Ambedkar’s encounters with humiliation and injustice began from his early childhood. When Gandhi was serving in the South African War, Ambedkar was ten years old, living with his aunt and going to a local government school in Satara. Thanks to a new British legislation,183 he was allowed to go to a Touchable school, but he was made to sit apart from his classmates, on a scrap of gunnysack, so that he would not pollute the classroom floor. He remained thirsty all day because he was not allowed to drink from the Touchables’ tap. Satara’s barbers would not cut his hair, not even the barbers who sheared goats and buffaloes. This cruelty continued in school after school. His older brothers were not allowed to learn Sanskrit because it was the language of the Vedas, and the colonization of knowledge was a central tenet of the caste system. (If a Shudra listens intentionally to the Vedas, the Gautama Dharma Sutra says, his ears must be filled with molten tin or lac.) Much later, in the 1920s, Ambedkar studied Sanskrit (and in the 1940s also studied Pali) and became familiar with Brahminical texts—and when he wrote Annihilation of Caste, he deployed this knowledge explosively.
Eventually, in 1897, the family moved to a chawl in Bombay. In 1907, Ambedkar matriculated, the only Untouchable student in Elphinstone High School. It was an exceptional achievement for a Mahar boy. Soon after, he was married to nine-year-old Ramabai (not to be confused with Pandita Ramabai) in a ceremony that took place in a shed built over a city drain. While he was doing his bachelor’s degree at Elphinstone College, a well-wisher introduced him to Sayajirao Gaekwad, the progressive Maharaja of Baroda. The Maharaja gave him a scholarship of Rs 25 (fifty cents) a month to complete his graduation. The Maharaja was one of a number of unusual, privileged-caste Hindu individuals who helped or allied with Ambedkar in times of adversity and in his political confrontations.
The times were turbulent. The Morley–Minto reforms, which advocated a separate electorate for Muslims, had been passed. Nationalists were infuriated and saw the reforms as a British ploy to undermine the unity of the growing national movement. Tilak was convicted of sedition and deported to Mandalay. In 1910, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a young follower of Tilak, was arrested for organizing an armed revolt against the Morley–Minto reforms. (In prison Savarkar turned toward political Hinduism and in 1923 wrote Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?)
When Ambedkar graduated, he became one of three students who was given a scholarship by Sayajirao Gaekwad to travel abroad to continue his studies. In 1913 (Gandhi’s last year in South Africa), the boy who had to sit on a gunnysack on his classroom floor was admitted to Columbia University in New York. It was while he was there, under the tutelage of John Dewey (of “Deweyan liberalism” fame), Edwin Seligman, James Shotwell, James Harvey Robinson, and A. A. Goldenweiser, that he wrote his original, path-breaking paper on caste, “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development,”184 in which he argued that caste could not be equated with either race or class, but was a unique social category in itself—an enclosed, endogamous class. When he wrote it, Ambedkar was only twenty-five years old. He returned briefly to India and then went to London to study economics at the London School of Economics and simultaneously take a degree in law at Gray’s Inn in London—a degree he had to abandon halfway but completed later.
Ambedkar returned to Baroda in 1917. To repay his scholarship, he was expected to serve as military secretary to the Maharaja. He came back to a very different reception from the one Gandhi received. There were no glittering ceremonies, no wealthy sponsors. On the contrary, from spending hours reading in the university library with its endless books, and eating at dining tables with napkins and cutlery, Ambedkar returned to the thorny embrace of the caste system. Afraid of even accidentally touching Ambedkar, clerks and peons in his office would fling files at him. Carpets were rolled up when he walked in and out of office so that they would not be polluted by him. He found no accommodation in the city: his Hindu, Muslim, and Christian friends, even those he had known at Columbia, turned him down. Eventually, by masquerading as a Parsi, he got a room at a Parsi inn. When the owners discovered he was an Untouchable, he was thrown onto the street by armed men. “I can even now vividly recall it and never recall it without tears in my eyes,” Ambedkar wrote. “It was then for the first time I learnt that a person who is Untouchable to a Hindu is also Untouchable to a Parsi.”185
Unable to find accommodation in Baroda, Ambedkar returned to Bombay, where, after initially teaching private tutorials, he got a job as a professor at Sydenham College.
In 1917, Hindu reformers were wooing Untouchables with an edge of desperation. The Congress had passed its resolution against untouchability. Both Gandhi and Tilak called untouchability a “disease” that was antithetical to Hinduism. The first All-India Depressed Classes Conference was held in Bombay, presided over by Ambedkar’s patron and mentor, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad, and attended by several luminaries of the time, including Tilak. They passed the All-India Anti-Untouchability Manifesto, which was signed by all of them (except Tilak, who managed to find a way around it).186
Ambedkar stayed away from these meetings. He had begun to grow sceptical about these very public but completely out-of-character displays of solicitude for Untouchables. He saw that these were ways in which, in the changing times, the privileged castes were maneuvering to consolidate their control over the Untouchable community. While his audience, his constituency, and his chief concern were the Untouchables, Ambedkar believed that it was not just the stigma, the pollution–purity issues around untouchability, but caste itself that had to be dismantled. The practice of untouchability, cruel as it was—the broom tied to the waist, the pot hung around the neck—was the performative, ritualistic end of the practice of caste. The real violence of caste was the denial of entitlement: to land, to wealth, to knowledge, to equal opportunity. (The caste system is the feudal version of the doctrine of trusteeship: the entitled must be left in possession of their entitlement and be trusted to use it for the public good.)
How can a system of such immutable hierarchy be maintained if not by the threat of egregious, ubiquitous violence? How do landlords force laborers, generation after generation, to toil night and day on subsistence wages? Why would an Untouchable laborer, who is not allowed to even dream of being a landowner one day, put his or her life at the landlord’s disposal, to plough the land, to sow seed, and harvest the crop, if it were not out of sheer terror of the punishment that awaits the wayward? (Farmers, unlike industrialists, cannot afford strikes. Seed must be sown when it must be sown, the crop must be harvested when it must be harvested. The farmworker must be terrorized into abject submission, into being available when he must be available.) How were African slaves forced to work on American cotton fields? By being flogged, by being lynched, and if that did not work, by being hung from a tree for others to see and be afraid. Why are the murders of insubordinate Dalits even today never simply murders but ritual slaughter? Why are they always burnt alive, raped, dismembered, and paraded naked? Why did Surekha Bhotmange and her children have to die the way they did?
Ambedkar tried to provide an answer:
Why have the mass of people tolerated the social evils to which they have been subjected? There have been social revolutions in other countries of the world. Why have there not been social revolutions in India, is a question that has incessantly troubled me. There is only one answer which I can give and it is that the lower classes of Hindus have been completely disabled for direct action on account of this wretched caste system. They could not bear arms, and without arms they could not rebel. They were all ploughmen—or rather condemned to be ploughmen—and they were never allowed to convert their ploughshares into swords. They had no bayonets, and therefore everyone who chose, could and did sit upon them. On account of the caste system, they could receive no education. They could not think out or know the way to their salvation. They were condemned to be lowly; and not knowing the way of escape, and not having the means of escape, they became reconciled to eternal servitude, which th
ey accepted as their inescapable fate.187
In rural areas, the threat of actual physical violence sometimes paled before the specter of the “social boycott” that orthodox Hindus would proclaim against any Untouchable who dared to defy the system. (This could mean anything from daring to buy a piece of land, wearing nice clothes, smoking a bidi in the presence of a caste Hindu, or having the temerity to wear shoes or ride a mare in a wedding procession. The crime could even be an attitude, a posture that was less craven than an Untouchable’s is meant to be.) It’s the opposite of the boycott that the civil rights movement in the US used as a campaign tool; the American Blacks at least had a modicum of economic clout to boycott buses and businesses that held them in contempt. Among privileged castes, the social boycott in rural India traditionally means “hukka-pani bandh”—no hukka (tobacco) and no pani (water) for a person who has annoyed the community. Though it’s called a “social boycott,” it is an economic as well as social boycott. For Dalits, that is lethal. The “sinners” are denied employment in the neighborhood, denied the right to food and water, denied the right to buy provisions in the village Bania’s shop. They are hounded out and left to starve. The social boycott continues to be used as a weapon against Dalits in Indian villages. It is noncooperation by the powerful against the powerless—noncooperation, as we know it, turned on its head.
In order to detach caste from the political economy, from conditions of enslavement in which most Dalits lived and worked, in order to elide the questions of entitlement, land reforms, and the redistribution of wealth, Hindu reformers cleverly narrowed the question of caste to the issue of untouchability. They framed it as an erroneous religious and cultural practice that needed to be reformed.
Gandhi narrowed it even further to the issue of “bhangis”— scavengers, a mostly urban and therefore somewhat politicized community. From his childhood, he resurrected the memory of Uka, the boy scavenger who used to service the household’s lavatory, and often spoke of how the Gandhi family’s treatment of Uka had always troubled him.188 Rural Untouchables—ploughmen, potters, tanners, and their families—lived in scattered, small communities, in hutments on the edges of villages (beyond polluting distance). Urban Untouchables—bhangis, Chuhras, and Mehtars—scavengers, as Gandhi liked to call them, lived together in numbers and actually formed a political constituency. In order to discourage them from converting to Christianity, Lala Mulk Raj Bhalla, a Hindu reformer of the Punjabi Khatri caste, rebaptized them in 1910, and they came to collectively be called Balmikis. Gandhi seized upon the Balmikis and made them his show window for untouchability. Upon them he performed his missionary acts of goodness and charity. He preached to them how to love and hold on to their heritage and how to never aspire toward anything more than the joys of their hereditary occupation. All through his life, Gandhi wrote a great deal about the importance of “scavenging” as a religious duty. It did not seem to matter that people in the rest of the world were dealing with their shit without making such a fuss about it.
Delivering the presidential address at the Kathiawar Political Conference in Bhavnagar on January 8, 1925, Gandhi said:
If at all I seek any position it is that of a bhangi. Cleansing of dirt is sacred work which can be done by a Brahmin as well as a bhangi, the former doing it with and the latter without the knowledge of its holiness. I respect and honour both of them. In the absence of either of the two, Hinduism is bound to face extinction. I like the path of service; therefore, I like the bhangi. I have personally no objection to sharing my meal with him, but I am not asking you to inter-dine with or inter-marry him. How can I advise you?189
Gandhi’s attentiveness toward the Balmikis, his greatly publicized visits to “bhangi colonies,” paid dividends, despite the fact that he treated them with condescension and contempt. When he stayed in one such colony in 1946
half the residents were moved out before his visit and the shacks of the residents torn down and neat little huts constructed in their place. The entrances and windows of the huts were screened with matting, and during the length of Gandhi’s visit, were kept sprinkled with water to provide a cooling effect. The local temple was white-washed and new brick paths were laid. In an interview with Margaret Bourke-White, a photo-journalist for Life magazine, one of the men in charge of Gandhi’s visit, Dinanath Tiang of the Birla Company, explained the improvements in the untouchable colony, “We have cared for Gandhiji’s comfort for the last twenty years.”190
In his history of the Balmiki workers of Delhi, the scholar Vijay Prashad says when Gandhi staged his visits to the Balmiki Colony on Mandir Marg (formerly Reading Road) in 1946, he refused to eat with the community:
“You can offer me goat’s milk,” he said, “but I will pay for it. If you are keen that I should take food prepared by you, you can come here and cook my food for me”…. Balmiki elders recount tales of Gandhi’s hypocrisy, but only with a sense of uneasiness. When a dalit gave Gandhi nuts, he fed them to his goat, saying that he would eat them later, in the goat’s milk. Most of Gandhi’s food, nuts and grains, came from Birla House; he did not take these from the dalits. Radical Balmikis took refuge in Ambedkarism which openly confronted Gandhi on these issues.191
Ambedkar realized that the problem of caste would only be further entrenched unless Untouchables were able to organize, mobilize, and become a political constituency with their own representatives. He believed that reserved seats for Untouchables within the Hindu fold, or within the Congress, would just produce pliable candidates—servants who knew how to please their masters. He began to develop the idea of a separate electorate for Untouchables. In 1919, he submitted a written testimony to the Southborough Committee on electoral reforms. The committee’s brief was to propose a scheme of territorial constituencies based on existing land revenue districts and separate communal representation for Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs, for a new constitution that was to be drafted to prepare for Home Rule. The Congress boycotted the committee. To his critics, who called him a collaborator and a traitor, Ambedkar said that Home Rule was as much the right of the Untouchable as it was of the Brahmin, and it was the duty of privileged castes to do what they could to put everybody on an equal plane. In his testimony, Ambedkar argued that Untouchables were as separate a social group from Touchable Hindus as Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs:
The right of representation and the right to hold office under the State are the two most important rights that make up citizenship. But the untouchability of the untouchables puts these rights far beyond their reach. In a few places they do not even possess such insignificant rights as personal liberty and personal security, and equality before law is not always assured to them. These are the interests of the Untouchables. And as can be easily seen they can be represented by the Untouchables alone. They are distinctively their own interests and none else can truly voice them…. Hence it is evident that we must find the Untouchables to represent their grievances which are their interests and, secondly, we must find them in such numbers as will constitute a force sufficient to claim redress.192
The British government did not, at that point, pay much attention to his testimony, though his presentation did perhaps provide the basis for Ambedkar being invited to the First Round Table Conference ten years later, in 1930.
Around this time, Ambedkar started his first journal, Mook Nayak (Leader of the Voiceless). Tilak’s newspaper, Kesari, refused to carry even a paid advertisement announcing the publication of Mook Nayak.193 The editor of Mook Nayak was P. N. Bhatkar, the first Mahar to matriculate and go to college.194 Ambedkar wrote the first thirteen editorials himself. In the first one, he described Hindu society in a chilling metaphor—as a multistoried tower with no staircase and no entrance. Everybody had to die in the story they were born in.
In May 1920, backed by Chhatrapati Shahu, the Maharaja of Kolhapur, known for his anti-Brahmin views and for pioneering the policy of reservation in education and jobs as far back as 1902, Ambedkar and his colleagues organi
zed the first All-India Depressed Classes Conference in Nagpur. It was agreed that no Untouchable representative chosen by a caste-Hindu majority could (or would) genuinely work against chaturvarna.
The 1920s marked the beginning of an era of direct action by Untouchables for the right to use wells, schools, courts, offices, and public transport. In 1924, in what came to be known as the Vaikom Satyagraha, the Ezhavas, a community-designated Shudra, and the Pulayas, who were Untouchables, agitated to use the public roads that skirted the Mahadeva temple in Vaikom, twenty miles from Kottayam in Travancore (now in the state of Kerala). One of the leaders of the Vaikom Satyagraha was George Joseph, a Syrian Christian, and an admirer of Gandhi. Gandhi, on his part, disapproved of a “non-Hindu” intervening in what he believed to be an “internal matter” of the Hindus.195 (The same logic had not applied three years before, when he “led” the Khilafat Movement.) He was also reluctant to support a fullblown satyagraha in an “Indian-ruled” state. During the course of the Vaikom Satyagraha, George Joseph was imprisoned. He became deeply disillusioned by what he saw as Gandhi’s inexcusable ambivalence on the issue of caste. As the tension in Vaikom rose, C. Rajagopalachari,196 Congress leader and Gandhi’s chief lieutenant, traveled to Vaikom to oversee matters. On May 27, 1924, he reassured the worried privileged-caste Hindus of Vaikom in a public speech:
Let not the people of Vykom or any other place fear that Mahatmaji wants caste abolished. Mahatmaji does not want the caste system abolished but holds that untouchability should be abolished…. Mahatmaji does not want you to dine with Thiyas or Pulayas. What he wants is that we must be prepared to touch or go near other human beings as you go near a cow or a horse … Mahatmaji wants you to look upon so-called untouchables as you do at the cow and the dog and other harmless creatures.197
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