Dr Gail Omvedt 

Dr Gail Omvedt 

Context – ONE of India’s foremost caste scholars, as well as noted author and activist, Dr Gail Omvedt passed away Wednesday after a brief illness at her residence in Kasegaon in Maharashtra’s Sangli.

Concept –

• The 81-year-old who was born in Minnesota in the US but made India her home had authored books on Dalit politics, women’s struggles and anti-caste movements and co-founded the ShramikMukti Dal with her husband, activist Bharat Patankar.
• Liberty, equality and community are the three most important components of a human vision for the new millennium,” Omvedt had said.
• Throughout her life, she and Patankar worked to alleviate the conditions of the marginalised and the exploited, including tribals, Dalits, peasants, labourers and women, setting up the ShramikMukti Dal in the ’80s.
• She came to India for research as part of her doctoral thesis on non-Brahmin movements in western India, and met here the famous Maharashtrian freedom fighter and social activist, IndumatiPatankar, whose son Bharat she would later marry. She took Indian citizenship in 1983.
• It was Omvedt who first studied the political implication of Jyotiba Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj, which led to new research in it.