In the winter of 1959, 30-year-old, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. headed to India to see the land of the father of nonviolent protests, Mahatma Gandhi. Earlier, King had finished leading the year-long ...

LIKE America’s twenty million Negroes, India’s sixty-five million ex-Untouchables are going through a time of significant change. The differences between the two groups are greater than the ...

India’s “untouchables” have attracted attention around the world. Assigned from birth to an inferior station in society, the untouchables are the victim of institutional discrimination. This situation ...

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KEEZHAIVANAGIRI, India — Muthu Vellaithevan, a farm laborer who is part of India’s untouchable caste, lost seven goats and a cow when massive waves lashed at his coastal village in the Dec. 26 ...

Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. By Sujatha Gidla. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 320 pages; $28. ONE in six Indians is a Dalit, which means “oppressed” in ...

I mean no disrespect, and I count myself in their number, but I'm wagering that most Americans have a half-baked understanding of the Indian caste system. It is complicated. Unless we are students of ...

Pakistan Christians pray for Asia Bibi, a Catholic mother of five who has been on death row since 2010 accused of blasphemy in Multan, Pakistan. Credit: AP Photo/Irum Asim Customs and habits cannot be ...

"Ants Among Elephants" is the memoir of an Indian woman, born a so-called untouchable, who is a New York City subway conductor. NPR's Stacey Vanek Smith speaks with author Sujatha Gidla. In the caste ...

NOT long ago, just after midnight one Sunday in downtown Bombay, I came upon a silent crowd of several hundred poorly dressed people grouped around a statue of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the great leader ...