Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (41 page)

31
Chandragupta Maurya (340–298 BCE), founder of the Mauryan dynasty, is credited with being the first emperor to rule large parts of the Indian subcontinent as one state. Gautama Buddha (c. 563–483 BCE), on whose teachings Buddhism was founded, preceded him. Chandragupta’s grandson was the emperor Ashoka (304–232 BCE), who turned from a warmonger to an advocate of Buddhism and pacifism (though he continued to give the death penalty till the end of his reign).

32
The allusion here is to the Varkari tradition that was established in western India with the Brahmin Dnyandev or Dnyaneswar, and the Untouchable Cokhamela in the fourteenth century, and was followed by saint-poets from the subaltern castes like Namdeo, Bahinabai and Tukaram into the seventeenth century. While Ambedkar disregarded the piety of Cokhamela, he quite often quoted the radical Tukaram who was Shivaji’s contemporary. For a discussion of the political aspects of Tukaram, who was of the Kunabi peasant caste, and his influence on Shivaji, see Gail Omvedt (2008, 109–32). A
varkar
is a pilgrim, and the Varkari tradition revolves around the god Vithoba or Vitthala in Pandharpur (in Maharashtra’s Solapur district). In popular lore Vitthala has come to be regarded as a form of Krishna and this tradition is seen as Vaishnavite. The Varkari cult is seven hundred years old, and with it begins the Marathi literary tradition, according to Omvedt (85). She discusses how scholars believe Vitthala could have had origins in Saivism, Buddhism or even among pastoral nomadic tribes. Omvedt discusses the Sanskritisation and Vishnu-isation of Vitthala and believes the god could have been originally female (“wide hips, narrow waist, busty, long hair, straight though harsh face”) and that contemporary Dalit Buddhists point to “the god’s blackness as evidence of indigenous origins” based on iconography (see 85–90). For an overview of the Bhakti tradition and sants in Maharashtra, see Zelliot and Berntsen (1998). Also see the volume edited by Lele (1981).

33
Guru Nanak (1469–1539) was the first of the ten gurus and founder of the Sikh religion. He started a strand of
nirguni
(without attributes) Bhakti tradition that advocated spending one’s life immersed in
nam simran
(remembrance of the divine name). Guru Nanak and the gurus that followed him preached spiritual equality against varnashrama dharma and imparted their teaching to devotees from all castes. Puri (2003, 2694) writes that while the Sikh holy book,
Guru Granth Sahib
, includes compositions by Kabir, a weaver, and Ravidas, a tanner (Chamar), the ten gurus of Sikhism came from Khatri families—the highest caste among Sikhs—and married their children within their caste. Despite the preaching of spiritual equality in the eyes of god, there was no expectation on the part of the gurus or their devotees to give up caste identity and thus the doctrine was not translated into social equality.

34
Ambedkar is referring here to the socialists within the Congress who in 1934 formed a faction called the Congress Socialist Party (CSP). Jawaharlal Nehru, at this juncture, was also actively advocating socialist ideas but did join the CSP.

35
Comitia Centuriata, or the Century Assembly, was originally an assembly of the Roman military, but soon turned into a political assembly, and became one of the three public assemblies of the Republic of Rome where citizens, grouped into ‘centuries’, voted on legislative, electoral and judicial matters. In the early days, entry to the Senate was only by birth and rank—so the patricians called the shots. Even in the Comitia Centuriata, instituted in about 450 BCE, entry was restricted initially to the patricians and the plebeians were kept at bay. Even after the Comitia Centuriata came to include plebeians, its organisation and voting system nevertheless gave greater influence to the rich than to the poor, which as Ambedkar points out, resembled the Communal Award. Ambedkar understands, in the caste context, the plight of plebeians with voting rights as being similar to that of Untouchables who were denied a separate electorate—the mere right to vote does not necessarily empower them. For more on the evolution of the Roman republic, see Olga Tellegen-Couperus (1993).

36
While Delphi, associated with the Greek god Apollo, was an important site in Hellenic political life, the Romans did not seem to consult the Oracle regularly owing to its considerable distance from Rome. They, however, tended to refer to the Sibylline Books, kept at the Capitolium. See Fontenrose (1978). For an account of the hold of religion on the Romans, see Rüpke (2007).

37
Ambedkar’s ire here is likely directed at the socialist turn within the Congress. Following the 1936 Congress session in Lucknow, where Nehru took over as party president at Gandhi’s behest, the Agrarian Resolution declared that “the most important and urgent problem of the country is the appalling poverty, unemployment and indebtedness of the peasantry, fundamentally due to the antiquated and repressive land revenue system”. Nehru and the few socialists he managed to sneak into the thirteen-member Congress Working Committee (CWC)—Acharya Narayan Dev, Jayaprakash Narayan and Achyut Patwardhan—sought to end the ‘middle class domination’ of the Congress and sought direct representation for peasants and workers in the party. But tacitly backed by Gandhi, the right wing within the Congress opposed Nehru’s socialist tendencies. On 29 June 1936, CWC members Babu Rajendra Prasad, Jairamdas Daulatram, Jamnalal Bajaj, Acharya Kripalani and S.D. Dev submitted their resignations from the CWC in a joint letter, contending that Nehru’s preaching of socialism in his election speeches was “prejudicial to the interests of the country and to the success of the national struggle for freedom”. Gandhi backed the conservatives, as did the business classes. Subsequently Nehru recanted. For a detailed account of Nehru and socialism, see R.C. Dutt (1980, 30–90).

38
Ambedkar (in Das, 2010b, 49–68) mounts a more direct attack on the socialists in the presidential address delivered on 12 and 13 February 1938 to the GIP (Great Indian Peninsular) Railway Depressed Classes Workmen’s Conference held in Nashik, Manmad district. In this speech he offers a trenchant critique of capitalism and Brahminism, and examines the problems with Indian socialists at greater length. Ambedkar was addressing the GIP conference in his capacity as president of the Independent Labour Party, the first political party founded by him in August 1936, a few months after the publication of
Annihilation of Caste
.

39
Emphasis in original.

40
Ambedkar is echoing the words of Dewey. According to Mukherjee (2009, 347): “So deeply embedded is Dewey’s thought in Ambedkar’s consciousness that quite often his words flow through Ambedkar’s discourse without quotation marks.” She also notes “how Ambedkar culled sentences from
Democracy and Education
to describe his version of the ideal society” (351). Ambedkar expresses his debt to Dewey in section 25.4 of AoC. The relevant paragraph from Dewey’s
Democracy and Education
, quoted by Mukherjee, reads: “A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of competency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents” (364). See Dewey (1916). All further citations from
Democracy and Education
are from the online edition.

41
John Dewey was an advocate of industrial democracy, which, in Noam Chomsky’s (2003) words “means democratising production, commerce, and so on, which means eliminating the whole structure of capitalist hierarchy”. Chomsky terms Dewey a “radical” in this interview. In another essay, Chomsky (2013) says: “Dewey called for workers to be ‘masters of their own industrial fate’ and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain ‘the shadow cast on society by big business.’ ”

42
This latter sentence also echoes Dewey (1916): “Sentimentally, it may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the present régime is not found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them, which are pursued simply for the money reward that accrues. For such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a desire to slight and evade” (cited in Mukherjee 2009, 364).

43
Ethnology draws upon ethnographic material to compare and contrast different cultures. Ethnography is the study of single groups through direct contact with their cultures. In the nineteenth century, ethnologists and ethnographers studied caste mainly as a subsidiary exercise in the supposedly higher and grander task of uncovering the evolutionary heritage of all humanity. In doing so they contributed to the ‘Orientalist’ exercise of the census and gazetteers and to the racial understanding of caste. Caste was thus subsumed into theories of biologically determined race essences. Ambedkar, in fact, begins his 1916 essay, “Castes in India”, with a reference to ethnology. Further, on caste and ethnology, see Bayly (1999, 11–19); and Dirks (2001, 126–38). See also Ketkar (1909/1998, 165–70).

44
Devadatta Ramakrishna Bhandarkar (1875–1950) was an epigraphist and archaeologist who worked for the Archaeological Survey of India. Ambedkar is citing from p.37 of this 1911 essay. Based on epigraphic research, Bhandarkar uses evidence from the Vedas and the epics of the Hindu tradition, such as the
Rig Veda
and the Mahabharata, to disprove the ‘purity of blood’ myth attributed to Brahmins. “It may be said that after all the Mahabharata … is a conglomeration of legends, which are not of much historical importance, though they cannot be objected to by an orthodox Brahmana and consequently may be adduced to silence his pretensions to purity of origin and the consequent highest place in Hindu society” (1911, 10).

45
In his understanding of the caste system and its evolution, Ambedkar here differs strongly from Brahminic appropriations (such as by B.G. Tilak who authored
The Arctic Home in the Vedas
, 1903) of the racial theory of Aryans and Dravidians propounded by European Indologists. In fact, as seen in Roy’s introduction to this edition, even Gandhi, in his South Africa years, strongly believed in the British and India’s ruling classes both being ‘Aryan’. Ambedkar, however, also differs on this front from his predecessor and radical thinker Jotiba Phule and his contemporary fellow-traveller ‘Periyar’ E.V. Ramasamy Naicker (1879–1973) who turned the racial theory inside out, postulated a pre-Aryan golden age, and regarded the Brahmins as Aryans, and hence foreigners, who imposed the caste system upon the non-Brahmins who were seen as an indigenous race. For Phule’s writings, especially
Gulamgiri
(Slavery, 1873), see G.P. Deshpande (2002, 23–101). Periyar, on the eve of independence, quite radically called upon the Dravidian people of South India to “guard against the transfer of power from the British to the Aryans” (
The Hindu
, 11 February 1946). As sociologist T.K. Oommen (2005, 99) argues, “According to Periyar, Brahmins had tried to foist their language and social system on Dravidians to erase their race consciousness and, therefore, he constantly reminded the Dravidians to uphold their ‘race consciousness’. However, Periyar did not advocate the superiority of one race over the other but insisted on [the] equality of all races. Thus the fundamental difference between Aryan Hinduism and Dravidian Hinduism is crucial: the former [is] hegemonic, but the latter is emancipatory.”

46
Eugenics is the ‘science’ of predicting and controlling heredity that was popular at the turn of the twentieth century, in that it was perceived to be an effort at the ‘improvement’ of the human species. The term was coined by Francis Galton inspired by Darwin’s theory of natural selection as well as the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on heredity (see also Note 47). Galton advocated that only the best and most meritorious should be encouraged to breed; a more disastrous strand of his theory led to Hitler’s ‘final solution’. According to Mark Singleton (2007, 125–46), the popularity of eugenics in India can be understood by the place it occupied as a ‘scientific explanation’ for the ‘degeneration’ of Hindu society and colonial subjugation by the British. Another reason for the popularity of eugenics was its valorisation of the endogamy of the caste system as a mechanism of racial purity.

47
For a good example of the use of eugenics to defend caste, see T.N. Roy (1927, 67–72), who begins with this assertion: “The greatest eugenic movement that the world has as yet witnessed originated in India. It was the institution of the caste system.” Arguing that “the earliest eugenic movement began with the institution of what is known as Gotra”, Roy blames the “downfall of Hinduism” on not observing caste distinctions well enough. “The Brahmin was originally created by eugenic selection,” he argues, and gives the finest examples of intellect in Bengal as being all Brahmin men—Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.

48
William Bateson (1861–1926) was a British scientist and is considered the founder of genetics. He wrote
Mendel’s Principles of Heredity
(1909) after the discovery of Gregor Mendel’s article written in 1866. Ambedkar is citing from p.205 of Bateson’s book. Bateson elaborated his own research findings following the investigation of Mendel’s theories. This discovery laid down the basis for not only genetics but also eugenics. However, early into his research Bateson had recognised the dangers of the application of genetics to social engineering and warned against the uniformising tendencies of eugenic thinking. See Harvey (1995).