Description

The India China Institute (ICI) at The New School proposes to organize a workshop to address the ways Dalit communities in South Asia and beyond continue to be denied full citizenship and fundamental rights, in spite of some increased legal protections in India since 1947. The caste system, the organizers assert, and the underlying notions of purity and impurity on which it is based, is not exclusively “Hindu,” as caste consciousness and practices pervade other religions too. The proposed workshop, which will focus on women’s lives and gender in connection with religion and caste, is intended to launch a larger collaborative research and policy effort. The workshop will connect senior and junior scholars, policymakers and activists, with an emphasis on emerging voices within the Dalit community, to create a new community of “Global Dalit Change-Makers.”
The workshop will take place in conjunction with a larger conference on “The Unfinished Legacy of B. R. Ambedkar,” which will also be held at The New School in the fall of 2019.
Since its inception, ICI has been engaged with Dalit issues as part of broader conversations on inequality, and with religion, notably in projects supported by previous HRLI grants on lived religion and sacred landscapes in the Himalaya. Ashok Gurung, ICI’s senior director and the PI on those earlier grants, would direct this project in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Cincinnati, Barnard, Harvard, Brandeis, University of Massachusetts, Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, and SAMATA Foundation in Nepal.