Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (13 page)

Over time, a section of the Mahar population left their villages and moved to the city. They worked in the Bombay mills
and as casual, unorganised labour in the city. The move widened their horizons and perhaps accounts for why the Mahars were politicised quicker than other Untouchable communities in the region.

Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 in the cantonment town of Mhow near Indore in Central India. He was the fourteenth and last child of Ramji Sakpal and
Bhimabai Murbadkar Sakpal. His mother died when he was two years old, the same year that his father retired from the army. The family was brought up in the
Bhakti tradition of
Kabir and
Tukaram, but Ramji Sakpal also educated his children in the Hindu epics. As a young boy, Ambedkar was sceptical about the
Ramayana and the
Mahabharata, and their capricious lessons in morality. He was particularly distressed by the story of the killing and dismembering of the ‘low-born’
Karna. (Karna was born of Surya, the Sun God, and the unmarried Kunti. Abandoned by his mother, he was brought up by a lowly charioteer. Karna was killed while he was repairing his chariot wheel on the battlefield by his half-brother Arjun on the advice of Krishna.) Ambedkar argued with his father: “Krishna believed in fraud. His life is nothing but a series of frauds. Equal dislike I have for Rama.”
¹⁸⁰
Later, in a series of essays called
Riddles in Hinduism
, published posthumously, he would expand on the themes of what he saw as inexcusable misogyny in Rama’s and Krishna’s slippery
ethics.
¹⁸¹

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,
¹⁸²
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 colonisation 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 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 organising an armed revolt against the Morley–Minto reforms. (In prison Savarkar turned towards 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”,
¹⁸³
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 in 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.”
¹⁸⁴

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).
¹⁸⁵

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 manoeuvring 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 labourers, generation after generation, to toil night and day on subsistence wages? Why would an Untouchable labourer, 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 terrorised 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:

In rural areas, the threat of actual physical violence sometimes paled before the spectre 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 neighbourhood, 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 non-cooperation by the powerful against the powerless—non-cooperation, 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 politicised 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.
¹⁸⁷
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, re-baptised 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 towards 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 8 January 1925, Gandhi said:

Gandhi’s attentiveness towards the Balmikis, his greatly publicised 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: