The gift of a life and death: Rohith Vemula and 'Us'

Abstract

Articulating itself in three ordered segments, this article is an attempt to think creatively with the circumstances of the life and death of Rohith Vemula. The effort is to conceptualise, through a revitalised notion of the "gift," the challenge of a life constituted as much by an inherent sociality as by a transformative radicalism of thought and action. Resituating caste sociality in a lived sense must, therefore, entail moving beyond victimhood and suffering, and encountering actively the spaces of biography and narrative history.