B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste system. It offers a scholarly critique of Hindu scriptures, scriptures that sanction a rigidly hierarchical and iniquitous social system. Arundhati Roy introduces this extensively annotated edition in 'The Doctor and the Saint, ’ examining the persistence of caste in modern India, and how the conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi continues to resonate. Roy breathes new life into Ambedkar’s anti-caste utopia, and says that without a Dalit revolution, India will continue to be hobbled by systemic inequality.
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Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, and has written several nonfiction books, including Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers and Walking with the Comrades. She is a contributor to the Verso anthology Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize.