Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (40 page)

7
The (Indian National) Social Conference was founded by Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901) in 1887, two years after the founding of the Indian National Congress. It was meant to serve as the social arm of the Congress, and it focused mainly on women’s uplift. Conservative leaders like B.G. Tilak were staunchly opposed to even the mild reforms suggested by votaries of the Social Conference.

8
Bal Gangadhar ‘Lokmanya’ Tilak (1865–1920) was a Chitpavan Brahmin and a social conservative who sought to imbue Congress nationalism with a distinct right-wing hue. He published two newspapers, the Marathi-language
Kesari
and
Mahratta
in English. Jaffrelot (2005, 44) calls him “the Congress leader from Poona who tended
not to put in practice
the social reforms he articulated” (emphasis added). Tilak saw even the education of women and non-Brahmins as “a loss of nationality” and consistently opposed the establishment of girls’ schools at a time when his coeval Jotiba Phule launched a full-scale attack on Brahminism, educated his wife Savitri, and established a school for girls which also admitted Untouchable children. See Rao (n.d.). For an account of the Phule-led non-Brahmin movement, see O’Hanlon (2002).

9
For a chronicle of the tussles between the Social Conference and conservative forces within the Congress, see John R. McLane (1988, 47–61). McLane writes: “In Maharashtra, Tilak demonstrated the potent political appeal of Hindu symbolism with the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals. In 1895, when the Congress met in Poona, the rowdyism of Tilak’s anti-reformer allies forced the Social Conference to abandon the use of the Congress enclosure for its meeting” (55).

10
Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee was amongst the founders of the Indian National Congress and became its first president. As a lawyer, he divided his life between England and Calcutta, and on retirement settled in Croydon, England. See the account of his daughter Janaki Agnes Penelope Majumdar (2003). While studying in England, in 1865, Bonnerjee wrote in a letter to his uncle: “I have discarded all ideas of caste, I have come to hate all the demoralising practices of our countrymen and I write this letter an entirely altered man” (Kumar 1989, 48). Since he had ‘lost caste’ by crossing the seas, Bonnerjee was regarded an outcaste by his family. He set up a separate household refusing to undergo penance, and renounced Hindu customs. He brought his wife out of purdah, made her eat beef and wear English clothes, and sent his children to England for education (Majumdar 2003).

11
The Peshwas were initially ministers under Shivaji who founded the Maratha empire in seventeenth-century western India. After the death of Shivaji in 1680, the Peshwas, who were Chitpavan Brahmins, turned into a military-bureaucratic elite, and, in one of those rare instances, both ritual and secular power were vested with Brahmins. The reign of the Peshwas witnessed what feminist scholar Uma Chakravarti (1995, 3–21) terms “the consolidation of Brahmanya-raj”. In 1818, the 30,000-strong army of the last Peshwa, Bajirao II (1795–1818), was defeated by the 500-member regiment of ‘Untouchable’ Mahar soldiers led by Capt F.F. Staunton. This is known as the Battle of Koregaon, along the river Bhima, northwest of Poona. For an account of the rise of the Brahmins in western India, see Eaton (2005).

12
In large parts of India, Dalit women act as
dais
(midwives) and are expected to help with childbirth in privileged-caste households.

13
Ambedkar is referring here to the court of Indore. This can be inferred from a citation of the same
Times of India
article in the posthumously published
Untouchables or the Children of India’s Ghetto
(BAWS 5, 48–9).

14
Following a Bombay government ruling, in August 1935, that Untouchable students should be admitted to schools, the Untouchables of Kavitha village enrolled four children in the local school. This invoked both physical assaults and social boycott, and the Untouchables turned to the Harijan Sevak Sangh, an organisation founded by M.K. Gandhi, for help. Gandhi and ‘Sardar’ Vallabhbhai Patel opposed the Untouchables’ efforts at taking recourse to law, and forced them to withdraw their complaint. Ambedkar, while recounting this incident, does not mince words (BAWS 5, 43): “With all the knowledge of tyranny and oppression practised by the caste Hindus of Kavitha against the Untouchables all that Mr Gandhi felt like doing was to advise the Untouchables to leave the village. He did not even suggest that the miscreants should be hauled up before a court of law. His henchman, Mr Vallabhbhai Patel, played a part which was still more strange. He had gone to Kavitha to persuade the caste Hindus not to molest the Untouchables. But they did not even give him a hearing. Yet this very man was opposed to the Untouchables hauling them up in a court of law and getting them punished. The Untouchables filed the complaint notwithstanding his opposition. But he ultimately forced them to withdraw the complaint on the caste Hindus making some kind of a show of an understanding not to molest, an undertaking, which the Untouchables can never enforce. The result was that the Untouchables suffered and their tyrants escaped with the aid of Mr Gandhi’s friend, Mr Vallabhbhai Patel.”

15
“Ran away” in AoC 1936 and subsequent editions.

16
The state of affairs in Chakwara has far from improved. Dalits in this village, denied access to the local pond, have been waging a struggle since 1980. In 2001, two Dalits were fined Rs 50,000 by the Jat- and Brahmin-dominated village panchayat for using water from the Chakwara pond (Usmani, 2008).

17
John Stuart Mill (1806–73) in the last chapter of
Considerations on Representative Government
(1861/2004) poses a critique of the colonial administration of the British empire. However, Mill’s criticism has to be seen in the context of his advocating “representative government” for the Americas and Australia for they are “composed of people of similar civilisation to the ruling country”, and “whose population”, he says, “is in a sufficiently advanced state”, compared to which “others, like India, are still at a great distance from that state”. Here, Mill argues, the coloniser must rule to introduce a higher form of civilisation. Ambedkar is alluding here to his contemporaries’ reverence for a complex figure who on the one hand championed the cause of individual freedom and liberty, and on the other, defended British imperialism by justifying the right of ‘civilised’ nations to rule over ‘barbarians’. In his essay “A Few Words on Non-Intervention” (1859/1984), Mill outlines the circumstances under which states should be allowed to intervene in the sovereign affairs of another country.

18
Term added in 1937.

19
Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–64) was a philologist, legal expert and social agitator, the first to organise a socialist party in Germany and rally the workers to assert their rights. He came to prominence as an interpreter of Marxism for the workers. However, from a letter written by Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann on 23 February 1865 it is clear that Marx considered Lassalle’s interpretation plagiarism. In the same letter he also expresses his condemnation of Lassalle’s attempt at striking a deal with Bismarck urging him to introduce universal adult suffrage in exchange of working-class support for the government.

20
Ambedkar is quoting from “On the Essence of Constitutions”, the famous speech Lassalle delivered on 16 April 1862 in Berlin.

21
Rendered as “Lasalle” in AoC 1936.

22
The Communal Award, also known as the Ramsay Macdonald Award after the British Prime Minister, issued on 16 August 1932, was the result of the Second Round Table Conference (September–December 1931) that granted separate electorates to minorities in the dominion of India. Besides Muslims and Sikhs, the Depressed Classes were also granted a separate electorate for twenty years. The award granted a double vote to Untouchables that allowed them to choose their own representatives from special constituencies, as well as to cast their vote in general constituencies. The Congress and Gandhi opposed this, and Gandhi went on indefinite hunger strike in Poona jail. A compromise was reached with the signing of the Poona Pact on 24 September 1932, under which the Untouchables were allotted reserved constituencies but not separate electorates. See the text of the Communal Award in B.R. Ambedkar (BAWS 9, 81). For a further delineation of the Communal Award and the Poona Pact and their implications, see “A Note on the Poona Pact” in this book (357–76).

23
For an analysis and discussion of the Communal Award and the Poona Pact, see Zelliot (2013, 128–42); Jaffrelot (2005, 52–73); Kumar (1985).

24
The Irish Home Rule movement was launched in the second half of the nineteenth century to recover legislative independence from the British after Ireland had become part of the Union. See more in Alan O’Day (1998) and Alvin Jackson (2003). Howard Brasted (1980) argues that the precedent of the Irish Home Rule movement awoke the nationalist spirit amongst the educated Indian elite and provided a model for the Congress. Home Rule could never be implemented in Ireland due to the strong oppostion by the Protestant Unionists of Northern Ireland (Ulstermen). Here, it is not clear if Ambedkar is referring to John Edward Redmond (1856–1918), Member of Parliament and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the National League, or his brother, William (Willie) Redmond (1861–1917), also an MP and nationalist politician.

25
Pontifex Maximus was the highest priest of the college of pontiffs in ancient Rome.

26
Patricians (derived from the root
patre
, meaning ‘father’) were the upper class in ancient Rome. Their ancestry was traced back by Roman historians such as Livy to the legend of Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome, who is said to have appointed one hundred men as senators. Patricians claimed to be descendants of these first senators and the Sabine women kidnapped and raped for procreation. Plebeians were the general body of lower-class, free citizens. There were other lower classes like the
peregrini
and slaves. Most historians agree that the distinction between patricians, plebeians and other classes was based purely on birth. The most readily available tool to distinguish between the classes was
gentes
, family names. See Livy (2006).

27
In his speech during the second leg of the Mahad Satyagraha on 25 December 1927, Ambedkar refers to the patrician–plebeian struggle, or ‘the Conflict of the Orders’ as it is more commonly known, in greater detail. The Conflict of the Orders, in which the plebeians sought political equality with the patricians, lasted between 494 and 287 BCE. In this protracted conflict, the patricians were occasionally forced to give some concession to the plebeians, but always sought to retain the final authority. Thus the provisions for economic reform in laws like Lex Licinia Sextia (367 BCE) and Leges Genuciae (342 BCE)—ceiling on the ownership of land by a single person, ban on lending that carried interest, etc.—were largely ignored by the patricians. In his Mahad speech, Ambedkar gives a very interesting account of how the positions of ‘tribunes’, constituted to protect the rights of the plebeians, were held exclusively by patricians in the beginning. Even when later laws stipulated that one of the two tribunes must be a plebeian, the patricians retained the power to reject an elected plebeian tribune through the authority of the oracle at Delphi (always a patrician). For excerpts of this speech, see Satyanarayana and Tharu (2013, 25–6). Ambedkar’s worst fears on the question of representation and final authority became a reality five years after the Mahad events when Gandhi’s suicide threat forced him to sign the Poona Pact of 1932. Therefore, in
Annihilation of Caste
, he returns to the theme of the Conflict of Orders with the bitterness of experience. See also Note 10 on Bodh Gaya in Ambedkar’s “A Reply to the Mahatma”.

28
Martin Luther (1483–1546), German monk who held the chair of Theology at the University of Wittenberg, was a key figure (along with John Calvin, John Wycliffe and Jan Hus) in the sixteenth-century Reformation movement. He sought to shift the religious leadership’s focus away from fees and payments as part of a renewal of the medieval Church. The reformers hoped to restore and clarify the core tenets of the faith, which they would then make accessible to all Christians. For a history of European Reformation, see Peter G. Wallace (2004).

29
The English Civil War (1642–51), which questioned the prerogative of the king and challenged the theory of divine right, owed much to the spirit of European Reformation. The Puritans—who espoused a militant, biblically based Calvinistic Protestantism—sought to ‘purify’ the Church of England of remnants of the Catholic popery, and argued that the Anglican Church established by Queen Elizabeth was far too close to Roman Catholicism. (‘Puritan’ means that the followers had a pure soul and lived a good life.) Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59), the French political thinker best known for his two-volume
Democracy in America
(1835, 1840), argued that the tradition of political liberty in the United States of America began with the settling of New England by the Puritans from England. For an in-depth study of debates around puritanism and liberty in England, see
Puritanism and Liberty
,
being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents
in A.S.P. Woodhouse (1951). This contains the Putney Debates, the Whitehall Debates, and numerous other documents about Puritan religious and political views during the English Revolution.

30
Prophet Muhammad (570–632 CE) unified scores of warring Arab tribes into a single religious polity (
ummah
, community) under
Islam
(which means to submit, surrender). For a concise history of Islam, see Karen Armstrong (2000), who writes: “Muhammad had become the head of a collection of tribal groups that were not bound together by blood but by a shared ideology, an astonishing innovation in Arabian society” (14). Nobody was forced to convert, but all Muslims belonged to one ummah, they could not attack one another, and they vowed to give one another protection.