All About Ambedkar, a brainchild of its founding editor, started as a students' blog at Presidency University, Kolkata. Dr. Mahitosh Mandal, while teaching Annihilation of Caste to an undergraduate batch at the Department of English, asked the students to closely read the works of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. He isolated about 30 texts by Dr. Ambedkar and asked the students to write critical reviews on them. The write-ups were different from any existing literature on Dr. Ambedkar, and Dr. Mandal thought these would be effective in disseminating the ideas of Dr. Ambedkar to academics as well as general readers. Four students–Sparsha Barman, Abhista Goswami, Ishan Purkait and Ranjana Sarkar–volunteered to design the website as per Dr. Mandal’s plan. Some other students contributed to the publication of the blog posts on the website: Prabal Bhowmik, Priyanka Das, Arnab Chatterjee, and Hirannya Sen. Once the website was launched and, after thorough revisions, some of the write-ups were published as part of the blog, it made quite a stir among the audience. Two of Dr. Mandal’s colleagues from Presidency University, Professor Priyanka Das and Professor Rajat Roy, came forward to help him broaden the scope of the website. This is when the idea of developing a full-fledged journal was conceived. When this idea was shared with some of the leading researchers in the field of caste studies, they expressed their excitement and readily agreed to be on the editorial board. Once the blog was transformed into an e-journal, the full name was agreed upon as All About Ambedkar: A Journal on Theory and Praxis.
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