Opinion: Why shudras must build museums of agrarian and artisanal instruments

Shudra history survives and exists in the furrows of agrarian lands and in artisanal fossils and living tools. The living shudras are also a huge repository of their history. India’s science exists in these unwritten furrows and in the deep wells of the wealth of labour. This nation’s future has to be built, taking lessons from these sources.

The day-to-day discourses of shudra food producers are replete with philosophical, economic and scientific thought. Unfortunately, this thought has not been recorded and textualised. Since most of their socio-economic and spiritual history is in the villages, young intellectuals of good calibre must engage in textualising it.

Shudra civilisation is spread out across many regions and states and is recorded in some regional languages and oral histories. Several scholars must undertake the painstaking work to study and write about shudra philosophy, science, and economics, in all regions and states mainly in English. Though it is not an easy task, given the denial of their history for millennia, it is possible to retrieve it.

There is a major task at hand for shudra voters, activists, leaders and rulers, whether at the state or central levels, to establish good museums of artifacts of production, social use, cultural use and architectural value...

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