Dickens Leonard | Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (original) (raw)

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles by Dickens Leonard

CASTE A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, 2024

The article is a critical review essay that contextualises, discusses, and theorises anti-caste p... more The article is a critical review essay that contextualises, discusses, and theorises anti-caste poetics in the context of discussions on Dalit aesthetics and experience vis à vis postcolonialism and subaltern studies, foregrounding an English poetry collection by a/nil, aka, Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan titled The Absent Color (New Delhi: Navayana, 2023). I propose that a/nil’s poetry, in comparison to discussions on world literatures, demands a specific labor in reading; his writing produces an annihilation of a given sensibility in reading poetry. I suggest that his poetry works like an inverse jigsaw puzzle, offering an anti-caste critique of a varna-centered world which is in place. The Absent Color, I argue, un-colors this world of deceptions, using discoloration (like annihilation) as a conceptual framework, to critique the world colored by caste.

Critical Philosophy of Race (Penn State Univ Press), 2023

This article studies the proposal of the twentieth-century anticaste scholar and writer Iyothee T... more This article studies the proposal of the twentieth-century anticaste scholar and writer Iyothee Thass of a millennial anticaste communitas (community) in creative opposition to caste immunitas (immunity). It argues that Thass's casteless community makes an appeal as it withdraws from caste and Brahminism by differentiating itself from enclosure. Thass's works sought to conceive and construct a community against caste in the vernacular both in the global and local context by way of a highly scholarly as well as creative engagement with Buddhism and the Tamil literary archive. In the colonial and nationalist context of the nineteenth century in the Indian subcontinent, his interpretative imaginaire of the history of India-Indhira Dhesa Sarithiram-was a pedagogy that establishes a belonging to world community and, at the same time, to one's own vernacular communities.

South Asian Popular Culture, 2023

This paper studies director Pa. Ranjith's experiments with cinema as a phenomenon in the context ... more This paper studies director Pa. Ranjith's experiments with cinema as a phenomenon in the context of new Tamil cinema and the counter-wave, new auteurs and digital cinema; discussions on caste and music, 'the casteless collective' music against caste; and Ranjith's sonic universe in the context of Gaana music, the city Madras, and the sounds of Madras. The article argues and concludes that, given the context, Pa. Ranjith's scripts be studied as a practice of resistant art against caste.

South Asia Research, 2021

Responding to the history of Dalit invisibility in print public sphere, this article explores one... more Responding to the history of Dalit invisibility in print public sphere, this article explores one of the earliest Dalit articulations in print in South Asia during the colonial period. Extending studies on anti-caste thought by foregrounding the Tamil cosmopolis, this conceptualises how the most oppressed by caste engaged with print in the early twentieth century, through studying the works on and of Pandit Iyothee Thass and his movement. The article proposes that these experiments with print opened the chance of a political to emerge, which was otherwise foreclosed, towards wording a caste-less community at this earlier time in Indian history.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2019

Social Scientist , 2017

This paper revisits MSS Pandian's famous article “One Step Outside Modernity”(2002); and critical... more This paper revisits MSS Pandian's famous article “One Step Outside Modernity”(2002); and critically engages with the ideas discussed. It draws and evaluates a “minor position” on print language – Tamil here; particularly, on how those oppressed by caste use the reserves of language, so as, to constitute a caste-less cosmology through writing. Incidentally, right from Jyotirao Phule, Poikkayil Yohannan, Iyothee Thass, to Ambedkar and Periyar, there was an attempt to create an ethical and/or religious imaginary as “history against,” and beyond it, emphasizing it through writing and printing.
Using theoretical arguments, drawn from recent works on “history from the below,” the paper would argue that while there is an emphasis in the radical practice of history on “non-written histories” of subaltern/minority communities; it is also important to underline subaltern articulations regarding the inevitability of written history as resource to counter hegemonic structures. The centrality ascribed to the written word and written history for a possible salvation of exploited and oppressed minorities seem to, primarily, complicate critical categories we have for nation and language. Hence, this paper may pose: how instrumental is writing for oppressed communities, such as Dalits, to embark a step inside language, yet, outside history?

In this context, the paper studies Pandit Iyothee Thass (1845-1914), an anti-caste Tamil intellectual, who ran the journal Tamizhan (Tamilian, 1907-1914), which particularly revived interest in Buddhism, and created a cosmopolitan anti-caste imaginary of those times. He passed away in the year, coincidently, when Gandhi, who also made popular use of print to create “an imagined political community,” returned to India. Thass, as an intellectual: an expert reader, referee, writer, composer, polyglot, publisher, and organizer, initiated a resistant knowledge practice, by using journalism as a tool to gain inroads into the print public sphere, which was undeniably caste-ridden. 42 such Tamil journals – by Dalits - were run from 1850 to 1947 in the Madras presidency. Such an event in print history is erased by popular historiography. Hence a revisit, so as, to re-evaluate that historical moment of erasure is imperative to capture the prolific Dalit participation and contribution to emancipatory knowledge practice through language. In the context of an increasing worry about the d(r)eath of prominent Dalit-journalists, and lack of Dalit media-practitioners in the contemporary; the paper reflects, is one step outside modernity, two steps outside tradition?

South Asian Popular Culture, Oct 23, 2015

This paper analyzes contemporary, popular Tamil films set in Madurai with respect to space and ca... more This paper analyzes contemporary, popular Tamil films set in Madurai with respect to space and caste. These films actualize region as a cinematic imaginary through its authenticity markers - caste/ist practices explicitly, which earlier films constructed as a “trope”. The paper uses the concept of Heterotopias to analyse the recurrence of spectacle spaces in the construction of Madurai, and the production of caste in contemporary films. In this pursuit, it interrogates the implications of such spatial discourses.

Peer Reviewed Book Chapters by Dickens Leonard

Tamil Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Caste, Gender, and Technology (Edited by Selvaraj Velayutham and Vijay Devadas), 2021

This chapter studies the ‘new Madurai genre’ as a Third Wave Tamil cinema, where caste finds a ne... more This chapter studies the ‘new Madurai genre’ as a Third Wave Tamil cinema, where caste finds a new currency. It foregrounds the dangerous and deviant heroes, who recur within Madurai as a cinematic space, in films such as Kadhal (Love, 2004), Veyil (Torrid Sun, 2005), Paruthiveeran (Cotton Champ, 2007), and Subramaniapuram (2008). They contest the cinematic construction of the homogenous ‘ethno-specific’ Tamil nation. If the First Wave interrupted the ‘Indian’ cinema’s project of discursively constructing a national people, the Third Wave offers a version of the Tamil country that is caste-infected and criminal prone. At the same time, it deconstructs the urbane cosmopolitan address that a Second Wave constructed in the 1990s. These films not only go beyond ‘neo-native’ imaginations to critique the First and Second waves, but also spatialize caste and criminality as conscripts of cinema.

The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India: Anxiety and Intimacy (Edited by Kaustav Chakraborty), 2019

This chapter significantly wishes to unpack how caste subjugates and marginalizes the body, locat... more This chapter significantly wishes to unpack how caste subjugates and marginalizes the body, location, and migration of close to one fifth of human in India. Firstly, using material made available through recent historical research on indentured labour in the colonial period; Secondly, by comparing the travel reports of Gandhi and Ambedkar; and finally, by analyzing the work of Iyothee Thass (1845-1914), a Tamil-Dalit intellectual who predates Ambedkar and Gandhi, which foregrounds a caste-free imaginary in the vernacular (hitherto understudied): I submit that displaced subjects, say Dalits, who are perennially positioned out-of-space (outcaste), search for an imagined home continuously. However violent the displacement and/or disembodiment be, they exscribe a home ‘in-place’ and ‘in-time,’ critically and creatively through writing and practice, conceiving anti-caste values. This is conceptualised as communitas of/from the outside. Contemporary critical theory that foregrounds experience as a pre-requisite to emancipatory socio-political thought is discussed as an inevitable dialogue/discourse, as it emanates from the subaltern-ized Other. Thus the chapter explores anti-caste communitas as an autonomous embodiment, which desires to touch intimately at least in resistant thought and action.

Secular Sectarianism (Edited by Ajay Gudavarthy), 2019

The chapter reflects on modern institutions, including educational institutions, and argues that ... more The chapter reflects on modern institutions, including educational institutions, and argues that they breathe a Brahmanic mode of representation, which is a particular mode of representing things, relations between things and an orientation towards things in India. This chapter intervenes to examine theoretical/conceptual possibilities of the Rohith Movement, and it consists of two sections. One of these primarily describes and discusses the Rohith movement and the letter he left us. The second part reflects and suggests a philosophical take on the sense and meaning of the Rohith movement in relation to progressive emancipatory radical politics as well as regressive communitarian politics in contemporary times. The chapter not only argues that the Rohith movement inspires a radical moment to exceed conventional solidarities, but it also invites the Dalit movement to resituate and transform itself from its undue reliance on legal and representational politics.

Multilingualism and Literary Cultures of India (Edited by M.T. Ansari), 2019

In the context of the Tamil intellectual Iyothee Thass’ important contribution to anti-caste thou... more In the context of the Tamil intellectual Iyothee Thass’ important contribution to anti-caste thought and the Tamil Buddhist movement in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, this paper calls for a critical review and evaluation of a richer understanding of anti-caste history and religion within a particular language - here Tamil. Social Scientists and writers have done so in the recent past (100 years after Thass), and he has become a subject of scholarly interest as well as scorn. The discussion on Thass as a historical discourse and critique evaluates how scholars have treated him thus far for various reasons. This chapter, thus, accounts and analyses these themes and scholarships on Thass as Non-Brahmin discourse and anti-caste critique.

Journal Essays by Dickens Leonard

Critical Times, 2020

Reflecting on the "suicide" of the anti-caste student activist in India, Rohith Vemula, now a Dal... more Reflecting on the "suicide" of the anti-caste student activist in India, Rohith Vemula, now a Dalit icon, this paper looks at the various meanings that his suicide note generates for the Dalit present. Mobilizing historical and philosophical material, particularly the work of anti-caste intellectuals such as Ambedkar and Iyothee Thass, the paper argues that conversion and renaming, among the oppressed, are acts that move to ward becoming-other.

Chalachitra Sameeksha, 2020

Can one wonder: why do we lose ourselves when we watch a film? What do we look and gaze at, when ... more Can one wonder: why do we lose ourselves when we watch a film? What do we look and gaze at, when we watch the film, so as to lose? What do we experience when time passes over a film? Do we re-act to the experience that is made possible due to the film? In other words, do we “gaze” at what is offered before us, without our own volition … without our own will?

Journal Articles (translated) by Dickens Leonard

Women Philosophers' Journal (Issue 4-5), 2017

This article titled "Literature and Censorship" was presented as a Guest Speech in Tamil as "Ilai... more This article titled "Literature and Censorship" was presented as a Guest Speech in Tamil as "Ilaikkiyamum Thanikkaiyum" by the writer Perumal Murugan in RAW.CON 2015 at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad. This was translated by Dickens Leonard and Vellaisamy into english, and is now published in the UNESCO Women Philosophers' Journal in a special issue on "Intellectuals, Philosophers and Women in India: Endangered Species." This article is the first write-up by Perumal Murugan which marked his return to literature. This speech is simultaneously translated and published in French as well.

Published in Südasien Vol. 36 No. 3, Oct. 2016, (pp 37-39). Translated from English to German by ... more Published in Südasien Vol. 36 No. 3, Oct. 2016, (pp 37-39). Translated from English to German by Theodor Rathgeber,

Le Nouvelle Revue de l'Inde: Le Tamil Nadu ( January 2017) The Conscripts of Cinema, translated i... more Le Nouvelle Revue de l'Inde: Le Tamil Nadu ( January 2017)
The Conscripts of Cinema, translated in French, published in the french journal "The New Indian Review" in the special issue on Tamil Nadu.

Unpublished Dissertations by Dickens Leonard

Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature, 2017

PhD Thesis (2017), Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad.

Master of Philosophy in Comparative Literature, 2011

Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad.

Conference Presentations by Dickens Leonard

International Conference on "Intergroup Inequality in Indian Society: Panel on Media" @ ISEC Bangalore

This paper aims to foreground the question of history in the formation of Tamil Cinema's engageme... more This paper aims to foreground the question of history in the formation of Tamil Cinema's engagement with culture and caste. It wishes then to foreground and reflect on the concept of a Dalit "moment" of entry, by studying Pa. Ranjith's radical movement towards the reconstruction of "the marginal and the minor"-i.e., the excluded of cinematic representation-as popular presence. Dividing this paper into three sections: the historical, the conceptual, and the demonstrative, this presentation attempts to engage with cinema as an exploration with art, albeit, within a limiting-context of the capital, exchange, consumption, exploitation, and estrangement. Yet, the delimiting aspect of it is at the level of wisdom as a felt-thought, where an embodiment of artistic experience illuminates beauty and joy in the realm of the true, the good, the right, and the just.

The paper seeks to study, critically, a component of popular contemporary Tamil cinema, especiall... more The paper seeks to study, critically, a component of popular contemporary Tamil cinema, especially foregrounding the films – Kadhal, Veyil, Paruthiveeran and Subramaniapuram – produced from the years 2004 – 2008, to read it differently, against itself, while departing from a general critique of the film, so as, to recover the portrayal of subaltern subjects – men and women - as critical interventions. I explore, to take issue, with the double stereotype – constructed within the claims - essentially stereotyped, by the PMK chief, of the men and women, implicated in his tirade against “lower” castes; of what is now being termed as prejudiced and casteist. The paper studies the disintegration of the type-heroes, heroines who contest and succumb to the caste imaginary, and the critical subjects who intervene.

CASTE A Global Journal on Social Exclusion, 2024

The article is a critical review essay that contextualises, discusses, and theorises anti-caste p... more The article is a critical review essay that contextualises, discusses, and theorises anti-caste poetics in the context of discussions on Dalit aesthetics and experience vis à vis postcolonialism and subaltern studies, foregrounding an English poetry collection by a/nil, aka, Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan titled The Absent Color (New Delhi: Navayana, 2023). I propose that a/nil’s poetry, in comparison to discussions on world literatures, demands a specific labor in reading; his writing produces an annihilation of a given sensibility in reading poetry. I suggest that his poetry works like an inverse jigsaw puzzle, offering an anti-caste critique of a varna-centered world which is in place. The Absent Color, I argue, un-colors this world of deceptions, using discoloration (like annihilation) as a conceptual framework, to critique the world colored by caste.

Critical Philosophy of Race (Penn State Univ Press), 2023

This article studies the proposal of the twentieth-century anticaste scholar and writer Iyothee T... more This article studies the proposal of the twentieth-century anticaste scholar and writer Iyothee Thass of a millennial anticaste communitas (community) in creative opposition to caste immunitas (immunity). It argues that Thass's casteless community makes an appeal as it withdraws from caste and Brahminism by differentiating itself from enclosure. Thass's works sought to conceive and construct a community against caste in the vernacular both in the global and local context by way of a highly scholarly as well as creative engagement with Buddhism and the Tamil literary archive. In the colonial and nationalist context of the nineteenth century in the Indian subcontinent, his interpretative imaginaire of the history of India-Indhira Dhesa Sarithiram-was a pedagogy that establishes a belonging to world community and, at the same time, to one's own vernacular communities.

South Asian Popular Culture, 2023

This paper studies director Pa. Ranjith's experiments with cinema as a phenomenon in the context ... more This paper studies director Pa. Ranjith's experiments with cinema as a phenomenon in the context of new Tamil cinema and the counter-wave, new auteurs and digital cinema; discussions on caste and music, 'the casteless collective' music against caste; and Ranjith's sonic universe in the context of Gaana music, the city Madras, and the sounds of Madras. The article argues and concludes that, given the context, Pa. Ranjith's scripts be studied as a practice of resistant art against caste.

South Asia Research, 2021

Responding to the history of Dalit invisibility in print public sphere, this article explores one... more Responding to the history of Dalit invisibility in print public sphere, this article explores one of the earliest Dalit articulations in print in South Asia during the colonial period. Extending studies on anti-caste thought by foregrounding the Tamil cosmopolis, this conceptualises how the most oppressed by caste engaged with print in the early twentieth century, through studying the works on and of Pandit Iyothee Thass and his movement. The article proposes that these experiments with print opened the chance of a political to emerge, which was otherwise foreclosed, towards wording a caste-less community at this earlier time in Indian history.

Economic and Political Weekly, 2019

Social Scientist , 2017

This paper revisits MSS Pandian's famous article “One Step Outside Modernity”(2002); and critical... more This paper revisits MSS Pandian's famous article “One Step Outside Modernity”(2002); and critically engages with the ideas discussed. It draws and evaluates a “minor position” on print language – Tamil here; particularly, on how those oppressed by caste use the reserves of language, so as, to constitute a caste-less cosmology through writing. Incidentally, right from Jyotirao Phule, Poikkayil Yohannan, Iyothee Thass, to Ambedkar and Periyar, there was an attempt to create an ethical and/or religious imaginary as “history against,” and beyond it, emphasizing it through writing and printing.
Using theoretical arguments, drawn from recent works on “history from the below,” the paper would argue that while there is an emphasis in the radical practice of history on “non-written histories” of subaltern/minority communities; it is also important to underline subaltern articulations regarding the inevitability of written history as resource to counter hegemonic structures. The centrality ascribed to the written word and written history for a possible salvation of exploited and oppressed minorities seem to, primarily, complicate critical categories we have for nation and language. Hence, this paper may pose: how instrumental is writing for oppressed communities, such as Dalits, to embark a step inside language, yet, outside history?

In this context, the paper studies Pandit Iyothee Thass (1845-1914), an anti-caste Tamil intellectual, who ran the journal Tamizhan (Tamilian, 1907-1914), which particularly revived interest in Buddhism, and created a cosmopolitan anti-caste imaginary of those times. He passed away in the year, coincidently, when Gandhi, who also made popular use of print to create “an imagined political community,” returned to India. Thass, as an intellectual: an expert reader, referee, writer, composer, polyglot, publisher, and organizer, initiated a resistant knowledge practice, by using journalism as a tool to gain inroads into the print public sphere, which was undeniably caste-ridden. 42 such Tamil journals – by Dalits - were run from 1850 to 1947 in the Madras presidency. Such an event in print history is erased by popular historiography. Hence a revisit, so as, to re-evaluate that historical moment of erasure is imperative to capture the prolific Dalit participation and contribution to emancipatory knowledge practice through language. In the context of an increasing worry about the d(r)eath of prominent Dalit-journalists, and lack of Dalit media-practitioners in the contemporary; the paper reflects, is one step outside modernity, two steps outside tradition?

South Asian Popular Culture, Oct 23, 2015

This paper analyzes contemporary, popular Tamil films set in Madurai with respect to space and ca... more This paper analyzes contemporary, popular Tamil films set in Madurai with respect to space and caste. These films actualize region as a cinematic imaginary through its authenticity markers - caste/ist practices explicitly, which earlier films constructed as a “trope”. The paper uses the concept of Heterotopias to analyse the recurrence of spectacle spaces in the construction of Madurai, and the production of caste in contemporary films. In this pursuit, it interrogates the implications of such spatial discourses.

Tamil Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Caste, Gender, and Technology (Edited by Selvaraj Velayutham and Vijay Devadas), 2021

This chapter studies the ‘new Madurai genre’ as a Third Wave Tamil cinema, where caste finds a ne... more This chapter studies the ‘new Madurai genre’ as a Third Wave Tamil cinema, where caste finds a new currency. It foregrounds the dangerous and deviant heroes, who recur within Madurai as a cinematic space, in films such as Kadhal (Love, 2004), Veyil (Torrid Sun, 2005), Paruthiveeran (Cotton Champ, 2007), and Subramaniapuram (2008). They contest the cinematic construction of the homogenous ‘ethno-specific’ Tamil nation. If the First Wave interrupted the ‘Indian’ cinema’s project of discursively constructing a national people, the Third Wave offers a version of the Tamil country that is caste-infected and criminal prone. At the same time, it deconstructs the urbane cosmopolitan address that a Second Wave constructed in the 1990s. These films not only go beyond ‘neo-native’ imaginations to critique the First and Second waves, but also spatialize caste and criminality as conscripts of cinema.

The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India: Anxiety and Intimacy (Edited by Kaustav Chakraborty), 2019

This chapter significantly wishes to unpack how caste subjugates and marginalizes the body, locat... more This chapter significantly wishes to unpack how caste subjugates and marginalizes the body, location, and migration of close to one fifth of human in India. Firstly, using material made available through recent historical research on indentured labour in the colonial period; Secondly, by comparing the travel reports of Gandhi and Ambedkar; and finally, by analyzing the work of Iyothee Thass (1845-1914), a Tamil-Dalit intellectual who predates Ambedkar and Gandhi, which foregrounds a caste-free imaginary in the vernacular (hitherto understudied): I submit that displaced subjects, say Dalits, who are perennially positioned out-of-space (outcaste), search for an imagined home continuously. However violent the displacement and/or disembodiment be, they exscribe a home ‘in-place’ and ‘in-time,’ critically and creatively through writing and practice, conceiving anti-caste values. This is conceptualised as communitas of/from the outside. Contemporary critical theory that foregrounds experience as a pre-requisite to emancipatory socio-political thought is discussed as an inevitable dialogue/discourse, as it emanates from the subaltern-ized Other. Thus the chapter explores anti-caste communitas as an autonomous embodiment, which desires to touch intimately at least in resistant thought and action.

Secular Sectarianism (Edited by Ajay Gudavarthy), 2019

The chapter reflects on modern institutions, including educational institutions, and argues that ... more The chapter reflects on modern institutions, including educational institutions, and argues that they breathe a Brahmanic mode of representation, which is a particular mode of representing things, relations between things and an orientation towards things in India. This chapter intervenes to examine theoretical/conceptual possibilities of the Rohith Movement, and it consists of two sections. One of these primarily describes and discusses the Rohith movement and the letter he left us. The second part reflects and suggests a philosophical take on the sense and meaning of the Rohith movement in relation to progressive emancipatory radical politics as well as regressive communitarian politics in contemporary times. The chapter not only argues that the Rohith movement inspires a radical moment to exceed conventional solidarities, but it also invites the Dalit movement to resituate and transform itself from its undue reliance on legal and representational politics.

Multilingualism and Literary Cultures of India (Edited by M.T. Ansari), 2019

In the context of the Tamil intellectual Iyothee Thass’ important contribution to anti-caste thou... more In the context of the Tamil intellectual Iyothee Thass’ important contribution to anti-caste thought and the Tamil Buddhist movement in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, this paper calls for a critical review and evaluation of a richer understanding of anti-caste history and religion within a particular language - here Tamil. Social Scientists and writers have done so in the recent past (100 years after Thass), and he has become a subject of scholarly interest as well as scorn. The discussion on Thass as a historical discourse and critique evaluates how scholars have treated him thus far for various reasons. This chapter, thus, accounts and analyses these themes and scholarships on Thass as Non-Brahmin discourse and anti-caste critique.

Critical Times, 2020

Reflecting on the "suicide" of the anti-caste student activist in India, Rohith Vemula, now a Dal... more Reflecting on the "suicide" of the anti-caste student activist in India, Rohith Vemula, now a Dalit icon, this paper looks at the various meanings that his suicide note generates for the Dalit present. Mobilizing historical and philosophical material, particularly the work of anti-caste intellectuals such as Ambedkar and Iyothee Thass, the paper argues that conversion and renaming, among the oppressed, are acts that move to ward becoming-other.

Chalachitra Sameeksha, 2020

Can one wonder: why do we lose ourselves when we watch a film? What do we look and gaze at, when ... more Can one wonder: why do we lose ourselves when we watch a film? What do we look and gaze at, when we watch the film, so as to lose? What do we experience when time passes over a film? Do we re-act to the experience that is made possible due to the film? In other words, do we “gaze” at what is offered before us, without our own volition … without our own will?

Women Philosophers' Journal (Issue 4-5), 2017

This article titled "Literature and Censorship" was presented as a Guest Speech in Tamil as "Ilai... more This article titled "Literature and Censorship" was presented as a Guest Speech in Tamil as "Ilaikkiyamum Thanikkaiyum" by the writer Perumal Murugan in RAW.CON 2015 at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad. This was translated by Dickens Leonard and Vellaisamy into english, and is now published in the UNESCO Women Philosophers' Journal in a special issue on "Intellectuals, Philosophers and Women in India: Endangered Species." This article is the first write-up by Perumal Murugan which marked his return to literature. This speech is simultaneously translated and published in French as well.

Published in Südasien Vol. 36 No. 3, Oct. 2016, (pp 37-39). Translated from English to German by ... more Published in Südasien Vol. 36 No. 3, Oct. 2016, (pp 37-39). Translated from English to German by Theodor Rathgeber,

Le Nouvelle Revue de l'Inde: Le Tamil Nadu ( January 2017) The Conscripts of Cinema, translated i... more Le Nouvelle Revue de l'Inde: Le Tamil Nadu ( January 2017)
The Conscripts of Cinema, translated in French, published in the french journal "The New Indian Review" in the special issue on Tamil Nadu.

International Conference on "Intergroup Inequality in Indian Society: Panel on Media" @ ISEC Bangalore

This paper aims to foreground the question of history in the formation of Tamil Cinema's engageme... more This paper aims to foreground the question of history in the formation of Tamil Cinema's engagement with culture and caste. It wishes then to foreground and reflect on the concept of a Dalit "moment" of entry, by studying Pa. Ranjith's radical movement towards the reconstruction of "the marginal and the minor"-i.e., the excluded of cinematic representation-as popular presence. Dividing this paper into three sections: the historical, the conceptual, and the demonstrative, this presentation attempts to engage with cinema as an exploration with art, albeit, within a limiting-context of the capital, exchange, consumption, exploitation, and estrangement. Yet, the delimiting aspect of it is at the level of wisdom as a felt-thought, where an embodiment of artistic experience illuminates beauty and joy in the realm of the true, the good, the right, and the just.

The paper seeks to study, critically, a component of popular contemporary Tamil cinema, especiall... more The paper seeks to study, critically, a component of popular contemporary Tamil cinema, especially foregrounding the films – Kadhal, Veyil, Paruthiveeran and Subramaniapuram – produced from the years 2004 – 2008, to read it differently, against itself, while departing from a general critique of the film, so as, to recover the portrayal of subaltern subjects – men and women - as critical interventions. I explore, to take issue, with the double stereotype – constructed within the claims - essentially stereotyped, by the PMK chief, of the men and women, implicated in his tirade against “lower” castes; of what is now being termed as prejudiced and casteist. The paper studies the disintegration of the type-heroes, heroines who contest and succumb to the caste imaginary, and the critical subjects who intervene.

JNU, Delhi, 2023

Talk presented at JNU, April, 2023: Stroud’s 'The Evolution of Pragmatism in India' foregroun... more Talk presented at JNU, April, 2023:

Stroud’s 'The Evolution of Pragmatism in India' foregrounds the intellectual biography of Babasaheb Dr. Ambedkar and evaluates the reception of Dewey’s influential thought as a life-changing pedagogy in the works of the anti-caste activist, philosopher, and thinker. The author conceptualizes Dr. Ambedkar as critically and creatively weaving a “rhetoric of reconstruction” in the Indian subcontinent for the first time, arguably, and is attributed to be the founder of such an evolution in India.

IISER, Mohali, 2023

My talk would highlight a distinct style, if not a method, in Dr. Ambedkar's critical thinking. F... more My talk would highlight a distinct style, if not a method, in Dr. Ambedkar's critical thinking. Firstly, I would like to treat his thoughts on caste, which he calls as a "mechanism" of enfolding as the equipment of enclosure. And I will go on to reflect on his creative interpretations (later in his life) on the "riddles” as a “technique” of un-folding as the artefact of disclosure. I would like to use a comparative reading and an incisive reflection on these concepts as I foreground Dr. Ambedkar trajectory of thoughts on the “reject” and the "subject." Because there is an idea of the reject as a subject and the subject as a rejector in Ambedkar.

Review of Soumyabrata Choudhury's Now it's Come to Distances (New Delhi: Navayana, 2020); also pr... more Review of Soumyabrata Choudhury's Now it's Come to Distances (New Delhi: Navayana, 2020); also presented at the English Department, Presidency University, Kolkata, Feb 2021.

This talk (at Lamakaan, Hyderabad) for Ambedkar Jayanti on 14th April 2020, discusses three criti... more This talk (at Lamakaan, Hyderabad) for Ambedkar Jayanti on 14th April 2020, discusses three critical moments in Ambedkar’s journey, and Ambedkarite thought, as three critical stages that exscribe an anti-caste event, which is a “becoming-other-than-itself” (Nancy 1994). These particular moments – that recognize, abolish and persuade – are three speech-acts by Ambedkar at three different places during the years 1916 to 1956; each delivered in three different countries, separated by twenty years. I propose to analyse, firstly, a seminar presentation at Columbia University, New York, North America, in May 1916 which tried to “expose” the human institution of caste for the first time as a moment that educates. Secondly, a speech in May 1936 – which apparently seconded the undelivered “Annihilation” speech – that insisted the Mahar conference to “convert” in Bombay, India, as a moment that agitates. And lastly, the “last” speech on Buddhism as “critique” in the 4th conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in November 1956 at Kathmandu, Nepal, as a moment that organizes. This talk, thus, interprets these three moments in consequence as signatory events, and would wish to demonstrate how anti-caste events not only expose inscriptions of caste but also creatively stage acts of exscription against caste.