Facing casteism?Anti-Caste Helpline
Call 1-844-66-UNITEAmbedkar King Study Circle (AKSC)
Caste has no place—in India, in America, or anywhere. Together, we can end caste discrimination and build a just world.
The reading circle
The shelf
Books the circle has worked through.
1 session ·
Gail Omvedt
Gail Omvedt's biography of Dr. Ambedkar for Penguin's Lives series, tracing his path from an untouchable childhood in colonial India to the framing of its Constitution, and his lifelong argument that political freedom without social democracy is worthless.
3 sessions ·
Ashoka Mody
Ashoka Mody's economic history of India since 1947, arguing that every government since independence — across party and ideology — has favoured elite interests over the broad-based growth, education, and public health that would have lifted the country's poorest.
3 sessions ·
bell hooks
bell hooks's case that patriarchy wounds men as well as women, and that a man's capacity to love is not weakness but the discipline patriarchal culture trains out of him.
4 sessions ·
Malcolm X
Speeches, interviews, and letters from the last year of Malcolm X's life, gathered after his death, tracing his break from the Nation of Islam and his turn toward a Pan-Africanist, internationalist politics of Black liberation.
3 sessions ·
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar
The address Dr. Ambedkar wrote for the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal in 1936 and never delivered, arguing that caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers, and that it cannot be reformed, only annihilated.
1 session ·
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar
Dr. Ambedkar's own short autobiographical account, written in the mid-1930s and published only after his death, of the everyday humiliations of untouchability he faced on trains, in schools, and as a working professional, despite his education and titles.
1 session ·
Manoj Mitta
Journalist Manoj Mitta's two-century legal history of caste in India, tracing how legislation and the courts have by turns entrenched and challenged caste privilege, from colonial-era reform to the present.
3 sessions ·
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar
Dr. Ambedkar's unfinished examination of Hindu scripture, written in his final years and published posthumously, which sets a series of riddles against the texts and traditions that hold caste in place.
Next up
Saturday
Conferences
Democracy & Freedom: Promise vs Practice
The seventh annual conference examines how culture, law, and AI control public narratives—and how collective action can challenge inequality and build a more democratic future.
Drawn work
Comics AKSC publishes with the artists it works with, on what caste costs and where it still turns up. Each one is read a panel at a time, with the lettering written out beneath.
37 panels
Ambedkar King Study Circle · Gail Omvedt (Source text, “Towards a Marxist Analysis of Caste”)
21 panels
Ambedkar King Study Circle
Latest from AKSC
Blog
Federal law protects people from discrimination on race, colour, religion, sex and national origin, but not caste. A high school student sets out why the caste practised by Hindus in America needs naming and outlawing.
· Kanmani Duraikannan
Revolutionary voices
Forging an egalitarian society
AKSC is a membership organization. Members set its direction and carry its work, and dues start at $20 a year. If you are not eligible to join, you can still help sustain it.
