🔵✊🏽‘Dalit Voice’ and the history of another India – Himal Virtual Cover, January 2026

Dear reader,

“There is a fearful symmetry between the Brahminical enemies of Indian democracy and its Brahminical guardians,” Ashik Kahina writes in Himal’s latest piece, a monumental essay on the anti-caste magazine Dalit Voice and its founder, V T Rajshekar. Today, amid the rise of the Hindu Right in India, the magazine “has a message for anyone susceptible to nostalgia for the earlier days of ‘secular’ rule – a message especially urgent at a time when defeating the Bharatiya Janata Party, and it alone, is often presented as the horizon of the fight for a just society.”

Rajshekar – and, consequently, Dalit Voice – was not without its complications. Even before his death in 2024, the magazine succumbed to its circumstances and contradictions. But before then, across some four decades of polemical writing and activism, Dalit Voice and its idiosyncratic editor put forward what can be read as an alternative history of India between the 1980s and the arrival of Hindutva dominance, with caste identity and ideology at its centre.

Himal’s first virtual cover of 2026 presents one of India’s most lucid young writers and intellectuals excavating the legacy of a pioneering English-language anti-caste magazine amid ongoing efforts to archive and revive it. Although the digital archive is yet incomplete, Kahina writes, it “presents an opportunity for Rajshekhar’s work to reach beyond the limited readership it garnered in print, and for a new generation to discover a man who – whatever one makes of him – worked long, tirelessly and creatively against the uniquely Southasian horror we call the caste system.”