The Blindness Of Insight : Essays on Caste in Modern India – Dilip M. Menon

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A Navayana Everblue 20th anniversary edition

IS THE HINDU–MUSLIM CONFLICT a unique resolution of caste inequality within Hindu society? How has hatred for the internal Other, the dalit, transformed into aggression against an external one, the Muslim? Does the dalit have the right to life in modern India? What use did a brahmin like E.M.S. Namboodiripad have for Marxism? How did an avarna write himself into modernity using the Malayalam novel and Christianity? Why is the use of violence in the maintenance of caste hierarchy so present yet invisible? Dilip M. Menon argues that communalism in India may well be the return of the repressed histories of caste.

Communalism is the highest stage of casteism

Dilip M. Menon is currently Professor of Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand. He is the author of Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India, Malabar 1900-1948. He has translated Potheri Kunhambu’s novel of 1893, Saraswativijayam, a classic, from the Malayalam into English.