‘The Shudra Rebellion’: Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd studies the vital role of oppressed castes in India

The slogan-shouting and muscle flexing on the basis of caste and class were in full bloom during the elections in Maharashtra. It is a spectacle for all of India now. These elections have also opened up a Pandora’s box amid the demand for reservation of Marathas (Kshatriyas or Shudras) in Maharashtra. It is the same Maharashtra that had foregrounded the first non-brahmin movement led by Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, along with his partner Savitribai Phule. It was the first act of an assigned Shudra rebelling against the brahmanical patriarchal dogmatic order. Amidst this chaos, I came across a very important and apt intellectual work, The Shudra Rebellion by scholar Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, to understand these times. ughts.

Shudras in the age of frenzy

The book lays out the territory for the reader in terms of time and space, to understand the banal narrative of Hindi, Hindu, and Hindutva. This narrative has inverted the idea of a nation. Nation, the author says, has now been imagined via a cultural communitarian idea. This culture is an extension of the above majoritarian trio crafted by a deliberate and mythical construct of history. This mythologisation of history is the outcome of textuality – a limited birth but worth deciding on systemic structure.

The author draws attention to the discourse that demeans...

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