Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  * * *

  Chapter Nine

  The Annihilator of Caste

  B.R. Ambedkar

  Our next maker of modern India had one thing in common with Rabindranath Tagore—he too was the fourteenth and last child of his parents. There the parallels end. Where Tagore’s family was rich and upper caste, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was the son of a smalltime military official who hailed from the Untouchable Mahar caste. The boy studied in a school in Satara, where a Brahmin teacher changed his surname from Ambavadekar to Ambedkar. After the family moved to Bombay, Bhimrao matriculated from the Elphinstone High School. He then joined the now well-established Elphinstone College, where his fees were paid by the progressive maharaja of Baroda. He obtained his BA in 1912, whereupon he joined the service of the Baroda state.

  In 1913 Ambedkar was sent by the maharaja for higher studies to the United States. He joined Columbia University in New York, where he did a master’s thesis on the caste system and a doctoral thesis on provincial finance in British India. He was guided in his research by the economist E.R.A. Seligman and came under the influence of the philosopher John Dewey, who also taught at Columbia. Living in New York was an education in itself, broadening the mind and culture of this shy, young Indian from an underprivileged background. He read furiously on all subjects, buying, for his personal collection, more than 2,000 books from the second-hand stores of the city.

  In 1916 Ambedkar moved to London, enrolled at Gray’s Inn and began another doctorate at the London School of Economics. But his scholarship ran out, and he was summoned back to Baroda, where he was appointed military secretary to the maharaja. However, the discrimination he faced (due to his caste) led him to quit the job in disgust and move to Bombay. He started tutoring students for a living (as Gokhale had done before him). By now he was also politically active. With funds from the maharaja of Kolhapur (who, like his counterpart in Baroda, was a critic of the Brahmin stranglehold on society and politics in western India), he began a fortnightly paper for the depressed castes.

  In 1920 Ambedkar went back to London to resume his studies, funding himself from his savings, supplemented by a loan from a Parsi friend. His DSc thesis on the ‘problem of the rupee’ was accepted in 1923. He also qualified as a Bar-at-Law. On his return to Bombay, Ambedkar enrolled at the Bombay High Court, as Gandhi had once done, except that the younger man was able to maintain a successful legal practice. He remained active on other fronts, starting a society to spread education among the Depressed Classes (as the Untouchables were then legally known). In 1927 he was nominated to the Bombay Legislative Council, where his first speech (pace Gokhale) asked for the budget to be framed amidst less secrecy. Meanwhile, he had also begun lecturing at the city’s Law College (he later served a term as its principal).

  Ambedkar was not unsympathetic to the reformers who had preceded him. However, he felt that they had not gone far enough. The medieval saint-poets asked merely for Brahmins and Sudras to be treated on par as devotees of God. Ambedkar argued that religious equality meant little without social and economic equality. As for upper-caste reformers, there was, he thought, an inescapably patronizing tinge to their efforts. It was time for the Depressed Classes to assert their own rights under their own leaders.

  In 1928 a commission headed by John Simon came to India to examine the question of constitutional reforms. The Congress boycotted its proceedings, in part because its members were all white. In his testimony to the commission, Ambedkar argued that the Depressed Classes should be treated as ‘a distinct, independent minority’—as separate from the Hindus, as the Muslims already were. He also advocated direct action for the fulfilment of their rights, launching satyagrahas to allow Untouchables to drink water from tanks and to enter temples from which they were excluded. There was determined opposition by the upper castes, leading Ambedkar to conclude that reform could come only through the purposive action of the state. He thus asked, to begin with, for greater representation for the Depressed Classes at all levels of public service.

  Through the 1930s and 1940s, Ambedkar wrote a series of tracts excoriating Gandhi and Gandhism. The two men met several times, but could not reconcile their differences. In 1932 the British government awarded separate electorates for Untouchables. Gandhi went on a fast to protest. To save his life, a compromise was reached with Ambedkar (known as the Poona Pact) whereby a joint electorate would remain for Hindus, but with greater seats for the Depressed Classes.

  In 1936 Ambedkar formed the Independent Labour Party to fight the elections mandated under the new Government of India Act. (In later years the party changed its name twice, becoming, first, the Scheduled Caste Federation, and later, the Republican Party of India.) In June 1942 he was nominated to the viceroy’s Executive Council, the first Untouchable to be so distinguished. This set him even more firmly in opposition to the Congress which, in August of the same year, started its Quit India movement.

  When India became independent in 1947, the new Congress government offered Ambedkar the job of law minister. He served in the post for four years, before resigning in September 1951. By now he had become deeply attracted to the Buddha, whom he referred to as ‘my master’. In January 1954 he was asked to be the chief guest at the premier of a feature film on Jotirao Phule produced by the writer-editor P.K. Atre. In October 1956 Ambedkar converted to Buddhism in the city of Nagpur. Six weeks later he died in New Delhi.

  Like his great rival, Gandhi, Ambedkar had multiple agendas as well as multiple careers. He was, at various times, a lawyer, teacher, legislator, educational organizer, party builder and cabinet minister. Through all these roles and assignments he continued to be a prolific writer. He published important books on many topics, including federalism, theology and philosophy, finance, language, constitutionalism and, not least, the sociology, politics and history of the caste system.

  B.R. Ambedkar’s life and work are summed up by his biographer Dhananjay Keer as follows: ‘What did Ambedkar achieve for the Untouchables? The story of the past life of the Scheduled Caste Hindus was pitch dark … It was for the first time in the history of the past twenty-five hundred years that the sun of a better future arose on their horizon. Ambedkar, the son of their soil, their kith and kin, focussed the world’s attention on their civic, social and political rights and liberties, made untouchability a burning topic of the day, raised it to an international importance, and gave it a global publicity. His ceaseless hard struggle and his merciless hammer forced an opening for them, and inaugurated an era of light and liberty. He awakened in them a sense of human dignity, a feeling of self-respect and a burning hatred of untouchability that was worse than slavery. He pulled them out of slough and exorcized despondency and despair from their minds. He infused courage and new life into their demoralized and dehumanized cells. He gave them their soul and reimbued them with a spirit which enabled them to voice their grievances, and to stand up for justice, equality and liberty. Before the rise of their leadership they were treated worse than animals. His heroic struggle raised them to political equality with other communities in India …’

  The quaintness of the prose notwithstanding, this is an essentially accurate description of what one man did for his people.

  The Revolution Against Caste

  In 1927 Ambedkar led a protest against a ban on Untouchable castes drinking water from a lake in the town of Mahad. On that occasion he made a speech comparing the struggle against caste with the struggle against absolutism in late eighteenth-century France. Excerpts from that speech follow.1

  The Hindus are divided, according to sacred tradition, into four castes; but according to custom, into five: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras and Atishudras. The caste system is the first of the governing rules of the Hindu religion. The second is that the castes are of unequal rank. They are ordered in a descending series of each meaner than the one before.

  Not only are their ranks permanently fixed by the rule, but each is assigned boundaries it must not transgre
ss, so that each one may at once be recognized as belonging to its particular rank. There is a general belief that the prohibitions in the Hindu religion against intermarriage, interdining, interdrinking and social intercourse are bounds set to degrees of association with one another. But this is an incomplete idea. These prohibitions are indeed limits to degrees of association; but they have been set to show people of unequal rank what the rank of each is. That is, these bounds are symbols of inequality.

  The caste Hindus of Mahad prevent the untouchables from drinking the water of the Chavadar Lake not because they suppose that the touch of the untouchables will pollute the water or that it will evaporate and vanish. Their reason for preventing the untouchables from drinking it is that they do not wish to acknowledge by such a permission that castes declared inferior by sacred tradition are in fact their equals.

  Gentlemen! you will understand from this the significance of the struggle we have begun. Do not let yourselves suppose that the Satyagraha Committee has invited you to Mahad merely to drink the water of the Chavadar Lake of Mahad.

  It is not as if drinking the water of the Chavadar Lake will make us immortal. We have survived well enough all these days without drinking it. We are not going to the Chavadar Lake merely to drink its water. We are going to the Lake to assert that we too are human beings like others. It must be clear that this meeting has been called to set up the norm of equality.

  I am certain that no one who thinks of this meeting in this light will doubt that it is unprecedented. I feel that no parallel to it can be found in the history of India. If we seek for another meeting in the past to equal this, we shall have to go to the history of France on the continent of Europe. A hundred and thirty-eight years ago, on 24 January 1789, King Louis XVI had convened, by royal command, an assembly of deputies to represent the people of the kingdom. This French National Assembly has been much vilified by historians. The Assembly sent the King and the Queen of France to the guillotine; persecuted and massacred the aristocrats; and drove their survivors into exile. It confiscated the estates of the rich and plunged Europe into war for fifteen years. Such are the accusations levelled against the Assembly by the historians. In my view, the criticism is misplaced; further, the historians of this school have not understood the gist of the achievement of the French National Assembly. That achievement served the welfare not only of France but of the entire European continent. If European nations enjoy peace and prosperity today, it is for one reason: the revolutionary French National Assembly convened in 1789 set new principles for the organization of society before the disorganized and decadent French nation of its time, and the same principles have been accepted and followed by Europe.

  To appreciate the importance of the French National Assembly and the greatness of its principles, we must keep in mind the state of French society at the time. You are all aware that our Hindu society is based on the system of castes. A rather similar system of classes existed in the France of 1789: the difference was that it was a society of three castes. Like the Hindu society, the French had a class of Brahmins and another of Kshatriyas. But instead of three different castes of Vaishya, Shudra and Atishudra, there was one class that comprehended these. This is a minor difference. The important thing is that the caste or class system was similar. The similarity to be noted is not only in the differentiation between classes: the inequality of our caste system was also to be found in the French social system. The nature of the inequality in the French society was different: it was economic in nature. It was, however, equally intense. The thing to bear in mind is there is a great similarity between the French National Assembly that met on 5 May 1789 at Versailles and our meeting today. The similarity is not only in the circumstances in which the two meetings took place but also in their ideals …

  That Assembly of the French people was convened to reorganize French society. Our meeting today too has been convened to reorganize Hindu society … The road it marked out for the development of the French nation, the road that all progress [ive] nations have followed, ought to be the road adopted for the development of Hindu society by this meeting. We need to pull away the nails which hold the framework of caste-bound Hindu society together, such as those of the prohibition of intermarriage down to the prohibition of social intercourse so that Hindu society becomes all of one caste. Otherwise untouchability cannot be removed nor can equality be established …

  Remember that if the prohibitions on social intercourse and interdrinking go, the roots of untouchability are not removed. Release from these two restrictions will, at the most, remove untouchability as it appears outside the home; but it will leave untouchability in the home untouched. If we want to remove untouchability in the home as well as outside, we must break down the prohibition against intermarriage. Nothing else will serve. From another point of view, we see that breaking down the bar against intermarriage is the way to establish real equality. Anyone must confess that when the root division is dissolved, incidental points of separateness will disappear by themselves. The interdictions of interdining, interdrinking and social intercourse have all sprung from the one interdiction against intermarriage. Remove the last and no special efforts are needed to remove the rest. They will disappear of their own accord. In my view the removal of untouchability consists in breaking down the ban on intermarriage and doing so will establish real equality. If we wish to root out untouchability, we must recognize that the root of untouchability is in the ban on intermarriage. Even if our attack today is on the ban against interdrinking, we must press it home against the ban on intermarriage; otherwise untouchability cannot be removed by the roots. Who can accomplish this task? It is no secret that the Brahmin class cannot do it.

  While the caste system lasts, the Brahmin caste has its supremacy. No one, of his own will, surrenders power which is in his hands. The Brahmins have exercised their sovereignty over all other castes for centuries. It is not likely that they will be willing to give it up and treat the rest as equals. The Brahmins do not have the patriotism of the Samurais of Japan. It is useless to hope that they will sacrifice their privileges as the Samurai class did, for the sake of national unity based on a new equality. Nor does it appear likely that the task will be carried out by other caste Hindus …

  The task of removing untouchability and establishing equality that we have undertaken, we must carry out ourselves. Others will not do it. Our life will gain its true meaning if we consider that we are born to carry out this task and set to work in earnest. Let us receive this merit which is awaiting us.

  This is a struggle in order to raise ourselves; hence we are bound to undertake it, so as to remove the obstacles to our progress. We all know how at every turn, untouchability muddies and soils our whole existence. We know that at one time our people were recruited in large numbers into the troops. It was a kind of occupation socially assigned to us and few of us needed to be anxious about earning our bread. Other classes of our level have found their way into the troops, the police, the courts and the offices, to earn their bread. But in the same areas of employment you will no longer find the untouchables.

  It is not that the law debars us from these jobs. Everything is permissible as far [as] the law is concerned. But the Government finds itself powerless because other Hindus consider us untouchables and look down upon us, and it acquiesces in our being kept out of Government jobs. Nor can we take up any decent trade. It is true, partly, that we lack money to start business, but the real difficulty is that people regard us as untouchables and no one will accept goods from our hands.

  To sum up, untouchability is not a simple matter; it is the mother of all our poverty and lowliness and it has brought us to the abject state we are in today. If we want to raise ourselves out of it, we must undertake this task. We cannot be saved in any other way. It is a task not for our benefit alone; it is also for the benefit of the nation …

  Our work has been begun to bring about a real social revolution. Let no one deceive himself by supposing that
it is a diversion to quieten minds entranced with sweet words. The work is sustained by strong feeling, which is the power that drives the movement. No one can now arrest it. I pray to God that the social revolution which begins here today may fulfil itself by peaceful means.

  None can doubt that the responsibility of letting the revolution take place peacefully rests more heavily on our opponents than on us. Whether this social revolution will work peacefully or violently will depend wholly on the conduct of the caste Hindus. People who blame the French National Assembly of 1789 for atrocities forget one thing. That is, if the rulers of France had not been treacherous to the Assembly, if the upper classes had not resisted it, had not committed the crime of trying to suppress it with foreign help, it would have had no need to use violence in the work of the revolution and the whole social transformation would have been accomplished peacefully.

  We say to our opponents too: please do not oppose us. Put away the orthodox scriptures. Follow justice. And we assure you that we shall carry out our programme peacefully.

  How to Annihilate Caste

  In December 1935 Ambedkar was invited by the Jat Pat Todak Mandal, a Hindu reform organization based in the Punjab, to deliver the presidential address at their annual conference. However, when Ambedkar sent them the text of his address the invitation was withdrawn. He then published his speech, a brilliant and withering indictment of the caste system, at his own expense. In the preface to this pamphlet, Ambedkar wrote of the invitation sent and rescinded: ‘[W]hat can any one expect from a relationship so tragic as the relationship between the reforming sect of Caste Hindus and the self-respecting sect of Untouchables, where the former have no desire to alienate their orthodox fellows and the latter have no alternative but to insist upon reform being carried out?’ Excerpts from his undelivered address follow.2