Freedom From Caste: New Beginnings in Transdisciplinary Scholarship

The ten papers included in this special issue of J-Caste on ‘Freedom From Caste: AntiCaste Thought, Politics and Culture’ are a culmination of a long process of selection. We received fifty-five abstracts to a call for papers issued in February 2021. We had invited academic papers focusing on the anti-caste thought of important theorists, thinkers and movements in South Asia. In recent scholarship, new critical works have engaged extensively with the writings of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), the most celebrated of anti-caste theorists but to a lesser extent with Periyar E.V. Ramasamy (1879–1973), the iconoclastic anti-caste leader from the state of Tamil Nadu and a central figure in Dravidian politics. Their precursor, Mahatma Jotirao Phule (1827–1890), one of the most prominent anti-caste leaders in the colonial period and founder of Satyashodak Samaj in the state of Maharashtra in India, along with his wife Savitribai Phule, has also increasingly become the subject of academic study. Our aim was to invite new scholarship bringing their thought into conversation with each other, and beyond, to develop a deeper understanding of radical humanism embedded in anti-caste thinking and thus to understand the meaning of freedom from caste in its fullest sense. We were particularly interested in an exploration of lesser-known anti-caste thinkers especially from the ‘regions’, and marginalized communities in South Asia. Our leading questions were: How have anti-caste themes emerged in cinema, literature, and poetry, and how does anti-caste thought inform social and political movements and vice-versa? How have left, feminist and ecological movements dealt with caste? We