Identity, Rights, and Awareness

Reviews / Votes

The persistence of the problem of caste calls for innovative theories and more data for its eradication. Identity, Rights, and Awareness is a welcome contribution in this direction. The first book in the series Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding in Asia, it builds on the groundbreaking contribution of Johan Galtung. . . . Though a comparative study of three anti-caste movements is itself a stupendous task, Identity, Rights, and Awareness also provides readers with a detailed analysis of each movement. . . . Jeremy Rinker has conscientiously elevated TBM, BAMCEF, and PVCHCR organizations, as well as their intel-lectuals, members, and movements, to take their rightful place in the global academy. * Journal Of Buddhist Ethics * Jeremy Rinker offers a fascinating picture of the diversity of anticaste activism in contemporary India. Focusing on the varying narratives of oppression voiced by Buddhist, rights-based, and radical activists, he shows how each can enlighten and empower Dalit communities. Rinker asks probing questions about the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and about ways of reconciling them. This is a book not only for India specialists but also for scholars of social movements and activists within those movements. -- Clifford Bob, Duquesne University Identity, Rights, and Awareness engages with anticaste movements and activists to unearth the complexities of social justice discourse in India. It makes narratives of historically persecuted population audible by highlighting methods employed by them to change the existing exploitative social system via establishing new organizations and identities. Above all, it opens new theoretical and methodological debates on these issues among academics world over. -- Vivek Kumar, Jawaharlal Nehru University Rinker's work underscores the indispensability of education as an empowering tool for Dalits-a reality that is emphasized as a critical universal in the resistance identity of the three organizations. This is reiterated by a quote from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar: "The backward classes have come to realize that after all education is the greatest material benefit for which they can fight... that without education [their] existence is not safe" (p. 12). Although caste discrimination continues in India, this book is an asset to scholars, practitioners, activists, and politicians working to mitigate caste hierarchy. Within that context, this book is a milestone in peace studies. * Peace Research: The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies *