Write short notes with a sociological perspective: Different forms of Dalit assertion. (2016)
Assertion differs from protest: protest demands redress, assertion publicly performs an identity the social order denies. Ghanshyam Shah (Social Movements in India, 1990) notes there has never been a single Dalit movement; what runs through the many is a common claim to equality, self-dignity and the end of untouchability. Its forms are plural and cumulative.
Ritual and symbolic assertion
Claiming denied public space: the Mahad satyagraha (1927) for water from a public tank and the burning of the Manusmriti, the Kalaram temple entry (1930), and today the everyday acts that provoke reprisal — a Dalit groom riding a horse, a village seat contested. B. R. Ambedkar rejected the alternative route of Sanskritisation, which M. N. Srinivas showed yields positional and not structural change.
Religious exit
The mass conversion to Buddhism at Nagpur in 1956 turned rejection into a new collective identity outside Hinduism’s sanction. Kancha Ilaiah’s Why I Am Not a Hindu (1996) restated the refusal in cultural terms.
Cultural and literary assertion
The Dalit Panthers (Bombay, 1972) made Dalit literature — poetry, the testimonial autobiography, theatre — a weapon against upper-caste literary authority, asserting the epistemic value of lived humiliation.
Political and electoral assertion
Kanshi Ram’s BAMCEF (1971) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (1984) produced a Dalit-led government in Uttar Pradesh in 2007 (206 of 403 seats, 30.43 per cent of the vote). Sudha Pai (Dalit Assertion and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution, 2002) shows that statues, memorials and public space became currency of dignity. Newer vehicles include the Bhim Army, whose Chandrashekhar Azad won Nagina in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
Legal and constitutional assertion
Using the SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 and the Constitution itself as mass text; the nationwide Bharat Bandh of 2 April 2018 compelled Parliament to restore provisions the Supreme Court had diluted.
Campus, digital and economic assertion
Social-media-borne student mobilisation after Rohith Vemula’s death (2016) and the Una flogging (2016) has produced Karnataka’s Rohith Vemula (Prevention of Exclusion or Injustice) Bill, 2025; a parallel entrepreneurial strand seeks dignity through capital rather than the state.
Critique
Gopal Guru (“Dalit Women Talk Differently”, 1995) warned that assertion can silence Dalit women within the movement. Anand Teltumbde argues symbolic assertion has outpaced material change: the NCRB recorded 57,789 cases of crime against Scheduled Castes in 2023, and State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024) confirmed that gains concentrate within some sub-castes.
Conclusion
The forms of assertion have moved from ritual to cultural to electoral to legal, each widening the arena without abandoning the earlier one. Their cumulative achievement is a secure public identity; their common unfinished task is converting that identity into land, capital and safety.