Jul 06, 2011 12:42 PM
Book Synopsis
"Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines"
By Rajiv Malhotra & Aravindan Neelakandan, Amaryllis, 2011
In the 1990s I met an African-American scholar in Princeton who casually told me that he had returned from a trip to India, where he was working with the ‘Afro-Dalit Project’. This puzzled me. I got curious. Upon inquiry, I found that this US operated and financed project frames inter-jati/varna interactions and the Dalit movement using an American cultural and historical lens. The Afro-Dalit project paint Dalits as the ‘Blacks’ of India and non-Dalits as India’s ‘whites’. This import of racist framing into India set me on the path to this book. I started investigating and discovered a vast network of activists and academics. Some of them have evangelical intentions, some truly believe what they are improving human rights of the oppressed, and many such players converge on such geopolitical scenarios.
Every nation has its faultlines, ...more
