BANGALORE: Anupama Rao will give a lecture on the topic, ‘Ambedkar in His Time and Ours’, as part of the Azim Premji University Colloquium Series, in the city.
Can we rescue Ambedkar from Ambedkarism? Why might we wish to do so? This talk will argue that Ambedkar has been parochialised as a Maharashtrian thinker, at best, and a movement leader at worst.
Ironically, this makes for deep complicities between those who scant Ambedkar’s significance as a profound and innovative thinkers of democracy, on the one hand, and those who would freeze his life and image for Dalit hagiography on the other. Instead, this talk explores Ambedkar’s globality — his constant invocation of world historical events, and the political thought of emancipation — as enabling his critique of caste, capital, and the Hindu historical. The talk will seek to explore the global historical dimensions of Dr Ambedkar’s articulation of a Dalit political thought.
About the speaker
Anupama Rao is associate professor at the department of history, Barnard College, Columbia University, USA. Her research and teaching interests are in the histories of gender, caste and nationalism in South Asia, historical anthropology, political theory, law, human rights and colonial histories.