‘Rooted in the soil’: defining Dalitness as an ethic and worldview
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article, written by two Dalit scholars from different religions and nationalities, reflects on the contours of Dalitness as an ethic and worldview. Drawing on Dalit and Black writers, they put forward the praxis of Dalitness as ‘rooted in the soil’ to present Dalitness as negotiated, as lived, and dreamt rather than as always understood on dominant-caste society’s dehumanizing terms as broken, crushed, and damaged. Thinking through the praxis of rooted in the soil, they argue, offers methodological and ethical challenges that should concern readers and writers interested in questions and alternatives of awareness, intention, worldview, method, and material life/s rooted in communal imaginations of beauty and remedy amidst violence of Brahminism. In order to not essentialize such Dalitness as guaranteed by those born outside the caste system, they turn to Dalit novelist Vauhini Vara’s much-celebrated novel, The Immortal King Rao, to reflect on the function of Dalitness of the main protagonist of the novel, King Rao. They argue that beyond a label, Dalitness is a dynamic lived reality – a reality that emerges alongside an itinerary of contradictions that Dalit people deal with throughout their lives and a reclamation of their humanity in and through critiques of structures of domination in a caste-hierarchized world.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".