The Radical in Ambedkar

Critical Reflections

Bibliographic Data

ID3017140
AuthorsRavikant Kisana (0000-0002-1759-7929, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume11
Issue1
Pages246-258
Publication date2023-01-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCritical Philosophy of Race (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2165-8684 • E-ISSN: 2165-8692
PublisherThe Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5325/critphilrace.11.1.0246
OpenAlexW4362650178
LanguageEN
Citations received26

The caste system in South Asia is among the oldest surviving anthropological systems of structural social exploitation. For nearly three thousand continuous years people have been segregated into occupational guilds or castes based on birth, with no possibility of mobility between these. The castes are arranged in a hierarchy with the priestly groups, called Brahmins, placed at the top. Historically, only the Brahmins were allowed to monopolize knowledge of religious texts, leading to the creation of knowledge hegemonies. Similar monopolies were established over military and commercial enterprises by the Kshatriya and Bania castes, who were below the Brahmins in the social order. Taken together, these three upper-caste collectives have controlled the material relations within South Asia. Below them lie the Shudra castes; meant to be forbidden literacy on pain of death, they were relegated to menial tasks and services, petty agriculture, and artisanal labor. Shudras represent the lowest tier of the caste system, meant to be in perennial subservience to the upper castes. However, there are people even “below” the Shudras in this schematic, considered to be “outcastes,” or as being outside the caste system. It is this group of people, who were deemed so “impure” as to be deemed untouchable, that we know today as the Dalits. Forced to exist on the margins of society and coerced into occupations like the disposal of the dead and cleaning fecal matter, the Dalits carry within their souls the accrued trauma of hundreds of generations who have toiled under the most systematic, barbaric daily dehumanizing erasure ever devised by our species. The Dalits have, however, never accepted this system meekly. They have resisted the caste system since its earliest days, keeping alive perhaps the most ancient continuous resistance movement anywhere in the world.Hence, to the outsider’s gaze, if South Asia, especially India and its ancient civilizational history, comes across as anything more glorified than a violent battleground where these casteist structures have been constantly imposed, reinvented, and resisted, then it has much to do with how the Indian interlocutors have traditionally presented this society to those outsiders. Even in the recent past of British colonialism as well as the contemporary US-centric academia, research and writing on India has dialogued almost exclusively with Brahmins and other upper castes. This is evidenced by the virtual absence of Dalit academics in knowledge creation and its propagation.In that context, it is a point of tremendous significance that the editors of the book The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections, Dr. Anand Teltumbde and Dr. Suraj Yengde, and the protagonist of their editorial project, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, are all Dalits. Dr. Ambedkar (1891–1956) lived a dramatic life. Born in poverty to an untouchable Dalit family, he rose to dizzying heights, becoming the first Dalit to be educated at Columbia University, United States, and the London School of Economics, United Kingdom. In the span of a remarkable career, he almost single-handedly gave shape to a critical epistemology of caste and successfully brought it into the realm of identity assertion, legal rights, social justice, and political aspirations articulated in the civic language conducive for petitioning the then British ruling class. He was at once a committed social reformer, a political mobilizer, and an exceptional academic and philosopher, deservedly emerging as the chairman of the Drafting Committee for the Indian Constitution as well as the first minister of law and justice in the new republic. Though he soon fell out with the ruling elites, he emerged as one of the first and most fierce critics of the young Indian state. In the final years of his life, he converted to and worked to revive Buddhism in India as a means for Dalits to rid themselves, theologically and materially, of the hegemonies of the casteist Hindu faith. As such, Dr. Ambedkar’s legacy is difficult to compartmentalize into any one domain. However, this already onerous task has been complicated by the fact that even in postcolonial India, the knowledge hegemony of Brahmins has persisted as they continue to be an overwhelming majority within academia, intelligentsia, civil society, and influential circles of media and policy.Dalit intellectuals have historically argued that upper-caste South Asian scholars obfuscated the prominence of Dr. Ambedkar, either deliberately or through sheer mediocrity arising from a lack of social familiarity with Dalit culture. A common rebuttal against this critique is that Dalit society has deified Dr. Ambedkar into a Godlike figure and that anything less than an unapologetic hagiography is likely to be dismissed as a biased reading of his life. Both arguments carry relative merit: the upper-caste scholarship on Dr. Ambedkar has tended to focus more on his political petitioning and constitutional contributions, often sidestepping or toning down his radical declarations calling for the annihilation of caste and its attendant social and material mechanisms; on the opposite end, the icon of Dr. Ambedkar became more central than his prolific writing and mobilizing to certain sections of the splintering Dalit movement after his death.It is against this backdrop of competing legacies, over six decades after his death that Dr. Yengde and Dr. Teltumbde set out to resurrect the “real” Dr. Ambedkar from out of what they term the “blurred figurine” that we have received owing to the intervening misrepresented or muddled discourses. Their editorial project in The Radical in Ambedkar seeks to steer away from existing literature, which, they claim, either “badly glorifies or nicely vilifies” him, and to extract the radical possibilities of his oeuvre in the context of twenty-first-century issues, a world in which ancient casteist violence coexists with an ever-globalizing system, and where social mass movements are acquiring an increasingly transnational and intersectional dimension. To revisit Dr. Ambedkar’s prolific body of work and make it dialogue with these contemporary moments is the promising basis for this book. The first section, a collection of six essays redrawing the orientation of Dalit and Race studies, provides the most solid contribution in that direction. The social disenfranchisement and structural racism in the United States against minorities, especially its Black population, have many parallels with casteist exclusion and violence in South Asia. In the aftermath of the tragic death of George Floyd as the #BlackLivesMatter protests spread across the globe, it also saw solidarity from anticaste activists in India. In many ways Dr. Teltumbde and Dr. Yengde preempt these conversations.The editors point out correctly that Dr. Ambedkar’s time studying in Columbia University, New York, 1913–1916, coincided with the early years of the Harlem Renaissance, when Black intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois were already active within the community. Yet, somehow these leaders and the movements that grew around them did not speak to each other in any meaningful way over the subsequent decades. This is identified as a historic missed opportunity of sorts that Yengde and Teltumbde are trying to contemporarily rectify. In the opening essay of the book, Ronald E. Hall and Neha Mishra juxtapose the activism and vision of Dr. Ambedkar with Martin Luther King Jr. In this positioning what stands out is how the topographies of violence are so often situated around similar issues and exclusions. The essay points out that Dr. Ambedkar’s protest in the town of Mahad in 1927, where Dalits were forbidden to drink water from the public tank, mirrors the Black resistance against racial segregation of water fountains in the United States during the civil rights era and more recently the movement for safe drinking water in Flint, Michigan. In a subsequent essay, Kevin D. Brown makes a case for comparing such common struggles of the antiracism and anticaste movements, which could benefit by giving an internationalist dimension to both. Samuel L, Myers Jr. and Vanishree Radhakrishna, in their piece, compare the quantitative data patterns of hate crimes and atrocities perpetuated against Blacks in the United States and Dalits in India. Such studies can form the basis of building a global anthropology of structuralist exclusion and violence, connecting parallel social justice movements. Indeed, Gary Michael Tartakov’s essay attempts to extend such an anthropology, simultaneously philosophizing about the similar patterns of violence between Dalits in South Asia and Blacks in the United States, while comparing such patterns to the violence experienced by the Jews of medieval Christian Europe. Reading from historic archival texts, he points out common modes of social exclusion based on forcefully segregated housing, denial of education and access to social amenities, and prohibition of socioeconomic mobility as means by which the racial, casteist, and religious ideologies have perpetuated violence against oppressed groups.Such a cross-sectional analysis of movements also opens up opportunities to reevaluate the canonical role of previously established icons and institutions. One such icon up for a revision is the figure of Gandhi, whose nonviolent, civic resistance was presented as an output of some innate Indian tradition of moral humanism and exported to other ethnic, nationalist, and social movements. The ubiquity of such depictions, a result of decades of Gandhian scholarship emanating from South Asian studies departments populated almost exclusively by upper-caste academics, is now under question. As African intellectuals push back against the imagery of colonial heroes, resulting in the literal as well as the metaphoric fall of public statues dedicated to Cecil Rhodes, King Leopold II, and many other historically venerated men with a stake in the slave economy, increasingly the name of Gandhi is being added to these lists. There have been publicized demands by academics in University of Manchester, UnitedKingdom, and University of Ghana to remove Gandhi’s statues from their campuses, and these seem to have found echo in a multitude of similar demands during the recent #BlackLivesMatter protests. In this context, Goolam Ved and Ashwin Desai’s essay argues that it is the radicalism of Dr. Ambedkar, not Gandhi, that can bridge the contemporary moment of African resistances with the people’s movements in India. As proliferating capitalist structures wreck African economies and render entire communities vulnerable, they argue, there is an urgent need “now more than ever that Ambedkar meets Fanon meets Thomas Sankara meets Biko.”Taken together, these essays put forward a good case for drawing Dr. Ambedkar’s work and the anticaste resistance in India into the orbit of the increasingly globalized antiracism movement. Curiously, these essays are arranged in a section titled “Ambedkar’s Struggle in the Global Perspective,” even though most of the content focuses on race. Other globalized struggles centering on feminist and queer identities, for instance, are not just absent from this section but overall, in the collection of twenty-one essays spanning the whole book, they find representation in only one.This is an obvious blind spot of editors Teltumbde and Yengde in The Radical in Ambedkar as Dr. Ambedkar’s work has many crucial implications for the feminist and queer movements in South Asia. The sole essay dealing exclusively with these questions is Ritu Sen Chaudhuri’s essay, which interrogates the deeply orientalist nature of the traditional epistemology of Indology. She acknowledges Dr. Ambedkar’s role in helping her formulate “the caste–gender–sexuality system,” which informs the intersectional power hierarchies between these constructs as they play out in the daily cultural life of South Asia. However, beyond this, there is a paucity of voices and perspectives from Dalit feminists and queer intellectuals in the collection.This is particularly glaring, considering that the most politically successful Dalit mass leader in the decades after Dr. Ambedkar’s death is a woman. Mayawati, the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a region with more people than the combined populations of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, has built a political career drawing from Ambedkarite ideology. She was briefly even tipped to be a front-runner for the Indian prime minister’s post. Yet, throughout her career, she has found her sex to be routinely weaponized against her, often stemming as much from casteist backlash against a Dalit leader as from the deeply rooted misogyny that is hostile to women in leadership positions. In South Asia, the two are often deeply intertwined as Dr. Ambedkar pointed out in his works1 that the endogamous control of female sexuality and subversion of their social agency is one of the key tenets for the perpetuation of the caste system. What is even more glaring about the omission of any engaged scholarship tying back to Mayawati, not just from a feminist perspective but also from a political position, is the distance that Teltumbde and Yengde have put between their project and her ideological interpretation of Dr. Ambedkar. Mayawati and her political organization, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), are the product of the Bahujan movement built by Kanshi Ram in the 1970s and 1980s.The general elections in India are centered on a “first-past-the-post” system without separate electorates. This tends to favor political parties with upper-caste interests and ideologies, since they are better funded and more cohesively organized. Dalits, socially and economically marginalized even in independent India, found it hard to prosper within this system. Even Dr. Ambedkar struggled to gain an electoral in his as a political However, his Kanshi Ram gave shape to the identity of a “the on an social he set out to the Dalits with other by the upper castes, like the Shudra castes and Taken with the groups, these for an of the Indian The sheer of the Bahujan were to be to the material of the upper castes. However, to social between the of the Bahujan is no for common ideological in the daily lived of India, these are often in social with each these Kanshi Ram built the Bahujan movement from with a social which in the creation of such as the and the political of the It however, under the mobilizing of Mayawati that these and in political which the Dalits. in Mayawati was to the Uttar without any political to not just from Dalits, and but also from some sections of society with other political This was a historic moment it that it was to upper castes, Brahmins, to for an Ambedkarite by a Dalit Mayawati and political have since that the role by the Bahujan movement in Ambedkarite ideological between social groups, a and to social and centering the leadership in the of a Dalit be Yet, some of the essays dealing with political these essay on the Dalit in The Radical in Ambedkar focuses on He that some of the more Dalit castes have power and that have some of the Dalit castes in a much than He to the that the of new Dalit movements be in the splintering of the Dalit as the less castes becoming more This is a as it the ideological by the Bahujan which is in many of and similar of the social of Ambedkarite anticaste political the which is active in the Indian of is in He Dr. Teltumbde to critique the and of over Ambedkarite of material to its he that such some of radical in and of it the of the book that such have not political and social and have even Dalit and there has been a centering of the role of the Dalit in the in the the Dalit movement was a product of similar political and social with the increasingly and splintering Dalit movement. The to the movement in the United States for and in some the Black they to a social to to the anticaste movement. Kanshi Ram and the Bahujan however, which tended to more from the epistemology of Dr. Ambedkar, the to the of it more on This is the of historic missed opportunity for the anticaste which saw two parallel attempts to socially a around common topographies of casteist up around the time but not in with each there were some issues with and social these missed the editorial in The Radical in Ambedkar in up on this is a missed to of Ambedkarite role of Dalit in and as a political was a in the Dalit not to such Their internationalist vision and to a into the anticaste was also a as to be as of Dr. Ambedkar. are all and centered by the who are to the Dalit movement. Dr. Suraj was active in the while Dr. who at the time of writing this is under on by the India is considered to be to the of they are to their social context to on this collection of which a way deservedly the radical of Dalit to the contemporary activism and they some blind of Dalit intellectuals to the anticaste movement into the orbit of among these blind is the the of Dr. Ambedkar’s which as an anticaste in and was by most in the For the Buddhism to and to spread from the to and Asia. However, in the a movement by to a of and with the of the ancient University in the Buddhism from India. However, in this and Dr. Ambedkar in Buddhism the cultural of the anticaste resistance in South Asia. the of his life, he committed to Buddhism in India as a way for Dalits to theologically and the material of He much of his final even in to writing with religious in and the with of his at a mass on at in to the of as of the many Dalit intellectuals from the have about this of Dr. Ambedkar’s life. There has been an to it as some of even in religious for mass or to over its and of these exist across the The Radical in Ambedkar collection of Dr. piece, which argues that the to Buddhism did not any material beyond some He any by Dalit that the religious to more and social within the by that no data exist to any of by Dalits as to Dalits who did not it is this in of literacy and other of that in his essay, that such a material has been Dr. Teltumbde also that the of as a of among the Dalit leaders competing to gain control of the movement after Dr. Ambedkar’s death, to the splintering of the political this most has as the era was to some over the control of by leadership it the role imagery in the Bahujan by Kanshi Ram and To the splintering but not the of Ambedkarite Buddhism is a Dr. Suraj essay on the in the internationalist vision of the Ambedkarite movement the lack of in global for Dalits. over the fact that in his final Dr. Ambedkar to Dalits Buddhism into the global of and Asia. his he to and to to and was in with them as a of the movement centered in the United States, without the and queer of global is the of perspectives from intellectuals from these communities stands in to the of upper-caste intellectuals like and who are by sections of Bahujan This comes from the of of the Ambedkarite by the knowledge which are much in in the Indian This in with the and often in some essays like reading of Dr. Ambedkar’s the is the for The Radical in the editorial of the as is to out the it to be who is this being out For whose gaze, for whose and and with what are many possibilities in this book for new of to but the sidestepping of Bahujan and of Ambedkarite political and and the lack of representation of Dalit feminist and queer some blind in an editorial project that is as a radical editorial however, is as in the moment the Indian has into a of a that now to its and and social The most to this new about in when the ruling the interests of the elites, a of that to the rights of Indian As the Indian protests out across all Indian The of resistance was by the protest by women in where they the for an Their the as hundreds of similar up across the Indian by these saw active by Dalits, and even some sections of upper-caste and queer also in the with the articulated not just against the in but also in One of the most moments of the protests when under and media a Dalit emerged on the of the historic He there and a of the Indian Constitution with the of Dr. Ambedkar on it as the of men around to and in The and at across the at protests by at by queer at civil society and across social media all the of Dr. Ambedkar became the of the context of these it is that Radical in has been found and on the it is up to the academics and to the and

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