Ghasidas followed in the footsteps of Ravidas. While Ravidas stayed within Kashi, Ghasidas travelled on foot throughout Chhattisgarh, teaching. He taught the exploited Dalits to develop moral discipline and to liberate themselves socially and spiritually with his Satnam spirituality.

The exact teachings of Ghasidas are unknown, but the merit of any social movement is to be judged not by …

The greatness of Ravidas needs no telling. Just recently a Sikh follower of his was killed in Austria by the Brahminical forces and Dalits revolted across entire North India. Ravidas was born in Kashi, which was under Aryan, casteist occupation. In the city of Shiva, which had become the center of casteism (the antithesis of Shaevism), Ravidas created the …

Chokhamela was the first known Dalit revolutionary in India. He achieved an inner, spiritual revolution. In one of his later poems, he writes that in the beginning he was an outcaste who worshipped a stone in a temple, but now he found himself filling the sky and universe and he worshipped the Lord as his very own Self. This inner …

Basava founded one of the most militant, anti-caste movements in Indian history. He also started a new trend, because he was able to attract and create other great personalities to his movement. Though born a Brahmin, Basava was the first to renounce the temples and roam the Dalit parts of Kalyan, Karnataka. He mixed with the most oppressed and despised …

Nandanar was born in the Dalit slum village of Athanur of Tamil Nadu. He is known as the first hero in the Dalit resistance struggle. Nandanar lived in a time when Dalit voices were never heard in social life. It was an era in which Dalits gained only partial freedom by converting to Buddhism or Jainism. However for Dalits trapped …

While Mahaviira Jain was perhaps the first person to denounce casteism, it is Buddha who propagated these ideas to the common people. Buddha was an existential or spiritual revolutionary because he became a monk in order to remove suffering rather than to escape it. He learned Samkhya yoga under the Adivasi sage, Sainjaya and attained the final goal of this …

In 1886, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee presented Krishna as a historical hero in order to create an upper-caste Hindu (anti-Muslim) nationalism. In 1959, Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar presented Shiva as a historical figure in order to end (global) Aryan arrogance and establish universal humanism. According to Shrii Sarkar (in his seminal discourse “Tantra and Indo-Aryan Civilization”), Lord Shiva was born, 7500 …