A book that is often seen as a manifesto of the downtrodden, Why I am Not A Hindu, now in its third edition, is its author’s testament to what it has been like for the Dalitbahujans (Dalits and OBCs) of India. Writing with passionate anger, laced with sarcasm, on the caste system and Indian society, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd looks at the socioeconomic and cultural differences between the Dalitbahujans and Hindus in the contexts of childhood, family life, market relations, power relations, gods and goddesses, death and, not the least, Hindutva, and insists that the ‘Brahmins, Baniyas and neoKshatriyas’ [upper-class Sudras] ‘must learn to listen and to read what we have to say’ for their ‘own interest and in the interest of this great country’.