title: Arduino

text: The Arduino IDE supports the languages C and C++ using special rules of code structuring. The Arduino IDE supplies a software library from the Wiring project, which provides many common input and output procedures. User-written code only requires two basic functions, for starting the sketch and the main program loop, that are compiled and linked with a program stub "main()" into an executable cyclic executive program with the GNU toolchain, also included with the IDE distribution. The Arduino IDE employs the program "avrdude" to convert the executable code into a text file in hexadecimal encoding that is loaded into the Arduino board by a loader program in the board's firmware.


title: Arduino

text: From version 1.8.12, Arduino IDE windows compiler supports only Windows 7 or newer OS. On Windows Vista or older one gets "Unrecognized Win32 application" error when trying to verify/upload program. To run IDE on older machines, users can either use version 1.8.11, or copy "arduino-builder" executable from version 11 to their current install folder as it's independent from IDE.


title: Arduino

text: On September 14, 2022, the Arduino IDE 2.0 was officially released as stable. Previously, on October 18, 2019 the initial alpha preview was released as the Arduino Pro IDE. On March 1, 2021, the beta preview was released, renamed IDE 2.0. The system still uses Arduino CLI (Command Line Interface), but improvements include a more professional development environment, autocompletion support, and Git integration. The application frontend is based on the Eclipse Theia Open Source IDE. The main features available in the new release are:


title: Arduino

text: A "sketch" is a program written with the Arduino IDE. Sketches are saved on the development computer as text files with the file extension .ino. Arduino Software (IDE) pre-1.0 saved sketches with the extension .pde.


title: Arduino

text: Most Arduino boards contain a light-emitting diode (LED) and a current-limiting resistor connected between pin 13 and ground, which is a convenient feature for many tests and program functions. A typical program used by beginners, akin to Hello, World!, is "blink", which repeatedly blinks the on-board LED integrated into the Arduino board. This program uses the functions , , and , which are provided by the internal libraries included in the IDE environment. This program is usually loaded into a new Arduino board by the manufacturer.


title: Arduino

text: The open-source nature of the Arduino project has facilitated the publication of many free software libraries that other developers use to augment their projects.


title: Arduino

text: There is a Xinu OS port for the atmega328p (Arduino Uno and others with the same chip), which includes most of the basic features. The source code of this version is freely available.


title: Arduino

text: There is also a threading tool, named Protothreads. Protothreads are described as "extremely lightweight stackless threads designed for severely memory constrained systems, such as small embedded systems or wireless sensor network nodes.


title: Arduino

text: The Arduino project received an honorary mention in the Digital Communities category at the 2006 Prix Ars Electronica.


title: Arduino

text: The Arduino Engineering Kit won the Bett Award for "Higher Education or Further Education Digital Services" in 2020.


title: Maus

text: Maus is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodern techniques, and represents Jews as mice and other Germans and Poles as cats and pigs. Critics have classified "Maus" as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992 it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.


title: Maus

text: In the frame-tale timeline in the narrative present that begins in 1978 in New York City, Spiegelman talks with his father Vladek about his Holocaust experiences, gathering material and information for the "Maus" project he is preparing. In the narrative past, Spiegelman depicts these experiences, from the years leading up to World War II to his parents' liberation from the Nazi concentration camps. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father and the absence of his mother, who died by suicide when he was 20. Her grief-stricken husband destroyed her written accounts of Auschwitz. The book uses a minimalist drawing style and displays innovation in its pacing, structure, and page layouts.


title: Maus

text: A three-page strip also called "Maus" that he made in 1972 gave Spiegelman an opportunity to interview his father about his life during World War II. The recorded interviews became the basis for the book, which Spiegelman began in 1978. He serialized "Maus" from 1980 until 1991 as an insert in "Raw", an avant-garde comics and graphics magazine published by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, who also appears in "Maus". A collected volume of the first six chapters that appeared in 1986 brought the book mainstream attention; a second volume collected the remaining chapters in 1991. "Maus" was one of the first books in graphic novel format to receive significant academic attention in the English-speaking world.


title: Maus

text: Most of the book weaves in and out of two timelines. In the frame tale of the narrative present, Spiegelman interviews his father Vladek in the Rego Park neighborhood of Queens in New York City in 1978–79. The story that Vladek tells unfolds in the narrative past, which begins in the mid-1930s, and continues until the end of the Holocaust in 1945.


title: Maus

text: In Rego Park in 1958, a young Art Spiegelman is skating with his friends when he falls down and hurts himself, but his friends keep going. When he returns home, he finds his father Vladek, who asks him why he is upset, and Art proceeds to tell him that his friends left him behind. His father responds in broken English, "Friends? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week, then you could see what it is, friends!"


title: Maus

text: As an adult, Art visits his father, from whom he has become estranged. Vladek has remarried to a woman called Mala since the suicide of Art's mother Anja in 1968. Art asks Vladek to recount his Holocaust experiences. Vladek tells of his time in the Polish city of Częstochowa and how he came to marry into Anja's wealthy family in 1937 and move to Sosnowiec to become a manufacturer. Vladek begs Art not to include this in the book and Art reluctantly agrees. Anja suffers a breakdown due to postpartum depression after giving birth to their first son Richieu, and the couple go to a sanitarium in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for her to recover. After they return, political and anti-Semitic tensions build until Vladek is drafted just before the Nazi invasion of Poland. Vladek is captured at the front and forced to work as a prisoner of war. After his release, he finds Germany has annexed Sosnowiec, and he is dropped off on the other side of the border in the German protectorate. He sneaks across the border and reunites with his family.


title: Maus

text: During one of Art's visits, he finds that a friend of Mala's has sent the couple one of the underground comix magazines Art contributed to. Mala had tried to hide it, but Vladek finds and reads it. In "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", Art is traumatized by his mother's suicide three months after his release from the mental hospital, and in the end depicts himself behind bars saying, "You "murdered" me, Mommy, and left me here to take the rap!" Though it brings back painful memories, Vladek admits that dealing with the issue in such a way was for the best.


title: Maus

text: In 1943, the Nazis move the Jews of the Sosnowiec Ghetto to Srodula and march them back to Sosnowiec to work. The family splits up—Vladek and Anja send Richieu to Zawiercie to stay with an aunt for safety. As more Jews are sent from the ghettos to Auschwitz, the aunt poisons herself, her children and Richieu to death to escape the Gestapo and not die in the gas chamber. In Srodula, many Jews build bunkers to hide from the Germans. Vladek's bunker is discovered and he is placed into a "ghetto inside the ghetto" surrounded by barbed wire. The remnants of Vladek and Anja's family are taken away. Srodula is cleared of its Jews, except for a group Vladek hides with in another bunker. When the Germans depart, the group splits up and leaves the ghetto.


title: Maus

text: In Sosnowiec, Vladek and Anja move from one hiding place to the next, making occasional contact with other Jews in hiding. Vladek disguises himself as an ethnic Pole and hunts for provisions. The couple arrange with smugglers to escape to Hungary, but it is a trick—the Gestapo arrest them on the train (as Hungary is invaded) and take them to Auschwitz, where they are separated until after the war.


title: Maus

text: Art asks after Anja's diaries, which Vladek tells him were her account of her Holocaust experiences and the only record of what happened to her after her separation from Vladek at Auschwitz and which Vladek says she had wanted Art to read. Vladek comes to admit that he burned them after she killed herself. Art is enraged and calls Vladek a "murderer".


title: Maus

text: The story jumps to 1986, after the first six chapters of "Maus" have appeared in a collected edition. Art is overcome with the unexpected attention the book receives and finds himself "totally blocked". Art talks about the book with his psychiatrist Paul Pavel, a Czech Holocaust survivor. Pavel suggests that, as those who perished in the camps can never tell their stories, "maybe it's better not to have any more stories". Art replies with a quote from Samuel Beckett: "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness", but then realizes, "on the other hand, he "said" it".


title: Maus

text: Vladek tells of his hardship in the camps, of starvation and abuse, of his resourcefulness, of avoiding the —the process by which prisoners were selected for further labor or execution. Despite the danger, Anja and Vladek exchange occasional messages. As the war progresses and the German front is pushed back, the prisoners are marched from Auschwitz in occupied Poland to Gross-Rosen within the Reich and then to Dachau, where the hardships only increase and Vladek catches typhus.


title: Maus

text: The war ends, the camp survivors are freed and Vladek and Anja reunite. The book closes with Vladek turning over in his bed as he finishes his story and telling Art, "I'm tired from talking, Richieu, and it's enough stories for now." The final image is of Vladek and Anja's tombstone—Vladek died in 1982, before the book was completed.


title: Maus

text: Art Spiegelman was born on February 15, 1948, in Sweden to Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors Vladek and Anja Spiegelman. An aunt poisoned his parents' first son Richieu to avoid capture by the Nazis, four years before Spiegelman's birth. He and his parents emigrated to the United States in 1951. During his youth his mother occasionally talked about Auschwitz, but his father did not want him to know about it.


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman developed an interest in comics early and began drawing professionally at 16. He spent a month in Binghamton State Mental Hospital in 1968 after a nervous breakdown. Shortly after he got out, his mother died by suicide. Spiegelman's father was not happy with his son's involvement in the hippie subculture. Spiegelman said that when he bought himself a German Volkswagen it damaged their already-strained relationship "beyond repair". Around this time, Spiegelman read in fanzines about such graphic artists as Frans Masereel who had made wordless novels. The discussions in those fanzines about making the Great American Novel in comics inspired him.


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman became a key figure in the underground comix movement of the 1970s, both as cartoonist and editor. In 1972 Justin Green produced the semi-autobiographical comic book "Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary", which inspired other underground cartoonists to produce more personal and revealing work. The same year, Green asked Spiegelman to contribute a three-page strip for the first issue of "Funny " , which Green edited. Spiegelman wanted to do a strip about racism, and at first considered focusing on African Americans, with cats as Ku Klux Klan members chasing African-American mice. Instead, he turned to the Holocaust and depicted Nazi cats persecuting Jewish mice in a strip he titled "Maus". The tale was narrated to a mouse named "Mickey". After finishing the strip, Spiegelman visited his father to show him the finished work, which he had based in part on an anecdote he had heard about his father's Auschwitz experience. His father gave him further background information, which piqued Spiegelman's interest. Spiegelman recorded a series of interviews over four days with his father, which was to provide the basis of the longer "Maus". Spiegelman followed up with extensive research, reading survivors' accounts and talking to friends and family who had also survived. He got detailed information about Sosnowiec from a series of Polish pamphlets published after the war which detailed what happened to the Jews by region.


title: Maus

text: In 1973, Spiegelman produced a strip for "Short Order Comix" #1 about his mother's suicide called "Prisoner on the Hell Planet". The same year, he edited a pornographic, psychedelic book of quotations, and dedicated it to his mother. He spent the rest of the 1970s building his reputation making short avant-garde comics. He moved back to New York from San Francisco in 1975, which he admitted to his father only in 1977, by which time he had decided to work on a "very long comic book". He began another series of interviews with his father in 1978, and visited Auschwitz in 1979. He serialized the story in a comics and graphics magazine he and his wife Mouly began in 1980 called "Raw".


title: Maus

text: American comic books were big business with a diversity of genres in the 1940s and 1950s, but had reached a low ebb by the late 1970s. By the time "Maus" began serialization, the "Big Two" comics publishers, Marvel and DC Comics, dominated the industry with mostly superhero titles. The underground comix movement that had flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s also seemed moribund. The public perception of comic books was as adolescent power fantasies, inherently incapable of mature artistic or literary expression. Most discussion focused on comics as a genre rather than as a medium.


title: Maus

text: "Maus" came to prominence when the term "graphic novel" was beginning to gain currency. Will Eisner popularized the term with the publication in 1978 of "A Contract with God". The term was used partly to rise above the low cultural status that comics had in the English-speaking world, and partly because the term "comic book" was being used to refer to short-form periodicals, leaving no accepted vocabulary with which to talk about book-form comics.


title: Maus

text: The first chapter of "Maus" appeared in December 1980 in the second issue of "Raw" as a small insert; a new chapter appeared in each issue until the magazine came to an end in 1991. Every chapter but the last appeared in "Raw".


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman struggled to find a publisher for a book edition of "Maus", but after a rave "New York Times" review of the serial in August 1986, Pantheon Books published the first six chapters in a volume called "Maus: A Survivor's Tale" and subtitled "My Father Bleeds History". Spiegelman was relieved that the book's publication preceded the theatrical release of the animated film "An American Tail" by three months, as he believed that the film, produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, was inspired by "Maus" and wished to avoid comparisons with it.


title: Maus

text: The book found a large audience, partly because of its distribution through bookstores rather than the direct market comic shops where comic books were normally sold. "Maus" was difficult for critics and reviewers to classify, and also for booksellers, who needed to know on which shelves to place it. Though Pantheon pushed for the term "graphic novel", Spiegelman was not comfortable with this, as many book-length comics were being referred to as "graphic novels" whether or not they had novelistic qualities. He suspected the term's use was an attempt to validate the comics form, rather than to describe the content of the books. Spiegelman later came to accept the term, and with Drawn & Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros successfully lobbied the Book Industry Study Group in the early 2000s to include "graphic novel" as a category in bookstores.


title: Maus

text: Pantheon collected the last five chapters in 1991 in a second volume subtitled "And Here My Troubles Began". Pantheon later collected the two volumes into soft- and hardcover two-volume boxed sets and single-volume editions. In 1994 the Voyager Company released "The Complete Maus" on CD-ROM, a collection which contained the original comics, Vladek's taped transcripts, filmed interviews, sketches, and other background material. The CD-ROM was based on HyperCard, a Macintosh and Apple IIGS application that has since become obsolete. In 2011 Pantheon Books published a companion to "The Complete Maus" entitled "MetaMaus", with further background material, including filmed footage of Vladek. The centerpiece of the book is a Spiegelman interview conducted by Hillary Chute. It also has interviews with Spiegelman's wife and children, sketches, photographs, family trees, assorted artwork, and a DVD with video, audio, photos, and an interactive version of "Maus".


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman dedicated "Maus" to his brother Richieu and his first daughter Nadja. The book's epigraph is a quote from Adolf Hitler: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human."


title: Maus

text: Penguin Books obtained the rights to publish the initial volume in the Commonwealth in 1986. In support of the African National Congress's cultural boycott in opposition to apartheid, Spiegelman refused to "compromise with fascism" by allowing publication of his work in South Africa.


title: Maus

text: By 2011, "Maus" had been translated into about 30 languages. Three translations were particularly important to Spiegelman: French, as his wife was French, and because of his respect for the sophisticated Franco-Belgian comics tradition; German, given the book's background; and Polish. Poland was the setting for most of the book, and Polish was the language of his parents and his own mother tongue. The publishers of the German edition had to convince the German culture ministry of the work's serious intent to have the swastika appear on the cover, per laws prohibiting the display of Nazi symbolism. Reception in Germany was positive—"Maus" was a best-seller and was taught in schools. The Polish translation encountered difficulties; as early as 1987, when Spiegelman planned a research visit to Poland, the Polish consulate official who approved his visa questioned him about the Poles' depiction as pigs, and pointed out how serious an insult it was. Publishers and commentators refused to deal with the book for fear of protests and boycotts. Piotr Bikont, a journalist for , set up his own publishing house to publish "Maus" in Polish in 2001. Demonstrators protested "Maus"s publication and burned the book in front of "Gazeta"s offices. Bikont's response was to don a pig mask and wave to the protesters from the office windows. The magazine-sized Japanese translation was the only authorized edition with larger pages. Long-standing plans for an Arabic translation have yet to come to fruition. A Russian law passed in December 2014 prohibiting the display of Nazi propaganda led to the removal of "Maus" from Russian bookstores leading up to Victory Day due to the swastika appearing on the book's cover.


title: Maus

text: A few panels were changed for the Hebrew edition of "Maus". Based on Vladek's memory, Spiegelman portrayed one of the minor characters as a member of the Nazi-installed Jewish Police. An Israeli descendant objected and threatened to sue for libel. Spiegelman redrew the character with a fedora in place of his original police hat, but appended a note to the volume voicing his objection to this "intrusion". This version of the first volume appeared in 1990 from the publishing house Zmora Bitan. It had an indifferent or negative reception, and the publisher did not release the second volume. Another Israeli publisher put out both volumes, with a new translation by poet Yehuda Vizan that included Vladek's broken language, which Zmora Bitan had refused to do. Marilyn Reizbaum saw this as highlighting a difference between the self-image of the Israeli Jew as a fearless defender of the homeland, and that of the American Jew as a feeble victim, something that one Israeli writer disparaged as "the diaspora sickness".


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman, like many of his critics, has expressed concern that "[r]eality is too much for comics ... so much has to be left out or distorted", admitting that his presentation of the story may not be accurate. He takes a postmodern approach; "Maus" "feeds on itself", telling the story of how the story was made. It examines the choices Spiegelman made in the retelling of his father's memories, and the artistic choices he had to make—for example, when his French wife converts to Judaism, Spiegelman's character frets over whether to depict her as a frog, a mouse, or another animal.


title: Maus

text: The book portrays humans with the heads and tails of different species of animals; Jews are drawn as mice and other Germans and Poles as cats and pigs, among others. Spiegelman took advantage of the way Nazi propaganda films depicted Jews as vermin, though he was first struck by the metaphor after attending a presentation where Ken Jacobs showed films of minstrel shows along with early American animated films, abundant with racial caricatures. Spiegelman derived the mouse as symbol for the Jew from Nazi propaganda, emphasized in a quote from a German newspaper in the 1930s that prefaces the second volume: "Mickey Mouse is the most miserable idea ever revealed ... Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal ... Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!"


title: Maus

text: Jewish characters try to pass themselves off as ethnic Poles by tying pig masks to their faces, with the strings showing at the back. Vladek's disguise was more convincing than Anja's—"you could see she was more Jewish", Vladek says. Spiegelman shows this Jewishness by having her tail hang out of her disguise. This literalization of the genocidal stereotypes that drove the Nazis to their Final Solution may risk reinforcing racist labels, but Spiegelman uses the idea to create anonymity for the characters. According to art historian Andrea Liss, this may paradoxically enable the reader to identify with the characters as human, preventing the reader from observing racial characteristics based on facial traits, while reminding readers that racist classification is ever present.


title: Maus

text: In making people of each ethnicity look alike, Spiegelman hoped to show the absurdity of dividing people along such lines. Spiegelman has stated that "these metaphors ... are meant to self-destruct" and "reveal the inanity of the notion itself". Animals signified the characters' roles in the story rather than their races—the gentile Françoise is a mouse because of her identification with her husband, who identifies with the Holocaust victims. When asked what animal he would make Israeli Jews, Spiegelman suggests porcupines. When Art visits his psychiatrist, the two wear mouse masks. Spiegelman's perceptions of the animal metaphor seem to have evolved over the book's making—in the original publication of the first volume, his self-portrait showed a mouse head on a human body, but by the time the second volume arrived, his self-portrait had become that of a man wearing a mouse mask. In "Maus", the characters seem to be mice and cats only in their predator/prey relationship. In every respect other than their heads and tails, they act and speak as ordinary humans. Further complicating the animal metaphor, Anja is ironically shown to be afraid of mice, while other characters appear with pet dogs and cats, and the Nazis with attack dogs.


title: Maus

text: To Marianne Hirsch, Spiegelman's life is "dominated by memories that are not his own". His work is one not of memory but of "postmemory"—a term she coined after encountering "Maus". This describes the relation of the children of survivors with the survivors themselves. While these children have not had their parents' experiences, they grow up with their parents' memories—the memory of another's memory—until the stories become so powerful that for these children they become memories in their own right. The children's proximity creates a "deep personal connection" with the memory, though separated from it by "generational distance". In the field of psychology, this is called transgenerational trauma or generational trauma.


title: Maus

text: Art tried to keep his father's story chronological, because otherwise he would "never keep it straight". His mother Anja's memories are conspicuously absent from the narrative, given her suicide and Vladek's destruction of her diaries. Hirsch sees "Maus" in part as an attempt to reconstruct her memory. Vladek keeps her memory alive with the pictures on his desk, "like a shrine", according to Mala.


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman displays his sense of guilt in many ways. He suffers anguish over his dead brother, Richieu, who perished in the Holocaust, and whom he feels he can never live up to. The eighth chapter, made after the publication and unexpected success of the first volume, opens with a guilt-ridden Spiegelman (now in human form, with a strapped-on mouse mask) atop a pile of corpses—the corpses of the six million Jews upon whom "Maus" success was built. He is told by his psychiatrist that his father feels guilt for having survived and for outliving his first son, and that some of Art's guilt may spring from painting his father in such an unflattering way. As he had not lived in the camps himself, he finds it difficult to understand or visualize this "separate universe", and feels inadequate in portraying it.


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman parodies the Nazis' vision of racial divisions; Vladek's racism is also put on display when he becomes upset that Françoise would pick up a black hitchhiker, a "schwartser" as he says. When she berates him, a victim of antisemitism, for his attitude, he replies, "It's not even to compare, the schwartsers and the Jews!" Spiegelman gradually deconstructs the animal metaphor throughout the book, especially in the second volume, showing where the lines cannot be drawn between races of humans.


title: Maus

text: The Germans are depicted with little difference between them, but there is great variety among the Poles and Jews who dominate the story. Sometimes Jews and the Jewish councils are shown complying with the occupiers; some trick other Jews into capture, while others act as police for the Nazis.


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman shows numerous instances of Poles who risked themselves to aid Jews, and also shows antisemitism as being rife among them. The kapos who run the camps are Poles, and Anja and Vladek are tricked by Polish smugglers into the hands of the Nazis. Anja and Vladek hear stories that Poles continue to drive off and even kill returning Jews after the war.


title: Maus

text: Vladek's English is broken in contrast with that of Art's more fluent therapist, Paul Pavel, who is also an immigrant and Holocaust survivor. Vladek's knowledge of the language helps him several times during the story, as when he uses it to meet Anja. He also uses it to befriend a Frenchman, and continues to correspond with him in English after the war. His recounting of the Holocaust, first to American soldiers, then to his son, is never in his mother tongue, and English becomes his daily language when he moves to America. His difficulty with his second language is revealed as Art writes his dialogue in broken English; when Vladek is imprisoned he tells Art, "[E]very day we prayed ... I was very religious, and it wasn't else to do". Late in the book, Vladek talks of Dachau, saying, "And here ... my troubles began", though clearly his troubles had begun long before Dachau. This unidiomatic expression was used as the subtitle of the second volume.


title: Maus

text: The German word "Maus" is cognate to the English word "mouse", and also reminiscent of the German verb "mauscheln", which means "to speak like a Jew" and refers to the way Jews from Eastern Europe spoke German—a word etymologically related not to "Maus" but, distantly, to "Moses".


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman's perceived audacity in using the Holocaust as his subject was compounded by his telling the story in comics. The prevailing view in the English-speaking world held comics as inherently trivial, thus degrading Spiegelman's subject matter, especially as he used animal heads in place of recognizably human ones. Talking animals have been a staple of comics, and while they have a traditional reputation as children's fare, the underground had long made use of them in adult stories, for example in Robert Crumb's Fritz the Cat, which comics critic Joseph Witek asserts shows that the genre could "open up the way to a paradoxical narrative realism" that "Maus" exploited.


title: Maus

text: Ostensibly about the Holocaust, the story entwines with the frame tale of Art interviewing and interacting with his father. Art's "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" is also encompassed by the frame, and stands in visual and thematic contrast with the rest of the book as the characters are in human form in a surreal, German Expressionist woodcut style inspired by Lynd Ward.


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman blurs the line between the frame and the world, such as when neurotically trying to deal with what "Maus" is becoming for him, he says to his wife, "In real life you'd never have let me talk this long without interrupting." When a prisoner whom the Nazis believe to be a Jew claims to be German, Spiegelman has difficulty deciding whether to present this character as a cat or a mouse. Throughout the book, Spiegelman incorporates and highlights banal details from his father's tales, sometimes humorous or ironic, giving a lightness and humanity to the story which "helps carry the weight of the unbearable historical realities".


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman started taking down his interviews with Vladek on paper, but quickly switched to a tape recorder, face-to-face or over the phone. Spiegelman often condensed Vladek's words, and occasionally added to the dialogue or synthesized multiple retellings into a single portrayal.


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman worried about the effect that his organizing of Vladek's story would have on its authenticity. In the end, he eschewed a Joycean approach and settled on a linear narrative he thought would be better at "getting things across". He strove to present how the book was recorded and organized as an integral part of the book itself, expressing the "sense of an interview shaped by a relationship".


title: Maus

text: The story is text-driven, with few wordless panels among its 1,500 black-and-white panels. The art has high contrast, with heavy black areas and thick black borders balanced against areas of white and wide white margins. There is little gray in the shading. In the narrative present, the pages are arranged in eight-panel grids; in the narrative past, Spiegelman found himself "violating the grid constantly" with his page layouts.


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman rendered the original three-page "Maus" and "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" in highly detailed, expressive styles. Spiegelman planned to draw "Maus" in such a manner, but after initial sketches he decided to use a pared-down style, one little removed from his pencil sketches, which he found more direct and immediate. Characters are rendered in a minimalist way: animal heads with dots for eyes and slashes for eyebrows and mouths, sitting on humanoid bodies. Spiegelman wanted to get away from the rendering of the characters in the original "Maus", in which oversized cats towered over the Jewish mice, an approach which Spiegelman says, "tells you how to feel, tells you how to think". He preferred to let the reader make independent moral judgments. He drew the cat-Nazis the same size as the mouse-Jews, and dropped the stereotypical villainous expressions.


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman wanted the artwork to have a diary feel to it, and so drew the pages on stationery with a fountain pen and typewriter correction fluid. It was reproduced at the same size it was drawn, unlike his other work, which was usually drawn larger and shrunk down, which hides defects in the art.


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman has published articles promoting a greater knowledge of his medium's history. Chief among his early influences were Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner, and Bernard Krigstein's "Master Race". Though he acknowledged Eisner's early work as an influence, he denied that Eisner's first graphic novel, "A Contract with God" (1978), had any impact on "Maus". He cited Harold Gray's comic strip "Little Orphan Annie" as having "influenced "Maus" fairly directly", and praised Gray's work for using a cartoon-based storytelling vocabulary, rather than an illustration-based one. Justin Green's "Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary" (1972) inspired Spiegelman to include autobiographical elements in his comics. Spiegelman stated, "without "Binky Brown", there would be no "Maus"". Among the graphic artists who influenced "Maus", Spiegelman cited Frans Masereel, who had made early wordless novels in woodcuts such as "Passionate Journey" (1919).


title: Maus

text: Spiegelman's work as cartoonist and editor had long been known and respected in the comics community, but the media attention after the first volume's publication in 1986 was unexpected. Hundreds of overwhelmingly positive reviews appeared, and "Maus" became the center of new attention focused on comics. It was considered one of the "Big Three" book-form comics from around 1986–87, along with "Watchmen" and "The Dark Knight Returns", that are said to have brought the term "graphic novel" and the idea of comics for adults into mainstream consciousness. It was credited with changing the public's perception of what comics could be at a time when, in the English-speaking world, they were considered to be for children, and strongly associated with superheroes. Initially, critics of "Maus" showed a reluctance to include comics in literary discourse. "The New York Times" intended praise when saying of the book, "Art Spiegelman doesn't draw comic books". After its Pulitzer Prize win, it won greater acceptance and interest among academics. The Museum of Modern Art staged an exhibition on the making of "Maus" in 1991–92.


title: Maus

text: "Maus" proved difficult to classify to a genre, and has been called biography, fiction, autobiography, history, and memoir. Spiegelman petitioned "The New York Times" to move it from "fiction" to "non-fiction" on the newspaper's bestseller list, saying, "I shudder to think how David Duke ... would respond to seeing a carefully researched work based closely on my father's memories of life in Hitler's Europe and in the death camps classified as fiction". An editor responded, "Let's go out to Spiegelman's house and if a giant mouse answers the door, we'll move it to the nonfiction side of the list!" The "Times" eventually acquiesced. The Pulitzer committee sidestepped the issue by giving the completed "Maus" a Special Award in Letters in 1992.


title: Maus

text: "Maus" ranked highly on comics and literature lists. "The Comics Journal" called it the fourth greatest comics work of the 20th century, and "Wizard" placed it first on their list of 100 Greatest Graphic Novels. "Entertainment Weekly" listed "Maus" at seventh place on their list of "The New Classics: Books – The 100 Best Reads from 1983 to 2008", and "Time" put "Maus" at seventh place on their list of best non-fiction books from between 1923 and 2005, and fourth on their list of top graphic novels. Praise for the book also came from contemporaries such as Jules Feiffer and literary writers such as Umberto Eco. Spiegelman turned down numerous offers to have "Maus" adapted for film or television.


title: Maus

text: Early installments of "Maus" that appeared in "Raw" inspired the young Chris Ware to "try to do comics that had a 'serious' tone to them". "Maus" is cited as a primary influence on graphic novels such as Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" and Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home".


title: Maus

text: In 1999, cartoonist Ted Rall had an article published in "The Village Voice" criticizing Spiegelman's prominence and influence in the New York cartooning community. Entitled "King "Maus": Art Spiegelman Rules the World of Comix With Favors and Fear", it accused the Pulitzer board of opportunism in selecting "Maus", which Rall deemed unworthy. Cartoonist Danny Hellman responded to the piece with a series of emails in which Hellman impersonated Rall to his editors and colleagues. Hellman followed up by posting fake responses from New York magazine editors and art directors. Rall launched a lawsuit seeking damages of $1.5 million for libel, breach of privacy, and causing emotional distress. To raise funds, in 2001 Hellman had the "Legal Action Comics" anthology published, which included a back cover by Spiegelman in which he endorsed Hellman's actions, depicting Rall as a urinal.


title: Maus

text: In 2022 the board of trustees for McMinn County Schools in east Tennessee voted unanimously to remove "Maus" from the curriculum over concerns including profanity, violence, and nudity. The decision led to a backlash and attracted attention the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, and was covered by media in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Spiegelman called the decision baffling, "Orwellian", and "daffily myopic". The ban led to Amazon sales of "Maus" rising to No. 1. On January 30, 2022, it was the No. 1 overall for books. On January 31, "Maus" held the No. 1 and No. 2 ranks on Amazon at different times during the day, and also appeared as a best seller on Barnes & Noble's top 100 list and Bookshop's index of best-selling books.


title: Maus

text: A cottage industry of academic research has built up around "Maus", and schools have frequently used it as course material in a range of fields, including history, dysfunctional family psychology, language arts, and social studies. The volume of academic work published on "Maus" far surpasses that of any other work of comics. One of the earliest such works was Joshua Brown's 1988 "Of Mice and Memory" from the "Oral History Review", which deals with the problems Spiegelman faced in presenting his father's story. Marianne Hirsch wrote an influential essay on post-memory entitled "Family Pictures: "Maus", Mourning, and Post-Memory", later expanded into a book called "Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory". Academics far outside the field of comics such as Dominick LaCapra, Linda Hutcheon, and Terrence Des Pres took part in the discourse. Few approached "Maus" who were familiar with comics, largely because of the lack of an academic comics tradition—"Maus" tended to be approached as Holocaust history or from a film or literary perspective. In 2003, Deborah Geis edited a collection of essays on "Maus" called "Considering "Maus": Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust". "Maus" is considered an important work of Holocaust literature, and studies of it have made significant contributions to Holocaust studies.


title: Maus

text: According to writer Arie Kaplan, some Holocaust survivors objected to Spiegelman making a comic book out of their tragedy. Literary critics such as Hillel Halkin objected that the animal metaphor was "doubly dehumanizing", reinforcing the Nazi belief that the atrocities were perpetrated by one species on another, when they were actually done by humans against humans. Comics writer and critic Harvey Pekar and others saw Spiegelman's use of animals as potentially reinforcing stereotypes. Pekar was also disdainful of Spiegelman's overwhelmingly negative portrayal of his father, calling him disingenuous and hypocritical for such a portrayal in a book that presents itself as objective. Comics critic R. C. Harvey argued that Spiegelman's animal metaphor threatened "to erode moral underpinnings", and played "directly into racist vision".


title: Maus

text: Commentators such as Peter Obst and Lawrence Weschler expressed concern over the Poles' depiction as pigs, which reviewer Marek Kohn saw as an ethnic slur and "The Norton Anthology of American Literature" called "a calculated insult". Jewish culture views pigs and pork as non-kosher, or "unclean"—a point of which the Jewish Spiegelman was unlikely to be ignorant. Critics such as Obst and Pekar have said that the portrayal of Poles is unbalanced—that, while some Poles are seen as helping Jews, they are often shown doing so for self-serving reasons. In the late 1990s, an objector to "Maus"s depiction of Poles interrupted a presentation by Spiegelman at Montreal's McGill University with persistent abuse and was removed from the auditorium.


title: Maus

text: Literary critic Walter Ben Michaels found Spiegelman's racial divisions "counterfactual". Spiegelman depicts Europeans as different animal species based on Nazi conceptions of race, but all Americans, both black and white, as dogs—with the exception of the Jews, who remain unassimilated mice. To Michaels, "Maus" seems to gloss over the racial inequality that has plagued the history of the U.S.


title: Maus

text: Scholar Paul Buhle asserted, "More than a few readers have described as the most compelling of any depiction, perhaps because only the caricatured quality of comic art is equal to the seeming unreality of an experience beyond all reason." Michael Rothberg opined, "By situating a nonfictional story in a highly mediated, unreal, 'comic' space, Spiegelman captures the hyperintensity of Auschwitz."


title: Maus

text: Belgian publisher La Cinquième Couch anonymously produced a book entitled "Katz", a remix of Spiegelman's book but with all animal heads replaced with cat heads. The book reproduced every page and line of dialogue from the French translation of "Maus". The French publisher of the book, Flammarion, had the Belgian publisher destroy all copies under charges of copyright violation.


title: Dalit

text: Dalit (from meaning "broken/scattered"), also previously known as untouchable, is a name for people belonging to the lowest stratum of the castes in India. Dalits were excluded from the four-fold varna system of Hinduism and were seen as forming a fifth varna, also known by the name of "Panchama". Dalits now profess various religious beliefs, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity, Islam and various other belief systems. Scheduled Castes is the official term for Dalits as per the Constitution of India.


title: Dalit

text: The term "Dalit" is a self-applied concept for those called the "untouchables" and others that were outside of the traditional Hindu caste hierarchy. Economist and reformer B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) said that untouchability came into Indian society around 400 CE, due to the struggle for supremacy between Buddhism and Brahmanism (an ancient term for Brahmanical Hinduism). Some Hindu priests befriended untouchables and were demoted to low-caste ranks. Eknath, another excommunicated Brahmin, fought for the rights of untouchables during the Bhakti period.


title: Dalit

text: In the late 1880s, the Marathi word 'Dalit' was used by Mahatma Jotiba Phule for the outcasts and Untouchables who were oppressed and broken in the Hindu society. "Dalit" is a vernacular form of the Sanskrit दलित ("dalita"). In Classical Sanskrit, this means "divided, split, broken, scattered". This word was repurposed in 19th-century Sanskrit to mean "(a person) not belonging to one of the four Varnas". It was perhaps first used in this sense by Pune-based social reformer Jyotirao Phule, in the context of the oppression faced by the erstwhile "untouchable" castes from other Hindus. The term "dalits" was in use as a translation for the British Raj census classification of "Depressed Classes" prior to 1935. It was popularised by Ambedkar, himself a Dalit, who included all depressed people irrespective of their caste into the definition of Dalits. It covered people who were excluded from the four-fold varna system of Hinduism and thought of themselves as forming a fifth varna, describing themselves as "Panchama". In the 1970s its use was invigorated when it was adopted by the Dalit Panthers activist group.


title: Dalit

text: Socio-legal scholar Oliver Mendelsohn and political economist Marika Vicziany wrote in 1998 that the term had become "intensely political ... While the use of the term might seem to express appropriate solidarity with the contemporary face of Untouchable politics, there remain major problems in adopting it as a generic term. Although the word is now quite widespread, it still has deep roots in a tradition of political radicalism inspired by the figure of B. R. Ambedkar." They went on to suggest that its use risked erroneously labelling the entire population of untouchables in India as being united by a radical politics. Anand Teltumbde also detects a trend towards denial of the politicised identity, for example among educated middle-class people who have converted to Buddhism and argue that, as Buddhists, they cannot be Dalits. This may be due to their improved circumstances giving rise to a desire not to be associated with the what they perceive to be the demeaning Dalit masses.


title: Dalit

text: "Scheduled Castes" is the official term for Dalits in the opinion of India's National Commissions for Scheduled Castes (NCSC), who took legal advice that indicated modern legislation does not refer to Dalit and that therefore, it says, it is "unconstitutional" for official documents to do so. In 2004, the NCSC noted that some state governments used "Dalits" rather than "Scheduled Castes" in documentation and asked them to desist.


title: Dalit

text: Some sources say that "Dalit" encompasses a broader range of communities than the official "Scheduled Caste" definition. It can include nomadic tribes and another official classification that also originated with the British Raj positive discrimination efforts in 1935, being the "Scheduled Tribes". It is also sometimes used to refer to the entirety of India's oppressed peoples, which is the context that applies to its use in Nepalese society. An example of the limitations of the "Scheduled Caste" category is that, under Indian law, such people can only be followers of Buddhism, Hinduism or Sikhism, yet there are communities who claim to be Dalit Christians and Muslims, and the tribal communities often practise folk religions.


title: Dalit

text: The term "Harijan", or 'children of God', was coined by Narsinh Mehta, a Gujarati poet-saint of the Bhakti tradition, to refer to all devotees of Krishna irrespective of caste, class, or sex. Mahatma Gandhi, notably an admirer of Mehta's work, first used the word in the context of identifying Dalits in 1933. Ambedkar disliked the name as it placed Dalits in relation to a greater Hindu nation rather than as in an independent community like Muslims. In addition, many Dalits found, and still find, the term patronizing and derogatory, with some even claiming that the term really refers to children of devadasis. When untouchability was outlawed after Indian independence, the use of the word "Harijan" to describe ex-untouchables became more common among other castes than within Dalits themselves.


title: Dalit

text: In Southern India, Dalits are sometimes known as "Adi Dravida", "Adi Karnataka", and "Adi Andhra", which literally mean First Dravidians, Kannadigas, and Andhras, respectively. These terms were first used in 1917 by Southern Dalit leaders, who believed that they were the indigenous inhabitants of India. The terms are used in the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh/Telangana, respectively, as a generic term for anyone from a Dalit caste.


title: Dalit

text: In Maharashtra, according to historian and women's studies academic Shailaja Paik, "Dalit" is a term mostly used by members of the Mahar caste, into which Ambedkar was born. Most other communities prefer to use their own caste name.


title: Dalit

text: In Nepal, aside from "Harijan" and, most commonly, "Dalit", terms such as "Haris" (among Muslims), "Achhoot", "outcastes" and "neech jati" are used.


title: Dalit

text: Scheduled Caste communities exist across India and comprised 16.6% of the country's population, 2011 Census of India. Uttar Pradesh (21%), West Bengal (11%), Bihar (8%) and Tamil Nadu (7%) between them accounted for almost half the country's total Scheduled Caste population. They were most prevalent as a proportion of the states' population in Punjab, at about 32 per cent, while Mizoram had the lowest at approximately zero.


title: Dalit

text: Similar groups are found throughout the rest of the Indian subcontinent; less than 2 per cent of Pakistan's population are Hindu and 70–75 per cent of those Hindus are Dalits, in Nepal, Bangladesh had 5 million Dalits in 2010 with the majority being landless and in chronic poverty, and Sri Lanka. They are also found as part of the Indian diaspora in many countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, and the Caribbean.


title: Dalit

text: India is home to over 200 million Dalits. According to Paul Diwakar, a Dalit activist from the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, "India has 600,000 villages and almost every village a small pocket on the outskirts is meant for Dalits."


title: Dalit

text: Dalits have had lowest social status in the traditional Hindu social structure but James Lochtefeld, a professor of religion and Asian studies, said in 2002 that the "adoption and popularization of [the term "Dalit"] reflects their growing awareness of the situation, and their greater assertiveness in demanding their legal and constitutional rights".


title: Dalit

text: India's National Commission for Scheduled Castes considers official use of "dalit" as a label to be "unconstitutional" because modern legislation prefers "Scheduled Castes"; however, some sources say that "Dalit" has encompassed more communities than the official term of "Scheduled Castes" and is sometimes used to refer to all of India's oppressed peoples. A similar all-encompassing situation prevails in Nepal.


title: Dalit

text: In 1932, the British Raj recommended separate electorates to select leaders for Dalits in the Communal Award. This was favoured by Ambedkar but when Mahatma Gandhi opposed the proposal it resulted in the Poona Pact. That in turn influenced the Government of India Act, 1935, which introduced the reservation of seats for the Depressed Classes, now renamed as Scheduled Castes.


title: Dalit

text: From soon after its independence in 1947, India introduced a reservation system to enhance the ability of Dalits to have political representation and to obtain government jobs and education. In 1997, India elected its first Dalit President, K. R. Narayanan. Many social organisations have promoted better conditions for Dalits through education, healthcare and employment. Nonetheless, while caste-based discrimination was prohibited and untouchability abolished by the Constitution of India, such practices are still widespread. To prevent harassment, assault, discrimination and similar acts against these groups, the Government of India enacted the Prevention of Atrocities Act, also called the SC/ST Act, on 31 March 1995. In accordance with the order of the Bombay High Court, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry (I&B Ministry) of the Government of India issued an advisory to all media channels in September 2018, asking them to use "Scheduled Castes" instead of the word "Dalit".


title: Dalit

text: George Kunnath claims that there "is and has been an internal hierarchy between the various Dalit castes". According to Kunnath, the Dusadhs are considered the highest while the Musahars are considered the lowest within the Dalit groups.


title: Dalit

text: In the past, they were believed to be so impure that upper caste Hindus considered their presence to be polluting. The "impure status" was related to their historic hereditary occupations that caste Hindus considered to be "polluting" or debased, such as working with leather, disposing of dead animals, manual scavenging, or sanitation work.


title: Dalit

text: Forced by the circumstance of their birth and poverty, Dalits in India continue to work as sanitation workers: manual scavengers, cleaners of drains, garbage collectors, and sweepers of roads. As of 2019, an estimated 40 to 60 per cent of the 6 million Dalit households are engaged in sanitation work. The most common Dalit caste performing sanitation work is Valmiki (also Balmiki) caste.


title: Dalit

text: Gopal Baba Walangkar (c. 1840–1900) is generally considered to be the pioneer of the Dalit movement, seeking a society in which they were not discriminated against. Another pioneer was Harichand Thakur (c. 1812–1878) with his Matua organisation that involved the Namasudra (Chandala) community in the Bengal Presidency. Ambedkar himself believed Walangkar to be the progenitor. Another early social reformer who worked to improve conditions for Dalits was Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890).


title: Dalit

text: The 1950 Constitution of India, introduced after the country gained independence, included measures to improve the socioeconomic conditions of Dalits. Aside from banning untouchability, these included the reservation system, a means of positive discrimination that created the classifications of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes for Dalits. Communities that were categorised as being one of those groups were guaranteed a percentage of the seats in the national and state legislatures, as well as in government jobs and places of education. The system has its origins in the 1932 Poona Pact between Ambedkar and Gandhi, when Ambedkar conceded his demand that the Dalits should have an electorate separate from the caste Hindus in return for Gandhi accepting measures along these lines. The notion of a separate electorate had been proposed in the Communal Award made by the British Raj authorities, and the outcome of the Pact – the Government of India Act of 1935 – both introduced the new term of "Scheduled Castes" in replacement for "Depressed Classes" and reserved seats for them in the legislatures.


title: Dalit

text: By 1995, of all federal government jobs in India – 10.1 per cent of Class I, 12.7 per cent of Class II, 16.2 per cent of Class III, and 27.2 per cent of Class IV jobs were held by Dalits. Of the most senior jobs in government agencies and government-controlled enterprises, only 1 per cent were held by Dalits, not much change in 40 years. In the 21st century, Dalits have been elected to India's highest judicial and political offices.


title: Dalit

text: In 2001, the quality of life of the Dalit population in India was worse than that of the overall Indian population on metrics such as access to health care, life expectancy, education attainability, access to drinking water and housing.


title: Dalit

text: According to a 2014 report to the Ministry of Minority Affairs, over 44.8 per cent of Scheduled Tribe (ST) and 33.8 per cent of Scheduled Caste (SC) populations in rural India were living below the poverty line in 2011–12. In urban areas, 27.3 per cent of ST and 21.8 per cent of SC populations were below the poverty line.


title: Dalit

text: Some Dalits have achieved affluence, although most remain poor. Some Dalit intellectuals, such as Chandra Bhan Prasad, have argued that the living standards of many Dalits have improved since the economic system became more liberalised starting in 1991 and have supported their claims through large surveys. According to the Socio Economic and Caste Census 2011, nearly 79 per cent of Adivasi households and 73 per cent of Dalit households were the most deprived among rural households in India. While 45 per cent of SC households are landless and earn a living by manual casual labour, the figure is 30 per cent for Adivasis.


title: Dalit

text: A 2012 survey by Mangalore University in Karnataka found that 93 per cent of Dalit families in the state of Karnataka live below the poverty line.


title: Dalit

text: Discrimination against Dalits has been observed across South Asia and among the South Asian diaspora. According to a 2007 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the treatment of Dalits has been like a "hidden apartheid" and that they "endure segregation in housing, schools, and access to public services". HRW noted that Manmohan Singh, then Prime Minister of India, saw a parallel between the apartheid system and untouchability. Eleanor Zelliot also notes Singh's 2006 comment but says that, despite the obvious similarities, race prejudice and the situation of Dalits "have a different basis and perhaps a different solution". Though the Indian Constitution abolished untouchability, the oppressed status of Dalits remains a reality. In rural India, stated Klaus Klostermaier in 2010, "they still live in secluded quarters, do the dirtiest work, and are not allowed to use the village well and other common facilities". In the same year, Zelliot noted that "In spite of much progress over the last sixty years, Dalits are still at the social and economic bottom of society."


title: Dalit

text: The South Asia State of Minorities Report 2020 has found that since the BJP (the Indian people's party) has returned to political power in India as of May 2018, "Hate crimes against minorities have seen a spike – taking the form of mob lynching and vigilante violence against Muslims, Christians, and Dalits. BJP also strengthened and expanded a series of discriminatory laws and measures that target religious minorities. These include anti-conversion laws, blamed by human rights groups for empowering Hindutva groups to conduct campaigns of harassment, social exclusion and violence against Christians, Muslims, and other religious minorities across the country’. Laws ostensibly meant for the protection of cows continue to provide institutional backing for similar campaigns against Muslims and Dalits."


title: Dalit

text: While discrimination against Dalits has declined in urban areas and in the public sphere, it still exists in rural areas and in the private sphere, in everyday matters such as access to eating places, schools, temples and water sources. Some Dalits successfully integrated into urban Indian society, where caste origins are less obvious. In rural India, however, caste origins are more readily apparent and Dalits often remain excluded from local religious life, though some qualitative evidence suggests that exclusion is diminishing.


title: Dalit

text: According to the 2014 NCAER/University of Maryland survey, 27 per cent of the Indian population still practices untouchability; the figure may be higher because many people refuse to acknowledge doing so when questioned, although the methodology of the survey was also criticised for potentially inflating the figure. Across India, Untouchability was practised among 52 per cent of Brahmins, 33 per cent of Other Backward Classes and 24 per cent of non-Brahmin forward castes. Untouchability was also practised by people of minority religions – 23 per cent of Sikhs, 18 per cent of Muslims and 5 per cent of Christians. According to statewide data, Untouchability is most commonly practised in Madhya Pradesh (53 per cent), followed by Himachal Pradesh (50 per cent), Chhattisgarh (48 per cent), Rajasthan and Bihar (47 per cent), Uttar Pradesh (43 per cent), and Uttarakhand (40 per cent).


title: Dalit

text: Examples of segregation have included the Madhya Pradesh village of Ghatwani, where the Scheduled Tribe population of Bhilala do not allow Dalit villagers to use the public borewell for fetching water and thus they are forced to drink dirty water. In metropolitan areas around New Delhi and Bangalore, Dalits and Muslims face discrimination from upper caste landlords when seeking places to rent.


title: Dalit

text: In 1855, Mutka Salve, a 14-year-old student of Dalit leader Savitribai Phule, wrote that during the rule of Baji Rao of the Maratha Empire, the Dalit castes were chased away from their lands to build large buildings. They were also forced to drink oil mixed with red lead causing them to die, and then they were buried in the foundations of buildings, thus wiping out generations of Dalits. Under the rule of Baji Rao, if a Dalit crossed in front of a gym, they would cut off his head and play "bat and ball" on the ground, with their swords as bats and his head as a ball. Under these 17th century kings, human sacrifice of untouchable persons was not unusual. They also created intricate rules and operations to ensure that they stayed untouchables. She also wrote that if a Dalit learned to read and write, Baji Rao would say that their education takes away a Brahmin's job, and they were punished.


title: Dalit

text: According to an analysis by The IndiaGoverns Research Institute, Dalits constituted nearly half of primary school drop-outs in Karnataka during the period 2012–14. A sample survey in 2014, conducted by Dalit Adhikar Abhiyan and funded by ActionAid, found that among state schools in Madhya Pradesh, 88 per cent discriminated against Dalit children. In 79 per cent of the schools studied, Dalit children are forbidden from touching mid-day meals. They are required to sit separately at lunch in 35 per cent of schools, and are required to eat with specially marked plates in 28 per cent.


title: Dalit

text: There have been incidents and allegations of SC and ST teachers and professors being discriminated against and harassed by authorities, upper castes colleagues and upper caste students in different education institutes of India. In some cases, such as in Gujarat, state governments have argued that, far from being discriminatory, their rejection when applying for jobs in education has been because there are no suitably qualified candidates from those classifications.


title: Dalit

text: Discrimination can also exist in access to healthcare and nutrition. A sample survey of Dalits, conducted over several months in Madhya Pradesh and funded by ActionAid in 2014, found that health field workers did not visit 65 per cent of Dalit settlements. 47 per cent of Dalits were not allowed entry into ration shops; and 64 per cent were given less grains than non-Dalits. In Haryana state, 49 per cent of Dalit children under five years were underweight and malnourished while 80 per cent of those in the 6–59 months age group were anaemic in 2015.


title: Dalit

text: Dalits comprise a slightly disproportionate number of India's prison inmates. While Dalits (including both SCs and STs) constitute 25 per cent of the Indian population, they account for 33.2 per cent of prisoners. About 24.5 per cent of death row inmates in India are from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes which is proportionate to their population. The percentage is highest in Maharashtra (50 per cent), Karnataka (36.4 per cent) and Madhya Pradesh (36 per cent). Dalits have been arrested on false pretexts. According to Human Rights Watch, politically motivated arrests of Dalit rights activists occur and those arrested can be detained for six months without charge.


title: Dalit

text: Caste-related violence between Dalit and non-Dalits stems from ongoing prejudice by upper caste members. The Bhagana rape case, which arose out of a dispute of allocation of land, is an example of atrocities against Dalit girls and women. In August 2015, due to continued alleged discrimination from upper castes of the village, about 100 Dalit inhabitants converted to Islam in a ceremony at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi. Inter-caste marriage has been proposed as a remedy, but according to a 2014 survey of 42,000 households by the New Delhi-based National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the University of Maryland, it was estimated that only 5 per cent of Indian marriages cross caste boundaries.


title: Dalit

text: According to data for 2000 collected by India's National Crime Records Bureau, 25,455 crimes against Dalits were committed in the year 2000, the latest year for which the data is only available, 2 Dalits are assaulted every hour, 3 Dalit women are raped every day, 2 Dalits are murdered; and 2 Dalit homes are set on fire every day. Amnesty International documented a high number of sexual assaults against Dalit women, which were often committed by landlords, upper-caste villagers, and policemen, according to a study published in 2001. According to the research, only about 5% of assaults are recorded, and policemen dismiss at least 30% of rape reports as false. The study also discovered that cops often seek bribes, threaten witnesses, and conceal evidence. Victims of rape have also been killed. There have been reports of Dalits being forced to eat human faeces and drink urine by upper caste members and the police. In September 2015, a 45-year-old dalit woman was allegedly stripped naked and was forced to drink urine by perpetrators in Madhya Pradesh. In some parts of India, there have been allegations that Dalit grooms riding horses for wedding ceremonies have been beaten up and ostracised by upper caste people. In August 2015, upper caste people burned houses and vehicles belonging to Dalit families and slaughtered their livestock in reaction to Dalits daring to hold a temple car procession at a village in Tamil Nadu. In August 2015, it was claimed that a Jat Khap Panchayat ordered the rape of two Dalit sisters because their brother eloped with a married Jat girl of the same village. In 2003, the higher caste Muslims in Bihar opposed the burials of lower caste Muslims in the same graveyard. A Dalit activist was killed in 2020 for social media posts criticising Brahmins. A dalit was killed in 2019 for eating in front of upper-caste men.


title: Dalit

text: The Government of India has attempted on several occasions to legislate specifically to address the issue of caste-related violence that affects SCs and STs. Aside from the Constitutional abolition of untouchability, there has been the Untouchability (Offences) Act of 1955, which was amended in the same year to become the Protection of Civil Rights Act. It was determined that neither of those Acts were effective, so the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989 (POA) came into force.


title: Dalit

text: The POA designated specific crimes against SCs and STs as "atrocities" – a criminal act that has "the quality of being shockingly cruel and inhumane" – which should be prosecuted under its terms rather than existing criminal law. It created corresponding punishments. Its purpose was to curb and punish violence against Dalits, including humiliations such as the forced consumption of noxious substances. Other atrocities included forced labour, denial of access to water and other public amenities, and sexual abuse. The Act permitted Special Courts exclusively to try POA cases. The Act called on states with high levels of caste violence (said to be "atrocity-prone") to appoint qualified officers to monitor and maintain law and order.


title: Dalit

text: In 2015, the Parliament of India passed the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Act to address issues regarding implementation of the POA, including instances where the police put procedural obstacles in the way of alleged victims or indeed outright colluded with the accused. It also extended the number of acts that were deemed to be atrocities. One of those remedies, in an attempt to address the slow process of cases, was to make it mandatory for states to set up the exclusive Special Courts that the POA had delineated. Progress in doing so, however, was reported in April 2017 to be unimpressive. P. L. Punia, a former chairman of the NCSC, said that the number of pending cases was high because most of the extant Special Courts were in fact not exclusive but rather being used to process some non-POA cases, and because "The special prosecutors are not bothered and the cases filed under this Act are as neglected as the victims". While Dalit rights organisations were cautiously optimistic that the amended Act would improve the situation, legal experts were pessimistic.


title: Dalit

text: Discrimination is illegal under Indian law by the Removal of Civil Disabilities Act (Act 21 of 1938), the Temple Entry Authorization and Indemnity Act 1939 (Act XXII of 1939) and Article 17 of the Constitution which outlawed Untouchability. After India's independence in 1947, secular nationalism based on a "composite culture" made all people equal citizens, but Hindutva forces have worked to change India's secular tradition and promote Hindu nationalism. In Pakistan there are tensions between forces that want a modern secular state or an Islamic one. The constitution of Bangladesh proclaims Islam is the state religion but upholds secularism.


title: Dalit

text: Most Dalits in India are Hindu. There have been incidents which showed that Dalits were restricted from entering temples by high-caste Hindus, and participation in religious processions.


title: Dalit

text: In the 19th century, the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission actively participated in the rights of Dalits. While Dalits had places to worship, the first upper-caste temple to openly welcome Dalits was the Laxminarayan Temple in Wardha in 1928. It was followed by the Temple Entry Proclamation issued by the last King of Travancore in the Indian state of Kerala in 1936.


title: Dalit

text: In the 1930s, Gandhi and Ambedkar disagreed regarding retention of the caste system. Whilst Ambedkar wanted to see it destroyed, Gandhi thought that it could be modified by reinterpreting Hindu texts so that the untouchables were absorbed into the Shudra varna. It was this disagreement that led to the Poona Pact. Gandhi began the Harijan Yatra to help the Dalits, but ran into some opposition from Dalits that wanted a complete break from Hinduism.


title: Dalit

text: The declaration by princely states of Kerala between 1936 and 1947 that temples were open to all Hindus went a long way towards ending untouchability there. However, educational opportunities to Dalits in Kerala remain limited.


title: Dalit

text: Other Hindu groups attempted to reconcile with the Dalit community. Hindu temples are increasingly receptive to Dalit priests, a function formerly reserved for Brahmins. Brahmins such as Subramania Bharati passed Brahminhood onto a Dalit, while in Shivaji's Maratha Empire Dalit warriors (the Mahar Regiment) joined his forces.


title: Dalit

text: The fight for temple entry rights for Dalits continues to cause controversy. In a 2015 incident in Meerut, when a Dalit belonging to Valmiki caste was denied entry to a Hindu temple he converted to Islam. In September 2015, four Dalit women were fined by the upper-caste Hindus for entering a temple in Karnataka.


title: Dalit

text: There have been allegations that Dalits in Nepal are denied entry to Hindu temples. In at least one reported case, they were beaten up by some upper-caste people for doing so.


title: Dalit

text: In 1956, the Dalit jurist Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) launched the Dalit Buddhist movement, leading several mass conversions of Dalits from Hinduism to Buddhism. Ambedkar's Buddhism is a new kind of Buddhism that focuses on social and political engagement. About half a million Dalits joined Ambedkar in rejecting Hinduism and challenging its caste system. The movement is centered in Maharashtra, and according to the 2011 census, there were 6.5 million Marathi Buddhists (mainly Dalit Buddhists) in Maharashtra.


title: Dalit

text: Another Dalit Buddhist leader and reformer was Pandit Iyothee Thass, founder of the Sakya Buddhist Society of Tamil Nadu.


title: Dalit

text: Guru Nanak in "Guru Granth Sahib" calls for everyone to treat each other equally. Subsequent Sikh Gurus, all of whom came from the Khatri caste, also denounced the hierarchy of the caste system. Despite this, social stratification exists in the Sikh community. The bulk of the Sikhs of Punjab belong to the Jat caste; there are also two Dalit Sikh castes in the state, called the Mazhabis and the Ramdasias.


title: Dalit

text: Sunrinder S. Jodhka says that, in practice, Sikhs belonging to the landowning dominant castes have not shed all their prejudices against the dalit castes. While dalits would be allowed entry into the village gurudwaras they would not be permitted to cook or serve langar (the communal meal). Therefore, wherever they could mobilise resources, the Sikh dalits of Punjab have tried to construct their own gurudwara and other local-level institutions in order to attain a certain degree of cultural autonomy. In 1953, Sikh leader Master Tara Singh succeeded in winning the demands from the government to include Sikh castes of the converted untouchables in the list of scheduled castes. In the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), 20 of the 140 seats are reserved for low-caste Sikhs.


title: Dalit

text: Sikh women are required to have the surname "Kaur", and men, the surname "Singh", in order to eradicate caste identities and discrimination.


title: Dalit

text: In 2003 the Talhan village Gurudwara endured a bitter dispute between Jat Sikhs and Chamars. The Chamars came out in force and confronted the Randhawa and Bains Jat Sikh landlords, who refused to give the Chamars a share on the governing committee of a shrine dedicated to Shaheed Baba Nihal Singh. The shrine earned 3–7 crore Indian Rupees, and the Jat Sikh landlords allegedly "gobbled up a substantial portion of the offerings". Though Dalits form more than 60 per cent of Talhan's 5,000-strong population, local traditions ensured that they were denied a place on the committee. The landlords, in league with radical Sikh organisations and the SGPC, attempted to keep out the Dalits by razing the shrine overnight and constructing a gurdwara on it, but the Dalit quest for a say in the governing committee did not end.


title: Dalit

text: Chamars fought a four-year court battle with the landlords and their allies, including the Punjab Police. In that time Jats conducted several boycotts against the Chamars. The Jat Sikhs and their allies cut off the power supply to their homes. In addition, various scuffles and fights set Chamar youths armed with lathis, rocks, bricks, soda bottles and anything they could find fought Jat Sikh landlords, youths and the Punjab police. Dalit youngsters painted their homes and motorcycles with the slogan, "Putt Chamar De" ("proud sons of Chamars") in retaliation to the Jat slogan, "Putt Jattan De".


title: Dalit

text: Historically Jainism was practised by many communities across India. They are often conservative and are generally considered upper-caste.


title: Dalit

text: In 1958, a Sthanakvasi Jain called Muni Sameer Muni came into contact with members of the Khatik community in the Udaipur region, who decided to adopt Jainism. Their centre, Ahimsa Nagar, located about four miles from Chittorgarh, was inaugurated by Mohanlal Sukhadia in 1966. Sameer Muni termed them "Veerwaal", that is, belonging to Mahavira. A 22-year-old youth, Chandaram Meghwal, was initiated as a Jain monk at Ahore town in Jalore district in 2005. In 2010 a Mahar engineer called Vishal Damodar was initiated as a Jain monk by Acharya Navaratna Sagar Suriji at Samet Shikhar. Acharya Nanesh, the eighth Achayra of Sadhumargi Jain Shravak Sangha, had preached among the Balai community in 1963 near Ratlam. His followers are called "Dharmapal". In 1984, some of the Bhangis of Jodhpur came under the influence of Acharya Shri Tulsi and adopted Jainism.


title: Dalit

text: Mass conversions of lower caste Hindus to Christianity and Islam took place in order to escape the discrimination. The main Dalit groups that participated in these conversions were the Chuhras of Punjab, Chamars of North India (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh), Vankars of Gujarat, and Pulayas of Kerala.


title: Dalit

text: The first people converted to Christianity by Jesuits of the Madura Mission were members of Nadars, Maravars, and Pallar.


title: Dalit

text: They believed that "Christianity is a true religion; a desire for protection from oppressors and, if possible, material aid; the desire for education for their children; and the knowledge that those who have become Christians had improved".


title: Dalit

text: Christianity was thought to be egalitarian and could provide mobility away from the caste. Sometimes the only change seen was their personal religious identity. Even after conversion, in some cases Dalits were discriminated against due to the "residual leftover" practice of caste discrimination from their previous traditions. This is attributed to the predominantly Hindu society they lived in.


title: Dalit

text: Discrimination against Dalit Christians also remained in interactions and mannerisms between castes; for example, during the earlier days, the 'lower caste Christians' had to [cover] their mouths when talking to a Syrian Christian.


title: Dalit

text: In many cases they were still referred to by their Hindu caste names: For example "Pulayans" in Kerala, "Pariah" in Tamil Nadu, and "Madigas" in Andra Pradesh, by members of all religious backgrounds.


title: Dalit

text: Even after conversion, to some extent segregation, restriction, hierarchy, and graded ritual purity remained. Data shows that there is more discrimination and less class mobility among the people living in the rural areas, where incidents of caste discrimination is higher among people from all religious backgrounds.


title: Dalit

text: In many cases, the churches referred to the Dalits as 'New Christians'. It is alleged to be a derogatory term which classifies the Dalit Christians to be looked down upon by other Christians. During the earlier days of Christianity, in some churches in south India the Dalits had either separate seating, or had to attend the mass outside. Dalit Christians are also said to be grossly underrepresented amongst the clergy in some places.


title: Dalit

text: Inter-caste marriage among Christians is also not commonly practised. For example, Syrian Christians in Kerala will not marry Dalit Christians Even intermarriage between Bamons and Sudras in Goa is quite uncommon. Sometimes marriage to a higher class Hindu is preferred to marriage to a Dalit Christian.


title: Dalit

text: Caste-based occupations held by Dalits also show a clear segregation which perpetuated even after becoming Christian. Occupational patterns (including manual scavenging) are prevalent among Dalit Christians in north-west India are said to be quite similar to that of Dalit Hindus. Occupational discrimination for Dalit Christians goes so far as to restrict not only employment but in some cases for clean sanitation and water.


title: Dalit

text: Anti-Dalit prejudices exist in groups such as the extremist militia Ranvir Sena, largely run by upper-caste landlords in Bihar. They oppose equal treatment of Dalits and have resorted to violence. The Ranvir Sena is considered a terrorist organisation by the government of India. In 2015, Cobrapost exposed many leaders especially like C. P. Thakur alongside former PM Chandra Shekhar associated with Ranvir Sena in Bihar Dalit massacres while governments of Nitish Kumar (under pressure from BJP), Lalu Prasad Yadav and Rabri Devi did nothing to get justice for Dalits.


title: Dalit

text: The rise of Hindutva's (Hindu nationalism) role in Indian politics has accompanied allegations that religious conversions of Dalits are due to allurements like education and jobs rather than faith. Critics argue that laws banning conversion and limiting social relief for converts mean that conversion impedes economic success. However, Bangaru Laxman, a Dalit politician, was a prominent member of the Hindutva movement.


title: Dalit

text: Another political issue is Dalit affirmative-action quotas in government jobs and university admissions. About 8 per cent of the seats in the National and State Parliaments are reserved for Scheduled Caste and Tribe candidates.


title: Dalit

text: Jagjivan Ram (1908–1986) was the first scheduled caste leader to emerge at the national level from Bihar. He was member of the Constituent assembly that drafted India's constitution. Ram also served in the interim national government of 1946 He served in the cabinets of Congress party Prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi. His last position in government was as Deputy Prime Minister of India in the Janata Party government of 1977–1979,


title: Dalit

text: In modern times several Bharatiya Janata Party leaders were Dalits, including Dinanath Bhaskar, Ramchandra Veerappa and Suraj Bhan.


title: Dalit

text: In India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, Dalits have had a major political impact. The Dalit-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) had previously run the government and that party's leader, Mayawati, served several times as chief minister. Regarding her election in 2007, some reports claimed her victory was due to her ability to win support from both 17 per cent of Muslims and nearly 17 per cent Brahmins alongside 80 per cent of Dalits. However, surveys of voters on the eve of elections, indicated that caste loyalties were not the voters' principal concern. Instead, inflation and other issues of social and economic development dictated the outcome. Mayawati's success in reaching across castes has led to speculation about her as a potential future Prime Minister of India.


title: Dalit

text: Aside from Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, Damodaram Sanjivayya was chief minister of Andhra Pradesh from 11 January 1960 to 12 March 1962, and Jitan Ram Manjhi was chief minister of Bihar for just under a year. In 1997, K. R. Narayanan, who was a Dalit, was elected as President of India. In 2017, Ramnath Kovind was elected as the President of India, becoming the second dalit president of the country.


title: Dalit

text: Votebank politics are common in India, usually based on religion or caste. Indeed, the term itself was coined by the Indian sociologist M. N. Srinivas. Dalits are often used as a votebank. There have been instances where it has been alleged that an election-winning party reneged on promises made to the Dalits made during the election campaign or have excluded them from party affairs.


title: Dalit

text: The SC, ST Sub-Plan, or "Indiramma Kalalu", is a budget allocation by the Government of Andhra Pradesh for the welfare of Dalits. The law was enacted in May 2013. SCs and STs have separate panels for spending. The plan was meant to prevent the government from diverting funds meant for SCs and STs to other programs, which was historically the case. , no equivalent national plan existed. Scheduled Castes Sub Plan and Tribal Sub-Plan funds are often diverted by state governments to other purposes.


title: Dalit

text: While the Indian Constitution has provisions for the social and economic uplift of Dalits to support their upward social mobility, these concessions are limited to Hindus. Dalits who have converted to other religions have asked that benefits be extended to them.


title: Dalit

text: After World War II, immigration from the former British Empire was largely driven by labour shortages. Like the rest of the Indian subcontinent diaspora, Dalits immigrated and established their own communities.


title: Dalit

text: A 2009 report alleged that caste discrimination is "rife" in the United Kingdom. The report alleged that casteism persists in the workplace and within the National Health Service and at doctor's offices.


title: Dalit

text: Some claim that caste discrimination is non-existent. Some have rejected the government's right to interfere in the community. The Hindu Forum of Britain conducted their own research, concluding that caste discrimination was "not endemic in British society", that reports to the contrary aimed to increase discrimination by legislating expression and behaviour and that barriers should instead be removed through education.


title: Dalit

text: A 2010 study found that caste discrimination occurs in Britain at work and in service provision. While not ruling out the possibility of discrimination in education, no such incidents were uncovered. The report found favourable results from educational activities. However, non-legislative approaches were claimed to be less effective in the workplace and would not help when the authorities were discriminating. One criticism of discrimination law was the difficulty in obtaining proof of violations. Perceived benefits of legislation were that it provides redress, leads to greater understanding and reduces the social acceptance of such discrimination.


title: Dalit

text: More recent studies in Britain were inconclusive and found that discrimination was "not religion specific and is subscribed to by members of any or no religion". Equalities Minister Helen Grant found insufficient evidence to justify specific legislation, while Shadow Equalities minister Kate Green said that the impact is on a relatively small number of people. Religious studies professor Gavin Flood of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies concluded that the Hindu community in Britain is particularly well integrated, loosening caste ties. Casteist beliefs were prevalent mainly among first generation immigrants, with such prejudices declining with each successive generation due to greater assimilation.


title: Dalit

text: From September 2013 to February 2014, Indian philosopher Meena Dhanda led a project on 'Caste in Britain' for the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which focused on the proposed inclusion of a provision in the Equality Act 2010 to protect British citizens against caste discrimination. In 2018 the UK government decided not to include caste as a "protected characteristic" within the terms of the Act, and to rely instead on case law to identify tests for caste-based discrimination.


title: Dalit

text: Sikhs in the United Kingdom are affected by caste. Gurdwaras such as those of the Ramgarhia Sikhs are organised along caste lines and most are controlled by a single caste. In most British towns and cities with a significant Sikh population, rival gurdwaras can be found with caste-specific management committees. The caste system and caste identity is entrenched and reinforced.


title: Dalit

text: Caste-based discrimination has occurred amongst Sikhs in the UK. At a sports competition in Birmingham in 1999, Jat Sikhs refused to eat food that had been cooked and prepared by the Chamar community.


title: Dalit

text: The few gurdwaras that accept inter-caste marriages do so reluctantly. Gurdwaras may insist on the presence of "Singh" and "Kaur" in the names of the bridegroom and bride, or deny them access to gurdwara-based religious services and community centres.


title: Dalit

text: It is estimated that in 1883, about one-third of the immigrants who arrived in the Caribbean were Dalits. The shared experience of being exploited in a foreign land gradually broke down caste barriers in the Caribbean Hindu communities.


title: Dalit

text: The Romani people, originating in northern India, are said to be of Dalit ancestry. Between 1001 and 1026, the Romani fought under their Hindu rulers to fight the Ghaznavids.


title: Dalit

text: Many Dalits first came to the United States to flee caste-based oppression in South Asia. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the demand for labourers brought in many caste-diverse South Asian immigrants, many of whom were Dalit. After the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, immigrants from India were primarily professionals and students, largely from upper caste or dominant caste families. However, from the 1990s onwards, many more of the skilled labourers arriving from India have been Dalit, due to multiple generations of affirmative action policies in India, as well as ongoing efforts of organised resistance against caste discrimination.


title: Dalit

text: Dalits have faced discrimination and mistreatment throughout their existence in the United States. In the landmark Supreme Court Case "United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind", Thind unsuccessfully argued for his right to citizenship by claiming that his lighter complexion and upper-caste background implied that he was in fact Caucasian. Thind's lawyers described his supposed superiority to lower-caste Indians, stating "The high-caste Hindu regards the aboriginal Indian Mongoloid in the same manner as the American regards the Negro, speaking from a matrimonial standpoint." This attitude describes the disapproval of low-caste Indians such as Dalits held by upper caste Indian Americans at the time.


title: Dalit

text: Some people, like S.P. Kothari, argue that there is no caste division within Hindus in the United States today. However, reports and stories have shown Dalit Americans continue to face significant discrimination in the United States. In 2018, Equality Labs released a report on "Caste in the United States". This report found that one in two Dalit Americans live in fear of their caste being "outed". In addition, 60% have experienced caste-based discriminatory jokes, and 25% have suffered verbal or physical assault because of their caste.


title: Dalit

text: The Equality Labs report also found that two-thirds of Dalit Americans experienced unfair treatment at their workplace. In late June 2020, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against Cisco Systems, alleging that a Dalit engineer at the company faced discrimination from two of his upper-caste supervisors for his Dalit background. The lawsuit claims that "higher caste supervisors and co-workers imported the discriminatory system's practices into their team and Cisco's workplace". At the BAPS Hindu temple in the city of Robbinsville, New Jersey, some 200 workers to the U.S. on R-1 visas as religious volunteers filed suit over being held against their will.


title: Dalit

text: Dalit literature forms a distinct part of Indian literature. One of the first Dalit writers was Madara Chennaiah, an 11th-century cobbler-saint who lived in the reign of Western Chalukyas and who is regarded by some scholars as the "father of Vachana poetry". Another early Dalit poet is Dohara Kakkaiah, a Dalit by birth, six of whose confessional poems survive. The Bharatiya Dalit Sahitya Akademi (Indian Dalit Literature Academy) was founded in 1984 by Babu Jagjivan Ram.


title: Dalit

text: Notable modern authors include Mahatma Phule and Ambedkar in Maharashtra, who focused on the issues of Dalits through their works and writings. This started a new trend in Dalit writing and inspired many Dalits to offer work in Marathi, Hindi, Tamil and Punjabi. There are novels, poems and even drama on Dalit issues. The Indian author Rajesh Talwar has written a play titled 'Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the Four Legged Scorpion' in which the personal experiences of Dr Ambedkar and the sufferings of the community have been highlighted.


title: Dalit

text: Baburao Bagul, Bandhu Madhav and Shankar Rao Kharat, worked in the 1960s. Later the little magazine movement became popular. In Sri Lanka, writers such as K.Daniel and Dominic Jeeva gained mainstream popularity.


title: Dalit

text: Until the 1980s, Dalits had little involvement in Bollywood or other film industries of India and the community were rarely depicted at the heart of storylines. Chirag Paswan (son of Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan) launched his career in Bollywood with his debut film "Miley Naa Miley Hum" in 2011. Despite political connections and the financial ability to struggle against ingrained prejudices, Chirag was not able to "bag" any other movie project in the following years. Chirag, in his early days, described Bollywood as his "childhood dream", but eventually entered politics instead. When the media tried to talk to him about "Caste in Bollywood", he refused to talk about the matter. A recent Hindi film to portray a Dalit character in the leading role, although it was not acted by a Dalit, was "" (2007). The continued use of caste based references to Dalit sub-castes in South Indian films (typecast and pigeonholed in their main socio-economic sub-group) angers many Dalit fans.


title: Dalit

text: A Brazilian telenovela "India: A Love Story" was broadcast in 2009 where the main female character Maya, who is of upper class, falls in love with a Dalit person.


title: Dalit

text: Several Dalit groups are rivals and sometimes communal tensions are evident. A study found more than 900 Dalit sub-castes throughout India, with internal divisions. Emphasising any one caste threatens what is claimed to be an emerging Dalit identity and fostering rivalry among SCs.


title: Dalit

text: A DLM (Dalit Liberation Movement) party leader said in the early 2000s that it is easier to organise Dalits on a caste basis than to fight caste prejudice itself.


title: Dalit

text: Balmikis and Pasis in the 1990s refused to support the BSP, claiming it was a Jatav party but over 80 per cent of dalits from all united Dalit castes voted BSP to power in 2007.


title: Dalit

text: Many converted Dalit Sikhs claim a superior status over the Hindu Raigars, Joatia Chamars and Ravidasis and sometimes refuse to intermarry with them. They are divided into gotras that regulate their marriage alliances. In Andhra Pradesh, Mala and Madiga were constantly in conflict with each other but as of 2015 Mala and Madiga students work for common dalit cause at University level.


title: Dalit

text: Although the Khateek (butchers) are generally viewed as a higher caste than Bhangis, the latter refuse to offer cleaning services to Khateeks, believing that their profession renders them unclean. They also consider the Balai, Dholi and Mogya as unclean and do not associate with them.


title: NCT (group)

text: NCT (; an acronym for Neo Culture Technology) is a South Korean boy band formed by SM Entertainment and introduced in January 2016. The group consists of 23 members and divided into four different sub-units: NCT U, NCT 127, NCT Dream, and WayV. In South Korean charts, NCT has recorded more than 24 million album sales across all sub-units, making them the best-selling act under SM Entertainment.


title: NCT (group)

text: The group debuted their first sub-unit, the rotational NCT U, on April 9, 2016, with the double digital single "The 7th Sense" and "Without You". It was followed by the Seoul-based sub-unit NCT 127 on July 7, 2016, with their eponymous extended play and the then-teenaged sub-unit NCT Dream on August 24, 2016, with the digital single "Chewing Gum". WayV, a seven-member sub-unit based in China and NCT's first overseas sub-unit, debuted on January 17, 2019, with the single album "The Vision".


title: NCT (group)

text: Although each sub-unit promotes separately, NCT has united three times as a group to record three full-length albums: "Empathy" (2018), "Resonance" (2020), and "Universe" (2021). Within two months of release, "Resonance" sold over 2.6 million copies across its two parts, becoming the highest-selling physical album released by an act from SM Entertainment at the time and earning the group their first Daesang (Grand Prize) Award at the 2020 Asia Artist Awards. "Universe", which was released in December 2021, became their most pre-order album at 1.7 million copies, and later surpassed 1.8 million sales after its release.


title: NCT (group)

text: In January 2016, SM Entertainment founder Lee Soo-man delivered a presentation at the SM Coex Artium titled "SMTOWN: New Culture Technology 2016". The label planned to debut a new boy group that would "fall in line" with their culture contents strategy, one that would contain an "unlimited" number of members that would debut in separate sub-units within the group. Furthermore, the members would form "sub-unit teams" and have "collaborations" with each other. The name of the group was later revealed to be NCT, an acronym for the presentation title. NCT as a whole was SM Entertainment's first idol group to debut in nearly two years since Red Velvet in 2014 and SM Entertainment's first boy group to debut since Exo in 2012.


title: NCT (group)

text: Prior to joining SM Entertainment, some of the members were already involved in the entertainment industry. Jeno appeared in various commercials as a child. Jisung was a child actor and filmed movies such as "Boys, Be Curious" (2012) and "Go, Stop, Murder" (2013). Chenle was active on the Chinese music scene as a singer from 2009 to 2015; he released three albums and headlined a concert in China. In 2011, Yuta participated in the singing competition "Juice Winter Collection" in Japan, while Ten competed on the Thai TV show "Teen Superstar" under the name TNT. Xiaojun was a singing contestant on the Zhejiang TV program "X-Fire" in November 2015.


title: NCT (group)

text: Johnny, Yuta, Ten, Mark and Renjun joined the company via SM Global Auditions, while the remaining members were discovered through street casting, personal recommendation, community entertainment shows, and local auditions. Prior to their debut as members of NCT, 19 of the 23 current members of NCT were introduced as part of SM Rookies, a group of trainees under SM Entertainment created in December 2013. The first members of NCT to be introduced were Taeyong and Jeno. Sixteen other members were introduced through SM Rookies until early January 2016.