Mahitosh Mandal
All About Ambedkar: A Journal on Theory and Praxis, Volume 1, Number 1, October-December 2020
This inaugural issue comprises four featured articles, one film review, one book review and a study of one instance of caste-based discrimination.
Sanjib Mondal is a Dalit artist based in West Bengal and his paintings and artworks represent the casteist and classist oppression as experienced by the backward and lower caste Bengali population. Pinak Banik's critical approach to Mondal's art, particularly in light of how art becomes a means of liberation, is a crucial contribution to this opening issue. In a boldly argued article, Karthick Ram Manoharan reads the interface between debrahminization and decolonization and writes about the need to debrahminize the Indian academia. Subhayu Bhattacharjee emphasizes the pluralities that shape the reception, appropriation, and discursivization of Ambedkar. And Diganta Ghosh highlights the complex legal nuances of the constitutional policies of reservation.
In the review section, Karthick Ram Manoharan introduces us to the caste question in Tamil cinema through an analysis of the eponymous hero of the film Iraniyan. In this article, the readers would find a glimpse of the complexities of the anti-caste artistie and intellectual tradition in Tamil Nadu. Atreyee Sengupta offers an insightful analysis of the question of feminine self in her review of Baby Kamble's Dalit autobiography The Prisons We Broke.
The issue ends with the historic Mahad Satyagraha as undertaken by Ambedkar against the caste-based restrictions on the access of water.
Overall, this inaugural issue approaches the caste question in terms of diversity of subject matter, which would hopefully contribute to fulfilling the aim of the journal to introduce Ambedkar and the caste question to the reader as comprehensively as possible.