My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  Ambedkar’s main concern was to privilege and legalize “constitutional morality” over the traditional, social morality of the caste system. Speaking in the Constituent Assembly on November 4, 1948, he said, “Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.”65

  Ambedkar was seriously disappointed with the final draft of the constitution. Still, he did succeed in putting in place certain rights and safeguards that would, as far as the subordinated castes were concerned, make it a document that was more enlightened than the society it was drafted for. (For others, however, like India’s Adivasis, the constitution turned out to be just an extension of colonial practice. We’ll come to that later.) Ambedkar thought of the constitution as a work in progress. Like Thomas Jefferson, he believed that unless every generation had the right to create a new constitution for itself, the earth would belong to “the dead and not the living.”66 The trouble is that the living are not necessarily more progressive or enlightened than the dead. There are a number of forces today, political as well as commercial, that are lobbying to rewrite the constitution in utterly regressive ways.

  Though Ambedkar was a lawyer, he had no illusions about law making. As law minister in post-independence India, he worked for months on a draft of the Hindu Code Bill. He believed that the caste system advanced itself by controlling women, and one of his major concerns was to make Hindu personal law more equitable for women.67 The bill he proposed sanctioned divorce and expanded the property rights of widows and daughters. The Constituent Assembly dragged its feet over it for four years (from 1947 to 1951) and then blocked it.68 The president, Rajendra Prasad, threatened to stall the bill’s passage into law. Hindu sadhus laid siege to Parliament. Industrialists and zamindars warned they would withdraw their support in the coming elections.69 Eventually, Ambedkar resigned as law minister. In his resignation speech he said: “To leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu society, and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap.”70

  More than anything else, what Ambedkar brought to a complicated, multifaceted political struggle, with more than its fair share of sectarianism, obscurantism, and skullduggery, was intelligence.

  Annihilation ofCaste is often called (even by some Ambedkarites) Ambedkar’s utopia—his impracticable, unfeasible dream. He was rolling a boulder up a cliff, they say. How can a society so steeped in faith and superstition be expected to be open to such a ferocious attack on its most deeply held beliefs? After all, for millions of Hindus of all castes, including Untouchables, Hinduism in its practice is a way of life that pervades everything—birth, death, war, marriage, food, music, poetry, dance. It is their culture, their very identity. How can Hinduism be renounced only because the practice of caste is sanctioned in its foundational texts, which most people have never read?

  Ambedkar’s point is—how can it not be? How can such institutionalized injustice, even if it is divinely ordained, be acceptable to anyone?

  It is no use seeking refuge in quibbles. It is no use telling people that the shastras do not say what they are believed to say, if they are grammatically read or logically interpreted. What matters is how the shastras have been understood by people. You must take the stand that Buddha took…. You must not only discard the shastras, you must deny their authority as did Buddha and Nanak. You must have the courage to tell the Hindus that what is wrong with them is their religion—the religion which has produced in them this notion of the sacredness of caste. Will you show that courage?71

  Gandhi believed that Ambedkar was throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Ambedkar believed the baby and the bathwater were a single, fused organism.

  Let us concede—but never accept—that Annihilation of Caste is indeed a piece of utopian thinking. If it is, then let us concede and accept how reduced, how depleted, and how pitiable we would be as a people if even this—this rage, this audacious denunciation—did not exist in our midst. Ambedkar’s anger gives us all a little shelter, a little dignity.

  The utopianism that Ambedkar is charged with was very much part of the tradition of the anti-caste movement. The poetry of the Bhakti movement is replete with it. Unlike the nostalgia-ridden, mythical village republics in Gandhi’s “Ram Rajya” (The Reign of Lord Ram), the subaltern Bhakti saints sang of towns.72 They sang of towns in timeless places, where Untouchables would be liberated from ubiquitous fear, from unimaginable indignity and endless toil on other peoples’ land. For Ravidas (also known as Raidas, Ruhidas, Rohidas), that place was Be-gham-pura, the City without Sorrow, the city without segregation, where people were free to go wherever they wanted:

  Where there is no affliction or suffering

  Neither anxiety nor fear, taxes nor capital

  No menace, no terror, no humiliation …

  Says Raidas the emancipated Chamar:

  One who shares with me that city is my friend.73

  For Tukaram, the city was Pandharpur, where everybody was equal, where the headman had to work as hard as everyone else, where people danced and sang and mingled freely. For Kabir, it was Premnagar, the City of Love.

  Ambedkar’s utopia was a pretty hard-nosed one. It was, so to speak, the City of Justice—worldly justice. He imagined an enlightened India, Prabuddha Bharat, that fused the best ideas of the European Enlightenment with Buddhist thought. Prabuddha Bharat was, in fact, the name he gave to the last of the four newspapers he edited in his lifetime.

  If Gandhi’s radical critique of Western modernity came from a nostalgic evocation of a uniquely Indian pastoral bliss, Ambedkar’s critique of that nostalgia came from an embrace of pragmatic Western liberalism and its definitions of progress and happiness. (Which, at this moment, is experiencing a crisis from which it may not recover.)

  Gandhi called modern cities an “excrescence” that “served at the present moment the evil purpose of draining the life-blood of the villages.”74 To Ambedkar, and to most Dalits, Gandhi’s ideal village was, understandably, “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism.”75 The impetus toward justice turned Ambedkar’s gaze away from the village toward the city, toward urbanism, modernism, and industrialization—big cities, big dams, big irrigation projects. Ironically, this is the very model of “development” that hundreds of thousands of people today associate with injustice, a model that lays the environment to waste and involves the forcible displacement of millions of people from their villages and homes by mines, dams, and other major infrastructural projects. Meanwhile, Gandhi—whose mythical village is so blind to appalling, inherent injustice—has, as ironically, become the talisman for these struggles for justice.

  While Gandhi promoted his village republic, his pragmatism, or what some might call his duality, allowed him to support and be supported by big industry and Big Dams as well.76

  The rival utopias of Gandhi and Ambedkar represented the classic battle between tradition and modernity. If utopias can be said to be “right” and “wrong,” then both were right, and both were also grievously wrong. Gandhi was prescient enough to recognize the seed of cataclysm that was implanted in the project of Western modernity:

  God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 millions took to similar economic exploitation it would strip the world bare like locusts.77

  As the earth warms up, as glaciers melt, and forests disappear, Gandhi’s words have turned out to be prophetic. But his horror of modern civilization led him to eulogize a mythical Indian past that was, in his telling, just and beautiful. Ambedkar, on his part, was painfully aware of the iniquity of that past, but in his urgency to move away from it, he fail
ed to recognize the catastrophic dangers of Western modernity.

  Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s very different utopias ought not to be appraised or assessed by the “end product” alone—the village or the city. Equally important is the impetus that drove those utopias. For Ambedkarites to call mass struggles against contemporary models of development “eco-romantic” and for Gandhians to hold Gandhi out as a symbol of justice and moral virtue are shallow interpretations of the very different passions that drove the two men.

  The towns the Bhakti poet-saints dreamed of—Beghampura, Pandharpur, Premnagar—had one thing in common. They all existed in a time and space that was liberated from the bonds of Brahminism. “Brahminism” was the term that the anti-caste movement preferred over “Hinduism.” By Brahminism, they didn’t mean Brahmins as a caste or a community. They meant the domino effect, what Ambedkar called the “infection of imitation,” that the caste that first “enclosed” itself—the Brahmins—set off. “Some closed the door,” he wrote, “others found it closed against them.”78 The “infection of imitation,” like the half-life of a radioactive atom, decays exponentially as it moves down the caste ladder but never quite disappears. It has created what Ambedkar describes as a system of “graded inequality” in which “there is no such class as a completely unprivileged class except the one which is at the base of the social pyramid. The privileges of the rest are graded. Even the low is privileged as compared with lower. Each class being privileged, every class is interested in maintaining the system.”79

  The exponential decay of the radioactive atom of caste means that Brahminism is practiced not just by the Brahmin against the Kshatriya or the Vaishya against the Shudra, or the Shudra against the Untouchable, but also by the Untouchable against the Unapproachable, the Unapproachable against the Unseeable. It means there is a quotient of Brahminism in everybody, regardless of which caste they belong to. It is the ultimate means of control in which the concept of pollution and purity and the perpetration of social as well as physical violence—an inevitable part of administering an oppressive hierarchy—is not just outsourced, but implanted in everybody’s imagination, including those at the bottom of the hierarchy. It’s like an elaborate enforcement network in which everybody polices everybody else. The Unapproachable polices the Unseeable, the Malas resent the Madigas, the Madigas turn upon the Dakkalis, who sit on the Rellis; the Vanniyars quarrel with the Paraiyars, who in turn could beat up the Arundhatiyars.

  Brahminism makes it impossible to draw a clear line between victims and oppressors, even though the hierarchy of caste makes it more than clear that there are victims and oppressors. (The line between Touchables and Untouchables, for example, is dead clear.) Brahminism precludes the possibility of social or political solidarity across caste lines. As an administrative system, it is pure genius. “A single spark can light a prairie fire” was Mao Zedong’s famous message to his guerrilla army. Perhaps. But Brahminism has given us in India a labyrinth instead of a prairie. And the poor little single spark wanders, lost in a warren of firewalls. Brahminism, Ambedkar said, “is the very negation of the spirit of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.”80

  Annihilation of Caste is the text of a speech Ambedkar was supposed to deliver in Lahore in 1936 to an audience of privileged-caste Hindus. The organization that had been bold enough to invite him to deliver its presidential address was the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (Forum for Break-up of Caste) of Lahore, a “radical” offshoot of the Arya Samaj. Most of its members were privileged-caste Hindu reformers. They asked to be provided the text of the speech in advance, so that they could print and distribute it. When they read it and realized that Ambedkar was going to launch an intellectual assault on the Vedas and shastras, on Hinduism itself, they wrote to him:

  [T]hose of us who would like to see the conference terminate without any untoward incident would prefer that at least the word “Veda” be left out for the time being. I leave this to your good sense. I hope, however, in your concluding paragraphs you will make it clear that the views expressed in the address are your own and that the responsibility does not lie on the Mandal.81

  Ambedkar refused to alter his speech, and so the event was canceled. His text ought not to have come as such a surprise to the Mandal. Just a few months previously, on October 13, 1935, at the Depressed Classes Conference in Yeola in the Bombay Presidency (now in the state of Maharashtra), Ambedkar had told an audience of more than ten thousand people:

  Because we have the misfortune of calling ourselves Hindus, we are treated thus. If we were members of another faith none would treat us so. Choose any religion which gives you equality of status and treatment. We shall repair our mistake now. I had the misfortune of being born with the stigma of an Untouchable. However, it is not my fault; but I will not die a Hindu, for this is in my power.82

  At that particular moment in time, the threat of religious conversion by an Untouchable leader of Ambedkar’s standing came as the worst possible news to Hindu reformers.

  Conversion was by no means new. Seeking to escape the stigma of caste, Untouchable and other degraded laboring castes had begun to convert to other religions centuries ago. Millions had converted to Islam during the years of Muslim rule. Later, millions more had taken to Sikhism and Christianity. (Sadly, caste prejudice in the subcontinent trumps religious belief. Though their scriptures do not sanction it, elite Indian Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians all practice caste discrimination.83 Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal all have their own communities of Untouchable sweepers. So does Kashmir. But that’s another story.)

  The mass conversion of oppressed-caste Hindus, particularly to Islam, continues to sit uncomfortably with Hindu supremacist history writing, which dwells on a golden age of Hinduism that was brought to naught by the cruelty and vandalism of Muslim rule.84 Vandalism and cruelty there certainly was. Yet it meant different things to different people. Here is Jotiba Phule (1827–90), the earliest of the modern anti-caste intellectuals, on the subject of the Muslim rule and of the so-called golden age of the Arya Bhats (Brahmins):

  The Muslims, destroying the carved stone images of the cunning Arya Bhats, forcibly enslaved them and brought the Shudras and Ati-Shudras in great numbers out of their clutches and made them Muslims, including them in the Muslim Religion. Not only this, but they established inter-dining and intermarriage with them and gave them all equal rights. They made them all as happy as themselves and forced the Arya Bhats to see all this.85

  By the turn of the century, however, religious conversion came to have completely different implications in India. A new set of unfamiliar considerations entered the mix. Opposing an unpopular regime was no longer just a question of a conquering army riding into the capital, overthrowing the monarch and taking the throne. The old idea of empire was metamorphosing into the new idea of the nation-state. Modern governance now involved addressing the volatile question of the right to representation: Who had the right to represent the Indian people? The Hindus, the Muslims, the Sikhs, the Christians, the privileged castes, the oppressed castes, the farmers, the workers? How would the “self” in self-rule—the “swa” in swaraj—be constituted? Who would decide? Suddenly, a people who belonged to an impossibly diverse range of races, castes, tribes, and religions—who, between them, spoke more than one thousand languages—had to be transformed into modern citizens of a modern nation. The process of synthetic homogenization began to have the opposite effect. Even as the modern Indian nation constituted itself, it began to fracture.

  Under the new dispensation, demography became vitally important. The empirical taxonomy of the British census had solidified and freeze-dried the rigid but not entirely inflexible hierarchy of caste, adding its own prejudices and value judgments to the mix, classifying entire communities as “criminals” and “warriors” and so on. The Untouchable castes were entered under the accounting head “Hindu.” (In 1930, according to Ambedkar, the Untouchables numbered about 44.5 million.86 The population of African Americans in the US around th
e same time was 8.8 million.) The large-scale exodus of Untouchables from the “Hindu fold” would have been catastrophic for the “Hindu” majority. In pre-Partition, undivided Punjab, for example, between 1881 and 1941, the Hindu population dropped from 43.8 percent to 29.1 percent, due largely to the conversion of the subordinated castes to Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity.87

  Hindu reformers hurried to stem this migration. The Arya Samaj, founded in 1875 in Lahore by Dayananda Saraswati (born Mool Shankar, a Gujarati Brahmin from Kathiawar), was one of the earliest. It preached against the practice of untouchability and banned idol worship. Dayananda Saraswati initiated the Shuddhi program in 1877, to “purify the impure,” and, in the early twentieth century, his disciples took this up on a mass scale in North India.

  In 1899, Swami Vivekananda of the Ramakrishna Math— the man who became famous in 1893 when he addressed the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in his sadhu’s robes—said, “Every man going out of the Hindu pale is not only a man less, but an enemy the more.”88 A raft of new reformist outfits appeared in Punjab, committed to saving Hinduism by winning the “hearts and minds” of Untouchables: the Shradhananda Dalituddhar Sabha, the All-India Achhutodhar Committee, the Punjab Achhut Udhar Mandal,89 and the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal, which was part of the Arya Samaj.

  The reformers’ use of the words “Hindu” and “Hinduism” was new. Until then, they had been used by the British as well as the Mughals, but it was not the way people who were described as Hindus chose to describe themselves. Until the panic over demography began, they had always foregrounded their jati, their caste identity. “The first and foremost thing that must be recognised is that Hindu society is a myth. The name Hindu is itself a foreign name,” said Ambedkar.