Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  For Ambedkar, this time of elite self-doubt presented a moment he had been training for all his life. Born Bhimrao Ambavadekar, born incisive, born, in his own description, difficult, he grew up to become one of the most educated men in the India of his time. For two decades preceding Independence, he stood with his followers well outside the nationalist movement, condemning the Congress party as “fools and knaves.” He found Gandhi’s condescension toward untouchables, and his claim to speak for them, a manipulative strategy to keep them fighting on behalf of their upper-caste oppressors.

  The equal rights of a minority shouldn’t be a paternalistic gift from the upper castes, Ambedkar believed. This conviction led him to see much force in Jinnah’s (39) first hints, in 1940, that some form of partition was the way to protect the interests of Indian Muslims. It also led him briefly to contemplate a territorial homeland for India’s Dalits, and even a Dravidistan for the Tamil lower castes—an idea he discussed, in 1944, with Periyar (34). But he moved away from territorial solutions as a way to protect the interests of minorities, and came to believe it might be possible to achieve this within the shared constitutional order of a united India. By the time talks between the Congress and the Muslim League finally broke down, in 1946, he angled to be one of 296 people elected from across the country to serve in the Assembly that would draft the Constitution.

  At the time, he was just one of thirty untouchables elected to the Congress-dominated Assembly; he had only a small party behind him, and few real supporters among the Congress—not surprisingly: that “fools and knaves” line was Ambedkar being polite. Yet as Partition made the protection of minorities one of new India’s most important legislative issues, he wielded his superior policy and legal education to accrue power.

  In his youth, Ambedkar had burned a copy of the Laws of Manu, a legal text by the legendary Brahminic lawgiver whose ancient decree was said to have created the caste order. Now he wasn’t about to waste the chance to subvert that order by pressing into the Constitution the most sweeping system of affirmative action anywhere in the world.

  What Ambedkar helped realize, in this fertile historical moment, has made him omnipresent in contemporary India: bestatued and bespectacled in a three-piece blue suit, Constitution in his left hand, right finger pointing upward. In tens of millions of Dalit or Shudra homes, you’ll find his face on a poster, painting, or colored tile—a protective household man-god. If to Indian schoolchildren he is the man who wrote the Constitution, to India’s politicians he is a public emblem both of how far we’ve come in addressing the blight of caste and how central the state and politics are to that rectification.

  These readings simultaneously exaggerate and ghettoize Ambedkar’s contribution. He was a sophisticated, long-sighted constitutional collaborator whose interests extended beyond caste to the very structure and psychology of Indian democracy. In a way, he was India’s Tocqueville: not in aristocratic background, of course, but as a critic of the ancien régime, realistic enough to know that even a serious assault upon that regime (the introduction of democracy, the creation of a new legal order) would still leave alive the insidious limbs of past history, ready to nudge political action and policy away from their intended goals.

  * * *

  Ambedkar’s unprecedented story of moving from untouchability to shaper of modern India inspired a succession of “firsts”: first Dalit president, first woman Dalit leader, first Dalit millionaire, first Dalit billionaire, first Dalit woman wrestler. It’s as if the very fact of those achievements changes the status of the average Dalit and scrubs away history. Instead, the gold plating around such “firsts” makes it hard to recover these people as individuals. This was something Ambedkar thought about himself even at the height of his renown. “If you want to write what I tell you about my private life in your biography I have no objection,” he informed his biographer with characteristic insouciance. “I am also not worried whether people look at me in a bad way because of that.” As a scholar, he was at ease with complexity and attentive to particularity; and he might have chuckled at the popular sermon book version of his life as a dutiful struggle from the very bottom of the pile.

  Ambavadekar’s Maharashtrian family was one of a small outcaste elect created by the preferences of the British. In addition to favoring elites such as the Parsis for government contracts, the Raj had pet service communities. Among these were the Mahars, a group who comprised two-thirds of all the untouchables in western India. Historically, the Mahars’ work was to clear street carrion and collect food scraps. The British found in their diligence and loyalty the ideal human material for military service.

  Both Ambavadekar’s parents were of this military line, and both were educated, since the British afforded Westernized schooling to the offspring of those who served the Crown. Bhimrao, the last of the couple’s fourteen children, got this education, too—an opportunity fewer than one in a hundred of his untouchable contemporaries had. His mother died when he was young, and afterward his father, Ramji, supervised his education. The head of a military school in a garrison town in central India, Ramji would rouse his son at 2:00 a.m. to study for exams. Having known Jyotirao Phule (24), Ramji also taught his son to see untouchability—the label that translated in a young man’s life to being barred from drinking from certain wells, eating with schoolmates, or studying Sanskrit—as an outrage to be challenged.

  By his teenage years, the boy’s intellectual abilities had drawn the attention of both a Brahmin teacher, who gave him the name Ambedkar, and the Maharaja of Baroda, a lower-caste Maratha eager to train gifted non-Brahmins to serve in his administration. The prince helped Ambedkar attend Bombay’s prestigious Elphinstone College and, after his 1912 graduation, to further his education at Columbia University in the United States.

  Those New York years are often treated cosmetically in India, as if they primarily taught Ambedkar how to rock blue suits. Yet he acquired crucial analytic tools in America as well. From the historian James Harvey Robinson, he came to see history as a progressive movement; and from James T. Shotwell, an expert on labor and human rights, he saw how the expansion of rights could be the driver of that progress. From the philosopher John Dewey, he learned optimism about the capacity of democratic institutions to make more socially equal societies. More generally, from men such as Booker T. Washington, he learned the value of compromise in order to secure what was most vital to free a disenfranchised people: education. So stimulated, he began an intellectual and political career that would evolve into a groundbreaking analysis of caste.

  Although Ambedkar shared the British skepticism that India constituted a nation, at Columbia, seeing his homeland from a distance, he came to view India as possessing a cultural unity. But it did not lie in tolerance of diversity or accommodation of differences, as some upper-caste intellectuals liked to claim (see 28, Vivekananada, and 32, Tagore). Instead, it was built on a foundation of oppression rooted far deeper than the political rule of the Raj.

  He rubbished the argument that caste had a basis in the functional division of labor. Nor did he see caste as based on racial difference—as, for instance, in Phule’s history of Aryan Brahmin invasions of Dravida lands. To Ambedkar, the caste system was generated by the exclusionary social and kinship rules of the Brahmins, and it spread because other groups, especially those lowest down the order, aped the Brahmins’ precepts. They did so believing that spiritual, social, or economic benefits might come to them, too.

  This analysis would lead to a crucial insight: that the caste hierarchy was able to enforce itself with minimal physical coercion. It operated largely by voluntary submission, based on what Ambedkar described brilliantly as “an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt.” This kept at bay any concerted challenge to the system:

  All have a grievance against the highest and would like to bring about their downfall. But they will not combine. The higher is anxious to get rid of the highest but does not wish to combine with the h
igh … The low … would not make a common cause with the lower … Each class being privileged, every class is interested in maintaining the system.

  Ambedkar’s expansion of these ideas, in books, pamphlets, and speeches, became not just a critique of untouchability, but one of the most consequential pieces of polemical scholarship of his times. In their combination of subtle analysis and raw, angry political expression, many passages remind me of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. But Ambedkar’s political ideas, unlike Gramsci’s, would survive him in the code of law.

  * * *

  When Ambedkar returned to India in 1923, in his early thirties, to call him the first untouchable to receive a PhD would have done him down. He had also passed the Bar exams and was on his way to receiving a second PhD, from the London School of Economics (this time with the support of another lower-caste ruler, the Maharaja of Kolhapur). Yet if his economic, social science, policy, and legal training outmatched that of the elites he was about to contend with (what American minorities refer to as the requirement that they be “twice as good to get half as much”), Indian life was doing its part to keep his anger fresh. As he later wrote, humiliated, he had had to quit a coveted position as military secretary in the Maharaja of Baroda’s administration when he could not find a place to live. No landlord was willing to rent to an untouchable.

  Unlike the Buddha (1) or Mahavira (2), or even Periyar, each of whom was taking on the caste just a notch or two above, Ambedkar now wanted to take on the whole edifice—from the bottom. In caste Hindu quarters, that made him a despised figure, which in turn made him more impatient and defiant. He would learn only after failure to take the long view.

  A crucial lesson came in 1927, when, as founder of a group advocating for untouchables and lower castes, he led a march for water access in a caste-ridden Maharashtra town. After he drank from the local tank and claimed victory, upper-caste Hindus attacked the participants, who were later further ostracized for their activism. The experience convinced him that fighting in the streets was less likely to bring success than fighting through the law.

  The realization was probably fortunate for modern India, since mass organization was never Ambedkar’s strength. Over the next decades, he started a sequence of associations, federations, political parties, pressure groups, and campaigns, while considering alliances with Communists, Sikhs, socialists, and the Raj, among others. Some of his campaigns worked. In the hope of eliminating his followers’ self-image as polluting persons, he popularized the term “Dalit” (the Marathi for “broken”), which he used to refer to those usually called “untouchables” but whom he called in English “Broken Men.” But he wasn’t as charismatic before large groups as he was charming and convincing to small ones. Like Periyar, he seemed poised to be a merely local leader—until the unexpected intervention of the Raj.

  In 1930, as part of the British plan to give India more self-government gradually, leaders of different communities were invited to a roundtable to discuss a future constitution for India under dominion status. Jinnah was plucked to represent Muslims, and Ambedkar to represent untouchables, nationwide—a significant social promotion for a man little known outside his region. His bell-clear argumentative skills got him invited back to the next year’s roundtable, where he began an intellectual battle with Gandhi (38) that would last until the end of the Mahatma’s life.

  To Gandhi, the “sin” or “stain” of untouchability could be removed by altering personal attitudes—by requiring everyone at his ashram, for instance, to clean toilets. But Ambedkar bridled at the notion that untouchability was an excrescence on a caste system that was, on the whole, functional. He considered Gandhi a caste orthodox in a democratic reformer’s clothing, and later claimed he had seen past the disguise to “the bare man in him”—that he had seen Gandhi’s “fangs.”

  In fact, it was an argument with Ambedkar, not the British, that occasioned Gandhi’s most famous hunger strike in 1932. Underlying the immediate dispute, about separate electorates for untouchables, was a more fundamental clash: Should Indians first unite to fight for freedom against the British (as Gandhi believed), or should they first render justice to one another, before asking for it from the British (as Ambedkar insisted)? It was also, as fundamentally, an argument about who could profess to represent the diverse interests of the Indian people. The year before, Gandhi had famously said, “I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast mass of the Untouchables.” It was an imperious view that left no room for self-representation. At first, Ambedkar had seemed to accept Gandhi’s view that touchables and untouchables had to come together through love, not through electoral arrangements or law, but he now came to feel co-opted and used.

  Ambedkar turned sharply against Gandhi and the Congress, convinced that untouchables would have to fight their own fight. Unable to float a movement that could compete with the Congress, he decided to pursue his cause with British help, taking up a post in the viceroy’s government. Yet by the mid-1940s, the British were fed up with Ambedkar, too. For all his demands for concessions, he lacked the representational base some other untouchable leaders had, so they marginalized him as a policy-making adviser. This might have irked Ambedkar more were it not fast becoming clear that the overwhelming power to establish equality for low-caste and outcaste people would soon belong to the Congress. He sought out Muslim support. He made speeches backing proposed Congress policies. He signaled that an allegiance might be up for grabs. And when the Constituent Assembly was called, in December 1946, he had a seat at the table.

  * * *

  All modern constitutions enact a structural separation of government powers and establish individual rights. In India, the former, pressured by executive and judicial imperatives, has often proved fragile. In contrast, among the more robust and transformative elements of the Indian Constitution are those articles that grant fundamental rights to citizens defined primarily as members of communities rather than as individuals. This range of community rights remains, in its scope, quite unique to India. Rights against discrimination (including, quite specifically, caste discrimination) give the state positive powers to eliminate it. A right to equality of opportunity in public employment has also been affirmed. Ambedkar did more than anyone to embed these principles in the Constitution. But out of them grew a politics of reservations, or affirmative action, that was paradoxical in its effects.

  Initially, the principles were supposed to sanction, for a finite period, the reservation of places (quotas), in government employment and educational institutions, for Dalits, tribal groups, and others defined as “economically backward.” (A ten-year jump start was the initial hope.) Yet the power to determine eligibility for reservations was given to India’s state legislatures, and a constitutional principle thereby became an electoral expedient. Politicians can promise, in the name of equality, to expand the number of reserved places, and to extend them to include newly defined “backward classes.” Caste groups, even successful ones, compete and sometimes campaign violently to be deemed backward in order to benefit from reservations, which today apply to just under half of all positions in India’s national government institutions. In one state, the figure approaches 70 percent. So, in terms of social mobility, down is the new up. It’s one of the profound ironies of India’s democracy: reservations, designed to erode caste identities and fortify individual citizens, have invigorated caste categories now defined by the state.

  As a result of his role in creating these rights, all India’s political parties, including those whose views he opposed, claim Ambedkar today. He’s become a necessary electoral magnet for any politician who wants the votes of the dispossessed. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the low-caste leader of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), recently celebrated Ambedkar’s 125th anniversary by applying a tika on the forehead of a statue of the man who spent his entire life fighting Hinduism.

  How did such a latecomer to nationalism, and an opponent of Gandhi, come to have so c
entral a role in modern India? Nehru never fully trusted Ambedkar, and the feeling was mutual. But Ambedkar, vexing as he was to some, had intellectual skills Nehru and the senior Congress leadership required in the blood-dark wake of Partition. Ambedkar wasn’t only a Dalit representing a vulnerable community: he showed himself able to think across a range of issues, and to ask about the consequences, intended and otherwise, that various laws might have for the society as a whole. After the disaster of Partition—a disaster of political judgment as well as policy—avoiding further shortsighted decisions regarding minorities could not have mattered more.

  Hence, in 1947, after plans for Partition nullified Ambedkar’s seat in the Constituent Assembly—he was elected from, of all places, eastern Bengal—Nehru and Rajendra Prasad, the leader of the Assembly and later India’s first president, scrambled to keep him involved. “Apart from any other consideration we have found Dr. Ambedkar’s work both in the Constituent Assembly and the various committees to which he was appointed to be of such an order as to require that we should not be deprived of his services,” wrote a worried Prasad as he maneuvered to rig up another electoral post for Ambedkar. By August, Ambedkar had been given the Drafting Committee chairmanship.

  In the end, he would lose battles for many specific provisions to aid minorities. It’s strange, in contemporaneous letters, to find a man with revolutionary impulses regularly credited for negotiating compromises. Yet what those compromises amounted to was an uncommonly progressive document: both a synopsis of India’s deep historical conflicts and an extravagant promissory note for their future reconciliation in a pluralist, federal structure. In addition to enshrining affirmative action, the Constitution formally abolished untouchability. And, against the Gandhian ideal of decentralizing power, it created, with Ambedkar’s constant prodding, a state strong enough not to be captured by powerful caste groups in the future. It recognized both individuals and communities as bearers of fundamental rights, an original vision that would leave plenty of opportunity for future conflict and contradiction.