Gail Omvedt: US sociologist who ‘lived by her principles’ among India’s poor | Global development

On the village of Kasegaon, in India’s rural western area of Maharashtra, large crowds turned up for the funeral in August of a US-born, white sociologist whom many native individuals noticed as one among their very own.

Many of the mourners have been Dalits, who belong to the bottom caste in Indian society, beforehand deemed “untouchables”.

Gail Omvedt, who had made Kasegaon her residence for greater than 50 years and died there aged 80, was a distinguished determine within the anti-caste and ladies’s rights motion. She championed probably the most marginalised in Indian society. As one scholar put it, she “really practise[d] what feminists name prefigurative politics, ie, dwell by your rules”.

Omvedt renounced her US citizenship within the Eighties. She wished to dwell, marry and die among the many individuals she fought for and wrote about.

“[She] left all her US socio-cultural privilege [to] work for Indian Dalits,” says Somnath Waghmare, a Maharashtra-born film-maker who labored carefully with Omvedt whereas making a documentary about her life, which is but to be launched. “Indian Dalits love and respect her by [their] hearts.”

Waghmare says about 1,000 individuals attended Omvedt’s funeral. Her demise drew media consideration in India and all over the world, as students and activists paid tribute to a sociologist who was distinctive in her area.

Gail Marie Omvedt was born on 2 August 1941 in Minnesota. Her PhD in sociology from the College of California, Berkeley, centered totally on Savitribai Phule, who was referred to as the mom of Indian feminism, and her husband, Jyotirao Phule. The Phules, who got here from Maharashtra, have been amongst these main the Indian anti-caste wrestle and had devoted their lives to what was referred to as the most important non-Brahmin inhabitants.

Omvedt, who was concerned in anti-Vietnam conflict protests whereas residing within the US, moved to India within the Nineteen Seventies and settled in Maharashtra, marrying right into a household of freedom fighters. Her husband, Bharat Patankar, is the son of activists Indumati and Krantivir Babuji Patankar. Omvedt realized to talk flawless Marathi, the native language, and in addition spoke Hindi.

Cynthia Stephen, Indian author and poet, describes Omvedt’s mental legacy as distinctive and unparalleled. “It begins together with her personal journey rising up throughout the civil rights motion within the US after which being impressed by her trainer to check the anti-caste individuals’s actions in India.

“However what’s much more notable is how she was in a position to transcend her color, caste, class and academic privilege, virtually throw all these benefits away, and mix in with the lives of the agricultural working courses, the ladies, and the Dalits and the Adivasis, figuring out with them to a level that even most Indians didn’t,” she says.

Bharat Patankar and Omvedt labored on native and nationwide causes and co-founded Shramik Mukti Dal, or Toilers’ Liberation League, which began a mass social motion throughout India, highlighting the reason for farmers, drought-hit villages and dam-displaced communities. Omvedt devoted most of her power to gender and the ladies’s actions. She was additionally a scholar of Buddhist philosophy.

Omvedt was additionally identified for her work on BR Ambedkar, the social reformer and father of India’s post-independence structure.

Stephen, who can be a gender and growth coverage researcher, mentioned Indian scholarship, “in thrall to each Brahminical worldviews and the highly effective affect of left-oriented ideologies, principally utterly ignored the work of all anti-caste and lowered-caste thinkers and writers”.

“It was due to the work of students like Gail … Eleanor Zelliot and Rosalind O’Hanlon that these works noticed the sunshine of day and got here into the tutorial limelight. So the world owes a debt to those girls who introduced the very best of mental traditions but in addition an anti-colonial perspective to the scholarship and mental outputs of the Dalit-Bahujan scholarship in India, most of which was largely ignored by the Indian academy.”

Omvedt wrote greater than a dozen books, most notably Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr Ambedkar and the Dalit Motion in Colonial India, which, says Stephen, “spans two centuries of wrestle by the lowered castes, proper as much as the final days of Dr Ambedkar’s life and work”.

“That is of specific significance because it highlights the truth that the frequent individuals have been very a lot within the vanguard of the wrestle for liberation, not solely from the British colonisers but in addition from the social, political and spiritual buildings, which have been exploiting them for generations and centuries,” she says.

Paying tribute to Omvedt, Manisha Desai, head of sociology on the College of Connecticut, says: “Past her long run and enduring dedication, what was distinctive about her work from immediately’s vantage level is how little she centered on problems with particular person identities and the way a lot she sought to grasp the complexities of every group relatively than see them as homogenous entities in binary opposition to one another.”

Omvedt additionally influenced feminism in India and globally, says Desai. “In India and internationally Gail highlighted the significance of not simply colonial but in addition precolonial gender hierarchies as they have been reinterpreted by colonial capitalism, and later postcolonial and neoliberal capitalism; the failures of nationalist actions and of the left in addressing gender justice; the significance of seeing the variations amongst girls, even poor girls, Dalit girls weren’t undifferentiated; the significance of entry to land for his or her materials wellbeing; acknowledging girls’s information and drawing upon native cultural traditions of protest and wrestle,” she says.

Desai says Omvedt’s guide, In search of Begumpura, was notably attention-grabbing – Begumpura refers to an Indian utopia for a spot with no ache.

“To dedicate your life to a individuals and struggles in a land removed from your personal, be directly humble and write theoretically refined texts, really practise what feminists name prefigurative politics, ie, dwell by your rules, when you work for the revolution, are exceptional qualities that few practise. It was an honour to have met her,” says Desai.