Anand Teltumbde is a man of many shades. A senior professor at the Goa Institute of Management who identifies as a Marxist, Teltumbde has multiple qualifications: a degree in engineering from Nagpur’s Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, a management degree from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, and a doctorate in cybernetics from the University of Mumbai.

But his public persona is that of a Dalit writer and intellectual, and a long-time activist concerned with Dalit and civil-liberties issues. In his long-running column for the Economic and Political Weekly, Teltumbde has often been critical of India’s existing Dalit leadership. He recently turned seventy in a Mumbai prison, having been taken into police custody three months earlier under preposterous terrorism-related charges filed by the National Investigation Agency.

His book Republic of Caste is a collection of essays, reworked for publication, that take up a set of key issues concerning the relationship between caste and class, and assesses where Dalits stand today. Teltumbde develops his own perspective on Dalit emancipation through a critique of India’s mainstream communist and Ambedkarite political movements.