Benito.Z. Swu
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n these times, when all of us are groping in the dark, despairing, and unable to understand why things are the way they are, Arundhati Roy’s initiative of revisiting the debate between Gandhi and Ambedkar through her essay “The doctor and the saint”, however disturbing it may be for some people, however much it disrupts old and settled patterns of thought, has actually, in the end, helped to illuminate our path and give more impetus to our thinking of what India is today and where we the tribal Nagas stands both as an individual and as a member state of the Indian nation. The motive or better the reason for Arundhati Roy writing the said essay was the text of Dr. B.R Ambedkar’s speech titled ‘The Annihilation of caste’ which was written nearly eighty years ago. Caste is at the heart of the rot in the Indian society and polity. Quite apart from what it has done to the subordinated castes, it has corroded the moral core of the privileged castes and unfortunately in this social mess we Christian tribals sometimes end up as the innocent victim which some chauvinist castist individual might justify as unavoidable collateral damage. And as such Dr. Ambedkar’s “The annihilation of caste” and Arundhati Roy’s essay “The doctor and the saint” are both in my opinion a must read for we Nagas as well, as we negotiate through the minefield of the castist Indian mindset. Doing so will make us feel as though somebody had walked into a dim room and opened the windows. Reading Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar bridges the gap between what most Indians are schooled to believe in and the reality we experience every day of our lives. Just because we are fortunate enough to not have that segregating caste system in our society does not insulate us from this evil because as it is we are a part and parcel of the Indian subcontinent. It is in our interest that we unite and have an Ambedkar in our midst -now and urgently.India’s feisty Dalit leader Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar scarcely finds place in our historical consciousness, having been airbrushed from much of the discourse about the freedom movement though he has been assigned the pedestal of the father of the Indian constitution. Dr. Ambedkar has been virtually deleted from the India-Pakistan debate as well though he wrote possibly the most level-headed critique of the run-up to Partition. His bitter fights with Mahatma Gandhi to win social justice for scores of millions of India’s ‘untouchables’ who had remained outside the pale of the Congress party’s political pursuits are mostly researched and treasured by his Dalit followers. I believe part of the explanation for Ambedkar’s pointed exclusion from mainstream discourse, both in India and in Pakistan, can be found in the upper caste prism through which Hindu and Muslim scholars have tended to see their colonial history.
Among the many volumes authored by Dr. Ambedkar, “Annihilation of Caste” is his most radical text. It is not an argument directed at Hindu fundamentalists or extremists, but at those who consider themselves moderate, those whom Ambedkar called “the best of Hindus”. Dr. Ambedkar’s point is that to believe in the Hindu caste system and to simultaneously think of oneself as liberal or moderate is a contradiction in terms.
While Ambedkar, the untouchable, was heir to an anticastic intellectual tradition that goes back to 200–100 BC, Gandhi, a Vaishya, born into a Gujarati Bania family, was the latest in a long tradition of privileged-caste Hindu reformers and their organizations . Each represented very separate interest groups, and their battle unfolded in the heart of India’s national movement. What they said and did continues to have an immense bearing on contemporary politics. Their differences were (and remain) irreconcilable. Both are deeply loved and often deified by their followers. Ambedkar was Gandhi’s most formidable adversary. He challenged him not just politically or intellectually, but also morally.
Who, after Mahatma Gandhi, is the greatest Indian? Dr. Ambedkar almost always makes it into the final heat. He is chosen more for the part he played in drafting the Indian constitution than for the politics and the passion that were at the core of his life and thinking. we definitely get the sense that his presence on the lists is the result of positive discrimination, a desire to be politically correct. Their conflict complicates and perhaps enriches our understanding of imperialism as well as the struggle against it.
History has been kind to Gandhi. He was deified by millions of people in his own lifetime. His godliness has become universal. Gandhi has become all things to all people: Obama loves him, the Anarchists love him and so does the establishment. Narendra Modi loves him and so does Rahul Gandhi. The poor love him and so do the rich. He is the Saint of the Status Quo. Gandhi’s life and his writing—48,000 pages bound into 98 volumes of collected works—have been disaggregated and carried off, event by event, sentence by sentence, until no coherent narrative remains, if indeed there ever was one. The trouble is that Gandhi actually said everything and its opposite. For example, there’s his well-known description of an Arcadian paradise in “The Pyramid vs. the Oceanic Circle,” written in 1946: It says, “Independence must begin at the bottom. Thus every village will be a republic or panchayat having full powers. It follows, therefore, that every village has to be self-sustained and capable of managing its affairs even to the extent of defending itself against the whole world… In this structure composed of innumerable villages there will be ever-widening, never-ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village… Therefore the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength from it.” Then there is his endorsement of the caste system in 1921 in Navajivan. It is translated from Gujarati by Ambedkar (who suggested more than once that Gandhi “deceived” people, and that his writings in English and Gujarati could be productively compared): “Caste is another name for control. Caste puts a limit on enjoyment. Caste does not allow a person to transgress caste limits in pursuit of his enjoyment. That is the meaning of such caste restrictions as inter-dining and inter-marriage… These being my views I am opposed to all those who are out to destroy the Caste System.”
Is this not the very antithesis of “ever-widening and never ascending circles?”
Does that mean that Gandhi reformed, that he changed his views on caste? Towards the end of Gandhi’s life (when his views were just views and did not run the risk of translating into political action), he said that he no longer objected to inter-dining and intermarriage between castes. Sometimes he said that though he believed in the varna or caste system, a person’s varna ought to be decided by their worth and not their birth (which was also the Arya Samaj position). Dr. Ambedkar pointed out the absurdity of this idea: “How are you going to compel people who have achieved a higher status based on their birth, without reference to their worth, to vacate that status? How are you going to compel people to recognise the status due to a man in accordance to his worth who is occupying a lower status based on his birth?” He went on to ask what would happen to women—whether their status would be decided upon their own worth or their husbands’ worth.
Notwithstanding stories and anecdotes from Gandhi’s followers about Gandhi’s love for untouchables and the inter-caste weddings he attended, in the 98 volumes of his writing, Gandhi never decisively and categorically renounced his belief in chaturvarna, the system of the four caste. Though he was given to apologizing and agonizing publicly and privately over things like occasional lapses in his control over his sexual desire, he never agonized over the extremely damaging things he had said and done on caste. Gandhi offered himself to us as a visionary, a mystic, a moralist, a great humanitarian, the man who brought down a mighty empire armed only with Truth and Righteousness. What do we do with this structure of moral righteousness that rests so comfortably on a foundation of utterly brutal, institutionalized injustice as was the caste system? Is it enough to say Gandhi was complicated, and let it go at that? There is no doubt that Gandhi was an extraordinary and fascinating man, but during India’s struggle for freedom, did he really speak truth to power? Did he really ally himself with the poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable of his people?
“It is foolish to take solace in the fact that because the Congress is fighting for the freedom of India, it is, therefore, fighting for the freedom of the people of India and of the lowest of the low,” Ambedkar said. “The question whether the Congress is fighting for freedom has very little importance as compared to the question for whose freedom is the Congress fighting.” What was ‘freedom’ for some, was for others nothing more than a transfer of power.
History has been unkind to Ambedkar. First it contained him, and then it glorified him. It has made him India’s Leader of the Untouchables, the king of the ghetto. It has hidden away his writings. It has stripped away the radical intellect and the searing insolence.Using the Constitution as a subversive object is one thing. Being limited by it is quite another. Ambedkar’s circumstances forced him to be a revolutionary and to simultaneously put his foot in the door of the establishment whenever he got a chance to. His genius lay in his ability to use both these aspects of himself nimbly, and to great effect. Viewed through the prism of the present, however, it has meant that he left behind a dual and sometimes confusing legacy: Ambedkar the radical, and Ambedkar the father of the Indian Constitution. Constitutionalism can come in the way of revolution. And the Dalit revolution has not happened yet. We still await it. Before that there cannot be any other, not in India.
(to be continued)
(with reference from: Arundhati Roy’s essay “The Doctor and the saint”, Dr.Ambedkar’s speech text “Annihilation of Caste”)
