Freedom to Know: Creating Community with Ambedkar, Du Bois, Iqbal, Ramabai and Tagore

Asks how a (world) community can be created to allow structural minorities equitable access to intellectual and material resources • Draws on a range of primary sources • Brings the work of W.E.B. Du Bois into conversation with his Indian contemporaries • Adds a novel historical perspective to recent scholarship on critical social epistemology • Diversifies current ways of doing Indian philosophy In this book, Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach studies how Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956), W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Mohammed Iqbal (1877-1938), Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) diagnose the epistemic oppression they perceive and experience, their analysis of the coloniality of being as its cause, and their proposals to counter it. Kirloskar-Steinbach explores how these voices seek to co-create a space in which they can experience what it means to be free from the conceptual domination of academic frameworks, relish that freedom with their collaborators and, in the equal participation that that space affords, develop open-ended concepts that help them to resist the coloniality of being.