| Summary/Abstract |
This article analyses the history of Marathi-speaking India after 1600 in order to understand why Dalit and Bahujan movements first arose in this region before spreading across South Asia. It argues that this was an explicable consequence of a tradition of social action long extant at the village and supra-village levels—that self-organisation had been yoked to hegemonic power, but not thereby erased. I then invoke Antonio Gramsci’s concept of subalterns as subordinated fractions of a larger whole to analyse this phenomenon. Finally, I trace the breaks and continuities that enabled the leadership of Jyotirao Phule and B.R. Ambedkar.
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