Biography
Suraj Yengde is a research associate at the Department of African and African American Studies in Harvard University. Previously, he was Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and was part of the founding team of Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University.
An international human rights attorney by qualification from India and the UK, Yengde is a transnational Dalit rights activist involved in building solidarities between Dalit, Black, Roma, Indigenous, Buraku and Refugee peoples in the Fourth World project of marginalised peoples. He is a co-convener of ‘Dalit-Black Lives Matter’ symposium and the ‘Dalit and Black Power Movement’. He curated a monthly Ambedkar Lecture Series at Harvard. He is an associate editor of Southern Journal of Contemporary History.
He is also a founder and convenor of the Dalit Film Festival and India for Diversity movement.
Yengde is the author of best-seller Caste Matters (Penguin Random House India, 2019) and co-editor of the award-winning anthology The Radical in Ambedkar (India Allen Lane, 2018). Caste Matters is translated into four languages, and three more are under translation.
He writes and curates a popular column, Dalitality, at the Indian Express newspaper. In addition, he writes a monthly column titled, Ambedkarism for Loksatta, and a weekly column titled, Fourth World, in Marathi language for Daily Sakal newspaper. He has published more than 100 essays, articles and book reviews in multiple languages in the field of caste, race and ethnicity studies as well as labour and migration in the Global South.
Yengde was nominated for India's highest literary award, Sahitya Akademi, and is a recipient of the Dr Ambedkar Social Justice Award (Canada, 2019) and the Rohit Vemula Memorial Scholar Award (2018).
Yengde earned an undergraduate degree from the SRT Marathwada University, Nanded, Maharashtra, a masters’ degree from Birmingham City University and PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is currently reading for his second doctorate at the University of Oxford.
SAF participation:
March Meeting 2022
