Gail Omvedt

Gail Omvedt (2 August 1941 – 25 August 2021) was an American-born Indian sociologist and human rights activist.

Gail Omvedt in 2015

Quotes about Omvedt

• Such a position authorizes Omvedt’s recent pro-liberalization stance: neo-colonialism and economic dependency are abstract, academic concepts irrelevant to the lives of the peasant masses. 140
  • Natrajan, Balmurli, Ciarán ó Faoláin, and Kavita Philip. ‘SAPs, Dust, and Hot Air: Gail Omvedt and Liberalization’. Ghadar, November 1998. quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

• Among the academicians manipulatively shaping Dalit Studies, Gail Omvedt occupies a very important place. She is a sociologist from the University of California at Berkeley, and became an Indian citizen in 1983. She combines nineteenth-century colonial categories with Marxist subaltern constructions, seeing Indian culture as a creation by the upper castes to subjugate the lower castes for thousands of years. Anything that united Indians in their fight against colonialism is merely ‘high-caste symbols’. She attributes the attitudes of Aryan supremacy to even Mahatma Gandhi, saying that he ‘saw Aryans as his ancestors. As against what he saw as the evils of industrialism, he wanted to go back to an idealised, harmonious village society in which tradition ruled. This he called Ram Rajya’... While she argues against the Indian state and criticizes Indian industrialists, she favors globalization of the Indian economy in ways that would make India subservient to the West. Her former leftist colleagues analyzing her stand on globalization, find a striking continuity in her writings. They point out how she puts into the mouths of Dalits words of appreciation for British rule.
  • Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines