Anil Varghese, editor-in-chief
ForwardPress.in Target Audience: Individuals from backward castes as well as readers and researchers on Indian subaltern issues and interests from a Phule-Ambedkar Dalitbahujan perspective. Since the issues are addressed from multi-faceted angles by multi-disciplinary contributors the target audience too will be from a wide range of disciplines and interests including, but not restricted to, anthropology, sociology, politics, economics, literature and folk culture.
FORWARD Press began as a monthly magazine published from New Delhi. Now, it has moved on to becoming this active website and a publisher of books under the Forward Press imprint. These are projects of the Dalitbahujan Emancipation International (DEI). The magazine made its debut in the newsstands in June 2009 with the cover story titled “The Victory of Aspiration”. Ivan Kostka, who was once the Bombay bureau chief of India’s first youth magazine, JS or Junior Statesman, is the founding editor of FORWARD Press. He has had a life-long interest and engagement with Dalits and other Bahujan groups, starting with the Dalit Panthers in the early 1970s.
From the beginning, the founder’s vision has been that FORWARD Press be a vehicle to educate, as well as be a voice of, the “silenced majority”, the Bahujans. The Indian media, largely owned and staffed by the members of the upper castes, conveniently believes that casteism is a thing of the past and thus does a disservice to the general public by painting a false picture of society and politics that is free from this malaise.
FORWARD Press looks at majority India’s issues and interests primarily through the lens of Bahujan giants, Mahatma Jotiba Phule and Babasaheb Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who respectively gave us the radical compass and the constitutional map for charting the emancipative future for India’s marginalized majority.
While FORWARD Press has mostly focused on the Bahujan communities – OBCs, SCs, STs, and converted minorities – of north India, it was also India’s first fully bilingual (English-Hindi) magazine and has persisted with bilingual journalism ever since. It is intended to help Hindi readers improve their English as part of moving forward, as well as making it accessible nationally and, now, internationally.