Khairlanji
A Strange and Bitter Crop

Anand Teltumbde

210 pages | Rs 190 | Paperback | 9788189059156 | All rights available

In Khairlanji, on 29 September 2006, 44-year-old Surekha Bhotmange and her daughter Priyanka Bhotmange were stripped, paraded naked, and raped repeatedly. Surekha’s sons Roshan and Sudhir were lynched. The entire village was involved. The four bodies were dumped into a canal. The Bhotmanges were dalit. The Bhotmanges have been forgotten. After all, two dalits are murdered every day in India. Anand Teltumbde reconstructs one of post-independence India’s worst caste atrocities and tells us how and why Khairlanjis are always around us.

Reviews:

“Anand Teltumbde’s analysis of the public, ritualistic massacre of a dalit family in 21st century India exposes the gangrenous heart of our society. It contextualizes the massacre and describes the manner in which the social, political and state machinery, the police, the mass media and the judiciary all collude to first create the climate for such bestiality, and then cover it up. This is not a book about the last days of relic feudalism, but a book about what modernity means in India. It discusses one of the most important issues in contemporary India.” —Arundhati Roy

HoloCaste

‘The right of life and death was one of sovereignty’s basic attributes,’ said Foucault. ‘The right of life and death is always exercised in an unbalanced way: the balance is always tipped in favour of death.’ In post-independence India, the authority of caste found a new ally-the state and its police. The state admits to the murder of two dalits every day, a crime against a dalit every eighteen minutes. Atrocities pile up, forming a landscape of tears, blood and ashes. It could be said this is not genocide. It could be argued this is not a holocaust. What is it then, this slow, everyday ritual of murder? Unreported, easily forgotten. What should we call a holocaust in instalments- a ‘Holocaste’? This series from Navayana chronicles dalit massacres that go almost unnoticed in the world’s largest democracy. Each title in the Holocaste series will locate each specific massacre in its socio-historical context.