Navayana is India’s first and only publishing house to exclusively focus on the issue of caste from anticaste perspective. Navayana literally means ‘new vehicle’, a term given to Dr. B.R.Ambedkar’s socially and morally concerned, rationalistic, anti-metaphysical interpretation of Buddhism.

Registered in Pondicherry, Navayana was founded in November 2003 by Ravikumar and S. Anand. Ravikumar is a well known writer and public intellectual in the Tamil public sphere. He is the author of Venomous Touch: Notes on Caste, Culture & Politics (Samya), a collection of his writings translated into English. Ravikumar is currently a member of the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly, representing Dalit Panthers. Anand, earlier a journalist from Chennai, relocated to New Delhi following the International Young Publisher of the Year award in April 2007. In 2009, he was awarded the Ashoka fellowship for his work as a social entrepreneur.

Books

Navayana publishes the best of socially engaged writing from India: B.R. Ambedkar, Namdeo Dhasal, Kancha Ilaiah, Gail Omvedt, Meera Nanda, Dilip Menon, Anand Teltumbde…

Browse our catalog here,

or join the Navayana Book Club to get our entire backlist.

Navayana titles can be purchased online at Scholars Without Borders.

Submissions

Navayana Publishing invites manuscripts and book ideas from authors. We publish both academic and trade titles. A proposal must take into account Navayana’s focus areas. Any work that examines society, culture, history, politics or literature from a caste perspective is welcome. We encourage you to use caste as an analytical tool, but not valorise it. The perspective has to be anticaste. Academic titles, when considered, will be subjected to a review process.

You may submit a proposal on email by writing to us. The proposal should explain the overall structure and preferably offer a chapterization of the book.