Aishwary Kumar. Radical Equality

In a recent essay (“Rights vs. Duties,” Boston Review 41, no. 3 [2016]: 42–47), Samuel Moyn calls attention to the urgent need for a renewed focus on the idea of “duties” in history, juxtaposing a lacuna on that topic with what he sees as an overemphasis on the study of “human rights” over the last several decades. Rights and duties go hand in hand, inasmuch as every right suggests correlative obligations, yet there has been no corresponding public or academic discussion of duty’s place in the pursuit of the public good. Not incidentally, Moyn begins his essay with, and weaves the threads of his argument around, the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi, for whom duty was an important guiding principle. Aishwary Kumar approaches these issues tangentially in his thought-provoking new book Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy. Gandhi’s philosophy, and his politics, Kumar suggests, were ultimately built around a set of duties and obligations that structured society and guided all human relations. But significantly, Gandhi’s “conception of social obligation [was condensed] within the disciplinary and punitive limits of moral law” (54), what he called maryada dharma. So while emancipation stemmed from commitment to dharma, the moral law, which instructed all humans on righteousness (28), it had to be constrained (maryada). It is precisely on this point that B. R. Ambedkar, the champion of India’s lower caste (Dalit) community, most fiercely diverged from the Mahatma, with whom he would forever have a fraught relationship. For while Gandhi was a strong advocate for ending the practice of “untouchability,” and stood against discrimination based on birth, he remained committed to the overall organization of society, the social structure, on which the practice was based. “Within the surreptitious logic of maryada dharma, in other words, the harijan [Gandhi’s term for Dalits] became the limit beyond which satyagraha [the Gandhian method of pursuit of Truth], no matter how militantly reformist it promised to be, would not venture” (170). Gandhian duty, in other words, though mechanistically connected to nonviolence, was ironically blind to the violence of heredity, which for Ambedkar undermined Gandhian duty’s legitimacy.

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