Bringing Sharad Patil’s Anti Caste Writing to the World

Professor Rahul Sarwate of the School of Arts and Sciences is one of the three winners of the 2022 New India Foundation Translation Fellowship dedicated to bringing non-fiction works from Indian languages into English. Professor Sarwate will be translating Sharad Patil’s Marxvad: Phule-Ambedkarvaad.

This year, the New India Foundation announced its inaugural Translation Fellowships dedicated to bringing non-fiction works from Indian languages to English. Amounting to a stipend of Rs 6 lakh for each project and awarded for a six-month period, the Fellowship also offers an opportunity for direct mentorship under the Language Expert Committee and the NIF Trustees, apart from providing financial, editorial, legal, and publishing support.

Sharad Patil, who passed on in 2014, was known as one of the finest anti caste intellectuals/activists in the post Ambedkar period and the founder of the Satyashodhak Communist Party. About the narrative in Marxvad: Phule-Ambedkarvaad, Professor Sarwate says, “Sharad Patil seeks to build a Shudra philosophical worldview that borrows from multiple indigenous intellectual traditions, from Buddha to Phule. Patil presents an intellectual history of India that has largely been ignored by modern academic writings. I dearly hope that this translation will open up fresh ways of recovering and engaging with India’s variety of intellectual and political pasts.”

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