Read Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition Online
Authors: B.R. Ambedkar
Whether you do that or you do not, you must give a new doctrinal basis to your religion—a basis that will be in consonance with liberty, equality and fraternity; in short, with democracy. I am no authority on the subject. But I am told that for such religious principles as will be in consonance with liberty, equality and fraternity, it may not be necessary for you to borrow from foreign sources, and that you could draw for such principles on the
Upanishads. Whether you could do so without a complete remoulding, a considerable scraping and chipping off from the ore they contain, is more than I can say. This means a complete change in the fundamental notions of life. It means a complete change in the values of life. It means a complete change in outlook and in attitude towards men and things.
It means conversion; but if you do not like the word, I will say it means new life. But a new life cannot enter a body that is dead. New life can enter only into a new body. The old body must die before a new body can come into existence and a new life can enter into it. To put it simply: the old must cease to be operative before the new can begin to enliven and to pulsate. This is what I meant when I said you must discard the authority of the shastras, and destroy the religion of the shastras.
I have kept you too long. It is time I brought this address to a close. This would have been a convenient point for me to have stopped. But this would probably be my last address to a Hindu audience, on a subject vitally concerning the Hindus. I would therefore like, before I close, to place before the
Hindus, if they will allow me, some questi
ons which I regard as vital, and invite them seriously to consider the same.
In the first place, the Hindus must consider whether it is sufficient to take the placid view of the anthropologist that there is nothing to be said about the beliefs, habits, morals and outlooks on life which obtain among the different peoples of the world, except that they often differ; or whether it is not necessary to make an attempt to find out what kind of morality, beliefs, habits, and outlook have worked best and have enabled those who possessed them to flourish, to grow strong, to people the earth and to have dominion over it. As is observed by Professor
Carver:
[M]orality and religion, as the organised expression of moral approval and disapproval, must be regarded as factors in the struggle for existence as truly as are weapons for offence and defence, teeth and claws, horns and hoofs, fur and feathers, plumage, beards, and antlers. The social group, community, tribe or nation which develops an unworkable scheme of morality, or within which those social acts which weaken it and unfit it for survival habitually create the sentiment of approval, while those which would strengthen it and enable it to expand habitually create the sentiment of disapproval, will eventually be eliminated. Its habits of approval and disapproval handicap it as really as the possession of two wings on one side with none on the other would handicap a colony of flies. It would be as futile in one case as in the other to argue that one system was just as good as another.
162
Morality and religion, therefore, are not mere matters of likes and dislikes. You may dislike exceedingly a scheme of morality which, if universally practised within a nation, would make that nation the strongest nation on the face of the earth. Yet in spite of your dislike, such a nation will become strong. You may like exceedingly a scheme of morality and an ideal of
justice which, if universally practised within a nation, would make it unable to hold its own in the struggle with other nations. Yet in spite of your admiration, this nation will eventually disappear. The Hindus must, therefore, examine their religion and their morality in terms of their survival value.
Secondly, the Hindus must consider whether they should conserve the whole of their social heritage, or select what is helpful and transmit to future generations only that much and no more. Prof
John Dewey, who was my teacher and to whom I owe so much, has said:
Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse … As a society becomes more enlightened, it realises that it is responsible not to conserve and transmit the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society.
163
Even
Burke, in spite of the vehemence with which he opposed the principle of change embodied in the French Revolution, was compelled to admit that
a State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.
164
What Burke said of a state applies equally to society.
Thirdly, the Hindus must consider whether they must not cease to worship the past as supplying their ideals. The baneful effects of this worship of the past are best summed up by Prof Dewey when he says:
An individual can live only in the present. The present is not just something which comes after the past; much less something produced by it. It is what life is in leaving the past behind it. The study of past products will not help us to understand the present. A knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise. And the mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main material of education is that it tends to make the past a rival of the present and the present a more or less futile imitation of the past.
165
The principle, which makes little of the present act of living and growing, naturally looks upon the present as empty and upon the future as remote. Such a principle is inimical to progress and is a hindrance to a strong and a steady current of life.
Fourthly, the Hindus must consider whether the time has not come for them to recognise that there is nothing fixed,
nothing eternal, nothing sanatan;
166
that everything is changing, that change is the law of life for individuals as well as for society. In a changing society, there must be a constant revolution of old values; and the Hindus must realise that if there must be standards to measure the acts of men, there must also be a readiness to revise those standards.
I have to confess that this address has become too lengthy. Whether this fault is compensated to any extent by breadth or depth is a matter for you to judge. All I claim is to have told you candidly my views. I have little to recommend them but some study and a deep concern in your destiny. If you will allow me to say it, these views are the views of a man who has been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness. They come from one, almost the whole of whose public exertion has been one continuous struggle for liberty for the poor and for the oppressed, and whose only reward has been a continuous shower of calumny and abuse from national journals and national leaders,
167
for no other reason except that I refuse
to join with them in performing the miracle—I will not say trick—of liberating the oppressed with the gold of the tyrant, and raising the poor with the cash of the rich.
All this may not be enough to commend my views. I think they are not likely to alter yours. But whether they do or do not, the responsibility is entirely yours. You must make your efforts to uproot caste, if not in my way, then in your way.
I am sorry, I will not be with you. I have decided to change. This is not the place for giving reasons. But even when I am gone out of your fold, I will watch your movement with active sympathy, and you will have my assistance for what it may be worth. Yours is a national cause. Caste is no doubt primarily the breath of the Hindus. But the Hindus have fouled the air all over, and everybody is infected—Sikh, Muslim and
Christian.
168
You, therefore, deserve the support of all those who are suffering from this infection—Sikh, Muslim and Christian.
Yours is more difficult than the other national cause, namely,
swaraj.
169
In the fight for swaraj you fight with the whole nation on your side. In this, you have to fight against the whole nation—and that too, your own.
170
But it is more important than swaraj. There is no use having swaraj, if you cannot defend it. More important than the question of defending swaraj is the question of defending the Hindus under the swaraj. In my opinion, it is only when Hindu society becomes a casteless society that it can hope to have strength enough to defend itself. Without such internal strength, swaraj for Hindus may turn out to be only a step towards slavery. Goodbye, and good wishes for your success.
1
“Varnanam Brahmano Guru.”
This is
Manusmriti
10.3. Bibek Debroy’s translation: “Among varnas, the Brahman is the teacher/preceptor.” There is no standardised text of the
Manusmriti
; in some versions, the text mentions
prabhu
(lord) instead of
guru
(teacher). George Bühler renders the entire couplet at 10.3 as follows: “On account of his pre-eminence, on account of the superiority of his origin, on account of his observance of (particular) restrictive rules, and on account of his particular sanctification the Brahmana is the lord of (all) castes (varna)” (1886/2004, 276). Chapter 10 of the
Manusmriti
discusses varnas and their duties at length and lists out dos and don’ts.
2
Ramdas (1608–81) was a seventeenth-century coeval of the Maratha king Shivaji (1627/30–80), and is said to have been his Brahmin guru. Bhakti poet Tukaram, Shudra by birth and trader by profession, was also his contemporary. Bhakti is devotional love for a personal god experienced without the mediation of the priest or ritual. The progenitors of the Bhakti movement, the Alvars (sixth to ninth centuries) and Nayanmars (twelfth century) of the Tamil country, were fiercely monotheistic in their expression of love for Vishnu and Siva or their forms, and this happened at the expense and persecution of Jains and Buddhists (see Monius 2011). What was crucial, however, was that anyone from any strata of society—men and women—could aspire to reach god. The twelfth-century Basava-led Veerashaiva movement in the Kannada-speaking South, that launched the literary
vachana
tradition, repudiated the caste system and the primacy of the Brahmin. Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, sometimes fusing with elements of Islam and Sufism, the Bhakti movement manifested itself variously in the western, northern and eastern parts of the subcontinent through the work of sants, or teachers, who were largely from working-caste backgrounds but also included Brahmins (like Dnyaneshwar in western India or Chaitanya in Bengal) who embraced Bhakti’s egalitarian credo. According to the scholar Veena Naregal (2001, 12), Ramdas’s “religious and political pragmatism were quite at variance with the inspiration of the Bhakti poets”.
Dasbodh
, composed of 70,000
ovis
over twenty sections, offers an interpretation of vedantic philosophy. Ramdas talked of the need for the return of Brahmin supremacy and viewed the crisis in Maratha society as a breakdown in the social order due to ‘Muslim oppression’, Hindu conversions to Islam, and the usurpation of Brahmin spiritual leadership by the non-Brahmin Varkari saints and gurus (Ranade 1983). Ramdas today is a hero for Hindu nationalists, especially the Chitpavan Brahmins of Maharashtra. See also Note 32 on the Varkari tradition. Also see Gail Omvedt’s account (1976) of the differences between Mahanubhav Bhakti and Ramdas’s version of it, which she argues blunted the radical potential of Mahanubhav.
3
Antyaja: last-born; a term used for those outside the pale of the fourfold varna system which comprises Brahmin (priests), Kshatriya (warriors), Vaishya (merchants and farmers) and Shudra (menials). Of these, the first three groups are considered dwija, twice-born. The Shudra are the servile class meant to serve the top three varnas. The antyaja are outside the pale—Untouchables meant to live outside the village.
4
Savarna: those with varna, a caste Hindu; a term used for those within the fourfold varna system. A Shudra is also a savarna; the opposite of savarna is avarna, the Untouchable.
5
“Heart-burning” in AoC 1936 and subsequent editions.
6
Ambedkar is borrowing this term from John Dewey (1859–1952), the prominent American pragmatist philosopher, radical democrat and educational theorist who taught Ambedkar at Columbia University and influenced him deeply. Dewey, author of about forty books, helped create some of the most prominent political and educational organisations of his time: the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the League for Industrial Democracy, the New York Teachers Union, the American Association of University Professors, and the New School for Social Research. “Social efficiency” was a term that began its career in 1884 when it was introduced by British sociologist Benjamin Kidd (known for his work
Social Evolution
, 1884) who used it in a social Darwinist sense, but Dewey and others sought to rescue the term from a narrow, utilitarian approach and imbue it with humanitarian value. In the field of education, the term acquired currency in the 1920s. Arun P. Mukherjee (2009), who offers a fine analysis of Ambedkar’s refashioning of Deweyan thought into a tool for his own investigations of Indian society, argues that for Dewey and Ambedkar social efficiency lies in the individual being able to choose and develop his/her competencies to the fullest and thus mindfully contribute to the functioning of society. For a system that predetermines a person’s occupation on the basis of caste or class affiliations cannot but result in inefficiency. The term has its origins in early-twentieth-century attempts at reorganising society, politics and the economy for ‘efficiency’ based on ‘scientific principles’. For more on this, see Knoll (2009) and Holt (1994).