The Dalit Project
Archive
Pieces here aren't retracted — every one is still fully accurate and still fully listed in its own vertical. This page surfaces them a second time as foundational, evergreen work, or as earlier coverage a newer piece has since carried further, the way a serious publication's own back catalog works.
Land, Labour & Economic Justice
- October 2025Land Promised in 1892, Still Not Held: The Unfinished Business of Dalit Land Allotment in Tamil Nadu
An 1892 government order allotted over a million acres of land to Dalit communities across the Madras Presidency. More than 130 years later, they hold less than a tenth of it — and are still fighting, case by case, to claim what's legally already theirs.
- October 2025The Invisible Hierarchy: What Casteism Looks Like on a Tech Team
It rarely arrives as a slur. On a tech team, casteism looks like a review that never comes, a promotion cycle with the same names, an idea absorbed into the room and credited to someone else. The industry's self-image as a meritocracy is what makes it effective at hiding this.
- November 2025Inside India's New Caste Economy
India's tech economy is supposed to be a clean break from the old hierarchies. Look at who founds the companies, controls the venture capital, and runs the engineering teams, and the same pattern recurs — just wearing a credential instead of a caste name.
Representation & Power
- November 2025Zero Out of 121 Is Not a Pipeline Problem
Zero of 121 leadership roles in India's newsrooms are held by a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe journalist — and the data shows the loss isn't at the classroom, it's at the hiring door.
Gender Justice
- January 2026Paid Less for the Same Field: Wage Discrimination Against Dalit Women in Rural Labour
Independent wage surveys years apart keep finding the same pattern: Dalit women in rural India are paid less than men, and less than other women, for the same work in the same field.
Cultural Assertion
- December 2025Anti-Caste Cinema Doesn't Need Bollywood's Permission
Tamil cinema's anti-caste filmmakers built their own institutions and audiences before Mumbai noticed — calling that a 'crossover' gets the story backwards.
- January 2026A movement's own posters are not the same record as its histories
A New York exhibition space once ran a public program on an archive of Dalit Panther print material: posters, little magazines, poetry, most of it uncatalogued outside private shelves. A movement's own ephemera and a later historian's synthesis are different kinds of document, and they do not always agree.
Ambedkarite Ideas
- September 2025How Caste Began: Ambedkar's Endogamy Thesis
The most durable account of where caste comes from was written by a 25-year-old at a Columbia seminar in 1916. Ambedkar isolated a single mechanism — endogamy — as caste's essence, and made a century of subsequent theory look like elaboration around a missing centre.
- October 2025Whose Introduction Does Ambedkar Need?
When Navayana reissued Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste in 2014, Arundhati Roy's introduction ran longer than the text itself. What that says about who gets to explain Ambedkar to a general reader.
- December 2025The Word Disappears. The System Remains.
Nobody says "caste" at the dinner table or the job interview anymore. Something still shapes who sits where and who gets called back. Caste didn't leave those rooms — it learned to speak in a different grammar.