Dalit Journeys for Dignity

Dalit Journeys for Dignity is intended to be a facilitated discussion about the radical, field-shifting subfield of Dalit Studies within South Asian Studies. This event centers around the publication of this second volume, the Dalit Studies Volume Two (April 2025, SUNY Press and Permanent Black), using this occasion to reflect on the developments in this field since its formal inauguration with the Dalit Studies (Duke, 2016) by Ramnarayan S. Rawat (Delaware) and Kusuma Satyanarayana (EFL-U, Hyderabad) now close to a decade ago. It extends the discussion to a broader examination of the field’s affinities with other newer interdisciplinary subfields, such as Critical Caste Studies, Gender and Caste, or more established ones, like Black Studies. Invited alongside Rawat and Satyanarayana is the leading academic of the caste question at Columbia University, Anupama Rao, and the discussion will be facilitated by Sonali Dhanpal (Fellow at SOF/Heyman). 

About the Speakers

Ramnarayan Rawat is Associate Professor of History at the University of Delaware.  He is a historian of South Asia with particular interests in colonial and postcolonial India, racism and social exclusion, subaltern histories, and histories of democracy. His research focuses on Dalits (‘untouchables’) of India and their engagement with colonialism, nationalism, spatial and social exclusionary regimes, and democratic thought and practice in modern India. Recent publications include a co-edited book, Dalit Studies, with K. Satyanarayana based in Hyderabad (India), Duke UP, 2016, and an ongoing second book, ‘The Dalit Public Sphere: A Subaltern History of Liberalism and Democratic Practices’, which explores the role of Dalit groups in introducing innovative ideas and practices in the history of liberal thought. His first book, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012 & Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011) was the recipient of the Joseph Elder book prize awarded by the American Institute of Indian Studies (2009) and received ‘Honorable Mention’ in the 2013 Association of Asian Studies Bernard S. Cohn book prize.

Kusuma Satyanarayana is an Associate Professor and the Head of the Department of Cultural Studies at English and Foreign Languages University (EFL-U) in Hyderabad. He has designed and taught a set of courses under the rubric “Dalit Studies” and has published books and essays in the broad field of Dalit intellectual and literary history. He has co-edited two volumes of new Dalit writing: No Alphabet in Sight (Penguin, 2011) and Steel Nibs Are Sprouting (Harper Collins, 2013), along with the critical anthologies Dalit Studies (Duke UP, 2016), Dalit Text (2020), and, most recently, Concealing Caste (Oxford UP, 2023). At present, he is most interested in thinking about questions of dignity and equality in Indian literary cultures, intellectual traditions, and cultural practices. He teaches courses on cultural theory, Indian cultural history, and Dalit studies.

Anupama Rao is Professor of History (Barnard) and MESAAS (Columbia) and is Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She spent over nine years (2012-2019) as Senior Editor of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She is completing a monograph entitled "Ambedkar in America", a forthcoming volume (coedited with Shailaja Paik), the Cambridge Companion to Ambedkar; and has recently introduced and edited Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R. B. More (2019). She edited the 2018 reader Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality (2018), a sequel of sorts to the 2006 Gender and Caste. In addition to numerous essays, she is also the author of The Caste Question, a work of social and intellectual history, which has received critical acclaim for transforming the field’s understanding of the relationship between caste and democracy, and for its contributions to political thought and history more broadly. She directs the Ambedkar Initiative, which approaches B.R. Ambedkar as a global thinker and among the twentieth century’s most important voices in the radical democratic tradition, and supports engaged anticaste pedagogy and public outreach. 

Sonali Dhanpal is 2024-26 Buell Fellow and Fellow SOF/Heyman at Columbia University. She is a historian of modern architecture and urbanism who specializes in histories of colonialism, capitalism, and inequality. Her research on late colonial South Asia and post-colonial Britain examines the relationship between architecture and racial hierarchies that explain race, caste, and class-based unfreedoms within broader struggles for space under racial capitalism. Her book in progress, "Rule through Property Form", analyzes Bangalore’s emergence out of a boundary between colonial and princely rule to unravel the inextricable relationship between caste, the political economy of land/property, and the city. Dhanpal’s newer research is a social and intellectual history of race and housing that critically situates Britain’s post-war construction boom and subsequent decline as an afterlife of empire. She received her PhD in Architectural History and Theory in 2023 from SAPL, Newcastle University, as the inaugural Forshaw Scholar and was the 2023-2024 Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University.  

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.

Host or Publisher The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities