Badri Narayan
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A profile
From the archives of India Today
Badri Narayan: Former Head, Dalit Resource Centre, G.B. Pant Social Sciences Institute, Allahabad
Education
M.A in History and Ph.D from Allahabad University. He also has a postdoctoral degree from Cambridge University.
Loves
Writing poetry. He contributes to the Hindi literary journal Tadbhav and has so far published two collections.
Recent work
Fascinating Hindutava: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation, 2009. It revolved around the Sangh Parivar’s efforts to mobilise the Dalit vote.
It’s not an accident that nine of the 12 papers at a seminar in Canberra last June on the politics of marginalisation were devoted to cultural anthropologist Badri Narayan’s findings. For the Fulbright scholar and Smuts Fellow at Cambridge is one of the few academics involved in actively documenting and analysing history as it happens.
Using unexplored sources like folklore, collective memory and oral history, he has created a fascinating study of Dalit politics, be it unearthing facets of the Mayawati phenomenon or understanding how the Sangh Parivar is trying to saffronise Dalit heroes.
Whether it be a text he has written that has become part of the syllabus at Oberlin College, USA, or his arguments against the bipartisan politicisation of Dalits, he is never too far from the headlines.
-by Farzand Ahmed
