Unjustified Critique from the Right

Twenty-five years after I had left Delhi University, a former colleague of mine wrote an article ridiculing my participation in the weekly seminars in the Department of Sociology and the Centre of Advanced Study for raising the question of class. Pleading guilty as charged, I replied that class matters. A few years later, in a review article on The Radical in Ambedkar, the author isolated my essay in the book to argue that it shows the bankruptcy of Marxism to understand caste. In reply, I wrote that non-Marxist studies of caste, including Dalit studies following Ambedkar, end up mystifying caste. To the contrary, Marxism demystifies caste. The so-called bankruptcy of Marxism to understand caste is nothing but the bankruptcy of non-Marxist sociology and historiography to understand either caste or Marxism.