politics of the media, education, censorship and literature, these essays provide an unsettling impact on the consensuses of democratic India. Questions of power derived from his engagement with Marx, Bakunin, Derrida, Foucault and other philosophers and his wide readings in Tamil literature permeate his writings. Divided into five parts, the essays chart the history of dalits and land ownership, labour and education. He analyses the unanticipated turns of dalit narratives, including the film-maker Lenin’s much awarded docu-feature, Knock-Out. The final part acts as documentation, containing horrendous tales of oppression and the slaughter of dalits where power overturns the rule of law. A new piece for readers is ‘Theorizing Resistance’.
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