Q: How did you come to know about the Dalit Panther’s movement?
Dr. Vimal Thorat: At that time, the Dalit Panther movement was gaining ground. However, media was not projecting it in a favourable light. They themselves did some private publications. I got to know about them and their working through their literature. In college, non-Dalit students boycotted Dalit students who talked about the Dalit Panthers. The spread of the movement was restricted to Pune, Mumbai, Aurangabad and Nagpur since there was a dearth of leaders in the rural areas. My husband, S.K. Thorat was the general secretary of the Dalit Panther movement. He was then teaching in Aurangabad University. After marriage, I came in direct contact with the movement. I joined MA in what is now known as Dr. Baba Saheb Ambedkar Marathwada University and started participating in the movement.
I was working especially on issues specific to women. Then because of difference in ideologies, the movement got divided. Both of us, my husband and I, felt that it was unfortunate. The movement was in its full form in Siddhartha College, Mumbai and Milind College, Aurangabad.In 1977, I came to Delhi and joined JNU as a student of MA. The environment here was liberal but since this was a hub of Marxists, we used to have regular confrontations with them on the issue of caste. My husband together with friends founded the Ambedkar Study Circle. A reading group was formed and regular meetings were held on Sundays to discuss Ambedkar’s works. I participated enthusiastically in the anti-emergency movements as I saw it as a brazen attempt to hit at the roots of democracy.
The student community of JNU was not supportive of the Dalit movement and could not see the issue of caste as being different from class. However, as time passed, we were able to convince some of them; they started accepting the image of Ambedkar as a social democrat. In 1989, I joined IGNOU as a lecturer of Hindi, while doing my PhD in JNU. In my earlier student life I used to write love poems but the exposure to Dalit movement made me write on social issues concerning our lives. Initially I wrote in Marathi then shifted to Hindi.