On some evenings in Nagpur, the Library of Emancipation would fill up.
Fifteen or twenty people in a room is not much on a poster, but in real time, it changes the temperature of a space. People arrived after work, after classes, sometimes making their way across the city. Chairs were pulled close. They read poems aloud. They argued with films. They stayed longer than they meant to.
On other evenings, nobody came.
Once, for a scheduled book reading, Yogesh Maitreya was the only person in the room. He opened the book anyway and read aloud to himself. Kshitij, who helped set up and catalogue the library, calls it “a kind of madness,” but it is the kind Yogesh wears with ease. If a room has been made for reading, you read. Even if you are alone.
and yet we read
The Library of Emancipation did not last. The landlord demanded the space back. The books had to be moved out in a hurry. Plans were shelved. The furniture, the carefully built sense of place, disappeared in a few days. For the people who had begun to treat it as a small, welcome disruption in Nagpur’s cultural life, it felt as though they’d hit a wall while still in motion.
For Yogesh, it was not the end, just one more interruption in a long list of interruptions. The library was one expression of something that began elsewhere, with a different room and a different book.
the book that reconfigured him
In 2015, as a student, he met J. V. Pawar, a founding member of the Dalit Panthers and a historian of post-Ambedkarite movements. Pawar handed him five volumes he had written in Marathi. Yogesh read the first one and felt something deep and dormant within him shift.
The book did not move through the filters he was used to. There was no softening of language to accommodate readers who had never lived the things being described. No smoothing of edges to fit the comfort of dominant caste institutions. It was what happens when a community writes its own history and puts it into the world without asking for permission or approval.
The experience left him with a practical question that never quite left him.
books that won’t seek permission
“How many people like me,” he wondered, “who aspire to write, who want to bring their stories forward, but can’t because of the institutions which are simply beyond their reach… will their stories die?”
He was thinking of people he had seen growing up. Brilliant, radiant minds, excluded from opportunity because they didn’t have the right surname. Caught in a society where “our ideas of beauty, our aesthetic, our philosophy of life” are all restricted by caste. Where there is no social encouragement for certain kinds of ambition.
So when stories are written but cannot pass through existing institutions without being sanitised or turned away, something else has to exist.
His first attempt at an answer was practical. He translated Pawar’s book into English.
He did not know how to translate. He did it anyway, asking people to read, to edit, to suggest. He had no access to the publishing industry, but he knew how to ask questions. As a reader, you grow up thinking “books are sacred,” he says. Working on this one showed him something else: books are political. They can be made to dull someone, not sharpen them. A book is also a platform, and a platform carries responsibility for what it chooses to amplify, and how.
publishing that comes down to people
The obstacle, when it came time to print, was predictable. Money. He was a student with no savings. So he leaned on the one resource he trusted most: people.
His optimism is gleefully childlike in its candour. “Movement is about people, and people are resources.” Pawar was known and respected. Many people in the Ambedkarite movement in Mumbai valued his work. Yogesh asked some of them to pay in advance for books they had not yet seen. If they wanted one copy, he asked them to pay for three. When the book came out, those three copies would be theirs.
It worked. Forty to fifty thousand rupees came together, enough to print a thousand copies at a press in Prabhadevi. He remembers the press by name. He remembers standing outside a party office near Churchgate when the book was launched, without realising that an “inauguration” had been arranged. He arrived in a T-shirt, thinking it was a simple gathering, and found himself surrounded by bibliophiles from the Ambedkarite movement, people he had read, people whose work he was still learning.
He calls the experience transformative “not in a spiritual sense,” but in the sense of seeing a complete action through. Reading the book in Marathi. Translating it. Learning to navigate printing. Holding the finished object. Knowing that whoever read it would be different on the other side, as he had been.
“If I can publish one book, I can obviously publish a lot of books,” he thought. He also understood something else: if he could publish his own work, he did not have to submit his stories to an industry that could not see him clearly.
Panthers Paw Publication grew out of that intersection.
From 2016 to 2020, he published six or seven books. After moving to Nagpur, he published another 20 over five years. The numbers are small in a commercial sense and substantial in the context he is working in. He has taken the books to the UK, Germany, Sharjah, and Sri Lanka. He has found readers in academic spaces and outside them. Some people now know him as a publisher. Others as a writer. The two roles sit together, often uncomfortably, but he keeps moving forward.
Money remains uncertain. He is clear that this disadvantage is structural and won’t change without a tectonic shift that he may not see in his lifetime.
He pays attention to what happens when a book leaves the press. A poetry collection he published, Blue is the Colour I Choose by Tanya Singh, had a print run of 300 copies. It took three years to sell all of them. Roughly eight copies a month. A few thousand rupees here and there across a year. “When you publish three or four books a year on those terms, nothing stabilises. But if a thousand copies of one book move consistently each year”, he says, “I can build”.
Some books travel much further. Untouchable Goa is one of them.
the book that travels, and the Goa it carries
The book began as a mention from Amita, an archaeologist and writer, who told him about the Ambedkar Memorial lectures they used to organise in Goa with Dadu Mandrekar, a key Ambedkarite activist in the state. Dadu had written a book in Marathi, Bahishkrut Gomantak, originally published in 1997 in Aurangabad and long out of print.
The title stayed with him: Untouchable Goa, a Goa most visitors never see.
It took him a year and a half to find a copy of the original Marathi print. He then contacted Dadu’s wife and son, explained who he was and what he wanted to do, and asked permission to republish the work in translation. They said yes.
For the translation, he chose Nikhil, someone with deep roots in his own region, Khandesh, and training in both English and Marathi literature. The shared social realities mattered. The translator needed to understand the idiom, the cultural shorthand embedded in the original. The work took a year. Publishing is “an industry without machines,” Yogesh says. “Humans are the machines. They miss deadlines. They get lost. They come back. There is no conveyor belt.”
Once the book existed in English, he carried it wherever he went.
In Goa, at Xavier Centre, the structural nature of the delay came up in public conversation. Why had it taken so long for this book to appear in English? What image of Goa did the state choose to present to the world? On another occasion, a planned event in Pune was cancelled when the bookstore received pressure from right-wing groups. They were told the event was “political.” The staff were shaken. Yogesh wasn’t surprised. The work would continue elsewhere.
Abroad, the responses have been varied. At a book fair in Berlin, he watched some Indian attendees glance at the blue Ambedkarite flag at his stall, frown and walk away. He has had people, from India and elsewhere, come by to ask him about Babasaheb. They ask him about caste. About the Goa of this book.
He speaks patiently, sometimes with dark humour, about the narrow image of India many people outside the country carry. Meditation. Yoga. Bollywood. Elephants. Curry. Goa as a holiday brochure. For those who are curious, Untouchable Goa becomes an entry point into a different set of realities. He tells them simply: “Get this book, you will see the Goa you have not seen.” At a recent fair in Amsterdam, he sold every copy he had.
Underneath the logistics and travel, there is a clear sense of what publishing does.
“Publishing is also a resistance against the ignorance of caste society,” he says. Caste thrives when people are kept ignorant, when they internalise hierarchies, when they are denied the right to read or hear. He talks of Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule opening schools, of Thomas Paine’s influence on Jyotiba. Books are one way people have found language for what is being done to them and what might exist beyond that.
Reading, for him, is basic. It changes the body’s pace. It makes a different composition possible. “When you read, you communicate; you are in control, free to stop, free to go, free to ponder.” It is not scrolling. It is not being pulled by an algorithm.
That belief sits alongside a clear understanding of what happens when books are edited and marketed through dominant caste institutions.
the politics of blunting lived experience
He has worked with editors who want to “sanitise” narratives. He has seen suggestions that bend or dull the rhythm of a sentence because it does not make sense to an editor whose life has never intersected with the writer’s. For many Dalit authors, this is their first experience of the editor-author relationship, particularly in English. The power imbalance makes it near impossible to say no.
Yogesh keeps returning to questions of whose understanding is centred. When an editor says, “This does not make sense,” who is being asked to adjust? He talks about the psychological weight of rejecting suggestions when you come from a background where rejection is constant. “Saying no”, he says, “and knowing what to reject, is a form of freedom.”
He is careful to distinguish between editing that respects meaning and editing that smooths discomfort. He has spent time with poorly edited editions of Dr Ambedkar’s writing, with typos, missing references, and repetition that flattens the rhythm of the argument. Those are failures of craft, not political intervention. What concerns him is the “tendency to reshape Dalit narratives into something life-affirming enough to reassure dominant caste readers”.
He remembers being asked to do a “sensitive reading” for a large newspaper’s engagement with a book. His response was dry. Reading, if it is real, is already a sensitive act. If they wanted him to do it as an assignment, it needed to be paid. The deeper question for him is why sanitisation is needed at all.
He sees similar patterns in film. When viewers wish for positive endings from work rooted in Dalit experience, he hears a demand to feel better without having to sit with discomfort. That is where he draws a line. Some stories exist to introduce you to unpleasant realities outside your lived experience that you would rather ignore, not to absolve you.
His own writing has moved through its own apprenticeship. He started reading late in life. At first, he imitated the English and Welsh poets he encountered, especially Victorian voices. Over time, the borrowed cadence stopped fitting. His writing now sits in a different place: between philosophy, sociology and psychology, between personal experience and larger structures. He has written about caste as “pedagogic philosophy,” about the self and deception, and about the way bodies move through social space, inside and outside India.
He does not want to be reduced to being simply a representative of a community or a symbol of a movement. He knows this is how many people see him. He is more interested in being taken seriously as a thinker, in having his work engaged with critically rather than consumed as evidence.
a cover fights back
The same refusal to be flattened runs through his sense of design.
Working with designer Shiva Nallaperumal and November Studio, Panthers Paw has developed a visual language that does not resemble the heavy, poorly produced volumes typical of Babasaheb’s works. The Ambedkar pocketbook series – small, accessible editions of shorter writings – uses circles and lines, abstract forms some readers see as blood cells under a microscope. The covers do not always carry titles in the expected way. Sometimes they function more like posters, built to be legible as tiny thumbnails on a phone screen.
Yogesh does not claim to fully understand every design choice. He trusts the people he works with. He knows the existing visual cliches around caste – photographs of statues, familiar blue-and-brown palettes – no longer serve the ferment in Babasaheb’s thought. The books need “a striking, new, fresh interface” in both layout and design if they are to meet new readers on equal terms.
That trust in collaborators is visible elsewhere, too.
When he invited volunteers for the Library of Emancipation and the Nagpur Collective, people arrived through Instagram stories and word of mouth. Kshitij came to help catalogue books and ended up being paid even when he expected to volunteer. Nakul, a young graphic designer and documentary filmmaker, showed up and was immediately asked to consider how his skills could fit into the library’s needs, not as decoration but as part of the structure.
The collective around Yogesh is deliberately mixed. In one circle, there might be a nineteen-year-old, someone preparing for a PhD, someone in their late forties, someone working in an NGO. The only shared requirement is a commitment to Dr Ambedkar’s ideas and a desire to think with them. From there, roles and projects are shaped by interest and capacity.
Nakul describes him as “a curious chef” as much as a publisher. Someone who will introduce you to a song on a long drive to Yavatmal, talk about the weather, then suddenly drop a sentence that rearranges the way you see caste or art. Someone who can move, sometimes in the same breath, from an analysis of marketing as “based on lies” to deciding it is time for tea.
Seriousness and play sit comfortably alongside each other. When people challenge him or correct him on a fact, he does not treat it as a threat. He listens, laughs, adjusts.
Underneath the warmth, his view of the world is unsentimental.
He has seen caste boycott up close. During a month-long college fieldwork in Marathwada in 2013, he visited a village where a Scheduled Caste community had been entirely cut off. Boycott meant they could not buy food in local shops or grind grain in local mills. For salt, flour and basic supplies, they had to travel thirty kilometres by bus. The memory sits in his writing. It sits in his understanding of how fragile dignity is when it is not shared.
He has watched Indian elites abroad oppose anti-caste discrimination legislation, not because it would materially harm them but because it would make their behaviour legally visible. He has seen how, even under a strong constitution, laws remain paper tigers when those who interpret and enforce them are themselves deeply invested in caste privilege.
If people had homes, stable incomes, clean toilets, public transport, and minimum dignity, the struggle would move elsewhere. His own work would then sit in a different context. He would not need to argue, at book fairs and small events, for the idea that reading itself is revolutionary.
At the same time, he does not see language as a weapon to be used only in one register.
He talks about anger as something that has shifted for him. Some of it has softened as his material circumstances have stabilised and his focus has widened. Working with language, he feels a responsibility to stretch it rather than blunt it. “To be strong does not mean imposing your empowerment on others,” he says. It can also mean making space for others to feel they matter. He looks to Babasaheb for that balance: uncompromising in analysis, attentive in address.
In a time of shrinking space for speech, he treats it as a challenge to make language “greater,” not smaller. To find ways of saying things that keep conversation alive rather than closing it off. To offer comfort without lying. To help people see that they do not always have to submit, even when the structure around them demands it.
Yogesh, you see, plays the long game.
He mentions that Mao and his wife taught children for 20 years in preparation for liberation. He often returns to Babasaheb’s insistence that social democracy must precede political democracy. He is blunt about how far India is from that. There is no common civic ground between children from different regions, castes, and languages. There is no shared education that produces citizens first and caste subjects second. He worries about a generation raised on propaganda without access to texts like Annihilation of Caste, who may grow into adulthood with little sense of what democracy asks of them.
the long game isn’t a metaphor
Change, in his view, will not come from convincing adults already hardened into superiority or submission. It will come from long, slow work that may not deliver visible results in his lifetime. Cutting libraries, shutting schools, building more temples than reading rooms: these are, for him, signs of a country choosing to reinforce caste dominance by dulling a nation.
He spends time imagining futures where there are a hundred or a thousand publishers from marginalised communities, especially women, shaping the stories that circulate. He wants to run workshops in publishing for people from those communities, not as training in a narrow sense, but as a way of saying: “This is what I have learned; take what you need from it.”
For now, the scale is small. A press that began in a hostel room. A library that existed for a year and then had to be dismantled. Events where nobody comes, and events where the room is too full to breathe. Book fairs that introduce the world to an India beyond the Taj Mahal.
On the days when it feels pointless, when the news is exhausting, and the structural weight of caste and capital is too much, he reminds himself that “nothing changes overnight.” Teaching children for twenty years is one image. Reading alone in a closed library is another. Somewhere between those two, he keeps placing books into the world and watching who reaches for them.
