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The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/critphilrace.11.1.0246

2165-8692

Ravikant Kisana,

South Asian Studies and Diaspora

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 footprint in his days as a political campaigner. However, using his ideas, Kanshi Ram gave shape to the identity of a collective “Bahujan,” literally meaning “the majority.” Building on an imaginative social engineering base, he set out to ally the Dalits with other groups persecuted by the upper castes, like the Shudra castes and Muslims. Taken together with the tribal groups, these cohorts account for an estimated 75 percent of the Indian population. The sheer numbers of the Bahujan collective were theorized to be enough to blunt the material advantages of the upper castes. However, to achieve social alliance between the constituent groups of the Bahujan is no easy task, for despite having common ideological oppressors, in the daily lived reality of India, these groups are often in immediate social friction with each other.To overcome these odds, Kanshi Ram built the Bahujan grassroots movement from scratch with a scientific, experiment-oriented approach toward social strategizing,2 which culminated in the creation of objective-oriented organizations such as the BAMCEF,3 DS4,4 BRC,5 and ultimately the political party of the BSP. It was, however, under the charismatic mobilizing skills of Mayawati that these theories and grassroot networks actually succeeded in capturing political power, which had thus far eluded the Dalits. Most notably, in 2007, Mayawati was able to win the Uttar Pradesh assembly without any political alliances, managing to secure votes not just from Dalits, Shudras, and Muslims but also from some sections of Brahmin society disenchanted with other political options. This was a historic moment because it proved, albeit briefly, that it was possible to mobilize upper castes, including Brahmins, to vote for an Ambedkarite party led by a Dalit woman.Though Mayawati and BSP’s political fortunes have waned since that peak, the role played by the Bahujan movement in stitching together Ambedkarite ideological alliances between feuding social groups, pursuing a scientific and organized approach to social engineering, and symbolically centering the leadership in the hands of a Dalit woman, cannot be overstated. Yet, some of the essays dealing specifically with post-Ambedkar political themes completely overlook these achievements.Chandraiah Gopani’s essay on the “New Dalit Movements” in The Radical in Ambedkar focuses on intra-Dalit tensions. He suggests that some of the more powerful Dalit castes have cornered whatever little power and benefits that have trickled down, leaving some of the lesser organized Dalit castes in a much worse situation than before. He suggests to the reader that the future of new Dalit movements would be in the splintering of the cohesive Dalit unity as the less organized castes start becoming more assertive. This is a disingenuous claim as it inexplicably ignores the ideological cohesiveness achieved by the Bahujan movement, which is still strong in many parts of north, central, and western India.A similar diminishment of the social achievements of another Ambedkarite anticaste political party, the VCK,6 which is active in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, is seen in Hugo Gorringe’s essay. He quotes Dr. Teltumbde extensively to critique the alleged superficial obsession and grandstanding of VCK over Ambedkarite iconography instead of offering material emancipation to its supporters. While he does concede that such symbolic defiance offers some measure of radical imagination in and of itself, it fits the larger narrative of the book that such fixations have not yielded satisfactory political and social results, and possibly have even adversely affected Dalit unity and mobilization.In contrast, there has been a relatively significant centering of the role of the Dalit Panthers in the post-Ambedkar era. Also originating in the 1970s, the Dalit Panther movement was a product of similar political and social disenchantment with the increasingly leaderless and splintering Dalit movement. The Panthers looked to the antirace movement in the United States for answers. Gaining inspiration from, and styling themselves in some fashion after, the Black Panther movement, they too attempted to create a broad-based social coalition to give legs to the anticaste movement. Unlike Kanshi Ram and the Bahujan movement, however, which tended to draw more from the Buddhist epistemology of Dr. Ambedkar, the “Dalit Panther Manifesto” (1973–2016) aimed to broaden the definition of “Dalit,” basing it more on Marxist idioms.7 This is the site of another historic missed opportunity for the anticaste movement, which saw two parallel attempts to socially engineer a bigger consensus around common topographies of casteist persecution, coming up around the same time but not in conversation with each other. While there were some issues with timing and social reasons behind these missed collaborations, the editorial silence in The Radical in Ambedkar in picking up on this is nonetheless a missed chance to bring together diverging threads of Ambedkarite ideology.The role of Dalit Panthers in using street agitation and defiance as a political tool was a revolutionary development in the Dalit imagination hitherto not used to such direct action. Their internationalist vision and attempt to bring a Marxist strain into the anticaste discourse was also a paradigmatic shift as Communists had come to be framed as untrustworthy antagonists of Dr. Ambedkar. These are all acknowledged and centered by the editors, who are both lineally close to the Dalit Panther movement. Dr. Suraj Yengde’s father was active in the movement, while Dr. Teltumbde, who at the time of writing this review is under brutal incarceration on unsubstantiated charges by the India state, is long considered to be close to the Leftist intelligentsia of India.While they are able to bring their social context to bear on this collection of essays, which will go a long way toward deservedly restoring the radical praxis of Dalit Panthers to the contemporary activism and intellectual discourse, they also, unfortunately, replicate some blind spots typical of Dalit intellectuals seeking to orient the anticaste movement into the orbit of Marxist praxis. Primary among these blind spots is the apathy toward the Buddhist axiology of Dr. Ambedkar’s later works.Buddhism, which originated as an anticaste religion in fifth and fourth century BCE, was adopted by several powerful kings, most notably including Ashoka in the second century BCE. For the following millennium, Buddhism continued to receive state patronage and to spread from the subcontinent to Southeast and East Asia. However, in the eighth century CE, a major revivalist movement led by Adi Shankaracharya led to a resurgence of Brahminism, and with the brutal destruction of the ancient Nalanda University in the twelfth century CE, Buddhism disappeared from India. However, in this overarching historical ebb and flow, Dr. Ambedkar located in Buddhism the original cultural apparatus of the anticaste resistance in South Asia. Toward the end of his life, he committed himself to reviving Buddhism in India as a way for Dalits to theologically and spiritually exit the material stranglehold of Hinduism. He devoted much of his final years, even in failing health, to writing texts contemporizing Buddhist practices, collaborating with religious organizations in Buddhist countries, and himself adopted the religion along with lakhs of his followers at a mass conversion on 14 October 1956 at Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur.Owing to the rejection of religion as part of the Marxist doctrine, many Dalit intellectuals from the Left have remained noncommittal about this last arc of Dr. Ambedkar’s eventful life. There has been an attempt to explain it as some sort of materialist, even Marxist, praxis clothed in religious garbs for easy mass consumption, or to gloss over its relevance and achievements. Shades of these critiques exist across the The Radical in Ambedkar collection of essays, including Dr. Teltumbde’s own piece, which strongly argues that the conversion to Buddhism did not offer any material progression beyond some “spiritual-psychological gains.” He second- guesses any counterclaims by Dalit Buddhists that the religious conversion led to more cohesion and social progression within the community by suggesting that no data exist to confirm any higher degree of progression made by Buddhist Dalits as compared to Dalits who did not convert. Yet it is precisely this data, in terms of literacy rates and other markers of gender empowerment, that Nicolas Jaoul presents in his essay, suggesting that such a material differentiation has been observed. Dr. Teltumbde also suggests that the fetishization of Buddhist religiosity served as a recurring motif of one-upmanship among the Dalit leaders competing to gain control of the movement after Dr. Ambedkar’s death, inadvertently contributing to the splintering of the political core itself. While this most certainly has historical basis, as the immediate post-Ambedkar era was witness to some ugly battles fought over the control of Buddhist organizations by different leadership claimants, it sidesteps the role Buddhist imagery played in uniting the Bahujan masses by both Kanshi Ram and Mayawati. To acknowledge the splintering but not the cohesive strands of Ambedkarite Buddhism is a selective analysis. Dr. Suraj Yengde’s essay on the gaps in the internationalist vision of the Ambedkarite movement rues the lack of effort made in seeking global allies for Dalits. This, too, glosses over the fact that in his final years, Dr. Ambedkar sought to bring Dalits via Buddhism into the global Buddhist community of Southeast and East Asia. Despite his ill health, he traveled to Sri Lanka and Burma to deliver speeches to Buddhist congregations and was in constant communication with them throughout.To define internationalism, predominantly as a function of the antirace movement centered in the United States, without acknowledging the Buddhist, feminist, and queer dimensions of global struggles, is reductive. Furthermore, the underrepresentation of perspectives from intellectuals from these communities stands in contrast to the inclusion of upper-caste intellectuals like Partha Chatterjee and Anupama Rao, who are viewed warily by sections of Bahujan intellectuals.8 This wariness comes from the anxiety of appropriation of the Ambedkarite discourse by the Brahminical knowledge hegemonies, which are still very much in place in the Indian intelligentsia. This in combination with the academically dense and often inaccessible prose used in some essays like Rajesh Sampath’s Derridean reading of Dr. Ambedkar’s text begs the question: Who is the intended audience for The Radical in Ambedkar?If the editorial purpose of the collection, as stated earlier, is to draw out the “real Ambedkar,” it needs to be asked who is this “real Ambedkar” being drawn out for? For whose gaze, for whose evaluation and validation, and with what criteria?There are many genuine, groundbreaking possibilities in this book for new rooms of discourse to open up, but the purposeful sidestepping of Bahujan and Buddhist strands of Ambedkarite political and intellectual mobilization, and the lack of representation of Dalit feminist and queer perspectives, lays bare some nonradical blind spots in an editorial project that is intended as a radical revision.The editorial vision, however, is incredibly timely as in the present moment the Indian nation has virtually collapsed into a version of a Brahminical fascist state that now barely pretends to retain its democratic and egalitarian ideals and social structures. The most audacious attempt to cement this new order came about in December 2019, when the ruling party, BJP, representing the interests of the Brahminical supremacist elites, passed a series of laws that threatened to dilute the citizenship rights of Indian Muslims. As the Indian parliament capitulated, citizens’ protests broke out across all major Indian cities. The spirit of resistance was exemplified by the Shaheen Bagh protest led by Muslim women in Delhi, where they occupied the city street for an indefinite sit-it. Their defiance captured the imagination as hundreds of similar “Shaheen Bagh”–style sit-ins sprung up across the Indian nation. While led predominantly by Muslim women, these sites saw active community participation by Dalits, Sikhs, and even some sections of upper-caste Hindus. Feminist and queer groups also joined in the protest, with the opposition articulated not just against the specific laws in question but also toward Brahminism in general. One of the most spectacular moments of the protests happened, when under heavy police deployment and full media glare, Chandrashekhar Azad, a neo-Kanshi Ram-ite Dalit leader, emerged on the steps of the historic Jama Masjid. He stood there and raised a copy of the Indian Constitution with the picture of Dr. Ambedkar on it as the crowd of Muslim men stood around him shoulder to shoulder and cheered in defiance. The image made national headlines, and at Shaheen Baghs across the nation, at protests led by feminists, at events organized by queer collectives, at civil society vigils, and across dissenting social media hashtags all over, the image of Dr. Ambedkar became the symbol of resistance.In the context of these developments, it is clear that “The Radical in Ambedkar” has been organically found and celebrated on the streets. Now, it is up to the academics and intelligentsia to read the signs and build upon them.