BR Ambedkar: Slayer of All Gods

Author: pastepad.fivefilters.org

With many great leaders, we assess how they measure up to standards and ideals of a civilisation. In Ambedkar’s case, the reverse is true.
Scholarship, institutional power and a thicket of social support and contemporary memoirs have given Gandhi and Nehru scholarly scaffolding. Ambedkar has to shine through the veil of relative neglect.
For non-Dalits, there is a psychological sense in which they are not entitled to write about him.
There is also a pall of suspicion over writing about Ambedkar. For non-Dalits, there is a psychological sense in which they are not entitled to write about him.
There is also a pall of suspicion over writing about Ambedkar. For non-Dalits, there is a psychological sense in which they are not entitled to write about him. For decades, he was the disconcerting figure we chose to ignore. It is as if a society does its level best to marginalise a figure, and then jumps on his bandwagon when he succeeds despite them.
Reverence to Ambedkar is the easy facile gesture that prevents us from confronting his radicalism.
But the claim that he is more than a leader of Dalits alone should not be a facile gesture.
But the claim that he is more than a leader of Dalits alone should not be a facile gesture. It would need to ask the deeper question of what would have to be true for all of us to be entitled to claim him as our leader as well.
There is often a justified fear amongst Dalits that the gesture of treating him as more than a Dalit leader comes at the cost of blunting his radicalism. Non-Dalits become comfortable with him by blunting the piercingly clinical anger he always displays against injustice.
He chafed against the fact that almost all ideology was a ruse to render oppression of Dalits invisible, to cloud its visceral presence under a fog of abstraction.
Raw violence against Dalits was never fully acknowledged, or if acknowledged, its significance was minimised by a fog of mendacity and defensiveness.
Raw violence against Dalits was never fully acknowledged, or if acknowledged, its significance was minimised by a fog of mendacity and defensiveness. His complaint against Nehru, perhaps even more searing than his indictment of Gandhi, was just this: he had no ability to acknowledge the centrality of this violence to Indian society
What makes his anger productive is that it never shades into vengeance: it is always a form of pointed social critique.
What makes his anger productive is that it never shades into vengeance: it is always a form of pointed social critique. But his own lack of vengeance has become an excuse to de-radicalise him.
Ambedkar’s emphasis that Dalits would not play passive victims has become an excuse to forget the extent to which they continue to be victimised; his advocacy of constitutional politics has become a ruse to limit Dalit emancipation to facile constitutional gestures
By the strange alchemy of appropriation he has been made into a safe rather than disconcerting figure.
By the strange alchemy of appropriation he has been made into a safe rather than disconcerting figure. He is an object of consensus when it comes to invoking a figure to be revered. In truth, he is at the heart of the most fundamental conflicts over the soul of India.
Ambedkar disconcerts at so many levels.
He is unsurpassed in astute marshalling of facts and logic. There is, unlike Nehru, never a trace of sentimentality
He is unsurpassed in astute marshalling of facts and logic. There is, unlike Nehru, never a trace of sentimentality in any of his arguments.
Ambedkar also disconcerts because at some level, his positions are constantly exposing the hypocrisy of our own.
Ambedkar also disconcerts because at some level, his positions are constantly exposing the hypocrisy of our own. I do not mean this in a superficial sense that he always reminds us of the reality of injustice. I mean it in the deeper sense that he takes any ideal and shows how we do not fully follow through its conclusions.
Gandhi in his view had certainly employed non-violence in the cause of immoral ends of blunting Dalit demands. Gandhi also failed to do justice to the ideal of non-violence in a deeper sense. This was the idea that for someone who was a proponent of non-violence, there was an incredible psychological coercion at the heart of Gandhi’s tactics; and he even had the temerity to suggest that some of it was directed inward.
The claim that in a constitutional culture satyagrahya could be a form of violence, a narcissistic belief in one’s own truth without acknowledging the reality of difference, was a telling charge.
The claim that in a constitutional culture satyagrahya could be a form of violence, a narcissistic belief in one’s own truth without acknowledging the reality of difference, was a telling charge. Ambedkar’s belief in constitutional methods in the face of the experience of injustice was at least as much if not a more radical expression of non– violence than Gandhi could ever imagine
In many ways it is Ambedkar who tied India into a deeper form of non-violence than Gandhi did, by committing Dalits to a repertoire of constitutionalism— a fact some Dalit radicals rue has tied their hands.
His most telling charge against Nehru was that his Discovery of India, as it were, draws a kind of veil over injustice; and he often openly accuses Nehru of Brahmanism.
Ambedkar is one of the few leaders of his generation who understood the deep transformative effects of wealth on society.
This was not just from the idea that while renunciation could be a meaningful
while renunciation could be a meaningful gesture for upper castes, it was something of a sick joke to call on those who were dispossessed to practice it.
modernise India ignore at their peril. One of his most remarkable essays is a critique of Bertrand Russell’s Reconstruction of Society. He chided the aristocratic Russell for his platitudinous critique of the love of money.
One of his most remarkable essays is a critique of Bertrand Russell’s Reconstruction of Society. He chided the aristocratic Russell for his platitudinous critique of the love of money.
He chided the aristocratic Russell for his platitudinous critique of the love of money.
Love of money is always for something, and it is the purpose embodied in that something that will endow it with credit or shame….
Love of money is always for something, and it is the purpose embodied in that something that will endow it with credit or shame….Thus even love of money as a pursuit may result in a variety of character.’
Love of money is always for something, and it is the purpose embodied in that something that will endow it with credit or shame….Thus even love of money as a pursuit may result in a variety of character.’ This alignment of money with variety, and its absence with a possible dead uniformity, has more plausibility than easy critiques of avarice that come from a flippant moralism. So Ambedkar disconcerts. He stretches non-violence to its constitutional logic more than Gandhi; modernity to its association with variety more than Nehru; and his historical consciousness to the exploration of dark and evil spaces more than anyone else. In doing so, he exposes the limits of our allegiances to our own convictions.
This alignment of money with variety, and its absence with a possible dead uniformity, has more plausibility than easy critiques of avarice that come from a flippant moralism.
This alignment of money with variety, and its absence with a possible dead uniformity, has more plausibility than easy critiques of avarice that come from a flippant moralism. So Ambedkar disconcerts.
This alignment of money with variety, and its absence with a possible dead uniformity, has more plausibility than easy critiques of avarice that come from a flippant moralism. So Ambedkar disconcerts. He stretches non-violence to its constitutional logic more than Gandhi; modernity to its association with variety more than Nehru; and his historical consciousness to the exploration of dark and evil spaces more than anyone else. In doing so, he exposes the limits of our allegiances to our own convictions.
He stretches non-violence to its constitutional logic more than Gandhi; modernity to its association with variety more than Nehru; and his historical consciousness to the exploration of dark and evil spaces more than anyone else. In doing so, he exposes the limits of our allegiances to our own convictions.
The deep discomfort Ambedkar still causes, however, comes from a claim that is central to the contemporary struggle over the soul of India. The first was his claim of the centrality of violence to the constitution of Hindu society.
Violence was not an aberration, a flotsam that could be cleared up to reveal the bright and placid waters of Hindu society underneath. It was central to its identity and functioning.
There is no skirting around the fact that for Ambedkar, justice required declaring a war of sorts on Hinduism.
As he wrote in his reply to Gandhi, ‘I would like to assure the Mahatma that it is not the mere failure of Hindus and Hinduism which has produced in me the feelings of disgust and contempt. I am disgusted with Hindus and Hinduism because I am convinced that they cherish wrong ideals and lead a wrong social life. My quarrel with Hindus and Hinduism is not over the imperfections of their social conduct. It is much more fundamental. It is over their ideals.’
I am disgusted with Hindus and Hinduism because I am convinced that they cherish wrong ideals and lead a wrong social life. My quarrel with Hindus and Hinduism is not over the imperfections of their social conduct. It is much more fundamental. It is over their ideals.’
The project of achieving justice was not simply a matter of reforming a tradition, making it live up to its ideals. Justice would require whole-scale destruction of a tradition.
As a new Dalit consciousness gains strength on Indian campuses, this is arguably going to be the single biggest cultural fault line to emerge in contemporary India. The emerging conflict between Ambedkar– Periyar activists on the one hand and ABVP on the other gives a whiff of this undercurrent, and why student politics is becoming even more intense on issues of identity.
gives a whiff of this undercurrent,
Even non-Brahmanical modes of Hindu articulation were so infected with its vice-like grip that it had to be dismantled before justice even becomes a possibility.
A large part of Ambedkar’s oeuvre that still repays close reading is his diagnostic: his relentless attempt to understand what produced such a diabolically oppressive structure as caste.
Many of his theses are acute in their sociological insight and historical penetration. He rejected the Aryan Invasion theory of subjugation. He rejected all race-based explanations. He was particularly scornful of functional explanations of caste, since caste involved an imprisoning hierarchy of functionaries, not functions.
The first is that, whichever way we cut it, material or functional explanations could not by themselves explain the peculiarity of caste: it was at base a diabolical series of representations, imposed by a priestly class, as an act of power.
The first is that, whichever way we cut it, material or functional explanations could not by themselves explain the peculiarity of caste: it was at base a diabolical series of representations, imposed by a priestly class, as an act of power. It was self perpetuating through its denial to Untouchables of all three means of advancement: power, wealth and education.
The moral rage at Brahmanism comes from precisely this fact: that there is no possible functional justification for the order they created.
The moral rage at Brahmanism comes from precisely this fact: that there is no possible functional justification for the order they created. It was an imposition of power, pure and simple.
In the end, even the slightest defensiveness of caste is a ruse to blunt its sheer vileness as a social system.
For Ambedkar, the Purusa Sukta was a late interpolation in the Vedas. But the lesson he drew from it is that metaphysical categories always come braided with social hierarchy: no amount of allegorical reading of the Vedas or the Gita could get away from the fact that the transcendental was always aligned in the service of social hierarchy.
If you are brutally honest about the crisis of Indian intellectual traditions, you have to acknowledge the fact that this crisis has its roots not in Western delegitimisation, as potent as that might have been, but in the eruption of the ‘social question’.
If you are brutally honest about the crisis of Indian intellectual traditions, you have to acknowledge the fact that this crisis has its roots not in Western delegitimisation, as potent as that might have been, but in the eruption of the ‘social question’. With what straight face, what act of good faith, could you defend an intellectual tradition at whose core was an oppressive, hierarchical and segmented social system?
The nationalist movement was the last intellectual gasp of a project that thought it was possible to transcend tradition without making tradition despicable; it was possible to reform in order to preserve.
The nationalist movement was the last intellectual gasp of a project that thought it was possible to transcend tradition without making tradition despicable; it was possible to reform in order to preserve. Ambedkar threw a gauntlet to that project: the abolition of religion was necessary to the abolition of slavery
To make the question of power the defining hallmark of a tradition, the yardstick by which it is judged is Ambedkar’s singular achievement.
He was amongst the first thinkers to link the question of gender violence and communalism in relation to caste.
He was amongst the first thinkers to link the question of gender violence and communalism in relation to caste. In his early essays, he rightly pointed out not only that endogamy was central to caste, but that control of women, widows and unmarried girls in particular would be central to the maintenance of caste identity.
As he acerbically put it, a caste has no consciousness of being affiliated to another caste, unless it is in the context of Hindu-Muslim riots. In short, Hindus needed an ‘Other’ to consolidate their identity in the face of internal division.
The centrality of ahimsa in the Indian tradition was not a description of our non-violent history. Quite the contrary, it was a testament to the centrality of violence.
The sociologist Orlando Patterson had once argued that a proper discourse on freedom arose in Greece precisely because it was a society constituted by slavery: freedom was valourised precisely because it was needed as a negation of the existing social reality of slavery.
Ambedkar linked the existence of untouchability with beef; the peculiar horror at the Untouchable can only be explained by associating them with beef eating.
He was claiming that behind the valourisation of ahimsa lay a deep himsa; behind the interdictions of ritual lay the most serious mutilation of human personality anyone had seen; behind the homilies of a unified cosmic order lay the deep divisions of society.
If you have ever wondered why defenders of the cow can be so callous towards other human beings, read Ambedkar.
He had lamented that the hold of Brahmanism was such that India never had a Voltaire.
He had lamented that the hold of Brahmanism was such that India never had a Voltaire. It had an Erasmus maybe, partial reformers working within the paradigm of existing social structures. But no one who could radically question the legitimacy of the whole edifice.
It is hard to imagine RSS workers who chant his name coming to terms with his critique of Hinduism. His Riddles in Hinduism was, after all, banned.
The nationalist movement was the last intellectual gasp of a project that thought it was possible to transcend tradition without making tradition despicable; it was possible to reform in order to preserve.
The nationalist movement was the last intellectual gasp of a project that thought it was possible to transcend tradition without making tradition despicable; it was possible to reform in order to preserve. Ambedkar threw a gauntlet to that project: the abolition of religion was necessary to the abolition of slavery. You do not reform to preserve; you have to destroy to liberate.
The striking sentence, ‘I belong to a society which is still ancient and in which God is a much more important member than man is’, is said with a deep sense of the tragedy of this condition; the claim that anything higher than ‘man’ is an erasure of humanity, a condition that we need to overcome.
The striking sentence, ‘I belong to a society which is still ancient and in which God is a much more important member than man is’, is said with a deep sense of the tragedy of this condition; the claim that anything higher than ‘man’ is an erasure of humanity, a condition that we need to overcome. Ambedkar was out to slay all gods.
Conversion to Buddhism was also a modality of social protest. Buddhism could also be recast as a revolutionary social ethic: combining freedom and equality and a social harmony.
In a sense this ‘encounter’ sums up India’s intellectual tragedy: on the one hand, a deep metaphysics without a social ethic; on the other, a social ethic that is deeply suspicious of metaphysics.
By his conversion to Buddhism, Ambedkar was saying: either one can have a just social ethic or be in thrall to a false metaphysics.
if Buddha slayed ritual, Ambedkar wanted to slay any residue of metaphysics, where man simply becomes an effect of some larger force, or gets lost in an abstraction.
As Aishwary Kumar has pointed out in an important recent book Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford University Press), Ambedkar is a radical in many senses. He is radical because of his unsentimental and unsparing view of democracy.
But he was quite clear that the maintenance of a constitutional form was ‘not quite the same thing as self government by the people’.
In fact, he was prescient in warning that there were two limitations to constitutional morality. The first limitation ‘was that the form of administration must be appropriate to and in the same sense as the form of the constitution’.
More importantly, almost as if he is directly admonishing us even 70 years later, ‘it is perfectly possible to pervert the constitution without changing its form by merely changing the form of administration and to make it inconsistent and opposed to the spirit of the constitution.’
As he wrote in What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, ‘By itself [universal suffrage] cannot bring about a government, in the sense of the government by the people and for the people.’
And finally, he understood the deepest contradiction of democracy: trying to institute a regime of political equality amidst deep social and economic inequality. This was a tension no democracy could survive for long.
As he categorically states, ‘Nationality is not such a sacrosanct and absolute principle as to give it the character of a categorical imperative, overriding every other consideration.
Ambedkar is relentlessly suspicious about the idea that the sovereignty of the people is a unitary thing. One of his reasons for reliance on liberal contrivances of checks and balances was this: that sovereignty cannot be a unitary thing, and therefore cannot be represented by anyone.
Second, given the depravity of Indian social conditions, he had more faith in the state as source of social order than in virtue as the basis of social harmony.
His relentless critique of decentralisation and localism, in part borne of a suspicion that it would simply empower local tyranny,
His relentless critique of decentralisation and localism, in part borne of a suspicion that it would simply empower local tyranny, was simultaneously a faith in the state’s ability to reconstruct society.
Ambedkar is, in some profound sense, too much of a believer in individuality to risk losing it in the metaphysical unity of republicanism.
As he sardonically remarked, other systems of exclusion marginalised excluded groups on one or two dimensions: exclusion from wealth, arms or education. The exclusion of Dalits was oppressive because it was along all three dimensions.
His lifelong quest to secure equitable representation for Dalits was borne of this recognition.
He was amongst the first to articulate the idea that the notion of merit needed ideological demystification: it was inherited privilege.
He was amongst the first to articulate the idea that the notion of merit needed ideological demystification: it was inherited privilege. That some of these platitudes still need to be reiterated is a testament to the degree to which we are still far from his ideals.
Indeed, one of the criticisms of his strategy was that this specificity made him less adept at making alliances with other groups. At the heart of this specificity was a particular experience of discrimination. It is for this reason that he wanted the acknowledgment of Dalits as a minority identity. One of the great ironies of the way reservations have unfolded is that both of these ideas have got lost to some degree.
Reservations now, in a sense, depend on a majoritarian alliance of Dalits and Other Backward Castes. It gives reservations a political solidity.
Reservations now, in a sense, depend on a majoritarian alliance of Dalits and Other Backward Castes. It gives reservations a political solidity. But it has obscured the ethical specificity of the Dalit condition.
As he categorically states, ‘Nationality is not such a sacrosanct and absolute principle as to give it the character of a categorical imperative, overriding every other consideration.’
It is to his eternal credit that he did not rely on any external crutches, the dialectic of history, the comforts of metaphysics, the consolations of religion, the certainties of a false scientism, to sustain hope against centuries of suffering.
As experience proves, rights are protected not by law but by the social and moral conscience of society. If social conscience is such that it is prepared to recognise the rights which law chooses to enact rights will be safe and secure.
As experience proves, rights are protected not by law but by the social and moral conscience of society. If social conscience is such that it is prepared to recognise the rights which law chooses to enact rights will be safe and secure. But if fundamental rights are opposed by the community, no Law, no Parliament, no judiciary can guarantee
As experience proves, rights are protected not by law but by the social and moral conscience of society. If social conscience is such that it is prepared to recognise the rights which law chooses to enact rights will be safe and secure. But if fundamental rights are opposed by the community, no Law, no Parliament, no judiciary can guarantee them in the real sense of the word.
The idea that in the final analysis we have no resources other than our own conscience can leave us defenceless, particularly, as Ambedkar knew, when that conscience was so easily overridden by false beliefs.
He once said of himself, “I am like a rock that does not melt but turns the course of rivers.” He certainly bent the course of a whole civilisation towards the arc of justice.
Ambedkar is not everyone’s thinker, because we have not done enough to deserve him.
Ambedkar is not everyone’s thinker, because we have not done enough to deserve him. He is everyone’s thinker in only one sense: he stands as a permanent admonishment to us all.

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BR Ambedkar: Slayer of All Gods

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