Reading and writing kept my spirit unbroken: Anand Teltumbde

Anand Teltumbde is a scholar, writer, and public intellectual whose work spans technology, management, and social justice. He has authored 33 books and contributed extensively to leading journals and periodicals, offering sharp theoretical insights on caste, oppression, and contemporary India. As a committed activist, he has played a significant role in India’s civil rights movement.

Born into a poor, landless labourer family, Teltumbde overcame formidable odds to study at Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur (Bachelor of Engineering), and the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (MBA). He earned a PhD in Management on cybernetic modelling and went on to hold senior corporate positions, including Executive Director at Bharat Petroleum Corporation and Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer at Petronet LNG, before moving to academics. He served as a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and later as a senior professor at the Goa Institute of Management, where he pioneered India’s first Big Data Analytics centre.

In 2018, he was implicated in the Bhima Koregaon case and spent 31 months in prison, an experience that shaped his recently published prison memoir The Cell and the Soul (2025). He has also written a reflective biography of Ambedkar, Iconoclast (2024). Several of his new works are forthcoming.

In this interview, Teltumbde reflects on his formative reading in a village school, the influence of Marxist and Dalit thinkers, his lifelong commitment to challenging oppression, and how reading and writing became tools of survival during his incarceration. He also recommends some essential readings for those interested in caste and social justice discourse. Edited excerpts:

 Tell us about your early relationship with books and reading during your childhood and adulthood? How did these experiences influence your commitment to social justice?

 I was born in Rajur, a small village in Yavatmal district of Maharashtra, which years later would be branded the farmers’ suicide capital. In those days, our school had only a single classroom but classes up to the fourth standard. When it expanded to the seventh, more cattle sheds were used to house children once the animals were driven out each morning. Books were a luxury; apart from a few stacked in the school office or in the homes of few literate elders, there was almost nothing to read. Yet the school had a tradition: every year, the student who topped the class received a book. That prize was mine for as long as I studied there.

In the third standard, illness kept me from the exam, but the teachers awarded me the book anyway. It was a Marathi biography of Joseph Stalin. I could not grasp everything, yet it opened a crack in my world. As a child, I constantly pestered my mother with questions: why didn’t we have land, a cow, goats, or a proper house like others? My parents, landless labourers, bent their backs on others’ fields and at lime factories near the colliery. My mother would brush me off, promising that when I grew up, we would have all these things. Stalin’s story, though half-understood, suggested that inequality was not fate—it could be explained, even fought. That little book became my first key to a locked world.

Around the same time, Rajur Colliery—with its large Dalit population—turned into a hub of Ambedkarite activism. We children sat in the front rows as speakers invoked Babasaheb Ambedkar, who had risen to become the most educated man in the world. He became my role model.

Still, my earliest lens was not caste but exploitation. I saw it in the lime factories, where my parents laboured for a pittance while owners lived in comfort. Later, even as I came to see the annihilation of caste as the true path to liberation, I resisted the label of “Dalit rights activist”. Rights, to me, were never adjectival—they belonged to all human beings, and to all citizens. Looking back, that little biography of Stalin was more than a prize. It was the seed of my political awakening.

Were there any particular books or authors during your formative years who had an impact on your intellectual journey and later writings?

 I cannot single out one book or author as decisive. I believe every book I read, every person I interacted with, directly or indirectly, shaped how I think and view the world.

I was drawn early to revolutionary thought—first to stalwarts like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg, and later to Marxists from Gramsci and Althusser, Amin down to Žižek, as well as Indian thinkers such as D.D. Kosambi, Debi Prasad Chattopadhyay, and Suniti Kumar Ghosh. I also revered those who laid down their lives for the causes they believed in: Kartar Singh Sarabha, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Chandrasekhar Azad, Ashfaqulla Khan—and the anti-caste crusaders: Ayyankali, Iyothee Thass, Acchutanand, and of course Ambedkar.

Ambedkar, however, was my enduring inspiration, internalised through my illiterate parents. Until I moved to Nagpur after the tenth standard, I had not read a page written by or about him, save for a school lesson on his childhood. What we knew came through folklore—songs that celebrated him as a lover of books who built the largest personal library. That image of Ambedkar fostered my own passion for reading and collecting books, a passion that has stayed with me ever since.

According to Bloomsbury, “Teltumbde writes of a heartless state that criminalises dissent with political imprisonment, of the relentless grind of injustice, and the profound cost of speaking truth to power.”

According to Bloomsbury, “Teltumbde writes of a heartless state that criminalises dissent with political imprisonment, of the relentless grind of injustice, and the profound cost of speaking truth to power.” | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

 Can you share a turning point in your reading or writing life during your younger days? A book, event, or an experience that shaped the writer and thinker you eventually became.

 As a student of science and engineering, I had little formal scope for literature, though I always contributed to school and college magazines. In engineering college, I was elected Secretary of the Magazine and Debates Committee and was honoured as the Best Cultural and Literary Man of my batch. Beyond these activities, I experimented with writing during vacations.

During the vacation after the ninth standard, at my uncle’s place, I stumbled upon M.S. Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts. It’s terribly reactionary ideas provoked me to write a critique that eventually filled two exercise books—perhaps the first critical commentary on the text. Unfortunately, the notebooks were eaten away by rats in our mud house. The following year, inspired by N.W. Tilak’s Vanavasi Phul, I attempted a long poem in the classical Marathi genre, framed as a dialogue between a flower and a wandering painter. It expanded into reflections on the cosmos, life, and the entire gamut of issues, filling several hundred pages, which were also lost, save for a section published in my college magazine.

In college and later as a young engineer organising casual workers, I drafted numerous political notes and pamphlets, usually cyclostyled and circulated for immediate use, which I never cared to preserve.

My first sustained literary-political engagement came after I moved to Mumbai and joined the Navjawan Bharat Sabha, a left-oriented youth group active on issues like slum demolitions, labour repression, and the corporate-political nexus. We had a Marathi magazine, Thinagi (The Spark), inspired by Lenin’s Iskra. For over three years, I served on its editorial board and hand wrote the entire magazine, with illustrations, before it shifted to typesetting. Managing production, distribution, finance, and feedback, it was a collective experiment in teamwork—something that, in its spirit, surpassed what I would later see in corporate “team-building” exercises.

 How have your reading habits and tastes evolved over the years? Are there some books or texts you return to often?

 Reading was inseparable from my life. I carried books everywhere—in jeeps to project sites or in cars and planes later. During my three years of project life with Indian Oil, I averaged a book a day and developed the habit of fast reading, which later proved invaluable at IIM Ahmedabad. In business, this is a rare skill, and I often shared it with my students at IIM, IIT, and GIM, even giving tips on how to master it.

My reading was wide-ranging and often unfocused, though Marxist classics, philosophy, economics, politics, and history remained central. I scoured libraries and bookshops in Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Chennai, and Kolkata, frequently running out of money. In the 1990s, when neoliberal reforms were extolled by sections of the intelligentsia, even Dalits, I felt compelled to respond. Reading then found its complement in writing: I began producing essays and analyses to provide intellectual inputs to activists, making my reading purposeful and directed.

Over time, I built a formidable collection—over 10,000 volumes, after discarding more than half because of space constraints in Mumbai. Yet at IIT and GIM a few thousand more were added, packed in cartons. Often, when I needed a reference, locating it was impossible, and I would buy another copy. My collection thus contains many duplicate titles.

Unlike bibliophiles who cherish books as prized possessions, I see them as instruments of thought—meant to be used, not worshipped. This utilitarian approach mirrors my materialist outlook on knowledge: not as abstract wisdom to be admired, but as a resource to be deployed in concrete struggles, in writing, and in life.

 During your recent imprisonment, how important was reading in sustaining you?

 Before stepping into jail, I wasn’t sure if books would be allowed. When I surrendered to the National Investigation Agency, even Harsh Mander’s Looking Away and my notebook were disallowed. But once shifted to prison, I was relieved to find that reading and writing were permitted. Within days, I began reading all kinds of books and writing notes and later book drafts. Over 31 months, I filled several notebooks containing over 100 notes and drafts of four books.

We were allowed access to the prison library—four almirahs of English, Urdu, Marathi, and Hindi titles. They were soon exhausted. Books then reached me through other inmates and my co-accused. Reading and writing became my survival strategy. Prison rules did not permit night reading, yet I finished 179 books, as per my diary. In jail, I was jokingly called the “Rajinikanth of books” for my speed of reading.

If I had to single out books that resonated with me, they would be: Christophe Jaffrelot’s Modi’s India, a sharp account of the discontent under Modi; Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, a study of how tech monopolies commodify personal data; and H. W. Koch’s In the Name of the Volk, a chilling account of how Nazi Germany perverted law into an instrument of repression. It strikingly mirrored the current reality of India. These works sharpened my reflections on India, capitalism, and authoritarianism.

Reading and writing kept me intellectually alive and my spirit unbroken.

Iconoclast offers a deep analysis of not just Ambedkar’s philosophy, but also the man he was—complex, visionary and tenacious.

Iconoclast offers a deep analysis of not just Ambedkar’s philosophy, but also the man he was—complex, visionary and tenacious. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

 You have recently published your prison memoir. What prompted you to write it?

 As I noted in the preface to The Cell and the Soul, my memoir draws on twenty-two of over a hundred notes written during thirty-one months in Taloja Central Prison. These capture encounters with police, judiciary, and jail life; sketches of fellow inmates; and reflections meant to alert readers to the system’s deep discontent. I see it as part of a long tradition of prison memoirs—from Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Dead House to Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom—that testify to oppression, embody resistance, and serve as political pedagogy. Such writings document state violence, preserve erased histories, and often transform suffering into insight, as with Wilde or Gandhi.

In my case, the book sought to expose the process that consigned the BK-16 to prison, the police’s vile methods, and the silent cruelty of jail that claimed lives like Bhola’s and Father Stan Swamy’s. Prison, to me, revealed itself as an institution serving no purpose but the reproduction of oppression — yet no state is willing to relinquish. My memoir, therefore, is not just personal testimony but a continuation of prison literature’s tradition of resistance and reflection.

 In your Ambedkar biography and other writings, you challenge myths, including Ambedkar being the sole architect of the Indian Constitution. What was his actual role, and can you shed some light on claims that he considered burning the Constitution?

 Ambedkar is a unique phenomenon in modern India—tragically transformed by the ruling classes into a political instrument to manipulate and manage over 200 million Dalits. The man who fought for their emancipation is now iconised to enslave their minds, his real persona buried under layers of hagiography. My book Iconoclast is a reflective biography: not a photographic likeness but an impressionist portrait, revealing textures obscured by myth.

Your question—whether Ambedkar was the sole architect of the Constitution—shows how thick this crust has become. If he alone made it, what was the Constituent Assembly for? The first draft was prepared by B.N. Rau, revised by the Drafting Committee, and debated clause by clause before it was finally adopted. No doubt, Ambedkar’s contribution was greater than that of any single person, but it still does not make him its sole author or architect. The entire structure and process, outwardly democratic, was controlled by the Congress oligarchy—Nehru, Patel, Azad, and Prasad. Ambedkar’s own draft, States and Minorities, envisioned state socialism, yet in the Assembly he had to argue against codifying socialism, conceding to the Congress line. Later, Ambedkar himself stripped away the illusion. In the Rajya Sabha he admitted he was used as a “hack” to execute Congress decisions, even declaring he would be the first to burn the Constitution, for it was “of no use to anyone”. This truth is suppressed by the establishment, which prefers to brand the Constitution as his creation in order to placate Dalits and tie them to a document that reflected Congress consensus, not Ambedkar’s radical imagination.

Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly of India, February 1948. (Sitting – from left) N. Madhava Rao; Saiyid Muhammad Saadulla; B.R. Ambedkar; Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar, and Sir B.N. Rao. (Standing from left) S.N. Mukerjee, Jugal Kishore Khanna, and Kewal Krishan, in New Delhi.

Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly of India, February 1948. (Sitting – from left) N. Madhava Rao; Saiyid Muhammad Saadulla; B.R. Ambedkar; Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar, and Sir B.N. Rao. (Standing from left) S.N. Mukerjee, Jugal Kishore Khanna, and Kewal Krishan, in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives

 Having written extensively on caste and class, how do you view their intersection in Indian society? Why have efforts to address caste without considering class, or vice versa, historically fallen short?

 My activism and intellectual work follow a Marxian framework, which inevitably led me to confront caste. The logic of social transformation in India makes this unavoidable. Dogmatic Marxism, which ignores caste, leads nowhere; and obsessive casteism, often paraded as Ambedkarism against Marxism, ultimately delivers Dalits into the hands of the ruling classes. Intersectionality may aid sociological analysis, but lacks the theoretical depth to guide praxis. The real question is: if human history is a history of class struggle, how do we situate caste, race, gender, and other divisions? My conclusion is that class itself must be reconceptualised. Marx’s idea of class in terms of relations of production was conceptual, not definitional. Marxists took it narrowly, conflating it with the economic and neglecting the cultural and so-called superstructural forces that actively shape structural relations. My reformulation expands Marx’s schema—modes of production, classes, class struggle, and revolution—by viewing class as subsuming caste and other “impurities.” Class struggle, then, is simultaneously a struggle against caste, patriarchy, racism, and all such oppressions within a unified process of emancipation.

 While documenting and publishing subaltern histories, what challenges have you faced as an author, both in research and in bringing these stories to a wider audience?

 The challenges I face are hardly unique; anyone advancing unorthodox ideas encounters them. Today they appear in the form of identity obsessions and, above all, deep social polarisation. Since 2014, right-wing adherence has assumed cultish proportions, but more troubling is the polarisation within the broader constituency for change. Among readers, this often manifests in the feud between Marxists and Ambedkarites. Because my writings resist neat categorisation, Ambedkarites dismiss me as a Marxist, while Marxists dismiss me as an Ambedkarite—the former out of ignorance, the latter perhaps due to caste prejudice. Intellectual circles, too, remain locked in inherited identities, seeking cheap recognition, rarely engaging in disagreement on academic terms.

Compounding this is the middle-class orientation of society, widespread apathy, and the distraction economy of social media. People preoccupied with survival or superficial pursuits seldom invest energy in grappling with radical ideas. The result is a shrinking audience, often confined to the already converted. Human beings have always preferred the familiar, but the willingness to think against the grain—a vital condition for transformation—is fast disappearing.

 You’ve highlighted the structural roots and social consequences of violence against Dalits in your work. What structural reforms do you believe are crucial to stem this violence?

 Atrocities against Dalits remain one of India’s most disturbing realities. Official records register over 55,000 cases annually—indicating more than a dozen Dalit women raped and four Dalits murdered every day. These police figures are conservative; independent estimates suggest numbers up to ten times higher.

My research traced these crimes to shifts in the post-independence political economy. Half-baked land reforms and the Green Revolution produced a new class of rich Shudra farmers who replaced traditional landlords but upheld Brahminism. As old caste interdependencies collapsed, Dalits lost even minimal village securities and became dependent on wage labour controlled by these elites. When Dalits asserted themselves politically and culturally, class contradictions erupted along caste fault line— often in atrocities, as I showed in my study of the Khairlanji massacre (Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop).

The remedy lies in altering this structural equation: strengthening justice delivery, reducing Dalit vulnerability, and ensuring mass education. But lacking political will, these remain unrealised. Since 2014, with the rise of the Hindu Right, atrocities have only intensified. Dalit unity could deter perpetrators, yet the right thrives by splintering Dalits—keeping collective resistance a distant hope.

In this book, Anand Teltumbde identifies the watershed moments of post-Independence India’s journey: from the adoption of a flawed Constitution to the Green Revolution, the OBC upsurge, the rise of regional parties, and up to the nexus of neoliberalism and Hindutva in the present day.

In this book, Anand Teltumbde identifies the watershed moments of post-Independence India’s journey: from the adoption of a flawed Constitution to the Green Revolution, the OBC upsurge, the rise of regional parties, and up to the nexus of neoliberalism and Hindutva in the present day. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

 Looking at the trajectory of Dalit activism over the years, do you believe the movement can reinvent itself today to unify its diverse strands and confront caste and class oppression more effectively?

 Dalit activism has shown promise but failed to sustain momentum. After Ambedkar’s death, the Republican Party of India briefly rearticulated land struggles before splintering under Congress co-optation. Rising atrocities gave birth to the Dalit Panthers, but they too fractured along the Marxism-versus-Constitutionalism or Marx-versus-Buddha divide. A small Dalit middle class, enabled by reservations, largely withdrew into identitarian Buddhism or detached from politics. Kanshiram shifted the terrain by building All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation, Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti, and eventually the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)—an ambitious coalition of Dalits, OBCs, Adivasis, and minorities. The BSP’s rise in Uttar Pradesh briefly filled the political void, but unfortunately it remained bound to the logic of elections and inevitably degenerated into opportunism, becoming just another power-seeking outfit.

At every stage, the movement faltered in adapting to changing circumstances or forging durable alliances. Ambedkar himself compromised with Congress, only to resign in disillusionment and even disown the Constitution. His vision of a broad non-communist opposition never materialised, except in Kanshiram’s experiment. Instead, by treating communists as adversaries rather than allies, the movement drifted toward ruling-class parties—including those upholding Brahminism. In discarding class, clinging to caste rhetoric, and nurturing identitarian hubris, Dalit politics has taken a reactionary turn, while the condition of the masses sinks deeper into despair.

 Could you recommend some essential books or authors on caste that you believe everyone interested in understanding caste and inequality in India should read?

For readers seeking to build a grounded understanding of caste, I suggest the following:

1. R. Ambedkar – Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development; Annihilation of Caste.

Dipankar Gupta – Interrogating Caste

Marc Galanter – Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (1984)

Nicholas B. Dirks – Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001)

Christophe Jaffrelot – Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability (2005); Caste: The 21st Century (co-ed., 2012)

Gail Omvedt – Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (2012); Buddhism in India (2003)

Susan Bayly – Caste, Society and Politics in India (1999)

1. L. Seth – Class, State and Politics in India (1985); The Caste Question (posthumous essays)

Anand Teltumbde – The Republic ofCaste (2018); The Caste Con Census (forthcoming, 2025)

 Who are some contemporary Dalit writers or scholars whose works on caste and social justice you find particularly compelling and deserve wider recognition and readership?

 Numerous Dalit autobiographies illuminate the lived realities of caste. Many originated in Marathi and other Indian languages, and several have been translated into English. Key works include Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrogating My Chandal Life, Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan, Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke, Daya Pawar’s Baluta, Bama’s Karukku, Sharankumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi (The Outcaste), Vasant Moon’s Growing Up Untouchable in India, Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit, Suraj Yengde’s Caste Matters, and Viramma: Life of an Untouchable.

Beyond autobiographies, scholars provide critical insights into caste as a structural and philosophical problem. Sukhadeo Thorat’s Dalits in India: Search for a Common Destiny (2009) examines caste and economic discrimination empirically. Gopal Guru, through Humiliation: Claims and Context (2011, with Sundar Sarukkai) and Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social (2019), highlights the experiential and philosophical dimensions of caste.

For analytical perspectives on caste and its contemporary transformations, my own works include “Ambedkar” in and for the Post-Ambedkar Dalit Movement (1997), Persistence of Caste (2010), The Republic of Caste (2018), and the forthcoming The Caste Con Census (2025).

Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist and writer based in Kashmir. Bookmarks is a fortnightly column where writers reflect on the books that shaped their ideas, work, and ways of seeing the world.

Majid Maqbool

Courtesy : Frontline Magazine

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