Reflections on the life and work of scholar-activist Gail Omvedt

The book is a celebration of a life lived full and in adventure. The adventure is not just about how an American university graduate from a White middle-class family in Minneapolis travelled to India, found a soulmate in a radical activist from rural Maharashtra, became involved in peasant mobilisations and anti-caste agendas, and set up home in a village in Western India.

It is also about a University of California, Berkeley graduate, schooled in the radical campus politics of 1960s America, immersing herself in the anti-caste movements of Maharashtra, reading class into caste and vice versa, recognising the radical potential in a farmers’ movement (Shetkari Sanghatana), writing histories of less-remembered peoples, movements, spiritual traditions, and finally, retrieving from the past memories of forgotten ancestors to present visions of a futurist Begumpura, an abode free of sorrows, an egalitarian landscape.

If scholars (fellow travellers) Uma Chakravarti, V Geetha, Kalpana Kannabiran, Vibhuti Patel, and Surinder S Jodhka among others speak about Gail’s intellectual journeys and the insights she produced in her academic writings, a later generation of Dalit activists are fuelled by her vision of Begumpura.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of Equality Labs, a Dalit civil rights organisation, writes: “Her intellect and practical but principled praxis has intergenerational impacts. As she transitions from elder to ancestor, we will build on the world of resistance her words broke open for Dalits like me. In her memory, we will continue shaping strong, growing movements for caste equity here in the US, and across the global South Asian diaspora — anywhere caste-oppressed people require freedom from harm and the hope of a vibrant future.”

Jodhka writes about the scholar Gail who “had continued to remain outside the institutional context of the university teaching departments and research organisations shine on complex social phenomena”.

Chakravarti’s essay is an inquiry into her own evolution as a scholar and the pivotal role Gail played in that journey. It plots Gail’s own intellectual excursions in the worlds of scholarship concerning caste, class, gender, patriarchy, women, land relations and ownership, farming, alternate histories of Maharashtra and so on.

As Geetha writes, “Her (Gail’s) studies of Phule and his times, the non-brahmans in Bombay union politics, the relationship between communists, nationalists and the non-brahman movement are very valuable for what they tell us about the emergence of a distinctive third sort of politics in late colonial India. As much as nationalism and communism, anti-caste assertion was a response to the times, and its adherents straddled several political traditions, seeking to align them along the plane of a common justice.”

Partner Bharat Patankar’s long memoir is a note of love about a soulmate who was family, intellectual companion, and fellow organiser. It is both a personal story as well as intellectual history, of the restive ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, when new mobilisations, theoretical inquiries and social movements were challenging established ideas of working class politics. The article travels through the United States and India, different time zones, with no lines separating private and public worlds, personal and political inquiries.

Patankar writes: “Gail brings forward that there is no basic contradiction between Ambedkarism and Marxism. She does this in a very tender and loving manner which she learned from Buddha himself and Raidas, Tukoba, Soyrabai, Chokhamela, and Namdev-Jananabai. This is the bond that held us together throughout our lives and made our companionship romantic and creative.”

This book is about ideas, friendships, politics, music, food, hope. It brims with affection for a romantic humanist (as Prachi describes her mother) who loved people without inhibitions and imagined a world without borders and inequities.

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