Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (27 page)

This correspondence will disclose the reasons which have led to the cancellation by the Mandal of my appointment as president, and the reader will be in a position to lay the blame where it ought properly to belong. This is I believe the first time when the appointment of a president
is cancelled by the reception committee because it does not approve of the views of the president. But whether that is so or not, this is certainly the first time in my life to have been invited to preside over a conference of caste Hindus. I am sorry that it has ended in a tragedy. But what can anyone expect from a relationship so tragic as the relationship between the reforming sect of caste Hindus and the self-respecting sect of Untouchables, where the former have no desire to alienate their orthodox fellows, and the latter have no alternative but to insist upon reform being carried out?

B.R. A
MBEDKAR

Rajgriha, Dadar

Bombay–14

15 May 1936

a
These epigraphs were added by Ambedkar to the title page of the 1937 edition. The quote from Buddha is from Verse 12 of
The Dhammapada and Sutta Nipata
(p.3), part of
Sacred Books of the East
, Vol. 10 by Max Müller and Max Fausböll (1881). Drummond’s words are derived from the last lines from his preface to
Academical Questions
, Vol. 1 (1805, xv). Sir William Drummond (not H. Drummond as erroneously printed in the 1937 edition) was a Scottish diplomat and Member of Parliament, poet and philosopher. Ambedkar amends the punctuation and wording of Drummond’s words which read: “He, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; he, who dares not, is a slave.”

b
The Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (Forum for the Break-up of Caste) was a radical faction of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reformist organisation that was founded in Lahore on 10 April 1875 by Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1824–83). According to Sant Ram (see Note 3), in November 1922, about twenty-two men and women, at the behest of Arya Samaj leader Bhai Parmanand, met at his Lahore residence with the objective of forming a separate outfit to fight caste. In his autobiography
Mere jivan ke anubhav
(Experiences of my life, 1963/2008), Sant Ram says he suggested the name Jat-Pat Todak Mandal. The eighteen founding members of the Mandal listed by Sant Ram are: Bhai Parmanand (president); Pandit Bhoomand; Pandit Paramanand, B.A.; Chowdhary Kanhaiyalal; Babu Teertharam, cotton factory owner; Chak Jhumra; Pandit Brahmadatt Vidyalankar of Delhi; Shri Sudarshan, short-story writer; Pandit Dharmadev; Deewanchand, office-bearer of Arya Samaj, Jalandhar; Pandit Sant Ram, priest and Arya Samaj worker of Nau Shehra; Paramanand Arya, coal company, Lahore; Pandit Chetram, teacher, Girls School, Jalandhar; Devnath of Gurudutt Bhavan, Lahore; Devamitra, M.Sc., of Gurudutt Bhavan, Lahore; Dharmendra Nath, M.A., of Meerut; Sant Ram, B.A.; Mrs Parvati, wife of Pandit Bhoomanand; Mrs Subhadra Devi, wife of Pandit Paramanand. From the names, it appears that ‘Untouchables’ were not part of this distinctly caste-Hindu initiative, a point that Ambedkar draws our attention to in the Prologue of this address (p.189). The Mandal insisted on inter-dining and intermarriage. Membership, on paying two rupees as annual subscription, was meant for Hindus who took a vow to marry themselves or their children out of their caste.

c
Following his fallout with Ambedkar over the Communal Award of 1932 and the signing of the Poona Pact (see “A Note on the Poona Pact”, in this book, 357–76), M.K. Gandhi launched the Harijan Sevak Sangh in 1932 and an English weekly named
Harijan
in 1933. Ambedkar preferred the term Untouchable, with capitals, or the official term, Depressed Classes. He also preferred to address those within the varna fold as “caste Hindus” or
savarnas
, and sometimes as Touchables.

d
Sant Ram B.A., one of the founder-members of the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal, was born on 14 February 1887 in Puranibassi, Hoshiarpur district, Punjab. In his autobiography, he (1963/2008, 12) says the Gohil surname his father carried was found among Rajputs (warriors), Banias (traders) and Kumhars (potters). Sant Ram always used his graduation degree—B.A.—as initials to disavow caste-related surnames, though he identifies himself as a Kumhar. However, one source says he was born into the Megh caste, listed as a Scheduled Caste in today’s Punjab (Kshirsagar 1994, 323). Sant Ram says that Kumhars in his village did not make pots but practised trade. Sant Ram’s father, Ramdas Gohil, the first person in the village to educate his children, acquired wealth and influence through trade which took him as far away as Central Asia. Sant Ram was married at the age of twelve to an unlettered girl whom he taught to read and write and brought out of purdah. Five years after his first wife died, in 1929, according to the journal
The Indian Rationalist
(1952), he married “Sundar Bai Proothan, a Maharashtrian virgin widow. The marriage was notable for three reasons: it was a widow marriage, an inter-caste marriage, and an inter-provincial marriage.” Sundar Bai had been rendered a child widow at the age of eight. Sant Ram recounts two instances of caste discrimination, the first when studying in fourth grade in Ambala and the second when at college in Lahore at the hands of Banias, the merchant caste. In 1930, he published
Phansi ke pujari
(Priests of the noose) in Urdu, featuring biographies of nationalists, entitled
Inquilab ke parvane
(Moths to the flame of revolution) on the inside title page. A 1947 partition refugee, Sant Ram died in New Delhi in 1998 at the age of 101. In one of his exchanges with the Mandal featured in the Prologue, Ambedkar describes Sant Ram as the “moving spirit and the leading light” of the Mandal (p.199).

e
In 1931, the Mandal campaigned against the declaration of caste in the census. Mark Juergensmeyer (1982/2009, 39) writes that the Mandal relied heavily on the support of privileged-caste Arya Samajis in this regard. This may have caused the Mandal to refuse the address prepared by Ambedkar. Bhai Parmanand was the first president and he continued to support the Mandal despite the rift in 1924 when its permission to use the Arya Samaj pandal was revoked.

f
For an annotated edition of “Castes in India”, see Rege (2013).
Indian Antiquary
was an Orientalist monthly founded in 1872 by Dr James Burgess. It provided a platform for scholarly articles by both European and Indian scholars. In full, it was called
The Indian Antiquary: A Journal of Oriental Research in Archaeology, Epigraphy, Ethnology, Geography, History, Folklore, Languages, Literature, Numismatics, Philosophy, Religion, Etc
.

g
The portion of the Prologue from here till the end of Sant Ram’s letter has been added in the 1937 edition.

h
Kranti
(Revolution), edited by Sant Ram, was an Urdu monthly published from Lahore. After the founding of the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal, Sant Ram (1963/2008, 116) says the forum tried publishing a monthly magazine in Hindi. A monthly eight-page broadsheet called
Jat-Pat Todak
, priced at Rs 1.50, was published from December 1922 to September 1924, but it failed owing to the lack of Hindi readers. The Mandal produced, for free distribution, many books in Hindi, Urdu and English on the question of caste. In January 1927,
Jat-Pat Todak
was revived, this time as an Urdu publication. In January 1928, this was renamed
Kranti
, with Sant Ram as chief editor. “This became a very popular magazine,” according to Sant Ram. “Produced in Royal Octavo size, it had 64 pages. The magazine’s Health Special, Children’s Special, Women’s Special, and Men’s Special were extremely popular … Since the Mandal’s key assets were stuck in Pakistan,
Kranti
folded up after its last issue in August 1947 … After a gap, we revived it for two or three issues in India. Since the conditions were not right, we lost about Rs 2,000 and shut down
Kranti
for good” (117). According to Bhagwan Das (2010a, 21–2),
Kranti
was the only Urdu magazine that reported on the speeches of Ambedkar. Das also mentions the Mandal’s strong aversion to the conversion of Untouchables due to its proximity to the Arya Samaj.

i
Harijan, ‘children of god’, was the epithet used by M.K. Gandhi, beginning 1932, to paternalistically refer to ‘Untouchables’. The term figures in the bhajan “Vaishnava jana to” by Narsinh Mehta (1414?–1481?), a Gujarati Brahmin Vaishnavite poet-saint, which was popularised by Gandhi. The scholar Aishwary Kumar (2014) draws our attention to Gandhi citing Tulsidas’s sixteenth-century Ramayana, one of his favourite books on this term: “You know the word ‘Harijan’ occurs in Tulsidas’s Ramayana? There Lakshmana describes to Parashurama the characteristic of a true Kshatriya. He says:
(It is the trait of our clan never to use force towards a god, a Brahmin, a Harijan or a cow)” (CWMG 68, 327). The British government, from 1916 onwards, deployed the bureaucratic term Depressed Classes (used first in the volumes of the
Bombay Gazetteer
in 1877), which was replaced by Scheduled Castes in 1935 by the Government of India Act—a term that continues to be used in official parlance till date. ‘Harijan’ has been steadfastly rejected by the Ambedkarite and Dalit movements. Though the founding of the militant organisation Dalit Panther in Bombay in 1972 gave an all-India currency to Dalit (broken, crushed people), the term has been used in western India in this sense at least since Jotiba Phule’s (1827–90) time. Phule is supposed to have used Dalit in terms of
dalittuthan
(uplift of the downtrodden), but the evidence is anecdotal (Louis 2003, 144). Phule used the term Ati-Shudra for Untouchables in his writings. Etymologically, the origins of the term Dalit can be traced to the Buddha’s usage of the Pali
dalidda
in the
Dalidda Sutta
, said to have been preached at the Kalandakanivapa in Rajagaha (
Samyutta Nikaya
: XI.14). In Pali Buddhist literature, the term dalidda (
daridra
in Sanskrit) is used for the property-less poor in contrast to the
gahapati
class of the rich. Nalin Swaris (2011, 99), citing
Anguttara Nikaya
: III.84, says: “The
dalidda-kula
, the pauper-lineage, is described as people without enough to eat and drink, without even a covering for their back.” More recently, the Dalit leader P.N. Rajbhoj founded the journal
Dalit Bandhu
(Friend of Dalits) in Pune in 1928. For an account of the nascent histories of the terms Untouchable, Depressed Classes, Harijan, Scheduled Caste, etc., see Simon Charsley (1996). Sant Ram’s use of the term Harijan here shows how within three years of Gandhi coining the term it had entrenched itself among reformers and intellectuals. As Ambedkar says in the very opening paragraph of AoC, “I have questioned the authority of the Mahatma whom they [the Mandal] revere”.

j
In the process of opening with Sant Ram’s letter in the 1937 edition, Ambedkar rearranges the contents of this paragraph without affecting its import.

k
Sjt. here is short for the respectful prefix ‘Srijut’, commonly used during this period. For instance, in Gandhi’s autobiography the prefix Sjt. is often used (such as Sjt. Vitthalbhai Patel). The 1931 Macmillan edition of
Mahatma Gandhi: His Own Story
edited by C.F. Andrews has a glossary page that explains Srijut as “a common title the equivalent to ‘Esquire’ ”.

l
Bhai Parmanand (1876–1947) wore many hats. Born in Lahore, he started as an Arya Samaji under the influence of Lala Lajpat Rai and Lala Har Dayal, and moved to the far right as a Vedic missionary of the Samaj, travelling the world (South Africa, Guyana, Martinique, the US, South America) preaching, and became a founder-member of the Ghadar Party that sought to overthrow British rule. Remembered today for his leadership of the Hindu Mahasabha and for being a proponent of Hindutva, he was sentenced in 1915 to imprisonment on the Andamans in the First Lahore Conspiracy Case. Parmanand is also regarded as the first advocate of an Islamic state divided out of the subcontinent. Following the British announcement of the partition of Bengal in 1905, he suggested that “the territory beyond Sindh should be united with Afghanistan and North-West Frontier Province into a great Musulman Kingdom. The Hindus of the region should come away, while at the same time the Musulmans in the rest of the country should go and settle in this territory” (cited in Yadav and Arya 1988, 196). Also see Parmanand’s autobiography translated into English,
The Story of My Life
(1934/2003). Jaffrelot (2010, 139) cites Parmanand’s 1936 work,
Hindu Sangathan
, where he excoriates the Buddha for attacking the varnashrama system: “The abolition of castes and ashrams cut at the very root of social duties. How could a nation hope to live after having lost sight of this aspect of Dharma? ‘Equality for all’ is an appealing abstraction; but the nation could not long survive the rejection or destruction of Dharma.” Parmanand espouses such views in the year of inviting Ambedkar, and even as he is the founder-president of the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal.