Every February, the United States observes Black History Month, a commemoration dedicated to remembering the struggles, contributions, and intellectual traditions of African Americans. What began in 1926 as "Negro History Week" under the initiative of Carter G Woodson and the Association for the Study Negro life and History and later expanded into a month-long observance and was formally recognised by the US federal government in 1986. Since then, presidential proclamations have reaffirmed its significance, acknowledging that Black history is not peripheral to the American story, it is foundational to it.
The observance of Black History Month is not merely ceremonial. It is a recognition, it is epistemic. It is an intervention in memory. It challenges the structure of historical narration itself by insisting that a people long excluded from official archives must be placed at the centre of national consciousness.
Across the globe, another community continues a parallel struggle for historical recognition—Dalits in South Asia. Activists initiated Dalit History Month in 2015, marking April as a month to document, celebrate, and assert Dalit histories, intellectual traditions, resistance movements, and cultural contributions. While Black History Month has decades of institutional recognition, Dalit History Month is a grassroots initiative—yet its theoretical and political importance is equally profound.
History as a site of power
History is never neutral. It is shaped by those who hold power, political, economic, and cultural. For centuries, dominant groups controlled the archive, the curriculum, and the narrative. In the United States, slavery and segregation were not only economic systems but epistemic regimes: they denied Black people authorship over their own history. Similarly, in the caste-based social order of South Asia, Dalits were excluded not only from land and literacy but from the production of knowledge itself.
To be denied history is to be denied humanity.
The sociological insight of WEB Du Bois remains relevant here. Du Bois wrote about "double consciousness", the experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of a society structured by racial prejudice. This tension arises when dominant narratives attempt to fix identity within limiting definitions. Yet double consciousness is not simply a fractured state; it is a heightened awareness, an ability to perceive both the imposed gaze and one's own autonomous self-understanding.
In caste-structured contexts, a comparable dynamic has operated. Social hierarchies have historically sought to define worth and status in inherited terms, but communities positioned at the margins have not passively absorbed these definitions. Instead, they have cultivated counter-traditions of dignity, intellectual critique, and collective assertion. Through movements of self-respect, constitutional struggle, and cultural production, they have transformed imposed categories into platforms for democratic re-articulation. What emerges, therefore, is not internalised hierarchy, but an evolving political consciousness that refuses to let inherited structures determine selfhood.
Black History Month and Dalit History Month disrupt this imposed gaze. They assert that oppressed communities are not subjects of oppression but producers of thought, culture, and transformation.
Structural racism and structural casteism: Parallel logics
Though racism and casteism arise from different historical trajectories, their structural logic is comparable. Both systems institutionalise graded inequality. Both naturalise hierarchy. Both regulate access to education, labour, dignity, and spatial belonging. In the United States, the history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and racial segregation created enduring socio-economic disparities. The civil rights movement challenged these systems, but their legacies remain embedded in institutions.
In South Asia, caste operates as a deeply entrenched system of social stratification, historically justifying untouchability, exclusion from temples and wells, segregation in housing, and violent enforcement of occupational roles. Despite constitutional guarantees of equality, caste-based discrimination persists in subtle and overt forms.
The intellectual interventions of Dr BR Ambedkar are crucial in this context. Dr Ambedkar not only fought for the abolition of untouchability but analysed caste as a system of "graded inequality" where oppression is normalised and internalised through religious and social codes. His insistence on education, agitation, and organisation echoes the emancipatory tradition of Black intellectual resistance. Both Black and Dalit struggles reveal that oppression operates not only through overt violence but through the management of memory and meaning.
Black History Month's institutionalisation in 1986 signalled an acknowledgment by the US state that historical omission itself is a form of injustice. Presidential proclamations do not erase centuries of suffering, but they symbolically affirm the legitimacy of Black historical experience.
Dalit History Month seeks a similar recognition—though it has yet to achieve equivalent global institutional status. April holds symbolic weight because it includes the birth anniversaries of icons Jyotiba Phule and Dr Ambedkar, whose life represents intellectual rebellion against caste oppression. The month becomes a pedagogical space where Dalit literature, art, scholarship, and activism are highlighted.
Recognition is not merely symbolic; it redistributes dignity. Philosopher Charles Taylor argued that misrecognition can inflict harm by imprisoning someone in a false, distorted image. In caste and racial systems, this distortion is structural. Therefore, commemorative months function as corrective narratives, rewriting distorted histories with truth and pride.
Memory as resistance
Memory, when consciously reclaimed, becomes an act of resistance. It refuses erasure, challenges selective histories, and asserts dignity in the face of structural silencing.
Black History Month and Dalit History Month are not merely commemorative observances; they are intellectual and political interventions that reposition marginalised histories at the centre of democratic imagination. Black History Month foregrounds the narratives of civil rights mobilisations, cultural renaissance, and institutional transformation. From the philosophical interventions of Du Bois to the moral leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., and from the literary brilliance of Toni Morrison to the scientific excellence of Katherine Johnson, the month celebrates creativity and achievement that flourished despite systemic barriers. It affirms that Black intellectual, artistic, and political thought has fundamentally shaped modern democracy, culture, and knowledge production.
Similarly, Dalit History Month foregrounds anti-caste movements and transformative social thought. It honours reformers, writers, organisers, and constitutional visionaries who expanded the moral and institutional horizons of India. The constitutionalism of Dr BR Ambedkar was not simply a response to exclusion; it was a profound reimagining of equality, fraternity, and justice as foundational democratic principles. Dalit literature's aesthetic innovations redefined the language of experience and representation, while grassroots organising strategies articulated new models of collective assertion and civic participation.
In both traditions, memory is a reservoir of intellectual labour, ethical imagination, and creative excellence. These histories demonstrate that resistance is not only protest, it is production: of ideas, institutions, art, and new forms of solidarity. By centering these contributions, Black History Month and Dalit History Month affirm that democracy is deepened not by selective remembrance, but by an honest and expansive recognition of those who have continually reshaped it.
Global solidarities
In recent decades, transnational solidarities have strengthened connections between anti-racist and anti-caste movements. Dalit activists have drawn parallels with the Black freedom struggle, while Black scholars increasingly engage with caste as a comparative framework for understanding hierarchy.
Such solidarities are not about collapsing differences but about recognising shared structural patterns. Both movements demand dignity, representation, and justice. Both expose how inequality is reproduced through institutions. Global recognition of Dalit History Month, including observances in diaspora communities, signals that caste discrimination is not geographically confined, It is a global human rights issue. Perhaps the most transformative potential of these commemorative months lies in education. Curriculum shapes imagination. When textbooks omit Dalit or Black contributions, they silently reinforce hierarchy.
Black History Month has influenced curriculum reforms, ensuring that African American history is taught beyond token references.Dalit History Month must also be the mainstream academic discourse. Universities, schools, and public institutions must recognise that inclusive history strengthens democracy by grounding it in truth.
History from below: Reclaiming voice, reclaiming humanity
Commemorative months do more than mark time; they reconfigure the moral landscape of public memory. They speak to the emotional dimensions of injustice that formal histories often silence. In acknowledging collective suffering, they affirm that pain was real, that humiliation was systemic, and that endurance was not weakness but courage. They become spaces where grief is not privatized but shared—where remembrance itself becomes a form of dignity.
For communities long marked as impure, inferior, or expendable, public recognition performs a profound symbolic act. It restores humanity in a society that once denied it. It declares that their lives are not marginal footnotes to history but central chapters in the story of resistance and transformation. Recognition here is not mere celebration; it is moral redress. It communicates that their existence matters—not only in contemporary struggles for equality, but in the archive of collective memory. In this sense, observances such as Black History Month and Dalit History Month are not symbolic gestures of identity politics. They are acts of collective self-respect. They challenge historical erasure and reclaim narrative authority. They transform memory into resistance, remembrance into assertion, and history into a terrain where dignity is publicly restored.The deeper philosophical significance of these observances lies in their vision of democracy. Democracy is not merely electoral procedure; it is the equal recognition of every person’s dignity. When history excludes certain communities, democracy is incomplete.
By institutionalising Black History Month, the United States acknowledged that racial injustice is part of its national story. By expanding and strengthening Dalit History Month, government and society can similarly acknowledge caste injustice as central to their historical and contemporary reality. These months are recognising the history of the marginalized, they are about repairing fractured narratives, they insist that justice begins with memory.
Conclusion: From remembrance to institutional commitment
Black History Month teaches us that remembrance can become a revolution when it is institutionalised. It demonstrates that when a state formally recognises a history once suppressed, it does more than commemorate, it corrects. It signals that historical injustice will not be erased from public consciousness. It affirms that the lives, labour, and intellect of oppressed communities are foundational to the nation itself. The time has come for universities, state governments, central institutions, and international bodies to formally recognise April as Dalit History Month. Such recognition must not be reduced to symbolic gestures or token seminars.
It must include:
● Integration of Dalit intellectual traditions into mainstream curricula.
● Public lectures, archives, exhibitions, and research grants dedicated to anti-caste scholarship.
● Official proclamations acknowledging caste-based discrimination as a historical and ongoing injustice.
● Institutional spaces for Dalit voices in policymaking, academia, and cultural production.
When institutions refuse recognition, they participate in erasure. Silence, in such contexts, is not neutrality—it is complicity.
The institutionalisation of Dalit History Month would strengthen democracy. Democracies mature when they confront their deepest hierarchies. Just as Black History Month compels the United States to continually reckon with slavery, segregation, and systemic racism, Dalit History Month must compel South Asia and the global community to confront caste oppression with equal seriousness.
Recognition redistributes dignity. Curriculum reforms redistribute knowledge. Public commemoration redistributes memory.
Dalit History Month is not a demand for charity; it is a demand for historical justice. It insists that the story of democracy cannot be told without those who fought from its margins. It asserts that the Constitution, equality before law, and modern citizenship were shaped profoundly by anti-caste struggles led by thinkers such as Dr BR Ambedkar.
If February has become a permanent marker in the global conscience because institutions chose to honour Black history, then April must rise with equal moral force for Dalit history.
The question before us is not whether Dalit History Month deserves institutional recognition. The question is whether institutions are prepared to confront the truth of caste with the courage it demands.
For memory without power remains fragile.
But memory backed by institutions becomes transformative.
Let April not remain a month of informal remembrance.
Let it become a constitutionally conscious, academically grounded, and globally recognised affirmation of Dalit dignity.
Only then can we say that remembrance has moved beyond symbolism and become justice.
Akhilesh Kumar is an Ambedkarite activist and a PhD scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Prakash Priyadarshi is a Post-doctoral Fellow, ISEC, Bengaluru. Views are personal.