Marginality, Educational Opportunity and Access to Higher Education: Experiences of Scheduled Caste and Tribe Students in India

Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Ahead of Print.
This paper is based on the empirical data of the marginal section students who have come under the purview of the National Fellowship system at higher education level in India. The objective of the study is to find out their experiences with respect to the national fellowship system as a public policy measure and their educational attainment, participation and achievements within public policy discourse. Also, the study explores the educational opportunity, cultural capital and the socio-economic and political attainment of the marginal section students. Where, the study is based on both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The data are analysed through descriptive and thematic analysis methods. It addresses the major questions like: does the state become cultural capital for the marginal section students? How do the students from marginal backgrounds capitalize the public policy meant for them for higher education and what are their difficulties to avail this public policy?

Navayana Buddhism and the Scheduled Castes of West Bengal

Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Ahead of Print.
Though Buddhism began to revive in India in the late nineteenth century, Buddhist organizations did not pay much attention to bring the Dalits into their folds. Rather, the lower caste communities had aspired for constructing respectable caste identities in the late colonial period. However, conversion of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) to a modified form of Buddhism (called ‘neo-Buddhism’) has appeared as a sociocultural tool for the Dalits to fight against the casteism. In this paper, we have highlightws the background of the introduction of neo-Buddhism and the location of the Scheduled Castes of West Bengal in it.

Caste, Social Inequalities and Maternal Healthcare Services in India: Evidence from the National Family and Health Survey

Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Ahead of Print.
This study examines the level of access and utilization of maternal care health services among different socially disadvantaged groups in India. The study uses the data from the National Family Health Survey conducted in 2015–2016. We have used descriptive statistics and bivariate analysis to assess the trends and prevalence of maternal healthcare services among different social groups. Using logistic regression, we have estimated the association of different socio-economic variables on maternal healthcare services among different socially disadvantaged groups in India. The results suggest tremendous inequality in access to maternal healthcare services among socially disadvantaged groups in India. It was found that several factors such as women’s education, working status, household wealth quintile and mass media exposure significantly impact access and utilization of maternal healthcare services among various socially disadvantaged groups. In addition, the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe women are subjected to socio-economic discrimination at multiple levels, and their maternal healthcare situation remains highly fragile. The social identity and caste-based socio-economic inequalities remain a major challenge in India to assure universal access to maternal healthcare services.

Book review: Sekhar Bandyopadhyay & Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury, Caste and Partition in Bengal: The Story of Dalit Refugees, 1946–1961

Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Ahead of Print.
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay & Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury, Caste and Partition in Bengal: The Story of Dalit Refugees, 1946–1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 272 pp. ₹1,495, ISBN 978-0-19-285972-3 (Hardcover).

Dalit Humanism: Marginal Spatial Reality as a Site of Dalit Counterpublic in Bama’s Sangati and Tulsiram’s Murdahiya

Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Ahead of Print.
In India, one of the major counter-discourses constituted to critique the culture of violence, silence and impunity, harboured by the Indian public sphere, is offered by Dalit literary writings. Dalit counterpublic highlights the alternate cultural spaces that subvert and disrupt the dominant structures of repression by valuing the Dalit standpoint. The present article claims that the Dalit counterpublic is subaltern as well as locational; subalternity is based on the marginal position prescribed to Dalit people in the Indian social and cultural structure while location refers to the geopolitical territorial segregation. Bama’s Sangati and Tulsiram’s Murdahiya have been analysed using theoretical perspectives of counterpublic proposed by critics such as Nancy Fraser, Kanika Batra and Michel Warner. The findings suggest that Dalit people have transformed Dalit marginal site into a source of resistance.

Reclaiming the Body: Marital Rape and Self-sustainability in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You

Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Ahead of Print.
One of the burning issues of recent times is the domestic violence in forms of psychological tortures, physical assault, marital rape, etc., which are more or less visible in every society. This is the concern that leads this article to negotiate how individual identities get reshaped by the socio-cultural and political practices of the given systems of a society. Within this framework, this article analyses how ‘reclaiming the body’ helps ‘self’-sustenance of the female narrator while still contesting with the violated domestic life under the threat of patriarchal society in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017). In the novel, Kandasamy not only portrays her protagonist as a mere object subjected to patriarchy but also shows the ways of her constructing own ‘self’, more explicitly female subjectivity which this article intends to explore through the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler’s vision about construction of gender as mere rehearsed performative acts constructed to implement and cherish self-proclaimed supreme patriarchal ‘self’ of the society.

The State and the Madheshi Dalit Women’s Access to Citizenship in Nepal

Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Volume 15, Issue 1_suppl, Page S86-S99, August 2023.
The relationship between the state and Madheshi Dalit Womans (MDWs) with reference to the latter’s exercise of citizenship right has long been a contested issue in Nepal due to the latter’s alleged immigrant history and cultural and familial connection with the Dalits of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh of India. The MDWs who are at the lowest social order in Nepal because of their intersecting subordinate identities based on gender, caste, ethnic and class have been systematically excluded from the domain of Nepali citizenship during due course of hill-based national identity formation. Consequently, large number of the MDWs, their spouses and children have remained stateless or struggled hard to obtain citizenship owing to ethnic, caste, gender and class-based exclusion even after insertion of jus soli provisos for a brief period in the 2006 Citizenship Act. On this backdrop, this article, based on qualitative field study in the eastern Tarai, is an effort to explore the intricacies of the citizenshiplessness of the MDWs of Nepal’s eastern Tarai from their subjective experiences. The findings reveal a disappointing picture of citizenshiplessness of the MDW families by virtue of multiple forms of exclusion and also a sustained hierarchy within themselves based on access to different types of citizenship.

Learning Styles and Academic Achievement of Tribal Students

Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Ahead of Print.
Access to education for all is a hurdle task for a vast country like India. It is extra difficult when we consider the remote hamlets of tribal people. Tribal education was given prime importance by the different educational policies throughout the time. There are different issues like language, culture, lack of awareness, and so on, which are threat to achieving the goal. The educational goals mostly would not get fulfilled in the schools of tribal area. This may be related to the learning styles of tribal students as there is a close association between the learning styles of students and their academic achievement. In this context, the researcher studied the learning styles used by the tribal students in Alluri Sitarama Raju (ASR) district of Andhra Pradesh state, to identify the predominant learning style of tribal students. This article also discusses about the relation between learning styles and academic achievement of the students. If the student identifies their learning styles, it will help them to plan their way of learning. Similarly, if the teachers identify the learning styles of students, teaching learning activities could be planned accordingly.

Revisiting Major Approaches to Tribal Development in India: A Brief Review of Isolationist, Integrationist and Assimilative Approaches

Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Ahead of Print.
Three approaches, namely, isolationists, integrationists and Assimilative approaches are at the centre stage of philosophical and theoretical foundations that shape the discourses pertaining to the progress of tribal communities in India. Different schemes of tribal development implemented in India find their expression in at least one of these approaches. While the isolationist approach seeks to attain tribal development by treating tribal communities as specimens in a National Park, the integrationist approach calls for integrating the tribal communities with the mainstream. Undoubtedly, the isolationist approach has turned out to be an utter failure as it emphasizes confining the tribal communities within the forest, pushing them further to darkness and miseries. Integration is the ‘respectful merger’ of the tribal communities with the mainstream, staking a claim to an equal share of power and resources. Nevertheless, thrown into the ‘net’ of modernists from the ‘lap’ of nature in the name of integration, tribal communities have become the victims of modern industrialization. This calls for the ‘selective and slow integration’ of tribal communities with the mainstream population. However, this selective and gradual integration should be accompanied by suitable ‘protectionist’ instruments to devise an enhanced strategy aiming at the progress of the tribal communities.

Beyond Enrolment and Appropriation Politics in Dalit Girls’ Education: Caste and Patriarchy Among Scavenging Communities of Urban Haryana, India

Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Volume 15, Issue 1_suppl, Page S100-S112, August 2023.
While contemplating on Dalit girls’ education, a large body of research and policy drafts generally draws from the integration of enrolment and appropriation politics (around being a ‘Dalit’ and ‘women’) to explore the educational experiences and challenges of Dalit girls in the Indian education system. However, less attention is given to what lies beyond the enrolment and appropriation politics in Dalit girls’ education. This article is based on an empirical study conducted among households associated with ‘Unclean’ occupations from two urban cities of Haryana. In order to position Dalit girls’ education beyond enrolment and appropriation politics, the article attempts to unmask the ‘multiple patriarchies’ embedded in the socio-economic barriers often pervading Dalit girls in the Indian education system. While doing so, the article demonstrates the inseparable intersectionality of caste and gender, through the workings of external Brahmanical as well as internal Dalit patriarchy simultaneously functioning against Dalit girls’ education. Eventually, the article calls for a need to position Dalit girls’ education in a Dalit feminist standpoint framework.