Annihilation of Caste.

BR Ambedkar has left behind a vast body of work. There are also many books on him and his oeuvre. Given this context, what inspired you to work on this book? Author Ashok Gopal (Courtesy the subject) As I have said in the preface, I found that there were gaps in what has already been written about Ambedkar. Particularly in writings in English, Ambedkar’s turn to Buddhism has been unsatisfactorily told. That he was a deeply religious person, albeit not in the way many understand “religion”, was completely…

As recounted by Ambedkar in the prologue to the second edition of Annihilation of Caste, the genesis of the text lay in an invitation sent to him in December 1935 by Santram, the secretary of the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal, Lahore, to deliver the presidential address of the Mandal’s annual conference. The driving force of the Mandal, Santram was keen to learn about Ambedkar’s “new formula” for breaking caste, namely “annihilating” the religious notions on which it was based. Ambedkar was by then not interested in associating…

In a new book titled Rebels With A Cause, Famous Dissenters and Why They Are Not Being Heard, the author, Professor T.T Ram Mohan traces the trajectory of famous dissenters like Arundhati Roy, Oliver Stone, Kancha Ilaiah, David Irving, Yanis Varoufakis, U.G. Krishnamurti and John Pilger to depict how, in practice, dissent tends to be severely circumscribed and it is only the celebrity status of these dissenters in some cases that have kept them from being actively harmed. For instance, Mohan propounds that Arundhati Roy…