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This talk focuses on the intellectual and formidable anti-caste leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s (1891–1956) multi-pronged – social, cultural and political – strategies of creating manuski (human dignity), dharmantar (religious conversion) and respectable samaj (community) in a doubly colonial – British and brahmanical context. To Ambedkar, the larger Indian society denied manuski to Dalits. The caste mechanism restricted Dalits claims to personhood as Dalit humanity itself was constituted as a state of injury and punishment. The consequences were particularly dangerous for Dalit women lacking even minimal security. As a result, Ambedkar and his associates focused on both—external and internal—changes to cultivate manuski. Ambedkar constituted a new Dalit woman through these inner resources and interrelated ideas of an intrinsically caring and civilized humanity. He along with his associates robustly worked on a multi-pronged strategy—social, educational, political, legal, and religious, to regenerate Dalits and not merely reform them like in the case of elite touchable reformers.

Shailaja Paik is Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Professor of History and affiliate faculty in women’s, Gender, and sexuality studies, sociology, and Asian studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is a 2024 MacArthur Foundation “genius” Fellow. Paik is also the founding executive director of the Institute for Just Futures. Her work analyzes the politics of caste, gender, class, and sexuality, by focusing on the ideas, actions, and lives of Dalits (“Untouchables”). She is the author of the prestigious awards-winning book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity (Stanford University Press, 2022) and Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014). Paik is co-editing the Cambridge Companion to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (forthcoming) and Caste, Race, and Indigeneity in South Asia and Beyond (Forthcoming Routledge). Her research is funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, Yale University, Emory University, the Ford Foundation, and the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, among others. Paik has published several articles on a variety of themes, including kissing and nationalism, the politics of naming, Dalit and African American women’s solidarity, Dalit women’s education, and new Dalit womanhood in colonial India. Her scholarship and research interests are concerned with contributing to and furthering the dialogue in anti-race, anti-caste, and anti-patriarchy, human rights, anti-colonial struggles, transnational women’s history, and women-of-color feminisms.

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