Gavesanam deals with the Vedic discourse on many levels. It is mostly with the Rgvedic and the Yajurvedic texts, that is, with the hymns and the ritual texts, that it does so. The work shows a search for an insight into the highly cultivated poetic mind of the Rsis, which displays mystery and myth, knowledge and secrecy in their creations. The first two chapters illustrate with some clarity the method which is adopted in order to come to grips with a few of the symbolic and metaphorical, mythic and ritualistic texts and lays the foundation for the rest of the essay. The approach is interpretive and, therefore, necessarily speculative. In the main, the procedure is neither classificatory nor descriptive of the texts, since many scholars have done excellent work in this manner. The present exercise highlights the importance of the Vedic Ida, the Vedic World, the Vedic gods and goddesses like the Mitravaruna, Agni, Vak, Visnu, Sarasvat, Soma, and so on, from an interpretive point of view. A few figures make comprehension easier and more concrete. The work as a whole may be considered to be a long essay of progressive approximations, which means that the thoughts that are presented have to be corrected and complemented by further approximations in a truly academic and scientific spirit. Such an effort opens a new way for a better understanding and appreciation of the Vedic and the post-Vedic literature and culture.

One of twentieth-century India’s great polymaths, statesmen, and militant philosophers of equality, B. R. Ambedkar spent his life battling Untouchability and instigating the end of the caste system. In his 1948 book The Untouchables, he sought to trace the origin of the Dalit caste. Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men is an annotated selection from this work, just as relevant now, when the oppression of and discrimination against Dalits remains pervasive. Ambedkar offers a deductive, and at times a speculative, history to propose a genealogy of Untouchability. He contends that modern-day Dalits are descendants of those Buddhists who were fenced out of caste society and rendered Untouchable by a resurgent Brahminism since the fourth century BCE. The Brahmins, whose Vedic cult originally involved the sacrifice of cows, adapted Buddhist ahimsa and vegetarianism to stigmatize outcaste Buddhists who were consumers of beef. The outcastes were soon relegated to the lowliest of occupations and prohibited from participation in civic life. To unearth this lost history, Ambedkar undertakes a forensic examination of a wide range of Brahminic literature. Heavily annotated with an emphasis on putting Ambedkar and recent scholarship into conversation, Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men assumes urgency as India witnesses unprecedented violence against Dalits and Muslims in the name of cow protection.

Includes text and translations of manuscripts found in the library.