Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals

In Seeking Begumpura, Gail Omvedt reconstructs five centuries of anti-caste thought through the social worlds its intellectuals wanted to build, not only the oppression they opposed. “Begumpura,” the city without sorrow imagined in the poetry associated with Ravidas, becomes a name for egalitarian desire. Bhakti figures and later thinkers such as Jyotirao Phule, Iyothee Thass, Periyar, and B. R. Ambedkar appear in a long, internally diverse argument against Brahmanical hierarchy.

Omvedt treats songs, religious dissent, movement organization, history, and constitutional politics as forms of theory. Anti-caste traditions questioned graded inequality, ritual authority, property, labor, gender, and the social organization of knowledge; they also generated positive visions of dignity, fellowship, and democracy. Savitribai Phule and struggles over women’s education remind readers that abolishing caste requires transforming marriage, sexuality, family, and access to learning rather than adding gender after the central political work is done.

The breadth of the genealogy creates debate: thinkers separated by region, language, religion, and political strategy cannot be folded into one seamless tradition, and specialists may contest particular emphases or omissions. The book should be read alongside Dalit-Bahujan and feminist voices writing from their own locations. Its major contribution is to reject a history in which emancipation arrives only from colonial liberalism or elite nationalism. Oppressed communities were already theorizing worlds beyond caste and arguing over how freedom should be lived.