![]() ![]() ![]() To unearth this lost history, Ambedkar undertakes a forensic examination of a wide range of Brahminic literature. ![]() The outcastes were soon relegated to the lowliest of occupations and prohibited from participation in civic life. The Brahmins, whose Vedic cult originally involved the sacrifice of cows, adapted Buddhist ahimsa and vegetarianism to stigmatize outcaste Buddhists who were consumers of beef. He contends that modern-day Dalits are descendants of those Buddhists who were fenced out of caste society and rendered Untouchable by a resurgent Brahminism since the fourth century BCE. Ambedkar offers a deductive, and at times a speculative, history to propose a genealogy of Untouchability. Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men is an annotated selection from this work, just as relevant now, when the oppression of and discrimination against Dalits remains pervasive. In his 1948 book The Untouchables, he sought to trace the origin of the Dalit caste. Ambedkar spent his life battling Untouchability and instigating the end of the caste system. ![]() One of twentieth-century India’s great polymaths, statesmen, and militant philosophers of equality, B. ![]()
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