From a Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual: My Memoirs

‘Caste is Race in Ancient Times, Race is Caste in Modern Times, Untouchability is an Aryan Construct.
They said God has not created Untouchables.’

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd goes on to say, ‘Many people from the Brahmin–Baniya castes have written about their own greatness in their autobiographies, in English and in the regional languages. But I have not seen even a single autobiography of a person born and brought up in the shepherd community’. He adds that it is in writing about themselves that people gain a sense of self-respect. Shepherd’s evocative memoirs reveal the struggle for education and dignity that a great majority of Indians undergo. As a little boy herding sheep and goats, he and his brother were the first to go to school. The author writes of his long and often interrupted journey to becoming a writer and an intellectual, without support and having to overcome adversities.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd retired recently from being Director, Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at Maulana Azad National Urdu University. He has received the Mahatma Jyotiba Phule award, 2000. He is chairman of Telangana Mass and Social Organizations (T-Mass) that works for English-medium education. Among his best-known books are Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Culture, Philosophy and Political Economy; Buffalo Nationalism: A Critique of Spiritual Fascism; Untouchable God; and Post-Hindu India: A Discourse in Dalit-Bahujan, Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Revolution.