A searing memoir of the life of a sensitive and intelligent Dalit youth in independent India. Joothan tells us how he overcame contempt, humiliation, and violence to gain an education and join the slowly growing ranks of Dalit intellectuals in India. Full of vivid sketches of people and events, this book is indispensable to those who would understand modern South Asia, and valuable for those interested in gaining a comparative understanding of social discrimination and its effects worldwide. -- Sumit Guha, Brown University A moving evocation of the underside of life in India... An excellent translation from the Hindi with a useful introduction to the life of a man who deliberately uses his name, Valmiki, to signify his identification with the lowly scavenger even though he has climbed up to status as a middle class intellectual. -- Eleanor Zelliot, Carleton College, author of From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkarite Movement

Omprakash Valmiki describes his life as an untouchable, or Dalit, in the newly independent India of the 1950s. "Joothan" refers to scraps of food left on a plate, destined for the garbage or animals. India's untouchables have been forced to accept and eat joothan for centuries, and the word encapsulates the pain, humiliation, and poverty of a community forced to live at the bottom of India's social pyramid. Although untouchability was abolished in 1949, Dalits continued to face discrimination, economic deprivation, violence, and ridicule. Valmiki shares his heroic struggle to survive a preordained life of perpetual physical and mental persecution and his transformation into a speaking subject under the influence of the great Dalit political leader, B. R. Ambedkar. A document of the long-silenced and long-denied sufferings of the Dalits, Joothan is a major contribution to the archives of Dalit history and a manifesto for the revolutionary transformation of society and human consciousness.