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21 Tendulkar, "A Testament", Indian Literature, No 147, January-February 1992, quoted Makrand Sathe, "Editorial" in Vijay Tendulkar Omnibus (Gurgaon: Arvind Kumar Publishers), 2007, p 15.
22 As Kancha Iliaih puts it:
What difference did it make to us whether we had an English textbook that talked about Milton's Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained, or Shakespeare's Othello or Macbeth or Words- worth's poetry about nature in England, or a Telegu textbook which talked about Kalidasa's Meghasandesham, Bommera Potanna's Bhag- vatam, or Nannaya and Tikkana's Mahabhar- atham except the fact that one textbook is written with 26 letters and the other in 56 letters? We do not share the contents of either, we do not find our lives reflected in their narratives. We cannot locate our family settings in them. In none of these books do we find words that are familiar to us. With- out the help of a dictionary neither makes any sense to us. How does it make any differ- ence to us whether it is Greek and Latin that are written in Roman letters or Sanskrit that is written in Telegu? (Why I am not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Cul- ture and Political Economy (Calcutta: Samya)),1996, p 15.
23 Janet A Contursi, "Political Theology: Text and Practice in a Dalit Panther", The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 52, No 2, May 1993, pp 320-39, 27, emphasis added. I am indebted to this essay as well as to Anupama Rao, The Caste Question. Manan Desai points out that "the 'little maga- zine movement' was broader than the dalit lit movement, and involved non-dalit writers in- cluding Dilip Chitre (personal communication).
24 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press), 1963, p 40.
25 Ambedkar writes: Caste System is not merely division of labour. It is also a division of labourers. Civilised society undoubtedly needs division of la- bour. But in no civilised society is division of labour accompanied by this unnatural divi- sion of labourers into watertight compart- ments. Caste System is not merely a division of labourers which is quite different from di- vision of labour - it is an hierarchy in which the divisions of labourers are graded one above the other (Annihilation of Caste, IV).
For a discussion of the manifesto and more generally, Dalit Marxism see "Namdeo on Namdeo" in Namdeo Dhasal, Poet of the Under- world, trans. Dilip Chitre (Chennai: Mahayana Publishing), 2007, pp 168-69 and Sharankumar Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Litera- ture translated Alok Mukherjee (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan), 2010, pp 60-83; Anupama Rao, "Stigma and Labour" (Seminar 633 May 2012, 23-27).
26 Daniel Immerwahr, "Caste or Colony? Indianis- ing Race in the United States", Modern Intellec- tual History, 4, 2, 2007, pp 275-301.
27 Here they were following upon a long tradition of comparing caste-ism to racism. See for ex- ample, Jotirao Phule, Slavery (in the Civilised British Government under the Cloak of Brah- manism), 2nd edn, trans Maya Pandit (1911), in Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule, ed. G P Deshpande (Delhi: LeftWord Books), 2002.
28 Daniel Immerwahr, "Caste or Colony? Indian- ising Race in the United States", Modern Intel- lectual History, 4: 2, 2007, pp 275-301. The rela- tionship between race and caste has produced many debates; the most productive position, in my view, is that of Gerald D Berreman, "Caste in India and the United States", The American Journal of Sociology, Volume 66, No 2, Septem- ber 1960, 120-27, see Oliver Cox's letter chal- lenging this position, and Berreman's rejoinder in the same journal, Volume 66, No 5, March 1961, pp 510-14. I am indebted to Nate Roberts for these suggestions.
29 It is not possible here to discuss the many different ways in which African-American slavery and race relations were invoked by dalits, and caste by African Americans. These connections are of a different order than those made between anti-colonialism and slavery: thus, for example, the Victorian British paper Anti-Caste offered a platform for fighting all forms of racial oppression, but while seeking to make connections between slavery and imperi- alism, elided the question of question of caste within India. And then there was also the attempt to invoke the Indian caste system to indicate the hierarchies and fractures within African Americans; see Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopoli- tanism, The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Harvard University Press), 2012, p 79.
30 Manan Desai, "Caste in Black and White: Dalit Identity and the Translation of African-Ameri- can Literature" (forthcoming).
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