Recognizing the Importance and Impact of Dalit History Month
Title: Dalit History Month: Reclaiming Memory, Resisting Erasure
In the global struggle for equality and justice, memory becomes both weapon and wound. For the Dalit community in India — historically oppressed, systemically erased, and socially marginalized — history has long been a site of distortion and denial. What they were taught in schools didn’t reflect their reality; instead, it upheld the mythologies of dominance. But in the face of invisibility, powerlessness, and pain, a movement was born. That movement is Dalit History Month — a radical act of remembrance, a collective reclaiming of narratives, and a creative uprising against erasure.
What Is Dalit History Month?
Established in 2015 by pioneering anti-caste activists including Thenmozhi Soundararajan and Christina Dhanuja, Dalit History Month is observed throughout April. Inspired in part by Black History Month in the United States, it aims to remember, celebrate, and educate about the often-silenced history, contributions, and resilience of Dalits — a term reclaimed by communities that have historically been oppressed under India’s rigid caste system.
Dalit History Month is not a state-sponsored cultural initiative. It is a grassroots intervention — a bold counter-narrative to dominant caste historiography that has largely ignored or misrepresented Dalit creators, thinkers, and revolutionaries. It is not intended as tokenistic inclusion but as a rupture — a refusal to negotiate dignity and representation under systems of caste apartheid.
History as Crime Scene: The Politics of Erasure
As echoed by voices like Siddhesh Gautam, a Dalit artist and Ambedkarite thinker, “History has often been a crime scene.” It is a poignant reminder that history, when controlled by the powerful, can be a tool of oppression rather than illumination. Textbooks often glorify upper-caste heroes while ignoring or mischaracterizing Dalit icons. Institutions of culture, policy, and academia have rarely centered marginalized voices.
The pain of being excluded is compounded by being falsified — when Dalits do appear in mainstream accounts, they’re cast as either victims or villains, but almost never as visionaries. This distortion is not incidental; it is a form of epistemicide — the systematic destroying of knowledge systems — a colonial and Brahmanical inheritance.
Dalits and Adivasis were denied their own stories. But they resisted, quietly and courageously, through oral traditions, folk art, communal memory, and activism. Dalit History Month doesn’t ask for these stories to be included with a footnote. It demands that they be acknowledged, uplifted, and allowed to transform our understanding of Indian identity and nationhood.
Recovering Forgotten Names, Reigniting Movements
Dalit History Month breathes life into names that mainstream Indian historiography has often failed to mention. It is a time to remember not just revolutionary men like Dr. B. R. Ambedkar — the brilliant architect of the Indian Constitution — but also the women and grassroots activists who have been pillars of community resistance.
– Savitribai Phule and Fatima Sheikh: Among the first women educators in India, they established schools for Dalit and Muslim girls in the 19th century despite facing social boycott and violence.
– Ramabai Ambedkar: A figure of personal sacrifice, she endured hardship so that Ambedkar could lead a life of thought and action for social change.
– Jhalkari Bai and Uda Devi: Brave Dalit women freedom fighters who took up arms during India’s struggle against British colonialism, yet remain absent from mainstream nationalist narratives.
– Babytai Kamble: One of the earliest Dalit women autobiographers, whose literary work exposed layers of caste and gender oppression from a personal standpoint.
– Birsa Munda: An Adivasi youth who led the Ulgulan (rebellion) against both the British and exploitative landlords, asserting Indigenous identity and resistance.
– Rohith Vemula: A PhD scholar whose institutional murder in 2016 sparked nationwide protests against caste-based discrimination in education.
Each name is a challenge — to textbooks, to institutions, to collective amnesia. These stories are not additions to already-established history; they are critical stories in themselves that redefine what history must mean in a caste-conscious society.
Creating Through Resistance: The Role of Art
Under oppressive systems, the act of creation itself becomes political. Dalit History Month has become a platform not just for intellectual education but creative expression. Artists like Siddhesh Gautam, also known as “Bakery Prasad,” are redefining Indian visual culture through explicitly Ambedkarite aesthetics. His bold, politically infused illustrations commemorate thinkers like Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule, and movements like Ulgulan and Safai Karamchari Andolan (the campaign to end manual scavenging).
Dalit artists are not “asking to be seen.” They are seizing space — in gallery walls,