Founded in 1995, Deshkal Society works at the intersection of knowledge and grassroots action to advance inclusion, equity, and dignity for marginalized communities in India. Our mission is to challenge systemic exclusion while creating pathways toward a more democratic and just society. Our focus areas include elementary education, homestead land rights, and sustainable rural livelihoods and culture, with a special emphasis on the Musahar community in Bihar. Guided by a gender-based theory of change, we see women as central agents of transformation. Through the formation of Community-Based Organisations (CBOs) across 580 villages in Gaya district, we have enabled families to secure homestead land titles, strengthen incomes, and improve children’s learning outcomes. Deshkal blends research, advocacy, and field interventions, ensuring that community voices shape policies and programs, particularly via ongoing initiatives like Anandshala and Bodh Gaya Global Dialogues. At core, we remain committed to building an India rooted in dignity, justice, and equal opportunity.
The journey of Deshkal Society has taken account a number of dimensions such as making classrooms more plural and inclusive, raising the quality of education and ensuring effective learning in schools
The journey of Deshkal Society has taken account a number of dimensions such as making classrooms more plural and inclusive, raising the quality of education and ensuring effective learning in schools
The journey of Deshkal Society has taken account a number of dimensions such as making classrooms more plural and inclusive, raising the quality of education and ensuring effective learning in schools
The journey of Deshkal Society has taken account a number of dimensions such as making classrooms more plural and inclusive, raising the quality of education and ensuring effective learning in schools
The journey of Deshkal Society has taken account a number of dimensions such as making classrooms more plural and inclusive, raising the quality of education and ensuring effective learning in schools
The journey of Deshkal Society has taken account a number of dimensions such as making classrooms more plural and inclusive, raising the quality of education and ensuring effective learning in schools
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Books India Pvt. Ltd
ISBN: 1032646098
Publication Date: 2023
Price: 1087
Binding: Hardback
Pages: 180
Why are children from disadvantaged and minority communities overrepresented among academic underachievers, poor learners, and school dropouts? This volume engages with this question and examines classroom learning as a process that involves a multitude of actors situated in specific social, cultural, and historical contexts. The volume covers an interdisciplinary spectrum of educational processes, contexts, educational ambitions, and limitations of low-caste, working-class, and middle-class students from different Indian communities and regions. The volume delves into the problem of academic underperformance from a social identity perspective and probes into social context-based variability in classroom learning, systemic disadvantages in the form of negative stereotypes, and the family as an under-studied social group in all discussions of schooling. It also examines the teachers’ perceptions and attitudes towards Adivasi students and other minority groups in primary schools and their effect on children’s classroom engagement.
Publisher: Primus Books
ISBN: 978-9389933802
Publication Date: 2020
Price: 926
Binding: Hardback
Pages: 172
The marginalized self questions The century-old perception of the Musahar community as rat-eating, pig-rearing, habitually drunk, lazy and unmotivated; a perception fostered by the dominant discourse of development, and the historically prevalent hierarchical social system. This collection of essays argues that these victims of the dominant model of development acquire a different kind of power and critical consciousness due to their marginality, which helps them to examine the processes, practices, and institutions that give rise to and justify poverty, displacement, corruption, greed, competition, and violence in the name of development.
Publisher: Orient BlackSwan
ISBN: 978-93-5287-013-4
Publication Date: 2017
Price: 945
Binding: Hardback
Pages: xiii+327
Publisher: Orient BlackSwan
ISBN: 9788125045311
Publication Date: 2012
Price: 825
Binding: Hardback
Pages: xviii+480
Education is an ‘enabling factor’, which facilitates not only economic betterment but also human freedom. However, for the marginalised, basic education remains a challenge not only due to lack of access, but also because the pedagogy of mainstream education alienates the marginalised.
Publisher: Orient BlackSwan in association with Deshkal Society
ISBN: 9788125040545
Publication Date: 2010
Price: 720
Binding: Hardback
Pages: viii+320
This rich and extraordinary volume brings together contributions from scholars across the humanities and social sciences to provide an incisive analysis of the identity of the Dalits in history, literature and society. The essays organised in four thematic clusters, raise crucial questions: Who is a Dalit? Are Dalits a social or sociological category and what is their relationship with the mainstream? How are women represented among the Dalits? Can a Muslim be a Dalit? Can the Dalits form a unitary, socio-political category?Concerned and cognizant of the collective trauma and memories of centuries of unspeakable oppression, the essays in this volume focus on Dalit assertion and agency in postcolonial India, their challenge of the bigotry and prejudice of the dominant castes and their quest to break free from poverty and social exclusion. They also examine the dynamics of a pervasive caste system that is intrinsically hostile to the growth of a collective consciousness among the backward classes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN-13: 978-019806641-5
ISBN-10: 0-19-806641-4
Publication Date: 2010
Price: 895
Binding: Hardback
Pages: xiv+308
This volume provides a new perspective on the role of culture in shaping the attitudes towards economic development of marginalised people both in the global North and global South. The strength of the collection lies in the examples from within India and without, which illuminate old Dalit-Savarna and Hindu-Muslim dynamics specific to India. These also facilitate a new understanding of the processes of marginalisation in northern capitalist contexts.
Publisher: Deshkal Publication
ISBN: 81-902865-0-1
Publication Date: 2005
Price: 595
Binding: Hardback
Pages: xxii+146
Knowledge has intricate linkages with forces that govern our social life. Invariably, the production and denial of knowledge are akin to the production and denial of power. For centuries, caste system in the Indian subcontinent has controlled, regulated and hierarchised knowledge. Brahmanism, as it evolved over a period of time, has sought to legitimate the servitude of Dalit castes through its hegemony over the social universe of knowledge.
Publisher: Deshkal Publication
ISBN: 81-902865-0-1
Publication Date: 2002
Price: 595
Binding: Hardback
Pages: xxiii+176
Our understanding of the Musahars scattered on the plains of the Gangetic valley, who occupy the lowest rung in the Dalit hierarchy is purely based on the prejudices and attributes that are imposed upon them. Usually those classes or groups that aren’t remotely connected with them, let lone having a dialogue vis-à-vis them or those people who are used to looking down upon them with contempt consider drinking, eating pork and rat as an inalienable part of Musahar culture. Generally the image of the Musahar community that comes out through progressive academic debates considers them either as subjects of the modern production mechanism or as an object that gets defined through discussions around land relations. In this sense, the identity of the Musahar community is trapped within the orbit of the bonded labour.
Publisher: Deshkal Publication
Publication Date: 2001
Price: 250
Binding: Hardback
Pages: xiv+154
Publisher: Deshkal Publication
Publication Date: 2000
Price: 250
Binding: Hardback
Pages: xviii+138
Publisher: Deshkal Publication
Publication Date: 2000
Price: 500
Binding: Hardback
Pages: xiii+415
