Abstract
The word “Dalit,” from the Marathi for “broken” or “crushed,” has come to replace “untouchable” as the most common label for the more than 160 million people who live at the bottom of the caste hierarchy in India and other parts of South Asia. Names matter—never more so than when dealing with the identity of an oppressed minority. In 1972, a group of young Dalits in Bombay formed the Dalit Panthers. On August 15, 1973, the twenty-sixth anniversary of Indian Independence, the Dalit Panthers organized a march of some two hundred people through the streets of Bombay (Mumbai) in a celebration of what they called “Black Independence Day” (“Kala Swatantrya Din”). Drawing on the legacy of the Black Panthers, the Dalit Panthers challenged a narrative in which “independence” had already come to the Indian people. The very name “Dalit Panthers” marshaled notions of blackness and Black Power to present Dalit resistance as militantly unbounded by the triumphant complacency of self-proclaimed “democratic” nation-states.
I would like to thank Joe Trotter and the participants in the Black Power beyond Borders conference, Lara Putnam for chairing the panel on which I first shared this chapter, and Clifford Bob for reading an earlier version of this chapter. Some of the material in this chapter was first published in a different form in Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) and in Nico Slate, “Translating Race and Caste,” The Journal of Historical Sociology 24, no. 1 (March 2011): 62–79.
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Notes
Dalit Panthers Manifesto, Barbara Joshi, ed. Untouchable! Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement (London: Zed Books, 1986), 145. The 2001 Indian Census listed the population of Dalits or “scheduled castes” at 167 million and the population of “scheduled tribes” at 84 million. Together, these disadvantaged communities constitute approximately one-quarter of India’s population. Dalit communities also exist in Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere in South Asia. See www.censusindia.gov.in (accessed March 29, 2011);
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Slate, N. (2012). The Dalit Panthers: Race, Caste, and Black Power in India. In: Slate, N. (eds) Black Power beyond Borders. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295064_7
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