Caste Iron

I have an essay in The Caravan on Ambedkar's place in the Indian imagination, and why he hasn't received his due from upper-caste Indians.

"Turn in any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path,” wrote Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, India’s foremost crusader for dignity and civil rights. That monster has always haunted Ambedkar’s legacy, polarising it along caste lines. On the one hand is his godlike presence in Dalit communities, who, out of affection and admiration, have built countless statues of him, usually dressed in a Western suit and tie, with a fat book under his arm, and in whose folk songs, poems, and calendar art he has long held pride of place. For generations, his bold, secular, and emancipatory ideas inspired many Dalit activists and writers, many of whom recall their lives in “before-and-after Ambedkar” phases. When Omprakash Valmiki, the author of the memoir Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, first read about Ambedkar’s life and work, he “spent many days and nights in great turmoil.” He grew more restless; his “stone-like silence” began to melt, and “an anti-establishment consciousness became strong” in him. Ambedkar gave voice to his muteness, Valmiki wrote, and raised his moral outrage and self-confidence.

On the other hand, there remains a longstanding apathy for Ambedkar among caste Hindus. What respect he gets from India’s elites is usually limited to his role as the architect of the constitution—important, but arguably among the least revolutionary aspects of his legacy. The social scientist and educationist Narendra Jadhav, interviewed in the Times of India earlier this year, described Ambedkar as the “social conscience of modern India”, and lamented that he has been reduced to being “just a leader of Dalits and a legal luminary.” Indeed, even thoughtful, liberal elite Indians are commonly ignorant about Ambedkar’s life and social impact, both in his lifetime and in the decades since—as the scholar Sharmila Rege noted in Against the Madness of Manu: BR Ambedkar’s writings on Brahmanical Patriarchy, not only lay readers, but Indian post-graduates and academics in the social sciences, humanities, and women’s studies are also unlikely to have read him. What explains this severe disjunction in how Ambedkar is received in India?

More here.

Comments

[bhushan arekar]

Your essay in The Caravan should be thought provoking for the upper castes who refuse to seriously engage with Ambedkar's thought either out of utter hatred or ignorance for this great man. Even the so called leftist scholars never gave due place to Ambedkar in their work. However, the greatest achievement of Ambedkar lies in large number of dalit masses who revere him for emancipating them from the oppressive caste system. Ambedkar himself believed that great ideas will become extinct if they are not propogated. Had these poor, oppressed but socially conscious dalits had not kept Ambedkar's ideas alive then the caste hindus would have reduced him to some avatar of Lord Vishnu as they did to Buddha. Today Dalit politics has reached a critical level and hence it is not possible to ignore Ambedkar anymore. Dalits have acknowledge the debt of Ambedkar and upper caste are slowly realizing his greatness. But it is OBCs who need to reckon with Ambedkar's ideas. They form major portion of Hindu religion and if they embrace the spirit of Ambekar's ideology then dismantling caste system will become easier.

Bhushan Arekar
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[Maga]

Not just Ambedkar. Anyone who speaks against Brahmanical Hinduism is ignored. We don't hear much of EVR (Periayar) or C.N.Annadurai from TN either.