Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 224
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-0-7425-0881-1 • Paperback • December 2000 • $47.00 • (£36.00)
978-0-585-39406-0 • eBook • July 2002 • $44.50 • (£34.00)
Vasant Moon is a retired civil servant and Dalit activist. He is the editor of 17 volumes of Dr. AmbedkarOs writings and speeches in English. Gail Omvedt is a freelance writer and frequent visiting professor of sociology. Eleanor Zelliot is Laird Bell Professor of History emerita at Carleton College.
Chapter 1 The Neighborhood
Chapter 2 Fearless
Chapter 3 Callousness and Clouds
Chapter 4 The Heat and Rain of Childhood
Chapter 5 Dev Master's Curse Falls
Chapter 6 Religious Hymns
Chapter 7 Shooting Star
Chapter 8 Chickpeas and Parched Rice
Chapter 9 The Unconquered
Chapter 10 Parade of Lions and Tigers
Chapter 11 Foreshadowing
Chapter 12 Holy Victory
Chapter 13 Robust and Rollicking
Chapter 14 Sports and Study
Chapter 15 Pigeons and Politics
Chapter 16 Climax
Chapter 17 Wrath
Chapter 18 Cultural Transformation
Chapter 19 An Unspoiled Picture
Chapter 20 The Welfare of the World
Chapter 21 For What? For Books!
Chapter 22 I Begin to Write
Chapter 23 The End of Umar Khayam
Chapter 24 Rising Moon
Chapter 25 The Vows of Religion
Chapter 26 Falling Star
Chapter 27 Tying the Knot
Chapter 28 The Spinning Top
Chapter 29 Summing Up
There are few such autobiographies, especially in English, which makes Moon's memories of sleeping on village roads side by side with neighbors, of his mother waking at 4:30 a.m. to work in the mill and of the kindness of certain teachers particularly valuable....
— Los Angeles Times
Omvedt's translation is true to the original Marathi.
— Ravi Shenoy; Library Journal
This book is a welcome first step towards increasing our understanding of a much-neglected aspect of Indian life.
— Times Literary Supplement
Offer(s) an accessible glimpse of the life and times of one Dalit and the people he grew up with.
— Journal of Asian Studies
His [Moon's] autobiography, written in his native Marathi and translated into English, vividly describes life in an urban Indian slum and gives a glimpse of the internal politics that accompanied the independence movement.
— Pacific Reader
Vasant Moon's powerful memoir of youth in the slums of central India is by turns disturbing, entertaining, engrossing, and deeply inspiring. Moving beneath Moon's sharply etched tale of material deprivation, caste conflict, and neighborhood politics is the inexorable rise of Dalit (Untouchable) militancy and spirituality—illuminated by the towering figure of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, champion of the poor and leader of the Buddhist revival in India. This book puts living flesh on the bones of recent Indian socialhistoriography.
— Christopher Queen, Harvard University
There are few such autobiographies, especially in English, which makes Moon's memories of sleeping on village roads side by side with neighbors, of his mother waking at 4:30 a.m. to work in the mill and of the kindness of certain teachersparticularly valuable.
— Los Angeles Times
A powerful personal and collective memory of caste oppression and struggle in India from the 1930s to the 1950s. . . . Both as a historical and as a literary document, there is much to consider in this thought provoking and intenselymoving memoir.
— Shalini Ramachandran; Race & Class
-an engaging and accessible life story covering the sweep of twentieth-century India
-the authentic narrative voice draws students into primary source material -vivid descriptions of daily life bring India alive