Karthick Ram Manoharan, University of Wolverhampton
All About Ambedkar: A Journal on Theory and Praxis, Volume 1, Issue 1, September-December, 2020, 17-23
ABSTRACT
Debrahminization is not constrained by disciplinary purity and is fundamentally transdisciplinary. It draws from philosophy, theory, psychoanalysis, history, sociology etc. to critically look at how social hierarchies have been produced, exist and are challenged in India. An important forerunner to this attempt would be Braj Ranjan Mani’s Debrahmanising History. Debrahminization as an academic exercise engages not only with Indian subaltern thinkers but also with radical thinkers from the West, Africa, the Middle-East and Latin America to arrive at a truly global approach to the study of disciplines. It is quite comfortable in reading Phule, Ambedkar or Periyar comparatively with Hegel, Lacan, Fanon, MLK, Freire or Zizek for that matter. Since it is not concerned with the baggage of accepting or rejecting the Western canon, it is more fluid, broader, and inclusive than simple exercises of decolonization, while at the same time being true to one of the key aims of decolonization namely the promotion of new and critical voices from the non-West.
Karthick Ram Manoharan is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton. He is working on the project “Freedom from Caste: The Political Thought of Periyar E.V. Ramasamy in a Global Context” funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.