The Fire of Equality
In 1927, Babasaheb Ambedkar spent his Christmas consigning a book to flames. Earlier that year in March, he had already led a procession of Untouchables to the Chavdar Tank in Mahad to drink water from it. This historic act was a reclamation of humanity and a declaration of the norm of equality in India. After the violent Savarna backlash to the revolutionary declaration, Ambedkar convened another satyagraha in Mahad and on 25 December 1927 ceremonially burnt a copy of the Manusmriti.
This text contained the most elaborate prescriptions of caste inequality and was the most powerful symbol of the punitive economy of caste. By burning it, a lover of books like Ambedkar set the terms of what any future state must guarantee its citizens—a life of dignity and freedom, a self-governed life, free from the tyranny of tradition. This fight against discrimination subsumes all differences—all religious and social groups are invited to shed their prejudices and enter an associated life of liberty, equality and fraternity. As the year ends, let us remember Babasaheb’s vision of a society of manuski (humanity) and maitri (friendship).
This year, Navayana released several books that speak directly to the political impasses of our day. Naisargi Davé’s philosophical treatise, Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being, is timely discussion on the ethics of caring for animals in an unequal society like India. The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism by Srirupa Roy discusses the peculiar modern phenomenon of democratically elected populist strongmen who are popping up around the world.
Lo Bir Sendra: A Hunter in the Burning Forest, a memoir by the great Adivasi leader, Jaipal Singh, tells the story of an exceptional man who lived a thrilling life and reluctantly became a political leader to fight for the rights of his people.
Navyug Gill’s Labors of Division: The Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab traces how peasants came to be constituted in the Panjab and how their emergence was linked to global economic flows and colonial governance. Did you know that modern postural yoga is not even Indian and its cult of wellness has been taken over by unscrupulous grifters? Stewart Home’s Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order in Wellness 
tells us the story of how yoga became an obsession in the West and how it came to be appropriated by frauds and opportunists. Navayana also released new editions of Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary, My Sunset Marriage: One Hundred and One Poems, Religious Rebels in the Punjab: The Ad Dharm Challenge to Caste and The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India this year. A new paperback edition of the award-winning A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar was also released this year.
Anand Teltumbde’s The Caste Con Census was our biggest release of the year. It is a quick rehearsal of the history of caste and book that leaves us with a warning—do not take social justice measures like the caste census as an unassailably good. Teltumbde forces us to recognize how all well-intentioned welfare measures can turn into instruments of control for the benefit of those in power. Our last release of the year was Sebastian Vattmattam’s Elephants in a Sugarcane Field: The Limits of Desire, God, Dreams, Language, Self, a book thatphilosopher Slavoj Žižek described as, ‘A great gift. It shows that my dreams were not daring enough.’ In this accessible book, Prof Vattmattam explains the theories of Žižek and Jacques Lacan using examples and social situations from South Asia. In doing so, we are left with deeper understandings of the psychologies of caste, race, swearwords, environmentalism, selfhood and many other social objects that govern our lives.
Get the books and many others at discounted rates on the Navayana website. Celebrate this Christmas basking in Babsaheb’s bonfire of equality, into which he consigns all ideas that fuel oppression.
(The featured image is a handbill issued by Bahishkrut Hitakarini Sabha which announced the 25 December 1927 satyagraha in Mahad)