Abstract
Religions sprout from philosophies that aspire for universal love and harmony. However, it is not uncommon to witness the misconstrued understanding and, even manipulation, for political causes when religions percolate into the praxis of everyday life. I look at the misconstrued understanding of Hinduism as a political manipulation that helps the upper castes to serve their causes in maintaining caste structure and power over Dalits. Even Dalits manipulate Hinduism to serve their petty causes and to ensure small benefits and even survival. Babasaheb Ambedkar was the representative voice of Dalits who had famously converted from Hinduism to Neo-Buddhism, and this conversion was based on the political need to uplift the status of Dalits and to redress the wrongs done to them by the hierarchical system of caste. However, Ambedkar’s conversion to Neo-Buddhism led to a new religious identity that created fissure among Hindu Dalits and Neo-Buddhists among ex-untouchables who were already divided into various sub-caste groups.
This research article looks at the core concepts of Hinduism and highlights how, even when caste, as a rigid and fixed system, was not sanctioned by the Hindu philosophy, it was made significant to serve the political purpose. I analyse two Dalit autobiographies in this light. Dalit autobiographies are the celebrated sites for personal as well as political. They represent authentic expressions of the lived life of Dalits. The selected autobiographies act as an appropriate source of evidence from which the working of religion in the day-to-day life of Dalits can be analysed.
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