Ten years of sustained organizing is indeed worth celebrating. We celebrate it through this magazine, not as a mere commemorative inventory of achievements- but as a site of collective inquiry and practical analysis. What has ten years of movement-building taught us?
The contributions gathered here refuse a singular narrative of the anti-caste movement. Several situate the present moment within longer trajectories. Some look at the international juridical terrain on which recognition and remedy for caste is being sought, and what it means to translate caste into the legible categories of American and international law. Others follow the legal battle to pass SB403, alongside the grassroots organizing that continues in the diaspora regardless of its outcome. Others trace caste's transnational trajectories, its movement with people, capital, and institutions, and its mutations along the way. And others turn to labor histories, underscoring the shared struggles of Dalit and Black workers, and illustrating how both communities have constituted themselves as political subjects rather than as objects of rescue.
A recurring theme across this issue is the rise of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism/supremacy) in diasporic spaces, and the fact that this rise has not gone unchallenged. Anti-Hindutva, human rights, and anti-caste organizations in the United States have continued to contest these majoritarian politics, and several contributions examine what that contestation has looked like, and at what cost. It is important to highlight here that the fundamental tenet of dismantling Hindutva is annihilating caste; the sooner all anti-Hindutva organisations realise this, the easier this fight will get.
There are articles here that turn to cultural and experiential ground: documentary practice as anti-caste work, where cinema, memory, and collective struggle are inseparable; and the situated experiences of Dalit communities across religious traditions.
Others still have turned the lens on the organization itself. Writing on AKSC's role in the US anti-caste movement, contributors describe an activist-first formation that is keenly responsive to events on the ground while understanding that education is a necessary tool for revolutionary practice. AKSC firmly believes that studying together is a means of social transformation; and that events and forms of inequality cannot be understood apart from an analysis of their origins and of the structures that reproduce them. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 's words rightly capture the essence of AKSC: Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy. Deeds uninformed by educated thought can take false directions.
But perhaps the most heart-warming collection of articles in this volume comes from AKSC members themselves, who have written with remarkable honesty about what AKSC has meant to them. We need look no further for a testament to the organisation’s ten-year legacy. These accounts speak for themselves, of what AKSC has come to mean to its members, and of the community it has nurtured.
As we stand at the precipice of the next decade of AKSC, what's next seems to emerge as an inquiry about anti-caste organising as a whole.
We live in a moment of profound political and economic fracture. To be any kind of a worker today is increasingly precarious; technological transformation, including the rapid deployment of AI, threatens to deepen existing relations of exploitation rather than dismantle them. The law is too often wielded not as an instrument of emancipation, but as a mechanism for preserving existing relations of power. Caste, both in India and in the diaspora, continues to be reproduced through institutions, workplaces, communities, and electoral politics. In the US, this manifests in the growing normalisation of Hindutva in public and political life, across party lines. The struggle for annihilation of caste cannot be separated from the struggle against these political and cultural forces that sustain it.
The annihilation of caste is possible only through the transformation of society into one free from all forms of oppression and exploitation. We need to transform the assertion of identity and the politics of resistance, into solidarity with wider struggles of the caste-oppressed. We need to recognise caste and patriarchy not as separate systems of domination but as mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing. We need to build effective coalitions with other social justice movements here in the US and elsewhere. We need to connect annihilation of caste to the material reorganisation of labour, wealth, and political power.
Such a transformation requires both political consciousness and organized collective action. Dr B.R Ambedkar emphasized “power behind which there is no organization, power behind which there is no consciousness- is no power.” Our politics should not merely demand recognition within existing structures, but fundamentally transform those structures and place real political power in the hands of the oppressed and marginalised across the world. It is through such a politics can the annihilation of caste move from an emancipatory ideal to a material inevitability.
Editors:
Ms. Swagata Biswas, PhD Candidate, State University of New York, Buffalo
Dr. S Subbulakshmi, Neuroscience Postdoc
Mr. S Karthikeyan, Software Engineer
Why AKSC Matters
Prof. Balmurli Natrajan
As AKSC celebrates its 10th anniversary, here are three reasons why it matters on the canvas of Indian diasporic organizations in the USA.
Interweaving activism with intellectual work: AKSC is exemplary for intentionally interweaving consciously intellectual work with committed activist work.
Unmasking the legitimization of caste in diaspora: AKSC’s various campaigns demonstrate the need to identify how caste legitimizes itself specifically within a diasporic context.
Centering labor within caste: AKSC organically centers the question of labor within the symbolic power of caste.
Let me elaborate.
If we know that caste is a “monster that crosses our path…whichever direction we turn” (as Babasaheb Ambedkar put it), and if we know that it needs to end, then what further research on caste do we need? Why not just join the anti-caste movement (provided there is one) and be activists (again, provided activists know what needs to be done to end caste)? Such rhetorical questions bring up the vexed distinction between intellectuals and activists, or scholarship and activism – which are both demonized in today’s India and the USA. Activism without intellectual rigor is sentimental at best and moralizing virtue signaling at worst since it reproduces divisions in its own ways, and scholarship devoid of activism is elitism at best and apathy at worst. Intellectual work therefore is a responsibility, a right, and a need. It is in this sense that AKSC distinguishes itself – its membership regularly engage with intensive readings of texts to seek this combination of activism with intellectual work, it has hosted a diverse set of academics demanding that they speak for a general public, and it foregrounds the need to make scholarly insights politically crafted as campaigns. AKSC thus shows to publicly facing intellectuals that studying caste is not simply an intellectual endeavor. It is a social responsibility as well as an intellectual commitment to a public cause. It demands a constant ability to be reflexive, humble, yet courageous and strategic as in a war. For, it is a war of ideas in which we struggle against a reality that is based on a fiction that people faithfully regard as fact, and which people in power faithfully preserve or use to their own benefit.
Caste justifies its own power to produce inequalities. That is the character of caste – it has been around for a while, not for nothing. It exists precisely in those places that we may think it does not. And while it may exist in those places that we think it does, it may not exist in ways we think it does. And it adapts itself to new contexts by changing its form and the key modes of justifying itself. This is what we can think of a legitimization regime of caste. Caste ensures its existence through creating its own armor of invisibility, of naturalness, of rightness, of goodness, and yes, of justice. Any force interested in destroying caste needs to uncover the ways caste routinely legitimizes itself. This depends entirely on the historical moment and geopolitical and social space that caste exists within. Thus, brahmanism, sanskritization, and culturalization are all modes of legitimization of caste in particular histories and contexts. AKSC has been a leader in this regard – its initiative to collect testimonials of how caste operates in the diaspora in specific sociocultural and work contexts and within the US multicultural context shows how caste legitimizes itself. That caste has traveled outside India demands that we produce accounts of how caste is a problem re-created in the diaspora (and not simply transported). This work, if taken forward and given depth, will prove invaluable for a justice-seeking diaspora.
Finally, AKSC’s unique configuration as an organization that is not simply located in the heart of the world of high-tech labor but one that is animated by members who consciously view themselves as workers in historical times sets them apart. Caste has always been about labor – its conceptualization (whose work is labor), its control (whose work is free), its management (who is put to work in what process and under what conditions), and its potential generation of profits (whose work has what value for surplus extraction). But understanding how this work of caste is done on the register of symbolic power and how caste necessarily appears always intertwined with class and gender is what is needed. For caste is not simply political economy but also a cultural-ideological force. And AKSC has grown into such an organization – capable of speaking for workers whose status within a neutral sounding category such as ‘employee’ reveals the play of symbols within capital itself and how caste has made its home and presence felt even as high-tech operates as the leading edge of a post-industrial power.
I wish several more decades of strength and power to AKSC to become a leading voice in showing us how Phule’s Satyashodak Samaj embodied what Gail Omvedt called “Passionate Equalitarianism” – a moral and revolutionary value base for viewing caste from the point of equity, and religion from the point of rationality.
AKSC - A Home and a School
Ms. Kavya Jawahar, AKSC Member
On January 22, 2024, the Hindutva regime successfully inaugurated the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. The celebrations were not confined to India but also spread to the student community at the University of Michigan, where I was doing my master's. I could not fathom a documented shame being turned into a source of national pride; an authorized massacre being concealed as a spiritual moment; an injustice to a huge section of Indians being forgotten. Unfortunately, I was the only one who felt that way. It pierced my heart to see how even a genuinely kind and humble person could take the side of hegemony and oppression, and how academic brilliance and personal integrity do not stop one from falling prey to divisive narratives. I could not see my friends and acquaintances the same way after that and found myself longing for a community that would mirror my values.
I got to relive the experience through Operation Sindoor in 2025, when an utter failure in national security, military operations, foreign diplomacy, and sovereignty went unquestioned and, at worst, got clubbed together with Islamic vilification and appropriation. This operation was perceived as a historic strike back and a reclaiming of glory by my Indian counterparts at work, and criticizing it was translated as unpatriotic and anti-national.
Encountering incidents like these, where majoritarian, apolitical, or regressive Hindutva voices were loudest, left me in severe anguish each time. The frustration of not being able to convey the left political ideas I believe in, the helplessness of not being able to change opinions, and the exhaustion of facing casual bigotry distressed me greatly. As a result, I increasingly reduced my social interactions and avoided serious topics. But that tormented me even more. I realized that my exasperation was not because of the people around me, but because of my own inaction. Possessing only the urge to do something, I was at sea as an unorganized individual. Joining AKSC was the shore I resorted to.
Within a few meetings, I knew I belonged there. AKSC provided a space where I never felt unheard. What I expected to be only a caste grievance collective expanded into a whole ecosystem —- interrogating class, caste, and gender disparities; organizing resistance to Hindutva and Brahminism; vocalizing LGBTQ+ and anti-racist politics; and engaging in endless reading, discussion, and screenings. Their effort in building political consciousness within their member community is the cornerstone of what they do. Stumbling upon a vibrant organization like this was, I'd say, a bit of luck on my part. In the short span of time I've been with them, AKSC has molded me in more ways than I could have imagined. I learned that the change I want cannot be obtained by running away, but by equipping myself; not through a one-time heated argument with peers, but through gradual conversation; not by trying to educate everyone I come across, but by mobilizing the masses; and not just by being a commentator, but by actively taking part in grassroots movements.
The impact of AKSC on my life goes beyond the political sphere. They became my support system, something many first-generation immigrants like me do not have. The connections I made with them transcended the meeting room. Whenever we come together in a non-formal setting, there is always hot tea, deep talks, hearty laughter, and tons of warmth. The new membership, predominantly a young female group, evokes the camaraderie of my college years. They give me an emotionally safe space where I can be myself. A circle like this in adult life, especially within the Indian diaspora, is hard to come by.
I believe the success of AKSC lies in preserving this personal connection with its members while remaining democratic in the exchange of thoughts and opinions. This ensures its continued relevance to today's issues, which in turn attracts the emerging adult generation myself included. The forces that enable exploitation like caste, sex, capital etc.,remain fundamentally the same, yet they have multiplied into so many forms that resisting them can feel almost insurmountable. These forms affect the current generation differently than they did previous ones. A progressive organization that continually renews and adapts itself is needed now more than ever, and I count myself honored to be a part of one such organization.
The Transnationalization of Caste
Prof. Ajantha Subramanian
Indians in the U.S. make up the most affluent and well-educated node of the global South Asian diaspora -- what some have referred to as “the Other 1%”. While Indians began arriving in the U.S. from the 1880s, the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965 transformed the caste and class character of Indian America.
The 1965 Act, which targeted scientists and engineers to advance America’s position in the Cold War, was a significant pull factor for educated, upper caste Indians. The two most important push factors were Indian state developmentalism and lower caste rights politics. Indian independence ushered in the building of a “mixed” economy weighted towards growing the public sector. Until the advent of economic liberalization in 1991, jobs in the public sector occupied a much larger share of employment. The expanding public sector was paralleled by the rapid growth in public higher education.
Before the 1960s, both public higher education and professional employment were dominated by upper castes. It was precisely these forms of caste capital that were targeted by lower caste rights politics and Indian affirmative action, or reservations. Reservations challenged the upper caste hold on higher education and the professions by instituting quotas for historically underrepresented groups. In regions with longer histories of quotas, their success in democratizing access to higher education and professional employment is unmistakable.
Upper castes have responded to such challenges to their entitlements in two ways. First, by shoring up their status locally. Quotas have been met with sustained opposition in the name of meritocracy and beneficiaries, especially Dalit students and employees, stigmatized and scapegoated as less deserving, less intelligent, and less capable. At the same time, most upper castes are convinced of their own castelessness. It has become a deeply held part of upper caste common sense that they are meritocratic individuals who have been scapegoated by a reservations system that unfairly benefits intellectually and socially inferior castes. Lost from view are the caste inheritances that have long enabled upper castes to monopolize pathways to socioeconomic mobility.
A second way that upper castes have responded to the challenge of lower caste rights is by moving. Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, upper castes have moved from countryside to city, from region to region within India, from public to private sector, and from India abroad. The specific form of capital they possessed -- academic and professional credentials -- made for easy "exit". Since this was a transferable form of capital, "exit" also contributed to the further accumulation of capital.
This is most dramatic in the case of the U.S. Indian diaspora where in a single generation, upper castes have been catapulted into the ranks of corporate managers and millionaire entrepreneurs. The Information Technology boom has facilitated this dramatic accumulation of wealth and consolidation of their “model minority” status. Success in the capitalist marketplace has deepened the upper caste investment in a narrative of humble origins in which histories of caste are strikingly absent. A particular conception of class is foundational to this narrative. Despite multi-generational histories of higher education, many Indians in the tech sector disavow education as a form of capital by contrasting it with mercantile capital, a distinction that underpins claims to self-made success.
More recently, the landscape of caste debate in the U.S. has shifted. A key catalyst was the 2020 caste discrimination case brought by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (now the Civil Rights Department) against Cisco Systems. The Cisco case has spurred anti-caste activism across the U.S. In February 2023, Seattle became the first American city to ban caste discrimination and California came close to adding caste to its Civil Code. A growing number of higher educational institutions have also added caste to their non-discrimination policies.
The new visibility of caste in the U.S. extends its tensions from the subcontinent to the diaspora. In response, we are witnessing fierce backlash against efforts to make caste discrimination visible and to enact legislation against it, with Silicon Valley emerging as a key battleground. Two repeated arguments have surfaced against making caste a protected category in U.S. anti-discrimination law. First, that caste protections would force Indian Americans who left caste behind in the homeland to think of themselves in caste terms. As in India, this claim to castelessness reduces caste to individual sentiment and disregards its structural power as a form of collective advantage for some and disadvantage for others.
A second argument against caste protections is that they are “Hinduphobic.” This perplexing equation of caste protections with “Hinduphobia” only makes sense when we consider a longer history of mobilization by groups with ties to the Hindu nationalist movement in India. Hindu nationalism became a force to contend with in 1989 when the Bharatiya Janata Party countered the threat of expanding caste quotas by launching a movement to destroy the Babri Masjid and build a temple dedicated to the god-king Ram in its place. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement shifted attention away from caste inequities by mobilizing a narrative of Hindu victimization at the hands of Muslims. The strategy was to pit religion against caste, which is precisely what we are witnessing today in the pitting of Hinduphobia against caste protections.
“Hinduphobia” is also a near-perfect echo of the Zionist use of “antisemitism” to preempt criticism of Israel. Groups like the Hindu American Foundation and the Coalition of Hindus of North America who are at the forefront of the pushback against caste protections have forged solidarities with Zionist organizations in hopes of similarly weaponizing “Hinduphobia” to preempt redress for caste discrimination. Like the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, such groups also work to defend the Hindu nationalist regime in India against criticism by human rights and pro-democracy organizations. More recently, the Hindu Right in the U.S. has even made common cause with white supremacy, as seen for instance in the selection of Steve Bannon as an honorary co-chair of the Republican Hindu Coalition.
To understand these alliances between a U.S. racial minority and ethnoreligious supremacisms requires keeping caste in view. Only then can we see their shared investment in naturalized social hierarchy and in the weaponization of “merit” to set back the clock to an imagined time of unchecked caste, racial, and ethnoreligious domination. The alignment between Indian tech capital and supremacist movements must be a wake-up call to all of us who believe in a pluralist democracy.
Caste, Class and Patriarchy: Assertion & Annihilation
Dr. S Subbulakshmi, AKSC Member
Only in my early twenties did I properly discover Dr Ambedkar’s writings and analyse them in depth, an act that changed my life. Having grown up without too many day-to-day economic hardships, it was primarily caste and gender which had determined how I had been treated by others, and to some extent, how I treated myself- up until that point. Reading Ambedkar, and Ambedkarite theory, gave my anger, fear, and sadness, a language. It gave me the understanding and strength needed to assert and to resist. Then, in my late twenties, I joined Ambedkar King Study Circle (AKSC), only to have my life changed again.
It is not an exaggeration when I say AKSC has molded me, both by teaching me and challenging my beliefs , and by providing a space where I could unapologetically be myself. AKSC taught me what “educate, agitate and organize” truly mean. It has given me friendships, comfort, and a sense of home I did not think I would find anywhere. This is not coming from a place of mere sentimentality, but a genuine assessment of how much meaning being part of AKSC has brought to my life. When I walk into the AKSC reading room, I can talk about casteism without having to overexplain; can discuss progressive, anti-caste, feminist politics and be taken seriously without being dismissed. This has made me feel seen, supported and empowered, in ways I had not even anticipated.
In this light, I wanted to use this article as a means to briefly examine the question of caste, class and patriarchy: both broadly, and within AKSC’s framework. This is motivated by my own struggle to clearly understand the interactions between these three forces, and by the shared conversations I have had with other women in Dalit movements, in anti-caste and left spaces. The question I keep coming back to is: how do we analyse caste, class and patriarchy- and understand how deeply they shape one another?
Challenging caste and patriarchy, and developing a solid theory to annihilate both, has suffered from a setback that has been intentionally manufactured to preserve the status quo: the reduction of structural oppression into questions of identity, individual tion, and representation alone. For instance, the ruling class has shown itself perfectly capable of absorbing and funding forms of liberal feminism that offer representation and recognition without threatening the structures that produce inequality. But this “girlboss” feminism does not translate into liberation for all. It offers a sense of temporary solace and comfort, while making it harder to see the material structures that produce oppression in the first place.
Caste and patriarchy are grounded in profound economic exploitation. They also carry uniquely socio-cultural signatures of stigma, exclusion, othering, and lack of any real power, all of which lead to material and psychological suffering. Caste-oppressed women experience this suffering particularly acutely. Without doing careful analysis of this interplay, annihilation of caste and patriarchy would be hard to achieve. As Anuradha Ghandy states in her treatise on trends in feminism: “How incorrect theoretical analysis and wrong strategies can affect a movement can be clearly seen in the case of the [western] feminist movement. Not understanding women’s oppression as linked to the wider exploitative socio-economic and political structure, to imperialism, they have sought solutions within the imperialist system itself…The struggle for women’s liberation cannot be successful in isolation from the struggle to overthrow the imperialist system itself.” Similarly, the fight against caste, patriarchy and class exploitation cannot be successful if they continue to be analysed incorrectly and in isolation from one another.
Dr Ambedkar, via his careful analysis, has firmly established the link between brahminism and patriarchy in India. In “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development” and “Who were the Shudras”, Ambedkar concludes that the hindu religion as developed by brahmins is responsible for the degraded conditions of women and the caste-oppressed. His analysis of the genesis of caste also made clear that the regulation of marriage, sexuality and women's reproductive lives was central to the reproduction of caste itself. Brahminism denies women their right to education, their right to be economically independent, even their right to choose who they want to marry, or marry at all. Dr Ambedkar framed the Hindu Code Bill as a means to codify in law, women’s rights in marriage and property ownership, based on this analysis.
Brahminical patriarchy continues to determine the lives of most Indian women even today. It affects women differently based on their caste locations- in terms of the oppressions they face, and the privileges they have. For instance, the control of women’s sexuality is not simply a manifestation of individual male domination; it serves a social function in maintaining caste boundaries. At the same time, the way that control is experienced is shaped by caste and class position. The same patriarchal structure does not produce identical experiences for caste-oppressed women as it does for the so-called upper castes. So, when people talk about “Dalit patriarchy”, I find it confusing. There are patriarchal relations in caste-oppressed households and in anticaste movement spaces. But my question is how “Dalit patriarchy” is a structural explanation for them, because Dalit men and women are both situated within the brahminical social order, and are forced to experience life differently. Brahminical patriarchy, with its socio-political and economic dimensions, is what needs to be studied, understood and annihilated.
When I first joined AKSC, I found it one of the most anti-caste and non-patriarchal spaces I had ever encountered in my life. There is always a refreshing frankness to work through our own blindspots, and a committed honesty to analyse and learn together. AKSC over the years has also consciously made efforts to encourage more women’s participation, especially in decision-making roles; and in the three years I have been here, I have seen the membership and participation of women only steadily increase, which has been heart-warming to witness. Which is why AKSC is particularly well positioned, in its next decade, to take these complex questions of caste, class and patriarchy head-on, and to develop both the theory and the practice needed to address them. AKSC already has the political framework and organizational practice necessary for taking this work forward. We need to continue to deepen our theory, sharpen our practice, and build the collective power needed to annihilate caste, patriarchy and class exploitation. In doing so, we can continue building toward the egalitarian society, devoid of all forms of oppression, that has been the enduring organizational vision since AKSC’s inception.
Holding the Line: Diaspora Activism and the Battle Against Global Hegemony
Dr. Bala Swaminathan, New York, President, Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America (2022-2024)
In her landmark treatise Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson defines caste as an artificial construction, an invisible infrastructure that grounds a society’s human rankings.
"Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit, and promise on the basis of one’s birth into a fixed hierarchy."
Wilkerson further elucidates a caste system as an architecture of human division: an enduring structure that uses arbitrary metrics to establish an inherited order, dictating where one fits before they even take their first breath.
While Western sociologists often treat caste as an exotic, archaic anomaly, iconic actor and activist Marlon Brando perceptively observed its universality: "The caste system may be more highly developed in countries like India or England, but every tier of society in almost every culture tries to dominate a group it perceives as beneath it."
Yet, as Brando noted, the Indian iteration represents the most refined, cruel, and suffocating manifestation of this global phenomenon. Unlike class systems, which theoretically allow upward mobility through wealth or education, or racial hierarchies that rely primarily on visual markers, the Hindu caste system of India operates with an insidious internal enforcement mechanism. Grounded in notionally sacred concepts of purity and pollution, endogamy, and hereditary occupation, it codifies human inequality into divine law. It inflicts a psychological and material violence that pursues a person across generations and across oceans.
II. The Transnational Spread and the American Battlefield
When Indians migrated to the United States, they brought their immense technical talents, academic rigor, and cultural richness. However, in their luggage came the unwritten codes of hereditary privilege. Caste discrimination in North America is no longer a hidden secret; it is a documented institutional reality.
THE DIASPORA FRONT
Institutional Discrimination
Resistance & Activism
Cisco Caste Lawsuit (2020) Veto of CA Senate Bill 403 Far-Right Hindutva Pressure
The watershed Cisco Systems lawsuit brought by California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing highlighted how a Dalit engineer was subjected to workplace discrimination, isolation, and denied promotions by dominant-caste managers in Silicon Valley. The case laid bare a truth that tech behemoths had long ignored: the corporate cubicles of Cupertino and Seattle were not immune to ancient prejudices.
This reality fueled the legislative push for California's Senate Bill 403 (SB 403), authored by Senator Aisha Wahab, which sought to explicitly add caste as a protected category under state anti-discrimination laws. The struggle surrounding SB 403 demonstrated the urgent necessity—and immense danger—of diaspora activism.
When the bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the legislature, far-right Hindutva organizations and conservative groups launched a disinformation campaign, leveraging corporate lobbying and political intimidation to secure a gubernatorial veto. This defeat highlighted the organized resistance of fundamentalist forces in the diaspora. These groups seek to suppress civil rights safeguards in the United States while insulating systemic oppression from public scrutiny.
The resistance of anti-caste activists in North America is not an isolated exercise in policy negotiation; it is a vital shield for frontline movements in the homeland. The modern Hindu right and fundamentalist organizations rely heavily on the diaspora for political legitimacy, lobbying power, and financial backing. When diaspora activism challenges these networks in Washington, Sacramento, or New York, it disrupts the flow of influence that sustains fundamentalism in South Asia.
This transnational solidarity has proven vital during major social movements: The Jallikattu Protests: When millions took to the streets in Tamil Nadu to protect cultural sovereignty against central overreach, diaspora rallies at the UN Headquarters and Indian consulates across the US kept international eyes on the movement.
The Anti-Sterlite / Vedanta Copper Mine Movement: When peaceful protesters in Thoothukudi were met with state violence, diaspora activism amplified their cause globally, targeting corporate boardrooms and demanding accountability.
Solidarity with Gen Z & Standing Against State Repression: When student movements and Gen Z youth rose up to challenge state overreach and authoritarian governance, the state responded with brutal suppression—deploying militarized police alongside non-uniformed thugs wielding nail-spiked batons against unarmed students. In response, diaspora activists organized nationwide demonstrations across major US cities to condemn this state-sponsored violence. By holding rallies outside diplomatic centers and educational institutions, the diaspora ensured that the state could not silence the youth in darkness. These coordinated US demonstrations amplified the resounding message of Gen Z back home, declaring to the international community that "the Emperor is naked" and exposing the moral bankruptcy of authoritarian control.
By confronting state overreach and corporate exploitation on foreign soil, North American activists ensure that authoritarian impulses in the homeland cannot operate in darkness.
In this high-stakes struggle, the Ambedkar King Study Circle (AKSC) has served as an essential pillar of grassroots organization. Founded ten years ago, AKSC bridged three of history’s greatest anti-oppression traditions: Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s crusade against caste hierarchy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight against racial subjugation, and Periyar’s campaign for social justice through caste/religion annihilation.
Through public forums, community outreach, rallies, and educational campaigns, AKSC has spent a decade exposing the mechanics of caste while holding fundamentalist groups accountable. Organizations like AKSC keep fundamentalist narratives at bay by: Refusing to Allow Revisionism: Providing a grounded, evidence-based counter-narrative to far-right attempts to portray caste protections as "Hinduphobic."
Providing Direct Support: Serving as a safe harbor for marginalized community members facing isolation or workplace harassment in the US.
Fostering Intersectional Coalitions: Connecting the anti-caste movement with broader American struggles for racial, economic, and worker justice.
As AKSC celebrates its 10th anniversary alongside its 7th Annual Conference, the anti-caste movement stands at a pivotal juncture. The defeat of legislative initiatives like SB 403 demonstrates that fundamentalist organizations are organized, well-funded, and intent on preserving historical privilege. Yet, as Dr. King reminded us, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." It bends because organizations like AKSC put their hands on that arc and refuse to let go. Activism in the United States is not a secondary effort to the struggles in India; it is a key front line. By organizing, educating, and protesting, the diaspora ensures that democracy remains an active force for human dignity across all borders.
My Journey with AKSC
Mr. Dhandapani Ponnurangam, AKSC Member
My journey with the Ambedkar King Study Circle began at its very inception, in 2016, when I was already volunteering with another Bay Area organization. A key figure behind AKSC started conversations about building something different, an organization whose very identity was justice, not solidarity as an occasional gesture, and one that named caste discrimination directly within the Indian community, something no Bay Area organization had done before. The name itself carries that founding intent: Dr. King stood for the racially oppressed in America, Dr. Ambedkar stood against caste oppression in India, and Ambedkar King Study Circle became a statement of shared struggle across two continents.
What struck me most, joining this world, was the culture of reading. AKSC's core strength has always been books, Ambedkar's writings, and works by anthropologists and researchers worldwide. I discovered how many deeply knowledgeable people already lived in the Bay Area, from the Dalit community and its allies, reading and organizing for years, disagreeing with each other and still standing as one. I had worked with nonprofits before where the mission stayed on paper while whoever held authority quietly steered things elsewhere. AKSC's integrity, its refusal to drift, is what kept me. It also showed me myself: I had always considered myself a reader, but I was a casual one, never grasping what purposeful reading could yield for me and for society, until I saw the gap between my habits and theirs.
Over the years I watched AKSC pick up issues from both the USA and India with real discipline, every opinion heard and debated, decisions reached by vote, then acted on, often with a formal press release. For local issues, it joined hands with other Bay Area nonprofits, forming temporary coalitions lasting only until the issue was resolved. I took part in some of these efforts myself, gaining a rare chance to witness struggle from the side of the oppressed.
Two moments stand out above all, spanning these ten years.
The first was a legal case involving a Bay Area tech employee, whom I will not name, nor will I name the company. The evidence was damning: discrimination in daily work, being passed over for promotion despite equal qualification, being mocked for having earned his education through India's reservation system, its affirmative action for caste-oppressed communities. It became one of the most serious caste discrimination cases the American tech industry had seen, putting corporations on notice. Around it, AKSC also collected testimonies from across the tech industry, some open, some anonymous, together becoming powerful evidence that caste discrimination is real and lived in America, something most Americans had never had reason to consider until this case made headlines.
The second was Senate Bill 403, California's caste discrimination bill, introduced by Senator Aisha Wahab. AKSC was a key organization, though not the only one, in building public understanding of the bill and countering the opposition working to defeat it, joining hands as it always did with other Bay Area organizations. The bill met the necessary votes in the legislature to advance to the Governor's desk. Then Governor Newsom vetoed it. I consider this AKSC's greatest moment, not despite the failure but because of how it failed. Every ounce of effort, unity, and courage the organization and its allies could bring to a serious political fight was brought, all the way to the final signature. That the bill cleared the legislature and fell only at the Governor's veto is proof of what this organization is capable of, and it remains the story I am proudest to have witnessed.
These two threads forced a reckoning with my own story. Most of my tech industry colleagues carry caste names as surnames, proudly, and overwhelmingly hail from North Indian states, where anti-caste movements never gained the force they did in Tamil Nadu, where I am from. Colleagues from Tamil Nadu carried no caste surnames at all, a direct legacy of the anti-caste movement led by Periyar, who removed his own caste name from his name between 1927 and 1929, formalized in a resolution issued on February 17, 1929. Nearly a century after that movement began, I stand as living evidence of its success, a beneficiary of India's reservation system and of Periyar's work erasing caste from the Tamil surname. Because of both, I made the journey from a farming family to an IT career in Silicon Valley carrying no caste identity with me, while many colleagues from North India made the same journey largely through privilege, in a region where that reckoning with caste never fully arrived. This is what anchored me to AKSC: a grassroots organization capable of doing for future generations in America what Periyar's movement did for mine in Tamil Nadu.
One memory sits at the center of all this for me. Years ago, on a tea break, a manager and I were walking through the office campus, and he casually rubbed his palm against my upper back. I thought nothing of it then. Only years later, after AKSC asked me for a testimony and I had learned how caste discrimination manifests indirectly, did I understand what had happened. He was checking whether I wore the sacred thread upper caste men wear on their bodies, unable to place my caste from my surname, since I am from Tamil Nadu, where Periyar's movement had already erased that marker. Without that testimony request, without AKSC, without the reading that made me vigilant, I would never have understood that moment. Indians often ask directly about caste when it isn't evident, or even when it is, simply to determine hierarchy, who ranks above, who ranks below. This is precisely what AKSC set out to stand against in Silicon Valley, and it taught me to recognize this even among highly educated professionals who should know better.
Working with AKSC also gave me exposure to spaces where men and women were treated as equals, where gender bias was called out, and where unconscious anti-caste blind spots were named. I learned what appropriation actually means in practice rather than theory, through open, honest discussion on every issue AKSC took up, and found my own unconscious biases in that mirror.
What I have come to believe, after ten years, is this: the way people treat each other inside AKSC is the way society itself should function. The knowledge it builds through reading, discussion, and action is the knowledge our schools and colleges should be imparting, instead of preparing people merely to become employees bound to corporate life, while the doors to discrimination and oppression are left unguarded. This is not only about the Indian diaspora, or only about caste. Working alongside people of different cultures, religions, and political views in the United States exposes all of us to a wider range of injustice, and different ways people respond to it. It is, at times, overwhelming, but serious participation in organizations like AKSC is not optional. It is quintessential.
Ten years in, from the naming decision that started it all to this commemoration, I remain proud to call myself part of this journey.
AKSC Felicitation
Dr. Sareeta Amrute
I was first introduced to AKSC when my friend Dr. Murali Shanmugavelan invited me to their 2020 annual meeting where he was an invited speaker alongside Dr. Ajantha Subramaniam, Dr. Thomas Blom Hansen, and Dr. William T. Armaline. I had been following along with the efforts to pass SB403 and knew of the work of AKSC in relation to that context, but this was the first time I was able to attend an AKSC event in person. Being an anthropologist and used to recording things ethnographically, I took copious notes on the day’s events, trying to impress on my mind the feelings and commitment in the room that day. The first thing I noticed was the careful inclusion of global issues. The talks were wide-ranging, from a frank discussion of SB403’s failure to be signed into law to South Africa and from class to caste and comparative systems of affirmative action. The setup was open and welcoming to everyone, in keeping with the theme of ‘Building a Caste Free Equitable Society from the Grassroots’. There were some people there who spoke of the AKKSC as being a space where they could openly speak about their experiences, recalling the arguments in Joel Lee and K. Satyanarayan’s Concealing Caste about all the ways that Dalit and other oppressed caste peoples have to hide their caste background in other places. Everyone wanted to know from me what brought me to the meeting, asking with curiosity. It was friendship, camaraderie, and learning from one another. This is Ambedkar’s definition of democracy, “having more than one opinion regarding the solution of any particular problem, [and] learn[ing] to give a respectful hearing to all who are worth listening” (1938 Speech in Sholapur, reprinted as “Democracy Must Give Respectful Hearing to All Who Are Worth Listening”, in Babasaheb’s Speeches:168-9).
Reading through the archives of AKSC meetings and activities, I notice patterns of global solidarity and consciousness-raising. According to the books they have read, the locations that the authors wrote about were (by number): the United States 7, India 22, comparative 3, the latter category including books comparing the United States and India and books about Palestine. Looking at the talks, we can place the talks by date on a timeline. Topics that were covered in AKSC talks and discussions over the years include: civil rights in United States, the Farmer’s Movement in India, the NEET exams scandals, Kashmir and Article 370, the killing of George Floyd, the treatment of the Kuki peoples in Manipur, Bhima Koregao, and Palestine. This timeline shows that AKSC is a revolutionary organization, in the sense that it pursues change in society that is based in a commitment to equality and to the expanding frames of where revolutionary thinking and cation are necessary. Finally, we can look at the archive to show resolutions from year to year, mapping subtle shifts in focus over time. In its first resolution, it ties together Ambedkar and King, caste and race, by recognizing both as economic, social and political forces that can only be tackled in all these dimensions and through alignments. The first resolution particularly addresses “the Dalit middle class who have achieved certain economic independency” but is “not only unable to assert their self-respect but also helpless when poor Dalits and Adivasis are subjected to denial of basic economic, civil, cultural and social rights” (First General Body Meeting Resolutions 2017:3). In the conclusion to the 2023 General Body Report, the members resolve to both widen the membership base and to cultivate grassroots, working-class individuals to lead a worker’s movement against caste in the United States. In the intervening years, which sometimes did not see a general meeting due to Covid restrictions, AKSC diligently tracked the number of women participating in events, for instance, and measured their efficacy in terms of events participated in and talks organized, but also in terms of democratic decision making involving extensive discussion and the collective implementation of decisions taken.
What does this data show? First, clearly AKSC is an activist-first organization. As activists, members respond to events. At same time, the AKSC holds to some basic tenets of pursuing anti-caste futures. The first one is that education is a tool for revolutionary practice, and the study circle is a means of social transformation. The second basic tenet is that it is not possible to understand events or forms of inequality without an analysis of the origins of those events and those social and economic structures. The third tenet is that people are not just one thing and do not have just one perspective. Ultimately, the goal of the ‘studying’ in the study circle is to understand how shifts in policy, government, and economy affect people on the ground.
I am left, at the end of this analysis, with a series of questions. First, the commemorations done by the AKSC have somewhat changed their character, while commemorations of Ambedkar, Periyar and King have remained, an early tradition of commemorating Lenin has been dropped. Perhaps this reflects a change in group priorities, orientations, or membership, but it is not commented on. What could be said of how the course of events has shifted what needs to be discussed? Another big question involves leadership and how it will continue now that the organization has a ten-year history. What will the leadership style of AKSC evolve into over the next decade? How will the organization remain open and receptive to what is needed in the anti-caste movement over time? And finally, will the AKSC continue to be India and U.S. focused? As new generations come to the organization, what will be the balance of issues considered appropriate to discuss within the larger goal of creating a society where all can live with dignity? I am looking forward to the next decades of seeing this vital organization pursue these goals.
Perhaps a clear shared issue in this moment is migration. Migration crackdowns reach deeply into the lives of people of all backgrounds across the United States and transnationally. This shared concern might bring the AKSC into coalition with new groups, even those that might not immediately recognize the importance of caste to the creation of free and dignified lives for all. At the same time, it may require AKSC members to learn more about other communities’ complex migration stories. This fact might provide new opportunities to build awareness around caste and create larger coalitions with a shared sense of responsibility about the work required to build democratic futures.
The Silences of Caste: An Academic and a Personal Reckoning
Ms. Swagata Biswas, AKSC Member
Bengalis are too progressive to care about someone’s caste. - I have heard some version of this claim my entire life, offered as fact, as reassurance, sometimes as a warning not to raise the subject at all. I have come to wonder whether that progressiveness is real, or whether it is simply a performance, the bhodrolok posture of accepting someone “inferior” in one’s circle without ever having to say so out loud. If it is a performance, it is a comfortable one, because it never has to be named. I cannot say for certain which is true. What I can say is that a certain apathy around college admissions, inter-caste marriage, and who gets invited into the close library study group became clear to me through words spoken as harmless.
The first time I felt the weight of my caste status was at the admissions desk of a “premium” college in the heart of Kolkata. A senior professor looked at my caste certificate and remarked, without looking up at my credentials, “eder toh nite-i hobey”, we “have” to admit “these” people. I felt deeply embarrassed in a room full of students, and I understood, before I understood almost anything else about caste, that my presence there had just been narrated as an obligation rather than an achievement. That comment was my real introduction to caste, not a classroom, not a textbook, but a professor’s offhand certainty that I did not belong on my own merit. It was followed by the quieter cruelty of friends calling me a “quota beneficiary” whose life had apparently been made easy. I did not examine any of this too closely then, because I was still oblivious to what it meant. I had never been formally taught the work of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, or of Jogendra Nath Mandal, the Bengali social reformer from the Namasudra community whose name should have been common knowledge in any Bengali classroom. I heard about them only in passing, in family “intellectual” discussions, never in school. Only later, through experience rather than education, did I become consciously and permanently aware of caste.
By the time I entered my master’s program at Calcutta University, I had met other SC students. Yet, any conversation about caste carried a particular discomfort, as though naming it was itself the transgression. I wanted to study caste formally; however, that proved difficult too, because, of course, in Bengal caste is barely ever an issue that needs intellectual attention.
After my master’s, I began looking at PhD programs abroad, as I felt I would have the liberty to research caste without judgment, which turned out to be only partially true. The final push came when I learned of the Cisco caste discrimination case in the United States, proof that caste did not dissolve at a border, that it traveled with us. I moved to the U.S. certain of one thing: I wanted to understand how caste continued to shape Dalit lives miles away from where it is supposedly rooted. What I had not prepared for was how hard it would be to sustain relationships with other, predominantly upper-caste, Indians in the diaspora, and how often my interest in anti-caste struggle was met with quiet discouragement. Fortunately, with support from my professors in the Anthropology department, I took on reviewing the existing literature on caste in the diaspora, expecting to find scholarship I could build on. Instead, I found silence.
Most of the South Asian diaspora literature I reviewed acknowledges, and briefly documents, a powerful sense of caste superiority among South Asian immigrants in North America, but rarely follows that thread further. Caste has only recently gained academic visibility, though it is still treated selectively. Dalit authors remain strikingly underrepresented, and most of what exists is written from a position of privilege that overshadows the Dalit voices and Dalit organizations doing the groundwork. We need more Dalit academics, and more Dalit representation in the institutions that decide which stories get told. We need to ask what gets popularized and what gets silenced in the telling of Dalit stories, in India and in the United States alike. What in that narrative is truthful, and what is performance disguised as solidarity?
In my attempt to understand caste in America, I came across Dalit-led grassroots organizations such as DSF, AIC, IBC, IBO, and others. AKSC stood out to me for its consistent commitment to self-education and to educating the next generation of leaders, and for building a community that extends beyond region, religion, and language. AKSC’s commitment to on-ground action has continued to change the narratives around anti-caste organizing. On this tenth anniversary, what stays with me most is AKSC’s intense desire for educating before organizing. It is a claim on the thing Dalits have been denied longest and most deliberately: education, on our own terms. Being part of AKSC has taught me what it means to hold an “anthropologist, an “activist,” and an SC/Dalit as a single, undivided identity. I found here what the diaspora literature could not offer me: a community held together not by region, religion, or language, but by something more exposed and honest, a shared human experience, and, I would say without much hesitation, a shared inhuman one too.
After a decade of sustained activism, I think AKSC has earned the right to ask the harder questions, not just of the world outside it, but of itself and of those of us who claim its name. What does it mean to educate before we organize, when the institutions we educate within remain structurally uninterested in caste as a serious object of study? What responsibility do Dalit scholars carry toward the communities our credentials often distance us from? What will it take for caste to stop being treated as a regional footnote to Indian identity, and be recognized instead for what it is: a continuous structure of violence that follows us wherever we go? I do not have full answers. But AKSC’s decade-long anti-caste organizing demonstrates that asking these questions honestly, together, is itself a form of the annihilation of caste Dr. Ambedkar envisioned.
Caste and Law - An International Perspective: Towards Recognition and Remedy
Dr. Annapurna Waughray
Caste and Law - An International Perspective: Towards Recognition and RemedyDr Annapurna Waughray, Professor of Human Rights Law Manchester Law School, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Introduction
This note draws on a presentation entitled Caste and Law - An International Perspective: Towards Recognition and Remedy given in October 2025 at the 6th Annual Conference of the Ambedkar King Study Circle Forging Indian Diasporic Solidarity: Confronting Oppression Within.
From campaigns by Dalit and anti-caste activists in the diaspora for legal recognition of caste in anti-discrimination legislation, to domestic litigation on caste discrimination and caste-related exploitation, to activism around caste and soft law equality codes, student activism on the negative role of caste in higher education in the diaspora, and the expanding presence of young Dalit and anti-caste lawyers and legal scholars in domestic and international legal fora concerned with equality and rights - the role of law, lawyers and legal scholars in the anti-caste struggle in the diaspora has never been more visible or more important. The anti-caste legal space is complex and fast moving domestically and internationally, and a comprehensive analysis is beyond the scope of this note. Rather, it focuses on five key points from the 2025 conference presentation.
First, myths about caste and caste harm: A fact too often denied by opponents of legal recognition and regulation of caste discrimination is that caste harms and inequalities have a long legal history. As Dr BR Ambedkar pointed out over a century ago, caste inequality has been constructed and maintained by law since the emergence of caste in ancient India as a social and economic institution. The legal construction of the caste social order dates from this time. While the phenomenon we now know as caste and the inequality and discrimination it engenders was subsequently shaped by colonial rule and the colonial legal system, it was not created by it. Although caste initially derived from and was enforced by religio-legal rules it is not solely a religious phenomenon: rather, it is a “general social characteristic” common to adherents of all the religions of South Asia and its diaspora “regardless of religious doctrine and teachings.” For this reason it is misconceived to characterize legislation prohibiting caste discrimination or litigation challenging caste discrimination as anti-Hindu or an attack on Hinduism and Hindus’ human rights, as suggested by opponents of its legal recognition and regulation – particularly given that caste discrimination has been unlawful in India since the COI 1950 and given assertions by some religious organizations that caste and caste discrimination is anyway alien to Hinduism.
Second, the continuing reality and entrenched nature of caste oppression, violence, inequality and discrimination in the subcontinent and in the diaspora is too often dismissed, minimized or treated as banal, its nature and consequences denied by the same opponents of legal recognition and regulation. Academic research as well as evidentiary work and research by human rights bodies, NGOs, advocacy organizations, the lived experience and testimony of those on the receiving end of caste harm, and more recently caste discrimination litigation in the diaspora, repeatedly attests to the reproduction of caste inequality and injustice globally, the continued influence of caste ‘on the practices, identities and social structures of the Indian diaspora,’ the relationship between caste and labor exploitation, and the intersection of caste with poverty and climate and environmental injustice.
Third, Dalit and anti-caste activists’ advocacy and direct engagement with international human rights law and UN human rights mechanisms, especially around the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism (the ‘Durban Conference’), was crucial in transforming caste oppression in the sub-continent and beyond into a globally visible international human rights issue. By the 1980s, Indian Dalits’ frustration with domestic anti-discrimination measures coupled with egregious caste violence led to focused lobbying of the UN’s international anti-discrimination and human rights mechanisms, first the UN minority rights mechanisms, then the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) (a treaty body) and the former UN Sub-Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (a Charter body). In 2002 CERD adopted General Recommendation (GR) 29 affirming that descent, one of the five grounds of racial discrimination in ICERD, includes “discrimination against members of communities based on forms of social stratification such as caste and analogous systems of inherited status.” In a parallel development the UN Sub-Commission in 2000 declared discrimination based on work and descent a global phenomenon and violation of international human rights law, making explicit the intersection between caste/ descent-based discrimination and stigmatized hereditary occupation and publishing guidelines for its elimination parallel to GR29. While India has always vehemently rejected that caste is a form of descent-based racial discrimination under ICERD, this understanding of caste has become part of international human rights law and a powerful lobbying tool for Dalit activists in the diaspora; but despite the political significance of international recognition, international mechanisms offers no compulsory remedial measures and limited remedies for individuals.
Fourth, in the past two decades Dalit and anti-caste activists in the diaspora have pursued demands for the legal regulation of caste discrimination beyond India via new legislation and judicial interpretation of existing statutes. It is only since the COI 1950 and thanks to the extraordinary legal work of DR BR Ambedkar that the principle of non-discrimination has applied de jure to Dalits in India. Previously, Dalits were explicitly subject de jure and de facto to non-equality and discrimination; yet the disconnect between India’s legal framework and the de facto reality remains vast. In Britain there is longstanding evidence of the existence of caste discrimination among and between people of South Asian heritage across all legally regulated fields (although large scale research on its scope and extent remains lacking); yet caste was unrecognized as a ground of discrimination (despite the experience of empire) until the 2010 Equality Act when Dalit and anti-caste lobbying resulted in a provision allowing – later, requiring – the government to add caste to the protected characteristic (trait) of Race, making caste discrimination explicitly prohibited by statute and opening up a hitherto unavailable route to legal remedy for victims. However this change has remained un-implemented, so that remedies for caste discrimination must be pursued under existing characteristics, forcing the claimant to overcome the preliminary hurdle of convincing the court that caste is captured by the chosen characteristic and that it has jurisdiction to hear the claim. The choice has been ethnic origins, a sub-category of Race, which through case law includes notions of descent or ancestry, linking it to caste as a system of inherited status; but only one “caste as ethnic origins” claim has succeeded (in 2015) and in an earlier interlocutory hearing to decide whether the caste claim could proceed under ethnic origins the judge emphasized that by acquiescing he was not setting a precedent. Opposition to the implementation of the statutory prohibition (which would overcome the preliminary hurdle problem) has come especially from religious groups claiming that legislation explicitly prohibiting caste discrimination is an attack on Hindus, while successive governments have argued that explicit protection is not required as the ‘case law route’ (relying on ethnic origins as the discrimination ground) is sufficient, even though case law since Tirkey in 2015 shows that this is not the case. The focus for legal regulation now is twofold; to garner wide-ranging support for the explicit prohibition of caste discrimination – for example in 2024 the UK’s Musicians Union called for an official ban on caste discrimination - and simultaneously to develop the legal arguments for litigating caste as an intersectional characteristic under existing traits.
In the US, with its federal legal system unlike the UK, legal activism is proceeding on different fronts: campaigns to add caste as an explicit trait, or part of one, in state or city-specific anti-discrimination legislation, for example California, New York – both ultimately unsuccessful – and Seattle (a ban on caste discrimination in housing, employment, contracting, public spaces such as hotels, public transport which was unsuccessfully challenged in 2024 and remains the first and so far only legal prohibition of caste discrimination in a US city or state); and pursuit of caste discrimination litigation (for example the CISCO Systems and BAPS Temple claims). Opposition in the US to caste legislation and litigation has followed the same pattern as in the UK – legislation is unnecessary because caste is already covered by existing characteristics or traits (secular opposition) and legislation is divisive and unfairly targets Hindus and Hinduism (religious opposition). Whether other cities or states will follow Seattle remains to be seen; but the CISCO and BAPS litigation continues despite legal opposition from groups such as the Hindu American Foundation.
Fifth, alongside legislation and litigation another route to recognition and remedy is the addition of caste to institutional equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) and anti-discrimination internal ‘soft law’ policies, notably by US Universities, irrespective of its lack of statutory recognition and uncertain justiciability. British institutions have resisted following this route (British EDI policies tend to mirror legislation) but a number of student unions and societies have, and organizations like the Anti-Caste Discrimination Alliance are making this a focus of their work.
My Journey with AKSC
A Karthik, AKSC Member
It feels like yesterday, but it has been nearly eight years since I first crossed paths with SK.
It was at a local Tamil school. He was patiently collecting signatures demanding a thorough investigation into the death of Fathima Latheef, the IIT Madras student who was found dead in her hostel room. Years later, the CBI closed the case, concluding that there was no evidence of external abetment to her suicide, effectively clearing the faculty members named in her letter. Yet for her parents, justice remains an unfinished journey. Their search for answers continues.
Looking back today, I realize that campaign was just one among countless efforts that define SK and AKSC. For years, I have watched them stand up—not because victory was guaranteed, but because remaining silent was never an option. That quiet persistence has shaped me more than I realized at the time.
When I moved to Silicon Valley in 2010, life changed in unexpected ways. For the first time, I had something I had never really enjoyed before: time. Away from work, I found myself reading more . Social media and blogging were becoming mainstream, and like many others, I entered that world without questioning much of what I consumed.
At that point, I had barely read Ambedkar or Periyar. I was reading novels written by Dan Brown, Jeffrey Archer, Tamil novelists like Vaasanthi, Kalki, Chandilyan and a lot of Tamil short stories . The political blogs I followed leaned heavily to the right. They told stories of a nation under siege, of Hindus being targeted, of an "Italian Congress mafia" looting the country. I believed them. I read endlessly about the 2G spectrum case, the coal allocation case, and countless corruption allegations. I even believed that right-wing commentators such as Badri Seshadri represented intellectual honesty.
Looking back now, I can clearly see how easily narratives become convictions when they are the only stories we hear. Over time, I came to believe that many of those allegations had been amplified or politically weaponized, helping shape the rise of right-wing politics in India.
Then something unexpected happened.
I got bored.
Every article seemed to tell the same story. Every villain looked familiar. Every conclusion was predictable. Curiosity led me elsewhere. I joined Facebook and began reading people who wrote in Tamil about politics, history, literature, caste, and social justice. By accident more than intention, I stumbled upon writings about Periyar and Ambedkar.
That accident changed my life.
By 2014, after the BJP came to power, many scholars and activists began writing extensively about the Dravidian movement and the history of social justice politics. Thinkers like Nannan, Professor Karunanandam, and Pulavar Senthalai Gowthaman patiently explained ideas that had never been part of my education. They did not merely offer political opinions; they gave me a vocabulary to understand inequality, caste, and power. For the first time, many pieces of the puzzle began to fit together.
A few years later, I read Periyar's Pen Yaen Adimai Aanal.
It was one of those rare books that quietly dismantles years of unquestioned assumptions. Ideas I had accepted as sacred suddenly appeared open to examination. My understanding of religion, gender, family, and society began to change—not overnight, but steadily.
Eventually, I stopped being religious.
The weekly temple visits stopped. The hymns stopped. The rituals stopped. I began wearing black more often, not as a symbol of rebellion, but as a reminder that I wanted my convictions to be guided by reason rather than tradition.
Some of my most cherished memories from that period are the conversations I had with my late father and my sisters. We debated atheism, religion, politics, and society for hours. I did not know then that those conversations would one day become memories I would treasure.
Around the same time, my Facebook circle grew to include many political activists. I closely followed protests across the United States against developments in India. Eventually, I joined the Sterlite protest outside the Indian Consulate in San Francisco.
That was where I first saw SK.
I did not speak to him that day. The atmosphere was electric. Slogans echoed across the gathering as strangers stood shoulder to shoulder for a cause they believed in. I exchanged contact information with many people, and through those connections I eventually found AKSC.
I did not know then how important that organization would become in my life.
As I became more vocal about my politics, life also became more complicated.
Friendships that had taken years to build slowly disappeared. Some relatives distanced themselves. The hardest part, however, was the workplace. The responses were never loud or obvious. They came quietly—in conversations that changed, opportunities that seemed to disappear, and an increasing awareness that speaking honestly could carry professional consequences. It took me years to recognize those experiences for what they might have been.
The Cisco caste discrimination case became another defining chapter in AKSC's journey. Through AKSC's discussions, talks, and study circles, I learned far more than I ever expected. I found the courage to write publicly about the subtle discrimination I had experienced at work and the personal cost of speaking openly. I stood in support of SB 403, spoke during discussions surrounding Seattle's anti-caste ordinance, and later addressed similar efforts before the Santa Clara City Council.
At the same time, Silicon Valley itself seemed to change. Conversations that casually normalized or celebrated Hindutva became increasingly common. Gradually, I withdrew from lunch-table discussions. Sometimes silence became easier than endless arguments. But silence has its own cost. There is a unique exhaustion that comes from constantly deciding which conversations are safe to have and which truths are better left unspoken.
Watching politics across the world today, I see societies becoming increasingly divided into "us" and "them." Nuance is disappearing. Dialogue is becoming rarer. It has never been harder to have honest political conversations without immediately being placed into a camp.
Perhaps that is why AKSC has meant so much to me.
It gave me something that had become increasingly difficult to find: a community where disagreement did not have to become hostility, where reading was valued, where conversations were rooted in curiosity rather than outrage.
Through AKSC, I found friends who became family, mentors who challenged me, and a reading habit that I had almost lost. Every three weeks, our book discussions remind me that there are still spaces where people can listen before they respond, question before they judge, and learn before they conclude.
Those evenings restore a little of the sanity that the world often seems determined to take away.
When I think back to that day at the Tamil school nearly eight years ago, I realize I was not merely meeting SK.
I was unknowingly beginning a journey that would reshape how I think, what I value, and the kind of person I aspire to be.
For that, I will always remain grateful.
I hope AKSC continues to grow—not merely as an organization, but as a home for people searching for knowledge, solidarity, and the courage to stand for justice. I hope to continue learning, contributing, and walking alongside this community for many years to come.
Resisting the Primary Contradiction Called Caste: The Local and Global Relevance of AKSC
Prof. Gajendran Ayyathurai, Göttingen, Germany
AKSC has galvanized the Indian diaspora. That is, by unambiguously standing against the problem of caste. Paradoxically, even after a couple of millennia of the violence of caste/casteism there is a betrayal by policies, theories, institutions, and movements to root out those who flaunt themselves as self-privileging-casteist groups, such as brahmins and others. Similarly, there is the letdown to re-center the pre-caste, casteless, and anticaste institutions, practices, memories, and histories of the “Indigenous Indians” as Iyothee Thass, the founder of modern anticaste Buddhism in South Asia, called the caste-imposed Indians back in 1913. In this context, AKSC exceptionally functions as an organization that consistently interconnects anticaste, antirace, and gender sensitive student, activist, and academic communities to resist the globalization of caste.
Studies confirm that untouchability and caste are the dehumanizing inventions of the group called brahmins, who invaded ancient India after Alexander the Great “slaughtered” them for their race-caste (varna-jati) proclivities and practices. But there is a colossal failure of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences in South Asia and the West to critique, reject, and establish post-brahmin and post-caste societies in South Asia, North America, Europe, and elsewhere. Problematically, South Asian Studies, for instance, “remains blatantly exclusionary and brahmin-white controlled.” At the most such disciplines are meant to benevolently patronize the Indigenous Indians they continue to denigrate as untouchables or ex-untouchables or broken people (i.e., dalits). Unsurprisingly, the criticism against such “sojourner brahmin-white dalit experts” with plum jobs, their summer and winter vacation field trips to have a good time with the dalits of South Asia is on the rise.
It is not an exaggeration when people say that there is no street, hamlet, village, town, city, and state that is caste-free after more than seventy-five years of postcolonial India. Tragically, the brahminical model of race-caste which Divya Dwivedi emphasizes as “the oldest race theory and racist practice” is alive and well, in and beyond South Asia. This means that the ivory tower theories peddled by brahmin-white academics, who often generously drop the names like Ambedkar, MLK, Periyar, Phule, Marx, Foucault, Derrida, Fanon, and others, refuse to sense neither the latent and manifest forms of racism and casteism, nor the everyday life of caste-imposed Indians, their inclusive knowledges and technologies, casteless and anticaste ways of everyday-life. Likewise, such theorists and academics are not for sociocultural and economic transformation that eradicates caste-race-gender segregation in North America and Europe, as is the case in India and other countries of South Asia. Given this vacuum, AKSC fulfills the much-needed role of being an organization that stands for an egalitarian safe space in which people could commit themselves to establish alternative societies that challenge the caste-race-gender disorder.
Lawsuits and anti-caste state legislations confirm that transgenerational brahminism/casteism is not an exception but a reality in the US. In fact, there is an ominous trend now in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the US. That is, the information and communication technologies and enterprises as well as the algorithms of the virtual world are steeped in racist and casteist tendencies and practices that are exclusionary. In this scenario, the AKSC, being based in California, not only brings together women, men, and children who stand against caste-race-gendered exclusionary practices but also members who are raceless, casteless, and gender sensitive technologists that contribute to critical caste communicative tools, sources, and spaces that are inclusive and transforming. Not surprisingly, AKSC remains a reliable movement and an organization that the victims of the devilish casteists and racists, in private and public life, could reach out to seek redressal in North America.
The casteist-racist accumulation of wealth by self-privileging-caste groups is on the rise. Reprehensibly, the networks of “transgenerational global brahminism” continue to clandestinely and vociferously operate in North America, Europe, India, and elsewhere. For instance, the US would soon have more than a thousand temples that replicate the racist-casteist-gendered spatial and other forms of segregation that continue to subordinate, exploit, dispossess, and displace a large majority of Indigenous Indians. There is no anticaste diversity, equity, and inclusivity in the US state and/or academic institutional policies and practices. Thus, it is easy for the casteist and racist vigilantes of Indian origins, who also go by the name “Euro-American brahmins,” to flex their racist and casteist trickeries against the anticaste, antirace, and gender-sensitive communities and organizations, such as the AKSC. Therefore, it is important that there is an awareness about the reassuring solidarities. This means that AKSC calls for committed members who need to be unwaveringly creative in coming up with methods, sources, programs, workshops, publications, and campaigns that stand against casteist-racist-gendered institutions and practices, and call for radical democratic alternatives in civil society, state, and academia for more just futures not just in North America and Europe. But, more importantly, in South Asia, the very place where the most dehumanizing violence called untouchability and caste was invented but is desperately in need of post-brahmin and post-caste societies.
From Anger to Collective Action - My 10-yrs Journey with AKSC
Mr. Kanak Natarajan, AKSC Member
When I think about Ambedkar King Study Circle (AKSC) completing ten years, I think about more than an organization reaching a milestone. I think about a part of my own life that has grown with it.
Before AKSC, I was angry about caste discrimination, social inequality, gender bias, and the injustices I saw around us—even in a foreign land like America. But that anger often came with helplessness and frustration. I could see the problems, but I did not know how to turn my concerns into meaningful action.
The news of the institutional murders of Rohith Vemula, one of the brightest Ph.D. scholars at the University of Hyderabad, and J. Muthukrishnan, a Ph.D. student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, shook me deeply. Their deaths forced me to question what it meant to stand against the systems that produce such violence. I felt I could no longer remain angry from a distance. I wanted to be part of something meaningful.
That was when AKSC became an important part of my journey.
One of my early experiences was helping organize a screening of the documentary Kakkoos with AKSC members. The film brought the realities of caste discrimination and manual scavenging closer to us. It reminded me that social injustice is not an abstract idea—it is a lived reality for millions. The screening and the conversations that followed gave me an opportunity to participate, contribute, and connect with like-minded people who were trying to understand and challenge these realities.
I also remember speaking into a microphone for the first time at an AKSC event organized to condemn the institutional murders of Rohith Vemula and J. Muthukrishnan. It may seem like a small moment, but it remains meaningful to me. I felt empowered. For someone who had spent so much time feeling angry and helpless, standing up and speaking in front of others was a turning point. I was no longer just someone who wanted change; I was beginning to understand how I could contribute to creating it.
That feeling stayed with me.
Over the years, AKSC became more than a space for events and organizing. It became a space where I learned to think, question, and grow. I was encouraged to read more, understand the history and nuances of social movements, and learn from the struggles that came before us. I began to understand that challenging caste, inequality, and oppression requires more than anger. It requires knowledge, patience, organization, and collective action.
I also learned the importance of working alongside other like-minded organizations. Many groups are doing meaningful work, and I have learned from being part of that broader movement. What makes AKSC special to me is how it brings together learning, discussion, culture, and action. It has given many of us a space to keep learning while finding ways to contribute.
Looking back, I realize that AKSC did not change me overnight. It changed me gradually—through conversations, books, events, friendships, and collective work. Most importantly, it gave direction to my anger. It helped me move from asking, “What can I do?” to ask, “What can we do together?”
That shift has been one of the most meaningful changes in my life.
Today, seeing AKSC grow and more people become part of it makes me genuinely happy. I remember when it was still taking shape, and it is inspiring to see how far it has come. More people are finding a space to learn, question, and act. More people are discovering that they do not have to remain silent or helpless in the face of injustice.
That growth gives me hope.
As AKSC completes ten years, my wish is that it continues to make a meaningful impact in America and beyond. I hope it reaches more people, encourages young people to read and think critically, and inspires future organizations and movements. I hope it continues to be a space where people find their voice, build solidarity, and turn their concerns into collective action.
For me, AKSC is not simply an organization I have contributed to. It is part of my own journey—from anger to understanding, from helplessness to participation, and from standing alone to finding strength in a collective.
Ten years of AKSC is ten years of learning, struggle, friendship, and hope.
As we celebrate this milestone, let us remember that the work is far from over. The inequalities we fight against have not disappeared, and the responsibility to challenge them remains with all of us. Let us continue to read, question, organize, and build the collective power needed to create a more just society.
Babasaheb Dr. Ambedkar, 'Thanthai' Periyar, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. showed us that education is a powerful weapon against oppression. But education alone is not enough. It must become the foundation for self-respect, solidarity, and collective action.
I believe AKSC continues to be that kind of space—a place where people learn to think freely, stand with dignity, and work together for equality.
May AKSC continue to grow, inspire, and organize. May it become an even stronger voice for justice in America and beyond, and a source of inspiration for future generations.
And may we always remember: The struggle for equality is not someone else’s responsibility. It is ours.
Jai Bhim!
Artificial Intelligence is useless if it is not in the process of labor
Mr. A. Ajinkya, AKSC Member
Jensen Huang has declared that AGI has arrived! On the other hand, an anthropic engineer exaggerated that the probability that AI will kill humanity is 10%. Much has already been documented about the catastrophic effects of “AI” on society, surveillance, climate, resource consumption, layoffs, stolen data and exploitation in labeling. But here we are not going to investigate consequences or possibilities of AI.
Rather true to marxist tradition we start from labor, and the evolution of AI in relation to the labor process. We zoom in to understand the conditions which gave rise to management, technology (software, hardware), and now Artificial Intelligence. The other clarification is the definition of Artificial Intelligence. The term Artificial Intelligence has become vague and can mean many things, but for the purpose of this analysis we limit the definition to the generative models trained at GPU scale with cheap memory and compute. What is Human Labor and how is it different?
Human labor is peculiar and different from animal activity. Whereas an animal say a bird works instinctively to build its nest, humans are not limited by just instinctive ability. Free from this limitation human labor power has indeterminate and vastly expanded forms. Humans can first conceive something in their imagination then build it by complex interaction of hands, tools, language, social collaboration and technology. In doing so his work transforms himself. As Engels points, “First labor, after it and then with it speech, these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man.” “The hand, is not only the organ of labor, it is also the product of labor.” Because of this above unique character of human labor, thought and action or conception and execution can be separated cleanly. An idea conceived by one can be executed by another. This key aspect of human labor needs to be grasped to discuss the further questions. Why must the capitalist take control of the labor process away from the worker?
Under capitalistic mode of production this human labor is not deployed towards his own or societal needs rather it is commoditized in service of capital. For this capitalist imposes 3 conditions 1 The workers can not own the means of production2 Workers are legally free (unlike serfs or slaves), but forced to sell their labor-power in order to survive.3 Workers are forced to sell their labor-power to expand capital, rather than to fulfill their own human potential. But what the capitalist purchases is not labor himself, but labor power, the worker’s capacity to labor for a certain period of time. Unlike a machine or raw material, this labor power is not fixed in advance which creates a problem for the capitalist.
Human labor, precisely because it is conscious, intentional and adaptable, can take an enormous range of forms and can be exercised with different intensity, skill and productivity. The capitalist buys something whose potential is vast but whose actual realization is unknown or uncertain. Here lies the contradiction. The same indeterminate character of human labor which makes it so productive and useful to capital also makes it impossible for the capitalist to know in advance how much actual labor he will obtain from the labor power he has purchased. This uncertainty, or anxiety is at the root of the control over the labor process. This uncertainty makes control necessary. The capitalist must take control of the labor process to turn purchased labor power into actual labor. This is the function of management. Engels quotes that “Science owes infinitely to production”. In the same spirit, Management Science including its software, AI and hardware owes infinitely to production and not the other way around.
Diagram 1:
How the capitalist take control of the labor process: Management, Science and Technology Now that we have laid down the specific nature of human labor above, we can get into how the labor process is controlled through the means of management and technology.
Under capitalist mode of production science, technology and management is employed ruthlessly to the sole purpose of controlling labor power in service of capital. In the process the planning skill and knowledge is sucked up into the mechanistic system, transformed and what gets pushed is repetitive execution, deskilled work, rules and monitoring. This process we briefly touched in part 1 can be visualized in the above diagram. At each stage starting from 1 - The worker’s conception is abstracted first by division of labor, then into management, simultaneously in machinery, followed by complex record keeping, software and hardware tools to process those datasets.
Once the worker understands this process of control over labor power it becomes easy to see Artificial Intelligence (w.r.t. the limited definition) in relation to the above process. AI does not suddenly arrive from outside the labor process. Capital has spent more than a century separating conception from execution, separating science from production, recording work, formalizing knowledge, expanding administrative labor and converting social knowledge into machine-readable information. Generative AI becomes possible within this historically produced informational environment.
Machines transferred portions of physical skill and control from the worker into the technical apparatus of production. Hardware and Software extend this process by encoding rules, procedures and organizational knowledge. Generative AI pushes it further by attempting to incorporate parts of language, symbolic, cognitive and even conceptual activity into the technical apparatus of capital itself. Meanwhile, the silicon valley has found a more metaphysical problem to worry about: Is AI conscious? Or robot rights. Apparently it is easier to debate whether the machine has a mind than to ask whose labor made it possible and whose labor it is being inserted into. But we workers must be clear that in capitalist mode of production, the function of generative AI which is to separate cognitive abilities itself from the worker is used to control the labor process.
Till now we saw how the labor process is controlled inside a manufactory. Under imperialism this control also takes a geographical form. Conception, ownership, finance and technological control are concentrated in a few centers while extraction, manufacturing, cheap labor and environmental destruction are spread unequally across global supply chains. Silicon Valley therefore cannot be understood by looking only at the engineers, labs and AI in California. It depends on mines, semiconductor factories, power grids, data centers and training labor spread across the world. The apparent concentration of “intelligence” in the model rests on a much wider global labor process. Artificial Intelligence is therefore not an immaterial technology produced inside a California laboratory. It is a concentrated technical product of a global labor process whose costs are socialized are dispersed across the world, while ownership and control is privately concentrated in very few hands.
Role of Federal Reserve in the control of labor process.
There is another factor behind the rise of cheap compute, cheap memory and the black-box world of neural networks: cheap capital. The industry narrative says that neural networks surfaced because computers became faster, GPUs became cheaper and algorithms became sophisticate. But as Yarden Katz points out, this explanation is incomplete. Seymour Papert, during the revival of connectionism in the 1980s, argued that increased computing power alone could not explain why connectionism suddenly became fashionable again. A economic explanation was also required. The same is true about today's AI. Training and running large models requires enormous investment in GPUs, memory, data centers, electricity and engineers long before any profit is guaranteed. The question therefore is not only how did compute / memory become powerful enough? It is also who supplied the capital to build so much of it?
After the 2008 financial crisis, and again during the pandemic, the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates close to zero and expanded its balance sheet through quantitative easing. Borrowing became cheap and returns on safer assets fell. Large pools of capital searched for higher returns, willing to finance projects where profits were many years in the future. The Federal Reserve is not a neutral institution standing above capital and labor. When employment becomes tight and workers gain bargaining power, the Fed “worries” about wage inflation and an “overheated” economy. Higher interest rates then slow investment and employment, helping restore the reserve army of labor and discipline wages. In this sense, cheap money supports capital, while excessive bargaining power in the hands of workers becomes a problem to be corrected. For example in November 2022, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said that demand for workers “far exceeds” their supply and that wage growth was running above a level consistent with 2% inflation. The Fed therefore sought a “restoration of balance” in the labor market. By August 2024, Powell could say that the labor market had “cooled considerably”: unemployment had risen to 4.3% and wage gains had moderated. Fed calls this ‘rebalancing’. But for the worker it simply means: when labor becomes scarce and wages rise, monetary policy is used to weaken labor’s bargaining position, restore the reserve army of labor and discipline wages.
All this created favorable conditions for Silicon Valley. Venture capital and the giant technology companies could pour enormous amounts of money into cloud infrastructure( Diagram 2 : Datacenter spending far exceeds commercial construction spending ) , chips, data centers and machine learning before it was clear whether these investments would become profitable. So the rise of GPU-scale AI cannot be explained simply by saying computers became faster. The GPUs, the data centers had to be built, the electricity supplied and capital supplied before any of it produced a return.
But the ground is shifting again. As cheap capital disappears, the pressure shifts back onto labor. If AI infrastructure becomes more expensive to finance, capital must recover those costs through higher productivity, lower labor costs and deeper control over the labor process. For the worker, the question is therefore not only who will finance the next data center, but who will be made to pay for it through intensified work, deskilling, layoffs or lower wages. Behind the GPU sits finance capital, but its costs are ultimately pushed back into the labor process.
Conclusion: "Artificial Intelligence is useless if it is not in the process of labor"
We started not from the question of whether Artificial Intelligence is intelligent, conscious or dangerous, but from human labor. Once we do this, much of the mystery surrounding AI disappears. AI emerged from a long capitalist development of the labor process: the separation of conception from execution, the concentration of knowledge in management, the recording and formalization of work, machinery, hardware and software, the global concentration of technological control, and finally the enormous supply of finance required to build GPU-scale computing.
But after all this, AI still remains a tool of production. Detached from living labor it produces no social use by itself. The server, GPU and model must enter the labor process and be put to some human purpose. The real question for the worker is therefore not whether AI will become conscious, but under whose control will this tool enter the labor process? Under capitalist relations,it is clear that AI is used to pull more knowledge and cognitive activity away from the worker, place it inside systems owned by capital, intensify work and reduce the dependence of capital on particular workers. What appears as an autonomous advance of the machine is therefore another stage in the struggle over control of the labor process. This is not an argument against machines, software or Artificial Intelligence itself. A machine which reduces necessary labor should be a liberation. Technology which contains the accumulated knowledge of society should belong to society. The contradiction is that under capitalism these enormous collective productive powers confront the worker as the private property and authority of capital. The task therefore is not to subordinate human labor to Artificial Intelligence, but the reverse: Artificial Intelligence must be subordinated to human labor and social needs. The machine must serve the worker.
Ref: CCP, katz, perpert, baverman Vijay prashad Science owes to productionTransition to Fed , how big are big modelsInterest rates lessBond market Management and Technology in the capitalist mode of production Origin of Artificial Intelligence Although Artificial Intelligence is nebulous and can mean many things, for now we limit its definition to the generative models trained at GPU scale with cheap memory and compute. The traditional meaning of Artificial intelligence With that limited definition we work further.
Why nowFederal Reserve and free risk capital Compute and Memory (yarden katz)What will happen if the free risk capital dries up
What must be done?
- Machine must be subordinated to human labor and NOT the other way around
According to Marvin Minsky, some of the changes that took places in AI in the 1980s are also explained by corporate interventions: “This kind of progress of trying new experiments with computers kept happening in the 1960s and ’70s and part of the ’80s, but then things tightened up. The great laboratories somehow disappeared, economies became tighter, and companies had to make a profit—they couldn’t start projects that would take 10 years to pay off.”
[1] yarden katz
When Workers Found Their Collective Voice: The Rise of the Indian Stone Workers Alliance of America
Mr. Qayam Masumi
Dalit Solidarity Forum
On February 22, 2026, Indian migrant stone workers gathered at the Labor Education Center at Rutgers University New Brunswick to confront years of exploitation, illness, family separation, and uncertainty and to chart a collective path forward. What had long been experienced as individual hardship was recognized as a shared struggle shaped by labor exploitation, caste inequality, immigration vulnerability, and social marginalization.
The gathering marked a decisive move from individual survival to collective action. Workers recognized that lasting change required organization, self representation, and collective power. This decision laid the foundation for the Indian Stone Workers Alliance of America (ISWAA), a worker led movement advancing labor rights, dignity, health, and economic justice for Indian migrant stone workers.
ISWAA also represents a broader fight against caste oppression and social marginalization, asserting that caste, nationality, or immigration status must never determine a worker’s right to equality, safety, dignity, and justice.
The Conditions That Produced a Movement
The origins of ISWAA are closely connected to the experiences of Indian migrant workers who were rescued during the May 2021 FBI raid at a BAPS temple construction site in Robbinsville, New Jersey. According to worker accounts, many had been recruited from rural India, predominantly from historically marginalized Dalit and Adivasi communities, and brought to the United States on R 1 religious visas. Upon arrival, however, they allege that they were assigned demanding stone cutting, carving, construction, and installation work rather than the religious duties they had anticipated.
Workers reported receiving wages as low as $1.20 per hour while working approximately 87 to 90 hours per week, often without a single day off for extended periods. Their accounts describe caste based discrimination, continuous surveillance, severe restrictions on movement and communication, and harsh workplace conditions. Although brought into the country through religious arrangements, they say their daily reality consisted largely of physically demanding construction labor.
These lived experiences form an important foundation of ISWAA’s mandate. The alliance represents an organized effort by workers to transform vulnerability into collective agency while confronting the socioeconomic structures that they believe contributed to their exploitation.
Beyond the Legal Case
While the May 2021 federal intervention changed the workers’ immediate circumstances, it did not end their struggle. In the years that followed, they faced the difficult task of rebuilding their lives in the United States while pursuing legal remedies and navigating complex immigration, employment, and personal challenges, with support from attorneys, labor advocates, and community organizations.
Yet legal proceedings capture only part of their experience. For some workers, more than eight years have passed since they were able to live with their families in India. Children have grown up without their fathers, parents have aged, and births, marriages, and funerals have taken place in their absence. Some were unable to return home even when their parents became seriously ill or died.
The consequences of this prolonged separation extend far beyond lost wages or legal claims. Workers and their families have endured emotional distress, disrupted relationships, and years of missed family life. Their experiences demonstrate that migrant labor exploitation can leave lasting consequences not only in the workplace, but across families and communities.
An Occupational Health Crisis
The workers’ experiences also reveal a serious occupational health crisis. Prolonged stone cutting and carving can expose workers to silica dust, which can cause silicosis, an incurable and potentially fatal lung disease. Many workers report respiratory and other chronic health problems linked to years of stone work. According to workers and their advocates, eleven workers have died since 2020, including one who died by suicide after returning to India, while others continue to face serious health challenges in the United States and Rajasthan. For ISWAA, justice therefore means more than fair wages and legal accountability. It also requires safe working conditions, access to specialized healthcare, and long term support for affected workers and their families.
From Isolation to Collective Power
For years, these men carried their pain quietly in the shadows. The February 2026 gathering at Rutgers provided a safe space to finally break that heavy isolation. Organized by the Dalit Solidarity Forum alongside the Ambedkar International Mission, India Civil Watch International, New Labor, and dedicated union allies, the meeting allowed workers to look each other in the eye and ask a vital question: How do we make sure no other worker ever has to suffer like this again?
The answer was clear: they had to organize themselves.
The workers realized that while support from lawyers and allies was important, they didn't have to remain passive victims waiting for help. They could step up as the leaders and organizers of their own movement. Deciding to found ISWAA wasn't just an organizational formality—it was a deep assertion of human dignity. They were claiming their right to tell their own story, not as passive subjects in a report, but as active leaders in a living movement.
From Private Struggle to Public Movement
On April 11, 2026, ISWAA took a brave step into the public eye during the Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Jayanti celebration in New York City, hosted by the Ambedkar International Mission. More than ten former stone workers stood together on stage, facing a large audience, to officially announce the launch of their alliance.
For men who had been forced into silence for years, standing on that stage was a deeply moving moment. It was a conscious choice to come out of the shadows, speak in their own voices, and connect their personal fight to global movements for worker rights and human dignity. Their message was simple and uncompromising: moving to another country for work should never cost you your basic human rights, and caste should never be used as an excuse to exploit anyone.
"Educate, Agitate, Organize"
In building ISWAA, the workers have drawn immense strength from the vision of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, whose historic call to "Educate, Agitate, Organize" gives them a practical roadmap for their movement: Education helps workers understand their legal rights and recognize the broader systems that affect their lives.
Agitation builds the moral courage needed to stand up and speak out against unfair treatment.
Organization turns individual pain into lasting, structured power.
By putting these principles into practice, ISWAA challenges the old idea that poor or marginalized workers must always rely on outsiders to represent them. Instead, the workers are taking charge of their own destiny.
The Struggle Continues
The creation of ISWAA does not mean the fight is over. If anything, a challenging new phase is just beginning. Legal battles are still ongoing, health problems persist, families remain separated, and economic stress continues to weigh heavily on everyone involved.
But the workers themselves are no longer the same men who walked into that site years ago. Those who once stood alone now stand shoulder-to-shoulder. Those who were once spoken for are now speaking up for themselves. Those who suffered under exploitation are now organizing to dismantle it. And those living with chronic illness are demanding that worker health be treated as a fundamental human right.
The story of the Indian Stone Workers Alliance of America is still being written. Full justice has not yet been won, and many hurdles lie ahead. But the direction is clear and irreversible. What started as individual cries for help has grown into a structured, worker-led movement. What began in isolation has transformed into deep solidarity. The workers are no longer fighting alone—they are standing together, building collective power, and making sure that no one else ever has to walk this painful road again.
An Organization Is Different Than Individuals Working Together
Ms. P. Arulmozhi, AKSC Member
An "Organization" is different than a bunch of individuals working together. I had been a part of different organizations at different points of time. But joining AKSC - i learned many things, one of which is understanding what an organization is and how to work like one. I had this idea of an individual can contribute to the society in a meaningful way through out their lives. But after the 8 years of my journey with AKSC, now i believe that only working as an organization will work. Not only by creating the change we want, but also by willingly undergoing to become the change ourselves. Now, "contributing to the society" in a way sounds like charity. When we are the society, what we work for also defines what we want from the society.
While my opinions and questions are considered to be controversial & provocative, it led to new topics of discussion at AKSC. While personal references are not usually taken for its content - every personal observation and comments became a discussion. I saw "personal is political & political is personal" in reality for the first time. Getting a space to utter what is going on in the mind as is - is rare. And there is a personal gain too - growing as a person!! Discussions are not always sober - there are arguments & heated debates.. at times they end with no conclusion. I have picked up fight with almost everyone. It gets as personal as it can get. But the outcome? the last 8 years has given me more honest friends than the entirety of my life before that.
And finally I blame AKSC for converting my charity mindset (which was cultivated carefully with glory for decades) into an organizational mindset. This is very significant for me. Fatigue can happen for many reasons. It includes the charity mindset which feeds the moral superiority by material privilege. An individual wears out. But an organization does not let you wear out. That's what makes me fly in at every opportunity i get, though I live at a distance.
Alternate History of the Labor Unions: Black and Dalit
Mr. Ashok Kumar Pindiga
A vast body of literature shows how labor unions play a vital role in enriching workplace democracy, increasing wages, and improving working conditions. However, very little attention has been paid to the role of workers’ unions in securing civil and political rights for the marginalized and destitute sections of society. This essay offers an alternate history of workers' unions; it discusses how marginalized sections: blacks in the USA and untouchables (Dalits) in India have formed trade unions not just to liberate themselves from oppression in the workplace, but also to reconstruct society based on liberty, equality, and fraternity.
The Black Workers Union
The years following the Civil War in the USA were among the most important in United States history, also known as the Reconstruction era (1865-1870). Kermit Roosevelt III contends that the ideals of liberty and equality for all were not in the vision of the founders of the US, but it was in the Reconstruction period that the Constitution was transformed(Roosevelt,2022). The amendments abolishing slavery, guaranteeing equal protection under the law to all citizens, and granting voting rights to the blacks were passed by Congress. During this period, the country transitioned from a slaveholding society to a free labor economy. However, freed black people continued to face significant socio-economic challenges as the diabolical Jim Crow system continued to govern social life.
An industrialist, George Pullman, took an interest in employing freed slaves as porters on his passenger trains, which offered hotel-like services on wheels (Anderson,1973). Enslaved people who spent years in personal service were trained to be loyal, obedient, and deferential, and freed black men suited to the demands of the work in Pullman cars. By 1920, the Pullman Company had become the single largest employer of black people in the US (ibid).
At the same time, the working conditions for Pullman train porters were debilitating; they worked long hours for very low pay, and their monthly wages were even below the minimum wage set in some states; the porters jostled to serve passengers to earn tips, and the best ones answered the call even before it rang; a porter had to exceed 400 hours per month or 11,000 miles to qualify for overtime (ibid). Even this precarious work was considered preferable to most jobs available for the black workers in the United States at that time, but no labor union came forward to address the harsh working conditions of the black porters in Pullman cars.
(Black Porters in Pullman Cars. Source: Smithsonian American Art Museum) Word spread about Asa Philip Randolph, a talented union organizer and second-generation freedman based in New York. The porters approached Randolph with their grievances; he immediately swung into action, both because no unions were willing to take up the porters' cause and because he recognized the importance of bringing Black workers into the labor movement. He founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) in New York City in 1925(ibid.).
(Logo of BSCP.Source: Abhmuseum)
By 1929, Randolph pressed the issue of the color clause in unions at the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) annual convention and got it removed.BSCP was the first all-black union under the AFL's umbrella (Dellums, 1973). After twelve years of relentless struggle with Pullman Company for union recognition, it finally entered into a contract with BSCP on August 25, 1937. This agreement reduced the number of hours from 400 to 240 per month and the annual salary to $1,250, and it guaranteed rest during layovers, with extra pay for any hours worked during that time (ibid.). According to C. L. Dellums, this was a historic contract because it was the first ever signed between a Black-led union and all-white management, which signed against its will (ibid). This success propelled Phillip Randolph into the national spotlight.
(A Phillip Randolph. Source:allposters)
March on Washington for Civil Rights
Because BSCP union members worked on the rails, they had daily contact with people across the country, making it easy to transport ideas; this network served as Randolph’s primary political base for almost five decades and made it easier to launch a national struggle. BSCP nurtured prominent civil rights leaders, including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. (Jones,2013).
Nancy Mclean argues that conservative political activists and the press aligned with white supremacists painted the demands for fair employment law as the handiwork of communists and that the purpose was not creating opportunities for black people but to cause unrest in the workplace (Mclean,2006). The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and even the NAACP purged their ranks. They distanced themselves from workers suspected of communist ties, including leaders as prominent as W.E.B. Du Bois (ibid.). This witch-hunting could have motivated the leaders fighting for civil rights to change strategy and recruit Christian ministers from the black community as advocates for civil rights. These new leaders began framing demands for equal rights in the language of the gospel and religious values (ibid).
After successfully raising the consciousness of workers' unions among Black people, Randolph turned his attention to federal employment, particularly jobs in the defense industry. On January 25th, 1941, Randolph announced that 10,000 Black workers from across the country would march on Washington to demand fair employment laws and a discrimination-free workplace (Jones, 2013). Anticipating that the march could cause political trouble, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt promptly announced Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination by companies and labor organizations engaged in executing war-related work (ibid.). The order also created the Fair Employment Practice Committee. Although March on Washington was called off, Randolph did not abandon the civil rights agenda and continued to advocate for it. The movement for the federal executive order helped spur various states to enact fair employment laws banning employment discrimination based on race.
(March on Washington DC in 1963. Source: Library of Congress; Getty Images)
While the previous executive order was confined to the defense contracts, black people continued to face discrimination in nearly all other sectors of the economy; they were last to be hired and first to be fired; they comprised more than twenty percent of jobless people, and their per capita income was the lowest (Euchner,2010). On May 15, 1963, Randolph once again announced a March on Washington with much greater strength. President Kennedy urged Randolph to call off the March, but he didn’t relent (ibid.). On August 28, 1963, a quarter million people from across the United States of America descended on Washington, D.C., to press for Jobs and freedom (Jones,2013). Key demands included establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee to prohibit discrimination in private firms based on race, religion, and national origin. It was from this podium that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech, I Have a Dream. A year later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination based on protected classes in employment, education, and public accommodation and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce the act.
Workers' Union of the Backward Classes in India
The Constitution of India, 1949, authored by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, is popularly known as the manifesto of social revolution. However, the state never put emphasis on implementing this manifesto in letter and spirit. The sea of oppression that Dalits continue to face every day, together with an endless list of pogroms against them in independent India, is a testament to that reality! For the Dalits, because the pernicious caste system blocked nearly all avenues for prosperity, quotas in government jobs were the primary means of their social mobility. Although the state filled the quotas only partially, educated Dalits were far more concentrated in government employment than in other organized sectors in the economy.
Kanshi Ram, a Dalit originally from the State of Punjab, was a federal employee posted in Maharashtra, where he had firsthand experience of caste discrimination at work and was affected by the plight of fellow Dalit workers who faced discrimination (Saxena,2015). Like Buddha, moved by people's suffering, he cut ties with his family to devote his life to eradicating caste and building a society based on liberty, equality, and fraternity. So did Kanshi Ram! He resigned from his job and severed ties with his family to work full-time to reconstruct society.
In 1973, Kanshi Ram and his fellow Dalit workers formed BAMCEF (the Backward and Minority Communities’ Employees Federation) (Singh,2023). The organization's philosophy fused ideas from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, and Ramaswami Periyar, and it adopted the slogan “Educate, Agitate and Organize!” From Ambedkar’s Republican Party of India.
BAMCEF advocated non-violent methods to bring about social change and leveraged rights guaranteed under the Constitution, while ensuring that the organization's praxis did not violate service rules, as state employees are barred from engaging in political activities (Bose, 2008). It mainly remained a workers' organization. It was to be a vanguard for the rights of the lower castes. BAMCEF spread to the length and breadth of India, aided by the government quotas for the Dalits and Tribals in public employment(ibid.). By the 1980s, the organization claimed its membership numbered between nine and ten million people, including hundreds of PhD holders, thousands of scientists, doctors, and other graduate degree holders (ibid). While a majority of the members of this BAMCEF were Dalit workers, it also had a sizeable section drawn from Tribal and other backward castes.
From Workplace to Legislature
BAMCEF primarily functioned as an employee organization that educated members about their rights and served as a pressure group. Kanshi Ram founded the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti (DS4) to connect with Dalit and other backward-caste masses. DS4 was meant to link the workers' union (BAMCEF) with ordinary people (ibid.). It launched a mass contact program with Dalits and backward classes in several states, often traveling by bicycle to Dalit ghettos and backward-caste neighborhoods in towns and villages (Kumar, 2022). There, activists discussed problems faced by backward castes and Dalits. DS4 deliberately held mock parliaments in cities to discuss these issues, often pressuring the Parliament of India to address them (Bose, 2008). The slogans of DS4 that resonated with the Dalit and backward masses were:
Vote Hamata, Raj Tumahara Nahi chalega, Nahi Chalega
(our votes, but your rule, that will not be tolerated)
Jiski Jitni Sankhya Bhari, Uski Utni Hissedari
(Political representation should be proportionate to the size of a community) By 1984, Kanshi Ram, using the foundation of BAMCEF and DS4, launched the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) (Lal, 2025). It made significant strides in a short span, sending three members to Parliament in its initial years, and within 10 years of its launch, in 1995, it secured political power in the state of Uttar Pradesh; Kanshi Ram’s lieutenant, Mayawati, a Dalit woman, became the chief minister of a most populous state in India (Jaffrelot,2012). If it were independent, the state would rank as the world's fifth most populous country. Uttar Pradesh is also the state where casteism, communalism and feudalism dominate the social life and terrible crimes are committed against Dalits; it is not to suggest other pockets of India are any safer for Dalits.
Probably for the first time in centuries, Dalits attained political power, that too through their own strength and by democratic and non-violent means. Once formed the government, the BSP was a force to be reckoned with for decades in India. It restored agency to Dalits and Tribals that was lost due to Gandhi’s fast against separate electorates for these sections.
(Swearing-in ceremony of Mayawati as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.Source: Outlook India)
Lesson Learned from the Black and Backward Caste Workers Unions
A rope that is composed of thin threads, yet when it is woven together, it can immobilize even a seven-ton elephant. Similarly, a workers’ union is a collection of toiling workers, but their collective strength can hold the mighty and powerful to account. The experiences of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the US and the backward-class workers' unions in India show that when marginalized sections come together, they can achieve what seems impossible. These movements have shown that it is possible to upend Jim Crow in the US and the Manu caste order in India. Just as A. Philip Randolph with Black Power Unions achieved Civil Rights not just for Black people but for all the marginalized groups in the US at the time, Kanshi Ram’s BAMCEF in India enabled Dalits, the most vulnerable section in the world, to attain political power, something deemed unthinkable. These two cases show how unions led by oppressed communities can transcend workplace demands to become engines of broader social and political transformation.
Post enactment of civil rights,1964, general labor unions in the US have undergone significant transformation in the twenty-first century. Today, they are far more inclusive than in the past. Dalit and other caste-oppressed workers in the US must join labor unions because, even after migrating to the US, they continue to be oppressed. Therefore, they must seek their support in pressuring corporations and the state to recognize caste as a protected class. As highlighted above, the collective strength of workers’ unions not only speaks truth to power in the workplace but can also play a primary role in reconstructing society on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Notes and References
Anderson, J. (1973). Philip Randolph: A biographical portrait. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Bose, A. (2008). Behenji: A political biography of Mayawati. Penguin Books.
Dellums, C. L. (1973). International president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and civil rights leader: Oral history transcript and related material, 1970-1973 (J. Henderson, Interviewer; T. H. Pittman, Introd.): Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California.
Euchner, C. C. (2010). Nobody turn me around: A people's history of the 1963 march on Washington. Beacon Press.
Jaffrelot, C. (2012). The caste-based mosaic of Indian politics. Seminar, (633). https://www.india-seminar.com/2012/633/633_christophe_jaffrelot.htm Jones, W. P. (2013). The March on Washington: Jobs, freedom, and the forgotten history of civil rights. W.W. Norton & Company.
Kumar, N. (2022). How Kanshi Ram painstakingly built the Bahujan movement. Forward Press. https://www.forwardpress.in/2022/10/how-kanshiram-painstakingly-built-the-bahujan-movement/ Lal, K. M. (2025). Dalit History Month | From philosophy to praxis—Tracing Kanshi Ram’s journey. Outlook India. https://www.outlookindia.com/national/dalit-history-month-from-philosophy-to-praxistracing-kanshi-rams-journey MacLean, N. (2006). Freedom is not enough: The opening of the American workplace. Russell Sage Foundation; Harvard University Press.
Roosevelt, K., III. (2022). The nation that never was: Reconstructing America's story. The University of Chicago Press.
Salim, S. (2023). Rise of BSP and Dalit politics in U.P. Round Table India. https://www.roundtableindia.co.in/rise-of-bsp-and-dalit-politics-in-u-p/ Saxena, M. (2015). Dalit movement: The role of Kanshi Ram. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention (IJHSSI), ISSN (Online), 2319–7722.
Singh, P. (2023). Remembering D.K. Khaparde: The man who Ambedkarised Kanshiram. The Mooknayak. https://en.themooknayak.com/bahujan-nayak/remembering-dk-khaparde-the-man-who-ambedkarised-kanshiram
We Needed the Annihilation of Caste, and We Got Erasure of Caste Instead
Mr. Ganesh Balamitran, AKSC Member
I have been organizing for 2 years with AKSC and the experience has helped me uncover a deep blind spot in my own activism. Over the years, through study and engagement, I had developed an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist outlook (from the global financial crisis, to black lives matter, to Palestine). But caste was my blind spot, a blind spot I did not even know I had. In every other way, I was proudly progressive, even proudly radical, and then I learnt anti-caste activism at AKSC. Once I started organizing with AKSC, I have had an opportunity to read and discuss, organize and through all of this, learn about the real impact of caste on people’s lives, even in the diaspora. I learnt about the real story behind the Cisco caste case, and it helped me get beyond the whitewash propaganda that well funded Hindutva groups were propagating online. Having studied about Black struggles in the US, I was able to finally connect caste struggles in India with Black struggles in the US. Intersectionality is real.
I want to reflect on why caste was such a gap in my understanding of society. Why, in my 50s, I had to be awakened to multi-generational caste struggles that have always been part of Indian society (including the diaspora). I grew up in India (mostly Mumbai) and have spent most of my adult life in California. Caste was present there, and yet, I lived mostly oblivious to it. Should I have done more to understand my own privilege, to think critically about the relationship between caste and inequality (instead of taking my privilege for granted)? - sure. Absolutely. Could the education system have helped me along in understanding caste and working on its annihilation? - I argue that it absolutely should have.
My primary, secondary and university education was in India. And through all of this wholesome, egalitarian, state run education - caste was hardly mentioned. The most important social ill and challenge for an egalitarian, socialist India, barely got a mention! My school and college didn’t create opportunities to discuss and debate how caste continues to play out in society and how we could annihilate it. I studied under the state Board of Maharashtra, yet there was no learning of the anti-caste movements of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Jyotirao & Savitribai Phule or Shahuji Maharaj. We learnt about some social ills - the idea that dowry is deplorable was learnt at school, and we all took great pride in Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s social work to end the cruel practice of sati. These were lifelong lessons that have stayed with me; so then why weren’t anti-caste struggles part of those lessons? In English, we would read Pandil Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore etc, yet we never read the most prolific English writer of modern India - Dr. B.R Ambedkar. Why did I first seriously encounter “Annihilation of Caste” in my 50s in the US? It is a highly accessible writing on the most important social problem of India, yet it was never introduced in our English classes. We also learnt and took great pride in India’s freedom struggle, and the most promoted movie of that genre was the Oscar award winning ‘Gandhi’, released in 1982, which narrated the story of the ‘Father of the Nation’ M.K Gandhi. Yet, Gandhi’s most severe political and moral critic, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar was not even featured in the film. There are so many more examples and I could go on here, but the key question I ask is - is all of this omission mere oversight by those who explicitly or implicitly control public education and cultural narratives in India? Or was this Erasure?
The last 3 years have also been an ongoing struggle against genocide, and I have watched the American public slowly wake up on Palestine and come face-to-face with apartheid and genocide perpetrated by America’s BFF - Israel. Israel has led a 100 year war of settler colonialism on the indigenous population of Palestine, so why are Americans only now seeing who are the real victims and who are the perpetrators? Because, for years, the true story of the Palestinians was completely erased from American education, and culture. The power of that erasure is that most Americans were left ignorant of the violence being perpetrated on Palestinians, while the American government could openly fund Israel and build up the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) to maintain the occupation of Palestine by force. The raised awareness of the common American is the biggest threat to America’s ongoing support of Israel. The erasure of knowledge is an active tool in the hands of the powerful.
I have now come to realize that the erasure of our anti-caste history from History and Social Studies and English and from popular culture was also a conscious act by those in power. As students, we took great pride in the work of not just Gandhi and Nehru and Patel, but also radicals like Bhagat Singh and Sathguru, but we did not learn to imbibe and take pride in the work of Dr Ambedkar, or Phule or Periyar. This was not an act of omission, this was an act of erasure. I live with the effects of that erasure, and I see its effects all around me in Indian social circles, where any engagement on caste is very uncomfortable. My time at AKSC has helped me unlearn and relearn Indian social history and to come to terms with the lived effects of a deeply casteist society. I implore everyone to start their own journey to understand why they might not really understand caste. What role their education and cultural exposure had to do with it, and how we can overcome the effects of educational and cultural erasure through our own efforts and with the support of anti-caste organizers around us.The scourge of caste will not end on its own. It will require each of us to develop an anti-caste outlook, and to actively annihilate caste.
Jai Bhim
Caste discrimination and the regulatory gap in the diaspora
Dr Asang Wankhede and Dr Shikha Dilawri
In a paper penned at Columbia University in 1916, B R Ambedkar foresaw that as long as caste exists in India, Hindus will hardly intermarry with outsiders, and that "if Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem." Caste, on Ambedkar's account, is an enclosed class, a group held shut by endogamy and reproduced across neighboring groups. An institution of that kind does not depend on South-Asian spatiality to survive. It requires a marriage network, a memory of surname, village and occupation, and a community willing to police them. A foreign border obstructs none of this. A century later, the record in the United States, Britain, and Australia and other jurisdictions globally bears out Ambedkar’s warning.
The evidence is not anecdotal
Anti-caste organising in the diaspora has long spotlighted how caste discrimination persists beyond the bounds of the subcontinent. In recent years, campaigning of the Ambedkar King Study Circle (AKSC), Dalit Solidarity Forum, the International Dalit Solidarity Campaign, CasteWatch UK, and a growing number of other anti-caste groups in the diaspora has been instrumental in securing emergent legislative action on caste.
In Britain, the first instance of judicial recognition was in 2015. Permila Tirkey, an Adivasi domestic worker brought from Bihar to a household in Milton Keynes, was made to work around eighteen hours a day for roughly eleven pence an hour. In Chandhok v Tirkey the Employment Appeal Tribunal held that caste may, on particular facts, fall within "ethnic origins" under section 9(1) of the Equality Act 2010, and the tribunal awarded her about £184,000.
In the United States, California's civil rights regulator sued Cisco Systems in June 2020 over the treatment of a Dalit engineer by two dominant caste managers. The case is still being litigated; a Hindu American Foundation suit challenging the regulator over it was dismissed in July 2025. Universities, from Brandeis in 2019 to the California State University system in 2022, added caste to their non-discrimination policies because students were bringing complaints of caste discrimination they faced on the university campus.
In Australia, the Human Rights Commission's National Anti-Racism Framework of 2024 recommended that the Commonwealth investigate legal protection against caste discrimination, including reform of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, on the basis of community consultation documenting casteism being systemic in employment, and pervasive in housing, education and social life. Thereafter, the Australian Human Rights Commission opened up a dedicated complaints mechanism for caste discrimination-related complaints in Australia.
Taken together, anti-caste mobilization and these legislative developments have shown that caste-based discrimination in the diaspora is not an aberration or anomaly. It does not play out as a singular insult or incident attributable to an individual 'bad actor' that can be isolated and addressed through a tribunal. Instead, across these contexts, we see common patterns emerge. Caste-based discrimination works through the allocation of socio-economic roles and resources: who is hired, promoted, housed, married, invited, and believed. It is reproduced through institutions that lack substantive state regulation in the diaspora, including temples, caste associations, and matrimonial platforms. It enters the formal economy through hiring pipelines and labor practices that draw on and mirror them. Anti-caste campaigning, then, has illuminated that caste discrimination in the diaspora is systemic and pervasive. And the aforementioned anti-caste groups have been at the forefront of securing legal regulation and policy recognition of caste, with mixed results as yet.
Lack of legal regulation in foreign lands
In the United Kingdom, Section 9(5)(a) of the Equality Act 2010, as amended by section 97 of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, provides that a Minister of the Crown must by order make caste an aspect of race. That is a duty, not a discretion, and it has gone unimplemented for thirteen years. In July 2018, after a consultation that drew more than sixteen thousand replies, the government announced that it would rely instead on developing case law and repeal the duty once a legislative vehicle appeared. Neither step has been taken. The statute book carries an unperformed duty to protect against caste discrimination and an unfulfilled promise to delete it, without substantial evidence of the lack of need for a dedicated legislation prohibiting caste.
In the US, Seattle became the first US jurisdiction to recognize caste discrimination by ordinance in February 2023, and Fresno City Council followed. California's SB 403 passed both chambers and was vetoed on 7 October 2023 as "unnecessary", because state law already prohibits discrimination on grounds including ancestry and is to be liberally construed. Bills in New York stalled at the close of the 2025 to 2026 session.
The Australian Racial Discrimination Act 1975 does not mention caste. Based to advocacy of Dalit groups in Australia, the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission accepted the interpretation that caste discrimination is covered by the existing ground of "descent" and "social origin" (ILO 111) and hence a caste complaint mechanism is now open to lowest caste groups.
Despite some movement, then, caste discrimination ultimately remains contested within existing legal frameworks. This acts as the major hurdle for caste-oppressed communities seeking redressal for the human rights harms through proper justice delivery mechanisms.
The cost of legal non-recognition
Where a ground is unnamed, the claimant must litigate the existence of the category before she can litigate her injury. Tirkey had to establish that caste was capable of falling within ethnic origins before she could show that her own facts fitted within it. The double burden is such that the case succeeds only where the caste maps onto ethnicity. Financial burden is another major reason that discourages Dalits from access to justice in caste discrimination cases.
An unnamed ground also generates no data. There is no complaint category, no statistics and no monitoring obligation. The resulting silence is then produced as proof that caste is not a significant issue to be addressed through legislative interventions. The Carnegie Endowment's 2020 survey of Indian Americans shows the difficulty. Of the Hindu respondents who claimed a caste identity, 83 per cent placed themselves in the general or upper category and 1 per cent as Dalit, while 5 per cent of all respondents reported caste discrimination in the previous year. The authors themselves cautioned that the sub-sample was small and non-disclosure likely. A sample composed overwhelmingly of dominant caste respondents cannot measure the experience of the caste oppressed, yet the figure circulates as settled. Instead, correct methodological approaches involving phenomenological or lived experiences research better capture the extent and nature of caste-discrimination that exists in diaspora contexts globally.
Nothing follows for institutions either. Without a named ground, no employer, landlord or university owes a duty to monitor, train or report on caste, and compliance functions act on enumerated categories alone.
Legislative silence is then read as a finding of fact. When a government announces that legislation is unnecessary, or a governor vetoes a bill as redundant, opponents cite the state itself as authority that caste discrimination is a fabricated grievance. Inaction acquires an evidentiary character it was never meant to have.
Finally, the available categories misdescribe the harm. Pleading caste as ethnicity invites the reply that both parties share one national origin and one ethnic community, which is often true. Yet the harm is based on descent. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, in General Recommendation 29 of 2002, interpreted "descent" in Article 1(1) of the Convention as covering communities discriminated against on work and descent, including caste. States including the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia are parties to the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The lack of adequate recognition of caste discrimination is therefore not the result of an absence of an obligation. Rather, it marks the non-implementation of a core treaty obligation.
The standard objection against recognition of caste discrimination is that naming caste stigmatizes South Asian communities and singles out Hindus. A neutrally drafted ground does neither, since it protects any person subjected to treatment based on caste and descent, in whichever direction the discrimination runs. The alternative is worse: without adequate protection against caste discrimination, impunity prevails and enduring harms that Dalits suffer in foreign lands are invisibilized.
Ambedkar's argument was substantive rather than mystical. By unearthing its mechanisms and entrenchment, he offered insight into how caste travels and why legal protections against caste-based discrimination must be extended to caste-oppressed communities even in foreign lands. Today, this is a task anti-caste groups in the diaspora such as AKSC have adopted and built on. Treating caste discrimination as ‘contested’ ignores substantive evidence while exacerbating the harms suffered by Dalits globally. A sui generis recognition of caste as a ground of discrimination in jurisdictions with substantive diaspora populations could be a good starting point towards further demystifying the global operations of caste and advancing the global anti-caste movement.
Sources
B R Ambedkar, Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development (paper read at Columbia University, 9 May 1916).
Chandhok v Tirkey [2015] ICR 527 (EAT); Tirkey v Chandok, ET Case No 3400174/2013 (remedy judgment, 2015).
Equality Act 2010, s 9(5); Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, s 97; Government Equalities Office, Caste in Great Britain and Equality Law: A Public Consultation (Government Response, 23 July 2018, HCWS898).
Department of Fair Employment and Housing v Cisco Systems Inc (filed June 2020; the agency is now the California Civil Rights Department); Governor's veto message on SB 403, 7 October 2023; Seattle City Ordinance CB 120511 (February 2023).
Australian Human Rights Commission, National Anti-Racism Framework (2024), Recommendation 17; Senate Estimates evidence, February 2026.
Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, General Recommendation No 29 on Article 1(1) of the Convention (Descent) (2002).
S Badrinathan, D Kapur, J Kay and M Vaishnav, Social Realities of Indian Americans: Results from the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2021).
Transnationalizing Hierarchy: Religious Institutions and the Reproduction of Caste in the South Asian Diaspora
Prof. Obed Manwatkar
Abstract
This article examines the transnational migration of caste dynamics into the United States, focusing on how religious institutions both replicate and challenge caste-based discrimination within the South Asian diaspora. Drawing on historical analysis and qualitative testimonies across Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Christian, and Islamic traditions, the study maps the manifestations of caste within American religious spaces. It further contextualizes recent legal milestones, such as the 2023 Seattle ordinance banning caste discrimination, within the broader framework of civil and human rights advocacy. Ultimately, the findings reveal a polarized landscape: while some institutional spaces enforce caste hierarchies through denial and silence, Dalit-led and Ambedkarite organizations serve as vital hubs for resistance, advocacy, and social transformation.
Keywords: caste, religion, South Asian diaspora, United States, Dalits, religious institutions, discrimination
Introduction
The caste system stands as one of the world's most enduring frameworks of social stratification. Originating in South Asia, caste has structured social, economic, and religious life for over two millennia. While most visible within Hindu society, where it historically organized communities around strict axes of ritual purity, pollution, and hereditary occupation, caste is neither static nor monolithic. Though status is ascribed at birth and traditionally unalterable, its socio-political meanings have shifted significantly across regional and historical contexts. To legitimize this rigidity, dominant religious discourses have historically leveraged cosmological doctrines like karma, framing an individual's present material and social subjugation as the direct consequence of deeds from a past life.
Classical scholarly literature maps this hierarchy through a four-fold varna framework: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (rulers/warriors), Vaishyas (traders), and Shudras (laborers). Entirely external to this framework are the communities historically marginalized as "Untouchables," who today collectively and politically assert the term Dalits ("the crushed" or "broken"). Relegated to occupations deemed ritually defiling and systematically barred from the varna order, Dalits have long been subjected to severe social segregation. Crucially, caste-based stratification is not unique to India or Hinduism; variations of this hierarchy warp social fabrics in Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, intersecting dynamically with local religious traditions, ethnic identities, and colonial governance.
Despite landmark constitutional safeguards—most notably India’s 1950 abolition of untouchability caste-based discrimination remains a stubborn contemporary reality across South Asia. Dalits continue to experience entrenched residential segregation, systemic denial of public infrastructure, exclusion from sacred spaces, and overt bias in education and labor markets. Human rights organizations and sociologists increasingly categorize this enduring structural violence as a form of "hidden apartheid," a pervasive subjugation quietly reproduced through deeply ingrained social norms, economic dependence, and uneven state intervention.
Caste Beyond South Asia: Diaspora and Transnationalization
Geographical boundaries have failed to contain the caste system within South Asia. Driven by large-scale waves of migration beginning in the mid-twentieth century, South Asian communities brought caste practices into transnational contexts, including the United States. While the dislocation of migration frequently destabilizes traditional social networks, caste has demonstrated remarkable fluidity, re-emerging and anchoring itself within diasporic families, religious institutions, professional workplaces, and civic organizations. Within the United States, however, caste discrimination is systematically obscured by dominant American racial frameworks that flatten South Asians into a monolithic, highly successful "model minority." This broad racialization effectively masks acute internal hierarchies, rendering caste-based trauma invisible and exceptionally difficult to legally or socially address. Despite this structural blindness, recent years have witnessed an institutional paradigm shift. Grassroots advocacy has forced growing recognition of caste discrimination within American academia, major corporations, and municipal governments, exposing it as a distinct, cross-communal axis of inequality. In this shifting landscape, religious institutions occupy a dual, pivotal role. As primary engines of cultural reproduction, they can actively entrench caste hierarchies through exclusionary leadership structures, ritual protocols, and endogamous marriage norms; conversely, they can serve as vital counter-spaces for systematic resistance, structural reform, and inter-faith solidarity.
Methodology and Sources
To capture the complex socio-religious realities of transnational caste dynamics, this study employs a qualitative, interpretive research design. This framework pairs structural historical analysis with a narrative inquiry approach, drawing on data from in-depth interviews, public testimonies, and institutional archives. Crucially, the article foregrounds the lived experiences of caste-oppressed individuals across multiple faith traditions. By positioning these personal narratives as authoritative, critical primary sources, the study analyzes how caste is both enacted and navigated in the daily texture of American religious life. This qualitative data is contextualized by a diverse array of supplementary materials, including international human rights reports, legal filings, contemporary scholarly literature, and extensive archival records documenting the legislative history of the 2023 Seattle anti-caste ordinance.
Religious Institutions and Lived Experiences of Caste
Hindu Upper-Caste Experience
Defined by theological plurality rather than doctrinal uniformity, Hinduism lacks a single founder, creed, or centralized authority. Historically, what unified Hindu communities was not uniform belief, but shared social practice, specifically, the caste system. While Hindus differ widely in their choice of deities, rituals, and philosophies, caste has long served as a baseline organizing principle.
Within the United States, upper-caste Hindu Americans frequently minimize or deny the existence of caste in public spaces, particularly in professional or multicultural environments. However, caste continues to shape private life powerfully, influencing marriage choices, temple governance, dining practices, and professional networks. Dominant-caste immigrants bring ancestral advantages, such as historical access to education, wealth, and social capital, into the diasporic context. Consequently, rather than dissolving through migration, these hierarchies are subtly rebuilt within American Hindu spaces. Temples and community groups frequently maintain exclusionary leadership structures while publicly branding caste critiques as attacks on the religion itself, thereby deflecting accountability.
Dalit Buddhist Experience
Dalit Buddhist organizations in the United States draw direct ideological sustenance from Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s structural reinterpretation of Buddhism as an emancipatory, radical rejection of caste hierarchy. For these practitioners, principles of absolute social equality, human dignity, and ethical conduct are not merely spiritual virtues but the foundational pillars of civic life. Civic organizations such as the Ambedkar Association of North America and the Buddhist Council of America have transformed these theological tenets into tangible sociopolitical action, actively engaging in grassroots caste awareness, broad interfaith coalition-building, and systemic legislative advocacy. Through targeted public education campaigns, including sponsoring university conferences and distributing Ambedkar’s foundational text, Annihilation of Caste, alongside decisive mobilization for legal safeguards like the 2023 Seattle ordinance and California’s SB 403 bill, these institutions have firmly positioned Buddhist orthopraxy as a vital driver of the contemporary American anti-caste civil rights movement.
Ravidasiya Experience
Despite Sikhism’s foundational theological commitment to absolute egalitarianism, caste continues to structure the institutional and religious life of the diaspora covertly. The proliferation of separate Ravidassia gurdwaras (places of worship) across the United States occurred as a direct counter-response to the systemic social exclusion of Dalit Sikhs from mainstream, dominant-caste-controlled religious spaces. This marginalization has historically manifested in restricted ritual participation, structural barriers to institutional leadership, and strict endogamous policing during marriage ceremonies. Because Dalit Sikhs frequently report enduring subtle forms of humiliation and alienation within supposedly egalitarian sacred spaces, the establishment of independent religious institutions became a necessary vehicle for reclaiming communal dignity and spiritual autonomy. However, while these independent spaces offer vital sanctuaries of self-determination, their very necessity underscores the profound limitations of internal reform within dominant-caste-dominated Sikh organizations.
Dalit Christian Experience
American Christian institutions predominantly conceptualize diversity through institutional frameworks of race and ethnicity, a tendency that effectively obscures internal caste stratifications. While South Asian Christians are routinely incorporated into broad multicultural or immigrant initiatives, the salient caste distinctions operating among them are rarely recognized by mainstream church structures. Consequently, dominant-caste Indian Christians disproportionately monopolize ecclesiastical leadership and clergy positions, while Dalit Christians remain systemically underrepresented. Furthermore, the universalist theological claim that all believers are "one in Christ" is frequently weaponized to deny the material realities of caste prejudice, thereby effectively silencing the distinct lived experiences of Dalit practitioners. This institutional denial functions as a powerful mechanism of erasure, allowing caste-based inequities to be quietly reproduced and maintained beneath a veneer of spiritual unity.
Dalit Muslim Experience
Within South Asian Muslim communities, caste stratification manifests through a deeply entrenched social hierarchy categorized into the Ashraf (noble lineages claiming foreign ancestry), the Ajlaf (local, low-caste converts), and the Arzal (historically degraded, Dalit-equivalent groups). Although Islamic theology explicitly mandates radical egalitarianism and rejects birth-based hierarchies, lived socio-religious practices continue to replicate these inherited status distinctions. In the United States, Pasmanda (marginalized and Dalit-allied) Muslims frequently face a dual burden; many feel compelled to conceal their background due to pervasive social stigma and the institutional monopoly maintained by Ashraf elites over diasporic mosques and Islamic organizations. While a growing network of global advocacy groups exists, caste remains a profoundly unaddressed tabula rasa within broader American Muslim institutions. This collective silence persists despite the escalating, systemic violence targeted against Pasmanda communities in South Asia.
Legal Intervention: Seattle’s Ban on Caste-Based Discrimination
The passage of the Seattle anti-caste ordinance on February 21, 2023, marked a paradigm shift in American civil rights jurisprudence. By formally adding caste to its anti-discrimination statutes, Seattle became the first Western jurisdiction to explicitly protect individuals from caste-based harm in workplaces, housing markets, and public spaces. The legislation, introduced by Councilmember Kshama Sawant, passed with the concerted backing of an unprecedented coalition of 177 civil rights, labor, and interfaith organizations. Legal and sociological analyses of the bill highlight its intersectional significance: it formally recognizes that caste-oppressed diaspora members face a double precarity, subverting the "model minority" myth by exposing how they are marginalized both by American racial hierarchies and internal subcontinental stratifications. Beyond its immediate local protections, the ordinance serves a dual systemic function: it strips away the legal anonymity that previously protected dominant-caste discrimination and provides a replicable statutory blueprint for civil rights advocacy across North America.
Conclusion
The findings of this study underscore the tenacious persistence of caste as a highly adaptable, transnational system of structural inequality. Diasporic religious institutions occupy a deeply polarized, dual role within this landscape: they function either as conservative engines of cultural preservation that reproduce caste hierarchies through institutional silence, active denial, and exclusion, or as transformative platforms for collective resistance and human rights advocacy. Dalit-led religious organizations, in particular, have been uniquely vital in pulling caste out of the private sphere, recasting it as a critical moral, social, and legal issue within American public life.
As a globalized matrix of oppression, caste has successfully mutated to survive within the novel racial and institutional architectures of the United States. While dominant-caste institutions continue to resist accountability by weaponizing discourses of religious hurt, the rise of powerful interfaith, inter-caste, and Dalit-led coalitions, exemplified by the historic passage of the Seattle anti-caste ordinance, signals an undeniable paradigm shift in Western legal protections and public consciousness. Ultimately, the radical vision of total caste annihilation articulated by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar remains a profoundly unfinished project. Yet, the burgeoning transnational solidarities bridging diverse religious, caste, and racial communities across the United States offer a vital, empirical blueprint for a more equitable, inclusive, and emancipated future.
Documentary as Anti-Caste Practice: Cinema, Memory, and Collective Struggle
Mr. Somnath Waghmare
My documentary practice has emerged not from the institutional center of cinema, but from the margins of caste society. I come from a Dalit-Buddhist background in rural Maharashtra, and my journey into filmmaking has been shaped by experiences of social exclusion, cultural invisibility, and political awakening through the Ambedkarite movement. For me, documentary cinema is not simply a medium of artistic expression; it is a method of inquiry, a form of memory work, and a collective political practice.
Over the past decade, I have worked on films that engage with caste, public memory, social justice movements, education, labor, and the cultural life of marginalized communities. These films include I Am Not a Witch (2015), The Battle of Bhima Koregaon: An Unending Journey (2017), Memories of Mangaon (2022), There Is No Caste Discrimination in IITs? (2023), Chaityabhumi (2024), and Gail & Bharat (2025). While each film addresses a different subject, they are connected by a common concern: how oppressed communities remember, resist, and create alternative futures.
Documentary as Counter-Archive
Mainstream cinema and media often reproduce dominant narratives about caste society. Dalit lives are either erased, stereotyped, or represented through the gaze of others. My documentary practice attempts to create a counter-archive one that records voices, spaces, rituals, songs, protests, and everyday experiences that are frequently absent from official histories.
In The Battle of Bhima Koregaon: An Unending Journey, I documented the continuing significance of Bhima Koregaon as a site of anti-caste assertion and historical memory. The film was not only about a past event; it was about how communities gather, remember, and defend their histories in the present. Similarly, Chaityabhumi explored the memorial space associated with Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, showing how it functions as a living site of collective mourning, political education, and social solidarity.
These films taught me that documentaries are not merely about recording facts. It is about listening carefully to people whose experiences have been ignored, and about recognizing memory as a form of resistance.
Filmmaking as Collective Process
My films are shaped through conversations with activists, students, workers, artists, scholars, and community members. I do not see documentary filmmaking as an individual achievement; it is a collaborative process that depends on trust, participation, and shared political commitment.
When making There Is No Caste Discrimination in IITs?, the process involved listening to students who spoke about caste discrimination within elite educational institutions. The film attempted to create space for testimonies that are often dismissed or silenced. In Memories of Mangaon, I engaged with local histories and community memory, allowing people to narrate their own experiences rather than fitting them into a predetermined framework.
This collaborative approach is important because anti-caste politics is itself collective. A documentary becomes meaningful when it is not only watched, but also discussed, questioned, and used in community spaces, classrooms, study circles, and public gatherings.
Cinema Beyond the Theatre
One of the most important aspects of my documentary practice has been exhibition outside conventional commercial circuits. Many of my films have traveled through universities, community organizations, independent film festivals, Ambedkarite gatherings, and international academic spaces. These screenings often become spaces of dialogue rather than passive consumption.
After screenings, audiences frequently connect the films to their own experiences of caste, migration, labor, education, and discrimination. In this sense, documentary cinema becomes a tool for political education and collective reflection. A film does not end when the credits roll; it continues through the conversations it generates.
For diaspora communities, especially South Asians living outside India, such films can also help sustain connections with histories of anti-caste struggle. They open conversations about how caste travels across borders and how solidarity can be built across different locations.
Challenges and Possibilities
Working as an independent documentary filmmaker from a marginalized background comes with many challenges: limited funding, restricted distribution, institutional barriers, and the emotional labor of working on difficult subjects. Yet these challenges have also clarified the importance of autonomous cultural production.
Documentary practice, for me, is closely connected to research, ethnography, oral history, and public engagement. It allows me to move between academic inquiry and community experience.
As I completed my doctoral research on caste, cinema, and the cultural politics of Marathi cinema, I realized that filmmaking can also function as a form of knowledge production — one that combines image, sound, testimony, and lived experience.
Towards an Anti-Caste Visual Future
At a time when digital media, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and algorithmic visibility are reshaping public culture, the question of who gets represented and who controls representation remains urgent. Anti-caste documentary practice must continue to create spaces for marginalized voices, community histories, and collective imagination.
I believe that documentary cinema can contribute to the broader struggle for social and economic justice by preserving memory, challenging dominant narratives, and building connections between communities. It can help us remember that the fight against caste is not only a legal or political struggle; it is also a cultural struggle over history, dignity, visibility, and belonging.
As the Ambedkar King Study Circle reflects on its ten-year journey, I see documentary practice as part of the same larger movement of political education, community organizing, and collective transformation. The camera, when used responsibly, can become a tool of listening, witnessing, and solidarity.
My hope is that future generations of filmmakers, artists, scholars, and activists will continue to create images that refuse silence and affirm the humanity, creativity, and resistance of oppressed communities. In that ongoing journey, documentary cinema remains not only a record of struggle, but also a participant in it.
My Journey with the Ambedkar King Study Circle (AKSC)
Ms. Lakshmi Natarajan, AKSC Member
My association with the Ambedkar King Study Circle (AKSC) has been one of the most meaningful and life-changing experiences of my life. I had the privilege of serving on the Executive Committee until 2021, and during those years I learned that social change is built not only by great leaders, but also by countless volunteers who quietly dedicate their time and effort to a larger cause.
I was fortunate to contribute to the organization in many ways. I helped organize the AKSC Conference, assisted in coordinating Periyar Birthday celebrations, hosted guests invited by AKSC, arranged food for conferences and public events, and introduced several speakers who later shared their knowledge with our members. Although these may seem like behind-the-scenes responsibilities, I came to appreciate that every successful event depends on people willing to serve without seeking recognition.
AKSC also taught me the importance of standing up for social justice beyond meeting halls. I actively participated in protests and public demonstrations that reflected the organization’s commitment to equality, rationalism, and human rights. Those experiences strengthened my conviction that meaningful change requires both learning and action.
One of the greatest gifts AKSC gave me was the habit of continuous reading. I attended the organization’s reading sessions regularly until 2022. Those discussions encouraged me to read more deeply, think critically, and examine issues from multiple perspectives rather than accepting conventional wisdom. The discipline I developed through those sessions has remained with me ever since.
The influence of AKSC extended beyond intellectual growth. It changed my personal lifestyle as well. After becoming an AKSC member, I consciously changed my food habits to become more accepting and accommodating of all types of food and people from different backgrounds. This may seem like a small personal change, but to me it symbolized a broader commitment to inclusiveness and letting go of unnecessary barriers.
The culture of reading, discussion, and constructive debate that I experienced in AKSC inspired me to create a weekly review and discussion session within my college alumni group. Those same skills have also helped me contribute more effectively to American Tamil Media, where thoughtful analysis, teamwork, and meaningful conversations are essential. In many ways, AKSC became the foundation upon which I built my later community service and leadership activities.
Looking back, I realize that AKSC gave me much more than opportunities to volunteer. It gave me lifelong friendships, the courage to question, the discipline to read continuously, and the confidence to contribute meaningfully to society. I remain grateful to every mentor, volunteer, and fellow member who walked this journey with me. The lessons I learned through AKSC continue to guide my work, my community service, and my outlook on life.
I will always cherish my journey with the Ambedkar King Study Circle, because it shaped not only what I do, but also who I have become.
How to Defeat the RSS? Challenge Brahminism to Counter Hindu Nationalism.
Mr. S. Karthikeyan, AKSC Member
‘brahminism’ is the axis of Hindutva, and the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) is the engine that drives it. The RSS was founded precisely for this purpose. In 1925, while India was fighting for freedom from British rule, Chitpavan brahmins founded the RSS to establish a Hindu Rashtra, while its real aim was to establish brahminical hegemony. As Dr. B.R. Ambedkar vividly captures, “... with Brahmanism, religion is a cloak to cover and hide its acquisitive politics.” The RSS can be defeated only by understanding its true aim: upholding ‘brahminism’.
Sitaram Yechury quotes:
“The centrality of Maharashtra in the formation of the ideology and organization of Hindutva in the mid-1920s might appear rather surprising, as Muslims here were a small minority and hardly a threat, and there had been no major riots in this region during the early 1920s. But Maharashtra had witnessed a powerful anti-Brahmin movement of backward castes from the 1870s onwards, when Jyotiba Phule had founded his Satyashodhak Samaj. By the 1920s, the Dalits, too, had started organizing themselves under Ambedkar. Hindutva in 1925 as in 1990-91, was an upper caste bid to restore a slipping hegemony.”
Anand Teltumbde writes:
“Far from being a tabula rasa for Hindu unity, it was a crucible of caste contestation and anti-Brahmin ferment. Against this backdrop, the RSS’s rhetoric of Hindu ekata (Hindu unity) can be read less as an inclusive reformulation of Hindu identity and more as a strategic counter-revolution, a project to neutralise the twin challenges posed by Muslim assertion and Dalit/non-Brahmin mobilization.”
Aijaz Ahmad writes:
“... highly influential political, social and educational movements were emerging already in late 19th century Maharashtra to combat the Brahminical caste order, for advancement of the untouchable castes and so on. This challenge to Brahminism served to unite much of the Brahmin elite to defend their caste privileges but, predictably, as defenders of ‘Hindus’ as such ... The majority of the founders and early leaders of the RSS turned out to be Maharashtrian Brahmins.”
Many leaders and scholars have similarly argued that the RSS was formed as a reaction to the anti-caste movement, which sought equal access to basic resources and political representation for historically marginalized people.
The most important feature of the RSS is its use of cultural hegemony to capture political power. It blends religious hatred with mythical cultural pride and rituals. Working on the cultural front to defeat the RSS is therefore an urgent task.
Formal coalitions and informal alliances exist to fight Hindu supremacy politically in the United States. However, they have yet to take serious initiatives to challenge brahminism on the cultural front. Such an initiative requires in-depth discussion and the right tactics and strategies. Consciously incorporating anti-caste culture into our practices and calling out brahminical practices must become an important feature of anti-Hindutva coalitions and alliances. Only by addressing these questions can such coalitions endure and ultimately uproot Hindutva.
References
What is Hindu Rashtra? - Sitaram Yechury, https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/what-is-hindu-rashtra/article23595906.ece
The RSS Was Also a Reaction to Early Dalit Mobilization - Anand Teltumbde, https://thewire.in/caste/the-rss-was-also-a-reaction-to-early-dalit-mobilization
India: Liberal Democracy and the Extreme Right - Aijaz Ahmed, https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/india-liberal-democracy-and-the-extreme-right/article27315369.ece
