Seeking Begumpura Analysis

Gail Omvedt’s(2008) rejection of Orientalist, nationalist and Hindutva impulses to ‘reinvent’ India. In her Seeking Begumpura, The Social Vision of Anti-Caste Intellectuals, argue that ‘all we need to do is take up the India envisioned by its dalit intellectuals and leaders-the Begumpura of Ravidas,the Bali Rajya of Phule,the Dravidastan of Periyar,the Buddhist commonwealth of the sakya Buddhists and Ambedkar’s Prabuddha Bharat. These are contrasted with Gandhi’s village utopia of Ram Rajya,Nehru’s Hindutva laced socialism and Savarkar’s territorialist Hindu Rashtra. Finally Omvedt emphasizes the continued relevance of the vision of the anti-caste intellectuals in the era of globalization. Most interestingly, writes the twentieth Century Celebrity Kancha Ilaiah(1996) that “Instead of depending on Western methods, Phule, Ambedkar and Periyar spoke and wrote on the day- to- day- experiences of the Dalit castes. He has made a pertinent point in this regard, stressing that 'personal experience brings out reality in a striking way'. He would argue that this is the only possible and indeed the most authentic way in which the deconstruction and reconstruction of history can take place (Why I am not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy,Culture and Political

He writes that recognizing the power of culture in the politics of transformation, they (Phule,Periyar, and Ambedkar) had emancipatory visions that embraced the whole of Indian experience, and stand firmly as an alternative to Tilak-Savarkarite, Gandhian, and Nehruvian visions”.Karl Marx says that “the ruling ideas of society are the ideas of the ruling