On a scorching April afternoon in 1936, a crowd gathered in Lahore to hear a speech that would never be delivered.
Since 2015, every April, the month of Ambedkar바카라™s birth, Dalit History Month is observed globally바카라”not only to remember Ambedkar바카라™s legacy, but to assert the long-buried, violently erased histories of Dalit resistance and intellectual contribution.
On a scorching April afternoon in 1936, a crowd gathered in Lahore to hear a speech that would never be delivered.
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the towering jurist and anti-caste revolutionary, had been invited to preside over the annual conference of the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal, a Hindu reformist group committed, at least nominally, to challenging caste hierarchies. But the organisers바카라”anxious about the radical content of his address바카라”eventually withdrew the invitation. The speech, which Ambedkar had titled Annihilation of Caste, was deemed too incendiary for their sensibilities. It condemned not only the caste system, but the very foundations of Hindu orthodoxy that sustained it.
Later that year, Ambedkar, in open defiance of his censorship, would go on to publish the speech himself: 바카라śI do not believe that we can build up a free society in India so long as there is a trace of this ill-treatment and suppression of one class by another.바카라ť He wrote.
Nearly a century later, His words continue to resonate as the movement for caste equality, resistance, and justice fights on.
Since 2015, every April, the month of Ambedkar바카라™s birth, Dalit History Month is observed globally바카라”not only to remember Ambedkar바카라™s legacy, but to assert the long-buried, violently erased histories of Dalit resistance and intellectual contribution.
The idea emerged in 2015, sparked by a collective of Dalit women scholars and artists, including Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Christina Dhanaraj, Maari Zwick-Maitreyi, and Sanghapali Aruna. Inspired by Black History Month in the United States, the movement sought to create a similar space for Dalit histories바카라”stories that had long been excluded from official textbooks, academic syllabi, and public memory. But Dalit History Month is not a carbon copy of its American counterpart. It emerges from a specific Indian reality, where caste functions not as an old wound but a living system, mutating through institutions, languages, and even progressive politics.
While its epicentre was initially digital바카라”with zines, social media campaigns, and oral history projects바카라”the impact has since rippled across classrooms, campuses, public lectures, and community festivals in India and the diaspora.
For centuries, the writing of Indian history has been dominated by the upper-caste, whether in colonial bureaucracies or post-Independence nationalist historiography. The result is a vast erasure of Bhakti poet-saints like Ravidas and Chokhamela, of anti-caste reformers like Iyothee Thass and Savitribai Phule, of contemporary thinkers like Sharmila Rege, Gail Omvedt, and Suraj Yengde. Where Dalit figures do appear, they are often decontextualised, sanitised, or tokenised. Even Ambedkar바카라”whose intellectual stature is unparalleled바카라”is routinely reduced to the symbolic role of 바카라śFather of the Constitution,바카라ť his radicalism obscured under layers of nationalistic piety.
Dalit History Month is not merely about representation. It is about reclamation. It is an assertion of epistemic sovereignty바카라”the right to name, to narrate, and to know on one바카라™s own terms.