GAIL OMVEDT

Ambedkar
Towards an Enlightened India

PENGUIN BOOKS
 Contents

About the Author

Dedication

Introduction

One:‘Without education … Shudras are ruined’

The Education of an Untouchable
Two:‘We are against Brahmanism but not Brahmans …’
Beginning the Fight for Dalit Human Rights
Three:‘Gandhiji, I have no homeland’
The Round Table Conferences, the Poona Pact and Nationalist Dilemmas
Four:‘I will not die a Hindu!’
The Conversion Shock
Five:‘Against capitalism and Brahmanism’
Years of Class Radicalism
Six:‘We can be a nation, provided …’
War, Peace and Pakistan
Seven:‘The law of Manu … replaced by the law of Mahar’
Shaping Independent India
Eight:‘Building a palace on a dung heap’
The Post-Independence Years
Nine:‘Buddham sharanam gacchami’
The Final Years
Conclusion: Dr Ambedkar and the Freedom Struggle of Dalits

Footnotes

Two: ‘We are against Brahmanism but not Brahmans …’: Beginning the Fight for Dalit
Human Rights
Three: ‘Gandhiji, I have no homeland’: The Round Table Conferences, the Poona Pact and
Nationalist Dilemmas
Five: ‘Against capitalism and Brahmanism’: Years of Class Radicalism
Eight: ‘Building a palace on a dung heap’: The Post-Independence Years
References
Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Copyright Page
 PENGUIN BOOKS

AMBEDKAR

Born in Minneapolis, USA, Gail Omvedt is an Indian citizen. She has an

MA and Ph.D in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. She
has been living in India since 1978, settled in Kasegaon Village in southern
Maharashtra, with her husband, Bharat Patankar, and other members of an
Indian joint family. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library, New Delhi.

Among her numerous books focusing on social and economic issues are
Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste (2003), Dalit
Visions (1995), Dalits and the Democratic Revolution (1994), Reinventing
Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India
(1993) and Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman
Movement in Maharashtra (1966). She has also collaborated with Bharat
Patnakar in translations from the Marathi into English.
To Prachi, and all the young generations of Indians, Indian-
Americans and other Americans who are learning to see
Ambedkar as one of the greatest leaders of modern India and
to struggle for the overcoming of caste and Brahmanism
 Introduction

There are undoubtedly more statues of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar in India

than of any other historical person of the last millennium. They have been
raised in every village, on crossroads, in every Dalit urban residential area
and in front of educational and governmental institutions throughout the
country. They show a stocky man, usually dressed in a western suit and tie,
holding a book under his arm. The book represents the Constitution of
India. Following the overthrow of the socialist regime in Russia, which
brought with it the upsetting of statues of Lenin, and the downgrading of
Mao in China, the number of these statues throughout India and elsewhere
represents the major monumental memorial today to a leader of the
downtrodden.
Such statues have played a major role in political assertion in recent
India. Their raising has represented a claim to pride and public space. Their
opponents also take them as such and express their hostility to Dalit
assertion by putting ‘garlands’ of chappals around such statues—actions
which have often led to severe rioting and police firing. With all of this, it is
clear that in the ‘politics of flags and statues’, Dalits have placed Ambedkar
at the top of the world.
At the same time, the depiction of the Indian Constitution symbolizes the
fact that Ambedkar was not simply a Dalit leader, not even a leader only of
all caste-oppressed. He was a national leader—in a different sense from the
well-known elite nationalists who led the struggle for freedom from British
colonial rule. Ambedkar’s nationalism was expressed in all his life’s work,
in the programmes of his various political parties, in his political decisions,
in the many books and essays he wrote on problems of caste, of Muslims
and minorities, of Pakistan and of women and in his role in the construction
of a democratic independent India. He played a major role in the
construction of Indian planning, in the formation of irrigation and energy
policies, and his work in setting up colleges and educational institutions
represented the efforts of all anti-caste leaders to win education as a tool of
liberation. Following his work in chairing the committee to draft the Indian
Constitution, he became law minister in the first cabinet after independence
whose most famous activity was guiding the Hindu Code Bill as a charter of
women’s rights in free India. All this represented a nationalism that was not
simply the winning of political independence but of ‘nation-building’, the
creation of social equality and cultural integration in a society held enslaved
for so long by the unique tyrannies of caste and varna ideology.
Today the name of Gandhi still resounds through the world as a force of
peace and non-violence. Yet what Ambedkar represents, the rising of
India’s oppressed and exploited and the herald of a new age of equality and
rationalism, is beginning to catch the imagination of African-Americans
and other racially oppressed groups, Japanese ex-untouchable Burakumin,
Buddhists in Asian societies building a ‘liberation theology’ within the
framework of their traditional religion and seekers everywhere looking for a
new model of liberation.
Within India, Ambedkar is often contrasted to Gandhi, an opposition that
is symbolized in their sculptural depiction. Gandhi, in loincloth and often
with a spinning wheel, represented an identification with India’s poor that
romanticized the traditional Indian village and its spiritual stagnation.
Ambedkar’s ‘western’ image symbolizes a claim by Dalits to the heritage of
the ages, a rejection of Brahmanic and other forms of narrow cultural
nationalism and a modernism that even today represents the height of
India’s Enlightenment tradition. If Gandhi was Bapu, the ‘father’ of a
society in which he tried to inject equality while maintaining the ‘Hindu’
framework, Ambedkar was Baba to his people and the great liberator from
that framework. But Dalits rightfully protest against a comparison that links
Ambedkar only to Gandhi; they see him as a world figure, one best
compared to Marx. While Gandhi fought for freedom from colonial rule,
Ambedkar fought for a broader liberation from exploitation and oppression.
In his own words, like Marx he was not simply a philosopher reinterpreting
the world but a leader of those who wanted to ‘reconstruct the world’ by
abolishing exploitative social structures. This orientation to social
transformation is expressed in a famous song by Annabhau Sathe, a Dalit
writer who was a lifelong member of the Communist Party of India: ‘Strike
a blow to change the world, so Ambedkar told as he left …’ Where
Ambedkar differed from Marx was in his emphasis on the role of
non-‘class’, non-economic structures in the process of exploitation, in
posing the importance of spirituality, ideology and consciousness both in
maintaining slavery and winning freedom. For him the answer was found in
Buddhism, but whether or not one agrees with this, the issues remain
central to all liberation movements.
The story of how this man rose from the poorest of India’s ‘untouchable’,
downtrodden masses to become an acknowledged shaper of independent
India and a symbol of rationalist liberation in a new millennium is one that
we will try to tell in the following pages.
 One

‘Without education … Shudras are ruined’

 The Education of an Untouchable

Without education knowledge is lost; without knowledge development is lost; without

development wealth is lost; without wealth Shudras are ruined.

—Jotirao Phule (1890)

Master of arts and doctorate in economics, Columbia University; master of

science and doctor of science in economics, London School of Economics
and Political Science; barrister-at-law, Grey’s Inn, London. For anyone to
attain so many degrees is impressive, but for an untouchable, born in a
small rural town in a colonial country at the end of the nineteenth century, it
is even more so. This superior education helped propel Bhimrao Ramji
Ambedkar to the leadership of a growing movement of India’s
downtrodden. The coincidence of several factors contributed to his success:
the openings for mobility provided by British colonial rule, the help of a
few progressive and far-sighted, wealthy and upper-caste social reformers,
sacrificial support from his family and his own sheer grit and determination.
Much of these personal strengths came from his family. Ambedkar was
born in Mhow, a small town in central India, on 14 April 1891 to an
untouchable family in military service. He was a member of the Mahars,
one of the largest untouchable castes of India, its ubiquitousness in
Maharashtra marked by the saying ‘Where there’s a village, there’s a
Maharwada’. Mahars were village servants who performed hereditary
duties for the headman, higher political overlords and the dominant groups
of the village. They held small allotments of land in exchange for these
services, and they were also agricultural labourers. In parts of the state,
especially in eastern Maharashtra, they sometimes had larger holdings, and
a few became wealthy farmers and even landlords. In both Bombay and
Nagpur Mahars provided a good proportion (about 20 per cent in Bombay,
40 per cent in Nagpur) of labourers in the burgeoning textile mills of the
colonial period.
 Dalits in Maharashtra also had a military tradition dating to the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Mahars and Mangs (the other large untouchable
caste of the region) were among the martial races of India, serving as
common paiks or soldiers and occasionally as squadron leaders. Sometimes
they were made heads of forts or guard posts. During the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries the British recruited such untouchable
communities extensively for the Indian army, which gave them access to
resources and association with new standards of life. Ambedkar’s
grandfather Maloji had been in the army, and his father, Ramji, born in
1848, became a subedar-major in charge of a military school in Mhow.
Recruitment of untouchables was brought to an end in 1893, as the theory
of ‘martial races’ began to exclude untouchables, feeding into increased
caste consciousness. But by that time the seeds of change were sown.
The Mahars also had religious-cultural traditions that linked them to the
wider traditions of rural communities and expressed their equalitarian and
liberatory aspirations. Some were Varkaris, followers of the cult of Vithoba,
the main bhakti movement of Maharashtra; some were Mahanubhavas,
members of an even older equalitarian movement. Out of the community
rose wandering mendicants of various kinds, often articulating their own
synthesis of the Brahmanic, non-Brahmanic and Muslim traditions found in
the country. Ramji was a follower of Kabir and observed the prayers and
rituals of the Kabirpanthi sect. He was a vegetarian and teetotaller. Another
uncle, a sannyasi of the Gosavi sect, had predicted in a surprise meeting
with Ambedkar’s parents in 1879 that their family would produce a great
man who would relieve the oppression of their people.
Ramji and his wife, Bhimabai, had fourteen children. Seven died in
infancy, a common fate of the time. The fourteenth, named Bhima and
called by the diminutive Bhiva, was the focus of the family’s hope for
greatness. He was a spoiled and much beloved child. As he grew, he
quickly gained a reputation for rambunctiousness and frequent fighting with
his schoolmates. He showed a total unwillingness to admit defeat in any
games. This belligerence and stubborn determination continued throughout
his life. Though he was often cautious, he could also be overwhelmed by
emotion, and he always played to win.
Shortly after Bhiva’s birth, the family moved to Dapoli in Ratnagiri
district and then to Satara in 1894 when Ramji got a position as storekeeper
in the public works department. There his youngest son first studied in a
camp school and then entered the first standard of the English-medium
government high school in 1900. Here he was registered as Bhiva Ramji
Ambedkar. Behind the name lies a story.
The family name was Sankpal, but Ramji decided to avoid its low-caste
connotation by using the name of his ancestral village. This is a common
practice in Maharashtra, where all names ending in ‘kar’ indicate a place.
The village was Ambavade, and so the boy’s name should have been
Ambavadekar. His teacher at the camp school, however, was a Brahman
named Ambedkar. While this man neglected his teaching duties to manage
a shop, he showed great concern for the children, and the young, bright
Bhiva was a favourite of his. To relieve the boy from walking a long
distance back to his home, he provided him a daily lunch. It was in his
honour that the boy’s name was registered as Ambedkar. In later years this
teacher wrote Ambedkar a warm letter when he became a delegate to the
Round Table Conference, and when he met him again in 1927, Ambedkar
honoured him as a guru. Thus one of the most famous names in modern
Indian history came from a man who was a negligent teacher but a good
person.
However, it was Bhiva’s father rather than any teacher who was
responsible for his education. ‘My father felt great turmoil that I should
pass my BA. Before dawn was a good time for study since the mind could
be quiet and disciplined. At the time of examinations he used to wake me at
2 a.m.’ (Khairmode 1968, 1: 59). Ramji himself could write English,
Marathi and the Modi script well, and his fierce concern was that his son
should not only pass but pass with distinction. Bhiva at first ignored his
studies and was careless about exams, but once the family moved to
Bombay in 1904, where he could access books of all kinds, he became
interested in reading. Ramji prodded him to work, and used his pension to
buy almost any book his precocious son demanded. When this small sum
was finished, he would run to his sister, ask for her jewellery and pawn it to
buy more until the next instalment of his pension came and he could redeem
it.
Bhiva and his brothers had never experienced untouchability in their
earlier military homes, but in Satara they got their first experience of caste
discrimination. Bhiva and one other untouchable student were forced to sit
separately; no barber could be found to cut their hair; and when he wanted
to study Sanskrit, he learned it was banned to untouchables. He could only
choose between English and Persian.
In 1904 Ramji lost his position and shifted to Bombay. Keeping both
sons in school on only his pension became impossible, and so the elder son,
Balaram, took a job in a factory. Bhiva continued his studies at Elphinstone
High School, where he got concessional fees. He had no student friends,
and most of his teachers ignored him. The boy spent much of his time
reading in a nearby garden. One beneficial outcome of this was that these
long studious hours were noticed by a distinguished reformist scholar,
Krishna Arjunrao Keluskar, then principal of Wilson High School, during
his own visits to the garden. Keluskar introduced himself, and for long
afterwards he remained an important supporter.
In 1905, at the age of fourteen, Bhiva’s marriage was arranged to
Ramabai, who was nine years old. In 1912, a boy, Yashwant, was born to
them. This first son was the only one to survive, though four more children
were born between 1913 and 1924.
In 1907 Bhiva got his matriculation degree. This was an achievement for
an untouchable boy, and a congratulatory meeting was held, presided over
by the non-Brahman political leader S.K. Bole and attended by Keluskar.
Knowing the family’s poverty, Keluskar arranged a scholarship from the
state of Baroda, one of the largest princely states in India. Its ruler was a
progressive Maratha, Sayajirao Gaikwad. With this, Ambedkar joined
Elphinstone College, and in 1913 he passed his BA examination in English
and Persian. There too he had little contact with his fellow students. Around
this time, his childhood nickname was dropped, and he was identified as
Bhim in the college yearbook.
In January 1913, Ambedkar decided to take up service in Baroda to show
his indebtedness to the maharaja. His decision provoked a quarrel with his
father, who wanted him to stay in the more open atmosphere of Bombay.
Ambedkar persisted, but on reaching Baroda, he found that his father had
been right about Gujarat’s greater casteism. He could find no residence
except for sleeping quarters in the Arya Samaj office, and he had to dine in
the distant untouchable quarters of the city. Nor could he find useful
employment. No department wanted to take him, and he was shifted around
without being given permanent work. Finally, hearing of his father’s death,
he returned to Bombay.
Rather than go back to Baroda, he argued his case before the maharaja in
Bombay. He responded with an offer of a scholarship to study at Columbia
University in New York City. He had decided to sponsor a number of
students there and, on the basis of Ambedkar’s excellent English, selected
him.
In July 1913, then, Bhimrao departed for his first major experience with
higher education in a world centre. He left a family of some ten to twelve
people, scrapping to survive on the earnings of Balaram, who worked as a
common labourer.
In New York Bhimrao experienced a scintillating new openness. With
untouchability meaning little to Americans and Indians there, he discovered
the joys of student companionship. For a while, he enjoyed himself. He
spent his days seeing dramas, playing games like badminton and learning
new sports such as ice-skating. Finally, remorse overtook him, and with a
new sense of responsibility, he turned to his studies. He spent his spare time
reading voraciously and scrounging in second-hand bookstores. At
Columbia he studied the social sciences, primarily economics. He was a
student of America’s most famous philosopher, John Dewy, but it was under
the guidance of Professor Edward Seligman, an economist, that he was
awarded his MA in 1915 and submitted his dissertation for his Ph.D in
1916.
 New York also brought his first contact with a prominent Indian
nationalist. This was Lala Lajpat Rai, who was touring the United States on
behalf of the Indian Home Rule League of America to recruit support for
anti-British struggles. Ambedkar attended several meetings of Lajpat Rai’s
organization, becoming friendly with its members, but debated with them
the problems of caste. He argued with Lajpat Rai that the nationalist
movement was neglecting issues such as untouchability. Lajpat Rai’s
response that these issues could be taken up with vigour once freedom was
won did not impress Ambedkar. Though the two remained on friendly
terms, he ended his participation in the organization’s activities.
In 1916, on finishing his degrees at Columbia, he decided to go to
London. He wanted to earn a barrister’s degree, another basis for economic
self-sufficiency, but because of the academic orientation of his scholarship,
he also proposed to obtain a degree in economics there. His Baroda
scholarship had expired and when the Diwan refused an extension of two
years, he appealed to the maharaja himself. Without waiting for a reply, he
left for London, landing without any money in his pocket, travelling
ticketless on the train and convincing the people with whom he was to stay
to pay for the carriage that brought his luggage. Two days later a letter
arrived awarding him a one-year extension. With this he registered at
Grey’s Inn for his barrister-at-law degree and at the London School of
Economics and Political Science for an MSc. (Economics) and doctorate in
economics. Within the year he had the outline for his proposed dissertation
on the ‘The provincial decentralization of Indian finance’, but a further
extension of his scholarship was refused. He was forced to return to India,
his ambitious studies halted by poverty.
However, he had come out of this first period of stay abroad with two
completed publishable writings. One, an essay on ‘Castes in India: Their
mechanism, genesis and development’, was written in 1916 for a
Columbian University seminar and published in The Journal of Indian
Antiquity. A larger work was the Ph.D thesis in economics, published in
1927 as The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India.
 In return for the scholarship, Ambedkar had signed a bond for a period of
service in Baroda state. This he began—and again encountered extreme
manifestations of casteism. He found quarters in a Parsi boarding house but
had to live under an assumed Parsi name. Work was no better. Brahman
clerks and subordinates were rude and talked openly against him; they kept
their distance and literally threw papers on his desk to avoid any contact.
When he tried to join the club where officers congregated, he was told to sit
in a corner away from anyone else and not to take part in any games. Nor
could he find satisfaction in his work. Though designated ‘military
secretary’ to the ruler, he had no clear assignment. He met rebuffs with
defiance and occasional harsh rejoinders, just as unwilling as the child
Bhiva to admit defeat in any encounter or game. In the hostile atmosphere
of Baroda he could find no friends and retreated into the solitary pleasures
of reading by devouring social, economic and political literature in the
library.
The unbearable conditions reached their height when a group of angry
Parsis, discovering his identity, besieged his boarding house, determined to
beat him up. The owner expelled him from his home. Finally, on 17
November 1917, he left the state for good.
Now the question of earning arose. Applications to the government were
met with silence; there was no concern to employ this much qualified
untouchable graduate—indeed, there may have been some fear about his
nationalist sympathies. Rounds to private companies also drew a blank.
Hopes of earning from his writings proved unrealistic. Finally he got a two-
year position as professor of political economy at Sydenham College, which
he held from 11 November 1918 to 11 March 1920. After scrimping and
saving Rs 7000 of his own and with a gift of Rs 1500 from the maharaja of
Kolhapur, he returned to London to complete the formalities for his doctoral
degree.
Ambedkar lived in London for three years, on minimal funds and
maximum determination. It was a life of abstinence, staying in a boarding
house, rising at 6 a.m., leaving immediately and sitting in libraries from
their opening to closing, going through his books. Among other Indian
students, who mostly enjoyed the life of theatre-going and freedom from
family responsibilities, he made a unique reputation for seriousness at
studies. But two new experiences arose for the young man—one emotional
and personal, the other nationalist and political.
A close relationship developed with the daughter of his second landlady,
Fanny Fitzgerald. She worked at the India Office, took notes for him on
various subjects, probably provided him with some financial help, and kept
his books for him when he returned to India. No evidence of his own
feelings exists, but it is clear that she was in love with him. Later he
referred to her as ‘F’. Around the mid-1950s, after the death of his wife,
Fanny developed some expectations of marriage, and one Indian newspaper
published a report in 1935 that he had married an ‘English widow’ during a
trip to London. Ambedkar, talking later of this relationship, asserted that
women had no role in his life and his emotional attachments (he mentioned
two, a Mahar fruit seller from Nagpur and an Indian teacher of English)
were cause for only regret. In England, he claimed, he had to spend his time
studying to prepare himself to confront the great leaders of Indian
nationalism in debate. Yet the correspondence was carried on for almost
twenty-five years (Khairmode n.d., 2:65–67; 1998b, 7:53–59).
He also became involved in Indian student life until it led to a political
clash. He began to attend the Students Union in which various students read
essays before the group. Ambedkar’s essay on the ‘Responsibilities of a
representative government in India’ sparked a heated controversy, until the
well-known political scientist Professor Harold Laski ended the debate with
the remark that the ideology reflected in the essay had too much
revolutionary politics to be appropriate for a student group. After this
Bhimrao began to get the reputation among other students as a
revolutionary, even a propagandist of the Russian revolution, and all
avoided close contact with him. He returned to his deep interest in books,
frequenting both bookstores and libraries. He wanted a library of his own,
like the impressive private collections he had seen in New York, and once
bought a complete set of yearly reports of the East India Company on the
Indian economy from 1700 to 1858. As a result, by the middle of 1921 he
found himself in severe financial difficulties. It may well be that it was at
this point that Fanny Fitzgerald provided important help. There is no record
of any other resource of which he could avail himself.
His DSc. thesis also led to controversy. Seventeen months after his MSc.
thesis was accepted in June 1921, he submitted the ‘Problem of the rupee’
for his doctoral thesis. It was expected to take four or five months for
approval, and in the intervening period the intrepid scholar had decided to
use his time to get a degree in Germany; he had begun a study of both
German and French. When he got approval from Bonn University, he left
for Germany, and then, in the middle of 1923, came word from his
supervisor, Professor Edwin Cannan, that his London examiners had
refused to approve his doctoral thesis. The reason was political—too much
criticism of British policy, too much of a departure from orthodox thinking
on international exchange. Finally he agreed to drop some portions of his
dissertation and revise the conclusion and returned to Bombay in April
1923. He sent the revised thesis in November 1923 and was informed by
telegram that he had won the degree.
Returning home, Ambedkar confronted the problems of setting up
household, with his wife and child as well as his sister-in-law and his
nephew to take care of. He wanted to begin law practice and registered at
the Bombay High Court in 1924. Unable to afford an office near the court
itself, he finally opened one at Damodar Hall in Parel with the help of
contributions from friends. It took months to get a single case, from a
Mahar, though interestingly enough he also got some supporting work from
a nephew of Lokmanya Tilak. Caste Hindus were reluctant to give him
cases, and, as before, he could get no support for his ambitious plans for
writing volumes on the economic history of India. He finally got a part-time
job teaching commercial law at the Botliboi Accountancy Institute to
support himself, and also earned some supplementary income as an
examiner for Bombay University. His habits of book-buying continued, and
constantly distressed his hardworking wife Ramabai, struggling to survive
on the small allotment he could afford to give her. But with an office,
library and constant gatherings of Mahars and other friends, his life began
to take shape.
Then personal tragedy struck. A third son was born, and Ambedkar was
more delighted with this child, named Rajaratna, than with any other,
spending happy hours playing with him. But in just over a year the boy died
of double pneumonia, to the great distress of the parents. Ambedkar later
wrote
There is no use pretending that I and my wife have recovered from the shock of my son’s
death and I don’t think we ever shall. We have in all buried four precious children, three sons
and a daughter, all sprightly, auspicious and handsome children … My last boy was a
wonderful boy the like of whom I had seldom seen. With his passing away life to me is a
garden full of weeds (Khairmode n.d., 2:104).

Ambedkar’s early economic writings show him as an imaginative and

careful analyst within the framework of neoclassical economics. The
Problem of the Rupee, published in 1923 in England at the time of a
struggle between nationalists and the British government over the exchange
rate, was a scathingly critical analysis of British currency policy over the
years. Ambedkar showed that within an open economy India could compete
well at the global level, noting that Indian exports and manufactures gained
at the expense of the British during the period of the low rupee. The
Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India, published in 1925 also in
England, critiqued imperialism within a liberal framework, but was
submitted to Americans who cared little about attacks on British policy. It
showed how British fiscal policy had impoverished India through irrational
taxation methods, through a land tax that prevented agricultural prosperity
and heavy customs and internal excise duties that injured its industry. It was
clear, he argued, that the British government was running India in the
interest of British manufacturers.
Most significantly, he asserted that the government was not acting against
social evils. The British ‘could not sympathise with the living forces
operating in the Indian society, was not charged with its wants, its pains, its
cravings and desires, was inimical to its aspirations … [T]he Government
of India dared not abolish the caste system, prescribe monogamy, alter the
laws of succession, legalize intermarriage or venture to tax the tea planters’.
It would be social causes, he proposed, not economic ones, that would lead
to nationalist revolt: improving roads and constructing canals would be of
no use since ‘any people … will sooner or later demand a government that
will be more man a mere engine of efficiency’ (Ambedkar 1989, 6:233–34).
Two articles published in 1918 in the Journal of the Indian Economic
Society showed the general trend of his social-economic drinking. One, a
review of a book by Bertrand Russell, showed Ambedkar as a firm
developmentalist and a believer in progress. He rejected the ‘quietistic’
view of life of traditional India and the principle of limiting needs, which
was later to be identified with Gandhism. Attacking the supposedly ‘moral’
critique of the love of money and worldly goods, he argued that ‘at a time
when the whole world was living in “pain economy” … and when the
productivity of human labour was extremely low … it is but natural that
moralists should have preached the gospel of poverty and renunciation of
worldly pleasures only because they were not to be had’ (Ambedkar 1979,
1:489–91). He saw growth in production and consumption as part of the
development of humanity, leading to variation. He did not agree with the
notion that property itself was evil: ‘The trouble … is not with property but
with the unequal distribution of it’ (Ambedkar 1979, 1:489–91).
The second article, ‘Small holdings in India and their remedies’, dealt
with the backwardness of Indian agriculture. Small holdings were indeed an
evil, he admitted, but whether a holding was ‘large or small’ depended not
on absolute size but on proportion to other factors of production. From this
point of view, Indian farmers who owned only the most meagre of
equipment for production (such as ploughs, carts and bullocks) had
holdings that were uneconomic because they were too large. Agricultural
production was inefficient, too much land was lying idle and the entire
economy was maladjusted. It was the high pressure on the land that was the
evil, and this in turn was due to the lack of industrialization. The
development of non-agricultural production—industrial growth—was thus
the main solution to the problems of Indian agriculture. It was clearly a
‘non-Gandhian’ conclusion, but consistent with Ambedkar’s whole
approach: the future of untouchables, indeed of all the Indian poor, did not
lie in the villages but in the development of an urbanized and industrialized
modern economy.
Ambedkar’s formal education was over. It was strikingly different from
the ‘brahmachari’ period of Brahmanic tradition, where attachment to a
guru’s household provided both authority and relief from all worldly wants,
where family responsibilities did not exist and learning could be undertaken
in an atmosphere of serenity and freedom. Rather, it was a period of
struggle, of a need to ensure some earnings from the beginning both for his
own and his family’s survival and of fierce determination. His period of
education was not only in the scholarship of the world but also in social
experiences of poverty and caste discrimination. And his awareness of the
importance of education was not simply an individual discovery; it echoed
one of the most famous sayings of a man he later was to call one of his
gurus, Jotirao Phule, who saw education as linked to development and
prosperity almost as India’s famous economist Amartya Sen was later to
stress.
With education in Bombay, New York and London, Ambedkar had
gained entry to the world’s treasury of social and economic thinking. Few
among even the wealthier circles of the nationalist elite had his breadth of
scholarship, not to mention collection of degrees. He had undertaken his
study as a Promethean fight to seize the gold of learning, as a resource not
simply for personal achievement but to use in the fight against the
oppression of India’s untouchables. The meaning of the western suit in all
the statues and pictures of Ambedkar is simply this identification with the
heritage of the world.
His was also an education in the meaning of poverty. The struggle for
survival started early. Ambedkar and his family shared the fate of common
Indians in a period when the average lifespan was in the twenties. The early
death of his mother, after giving birth to fourteen children of whom only
seven survived, his elder brother’s death after working as a labourer to
maintain the family, the death of four of five of his own children—all of this
showed the effect not simply of disease but of living conditions that must
have included malnutrition, overcrowding and lack of sanitation. This was a
different experience from that of the nationalist elite. Gandhi may have
travelled third class on trains out of conviction, but Ambedkar did so out of
necessity. Nehru and his companions may have been able to give up their
government jobs or connections with government institutions such as courts
because they had the assurance that wealthy, often landlord families could
continue to support the rest of their relatives. People of low caste and poor
background like Ambedkar, who were the main earning supporters of their
families, could not afford this. They had to assure economic survival as a
prerequisite for taking part in the nationalist movement. While criticisms
exist today of ‘middle-class’ Dalits, and Ambedkar himself was attacked as
a ‘petty bourgeois’ by the left of his time, it is clear that the meaning of
‘middle class’ was and is different in the case of Dalits.
Finally, caste was a pervasive experience. Much has been written on the
assault on personality that colonialism involved, the personal humiliation
and exclusion from social intercourse. Ambedkar himself experienced some
discrimination as an Indian and colonial, and expressed his own
nationalism. But these were minor compared to the experiences of
untouchability. Very probably due to the army background of his family, he
suffered less from the psychological internalization of humiliation than
most Dalits. His father and mother both came from army families, and
could escape the humiliations of low castes within the traditional village
system. Certainly, they instilled in their son a sense of ambition and self-
confidence. But once the family had moved to the mixed community of
Satara, the experiences of discrimination began. Such discrimination—
being forced to sit separately, unable to study the courses he wanted,
ostracized by other students and unable in a city like Baroda to find a place
to live and work respectably—was experienced as an outrage and not as an
expected part of a long-ordained place in society. It became clear to
Ambedkar that such caste discrimination was all-pervasive, that it involved
both economic cost and personal humiliation and that this prejudice
extended from the lowliest villages and urban slums to the most
sophisticated arenas of Indian life. Untouchability, and the cultural-religious
force that generated it, became the defining framework of his life and its
eradication the focus of his career.
 Two

‘We are against Brahmanism but not Brahmans …’

 Beginning the Fight for Dalit Human Rights

It was clear from his youth that Bhimrao Ambedkar would be a leader of
his community. Not only were there the extravagant prophecies of greatness
made by his mendicant uncle but his father had also pushed him in the
direction of ‘social service’. The young Bhim had expressed this aspiration
himself, arguing to the maharaja of Baroda that he hoped to combine a
career of employment in the state with social service and academic writing.
So highly educated a member of the untouchable community would take a
position of leadership. Thus in the 1920s, when Ambedkar returned from
London to take up a life of earning, he inevitably turned his attention to
politics.
It was a period when India was ablaze with social turmoil. The nationalist
movement was taking on new vigour with the leadership of an unlikely
South-Africa-returned lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi. A working- class
movement was surging, fuelled by a new doctrine fresh from revolutionary
triumphs in the old land of tsarism. And, finally, though less organized,
searching for leadership and ideology, and sporadic but ever-stronger,
movements of the caste-oppressed were rising. Along with the Marxists and
nationalists, Dalits and non-Brahmans throughout India were stirring and
turning to direct political assertion as the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms
opened up possibilities of empowerment, promising opportunities for them
if they could only gain political support to prevent upper castes from
monopolizing political and economic positions.
Dalit movements had been going on throughout India since the
nineteenth century. Dalits had fought for education, for gaining wastelands
for cultivation, for temple entry and, above all, for access to public space
and the use of roads and public transport. They had gained patronage from
various social reform organizations and from Christian missionaries. In
Maharashtra the Dalit movement won support and inspiration from the
Satyashodhak Samaj, founded by Phule in 1875. It also had an additional
cause, as demobilized Mahars began to agitate for re-entry into the army.
With some resources—a little land, a base in the textile mills, jobs as cooks
and butlers for Europeans, meagre pensions from the army—they generated
caste and sub-caste associations everywhere. Mahars were the first in
Maharashtra to organize themselves. Activists even in small towns like
Ahmednagar fought to get drinking water from public tanks. Gopal Baba
Walangkar, a pensioned soldier from Ratnagiri, led intense campaigns and
petitioning against the closure of military service. Shivaram Janba Kamble,
a butler in the Masonic hall in Poona, organized conferences, movements
and petitions in the area from 1903 to 1930.
After 1917-18 the nationalist movement also began to turn to taking up
the issue of untouchability. With the Second World War coming to an end
and the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms stimulating a new assertion of Dalits
and non-Brahmans, the old position, symbolized by the social
conservativism of Lokmanya Tilak’s slogan of ‘political reform before
social reform’, was no longer viable. The first resolution on untouchability
was passed in the 1916 Congress session in Calcutta. Organizations like the
Hindu Mahasabha also began to concern themselves with the issue.
In Maharashtra the most powerful social reform organization was the
Depressed Classes Mission led by an upper-caste Maratha scholar and
social reformer, Vitthal Ramji Shinde, and backed by the Brahman
reformers of the Prarthana Samaj. Shinde, a supporter of the Congress, had
founded the Depressed Classes Mission in 1906, focusing on education and
the propagation of a reformed Hinduism. He was also a major opponent of
the Non-Brahman Party in Maharashtra, attempting to bring Marathas into a
Congress-oriented political front. Thus Shinde’s educational efforts were
linked to drawing untouchables into the Hindu political and cultural
framework.
The direction of upper caste reform efforts was shown by three
Asprushyata Nirvaran (Untouchability Relief) conferences held in 1917 and
1918 by the nationalists. The first had intended to draw in Ambedkar by a
resolution felicitating him, but he had left for Baroda and the meeting had
to be held in his absence. A resolution at this conference called for backing
the joint proposals for reform made by the Indian National Congress and
the Muslim League, though this motion was opposed by the most important
Dalit present, G.A. Gavai of Nagpur. Gavai was a Hindu-Mahasabha-
oriented Mahar, who later was to become a major opponent of Ambedkar.
In a second meeting held in Bombay in March 1918, the organizers opposed
Dalit conversions. A third meeting in May held in Bijapur was attended by
Mahatma Gandhi, who himself strikingly made the point that a resolution
on untouchable support for Congress efforts had no meaning since no one
responded to his request for all actual untouchables present to identify
themselves. Thus none of these efforts could claim to be representative of
the untouchables themselves.
The growing non-Brahman movement became a stronger contender for
untouchable support. The Satyashodhak Samaj spread throughout much of
rural and urban Maharashtra after 1910, with the powerful support of the
maharaja of Kolhapur. It propagated the rejection of caste and Brahmanic
authority, and identified Shudras and Ati-Shudras (non-Brahmans and
Dalits) as original inhabitants enslaved by oppressive Aryan invaders. This
‘non-Aryan’ theme had wide appeal, with the non-Brahman movement in
Madras Presidency seeing non-Aryans as Dravidians and Aryans as
northern invaders. It was also adopted by most of the Dalit movements of
the 1920s, which began to define themselves as ‘Original inhabitants’—
Adi-Dravidas, Adi-Andhras, Adi-Hindus and Adi-Dharmis.
By 1917 non-Brahmans everywhere began to mobilize politically. This
gave rise to the Justice Party in the Madras Presidency and in Maharashtra
to the Non-Brahman Party.
The patron of the Maharashtra movement, Shahu Chhatrapati, the
maharaja of Kolhapur, was not himself an adherent of the Satyashodhak
Samaj. As a descendant of Shivaji, he claimed Kshatriya (and thus, in the
language of the time, Aryan) status, but he was fervently anti-Brahman.
Initially provoked by the refusal of his family priest to use rituals
recognizing his Kshatriya status, he turned against the entire Brahman
elite’s nationalist establishment. This led to an all-around programme of
reforms, which aimed to bring non-Brahmans into the administration of the
state and provide them with education and economic opportunity. In 1902,
while on a tour of Europe, he issued a government order for the recruitment
of only non-Brahmans into state service until they formed 50 per cent of the
posts. This was the beginning of the reservation system in India.
Untouchables were part of these reforming efforts. Shahu sponsored a
hostel for them in Kolhapur city and helped them set up small businesses
such as tea shops. He also struck a personal blow against untouchability by
stopping for tea there when he returned from hunting trips and forcing his
proud hunting companions to do likewise—a remarkable action in the early
twentieth century. *
The fierce attacks on casteism and Brahman dominance of the movement
may have appealed to the young Ambedkar, but the relationships he formed
with leaders like Shahu also had a social base. Shinde and his Depressed
Classes Mission antagonized Ambedkar by their apparently bland
assumption that they could represent the interests of untouchables; they
made no effort to take him or other untouchable leaders into their
confidence when they were formulating demands. Nor was there any effort
to share food with untouchables. In contrast, Shahu was not only willing to
take tea and food from them but also understood the need for autonomy.
Shahu met Ambedkar in 1920, when he made a donation to support a
bimonthly, Mooknayak, which Ambedkar was to supervise and which
would be managed by a young graduate, D.D. Gholap. (The paper ran only
for a year or so.) He sponsored a two-day conference at Mangaon in
Kolhapur state on 19 and 20 March 1920 felicitating Ambedkar. At the
conference Shahu said that previously he had also alienated himself from
Dalits, but from this time he intended to behave with full equality and
humanity. He also provided monetary support at crucial times, as with
Ambedkar’s second trip to London.
Perhaps as important was a personal rapport established between the two
leaders from the beginning. They could meet as equals, in spite of
considerable differences in their social and economic conditions, and
discussed the problems of caste and Brahmanism in a way that didn’t seem
possible for Ambedkar with the elite social reformers. Whatever the
qualitative difference between the humiliation that Shahu experienced in
being treated by his family priests and the Brahman elite as a ‘Shudra’ and
the bitter discrimination Ambedkar had to confront, they still shared a
common experience of caste discrimination. In spite of the occasional help
from Brahman supporters throughout this early period of Ambedkar’s life,
he seems to have found more of a ‘social’ meeting ground with non-
Brahmans. His own traits of stubbornness and a fierce determination to win
were given more scope by the way in which Shahu could couple his
patronage with scope for autonomy.
Ambedkar’s first political act brought him into conflict with Vitthal
Ramji Shinde. This was with regard to giving testimony before the
Southborough Commission, which had been set up after the Montagu–
Chelmsford reforms to tour India and survey the opinions of Indians on the
franchise. With regard to untouchables, Shinde and Chandavarkar, as the
most well-known social activists working on the issue, were invited by the
government, which did not seem to feel a need to seek any direct
untouchable testimony. Shinde’s proposals called for a franchise for
untouchables wider than the general one but still limited to those with
fourth standard education. Ambedkar submitted his memorandum on his
own, calling for separate electorates with eleven untouchables to be selected
by vote (with a much lowered franchise) from delineated constituencies in
Bombay Presidency; these would then choose one representative to the
Legislature. Thus, the two memoranda from Maharashtrians were the most
important ones on Dalit issues laid before the committee.
Ambedkar followed this up with a direct attack on Shinde. Along with
Shahu Maharaj, he travelled to Nagpur for a three-day ‘All-India
Conference of the Boycotted’ (Akhil Bharatiya Bahishkrut Parishad). Here
Ambedkar pushed for a resolution against Shinde, arguing that Shinde’s
proposals would leave untouchables under the domination of the upper
castes. Even after this Ambedkar continued to campaign against Shinde’s
leadership, and when resistance to autocratic behaviour within the hostels
arose from some of the Dalit students, he supported them. Shinde ended up
retiring in some disillusionment from his efforts for the uplift of
untouchables.
 More sustained organizing began with Ambedkar’s return from London
in 1923. People of the community gathered at his house constantly; the
demand for taking up action programmes was growing. On 9 March 1924
he took the first step by forming the Bahishkrut Hitakarni Sabha, with
himself as president of the managing committee and with distinguished
supporters such as Sir Chimanlal Setalvad, K.F. Nariman and others on the
board. The term ‘bahiskrut’, which had been used by a small organization in
Akola district in 1920, was perhaps the first effort by untouchables
themselves to find an appropriate nomenclature. Its stated objectives were
to spread education, improve economic conditions and represent the
grievances of the Depressed Classes. The sabha started a small library in
Parel and, with a grant from the municipality, a hostel for Depressed Class
students in Sholapur. It also began to hold rallies and conferences
throughout the Marathi-speaking areas.
Through the Bahishkrut Hitakarni Sabha, Ambedkar emerged as a mass
organizer. He proved to be a powerful speaker, rationally expounding Dalit
problems but at times being emotional and impulsive. Khairmode (1958,
2:99, 144–45) gives an example of a meeting in Satara at which a Brahman
speaker, Soman, criticized untouchable requests to be taken into
government service at a time when the national movement was calling for
boycott of official positions. Ambedkar rose and turned on him, savagely
and relentlessly attacking the hypocrisy of Brahmans who had monopolized
the bureaucracy for so long and were objecting on nationalist grounds now
that Dalits were beginning to get some education.
At the same time, untouchable issues were beginning to be put forward in
the Legislative Council. S.K. Bole, a member of the Non-Brahman Party
from the Konkan, moved a bill opening up public places to untouchables,
which was eventually passed, though without mention of temples.
Similarly, a bill was brought by the untouchable representative, D.D.
Gholap, to abolish the Mahar Watan—the first shot in what was to be a
protracted struggle on this issue. Watan lands were those traditionally held
by Mahars in exchange for their village services; the British had ratified the
lands at lower than usual revenue rates while continuing to extract the
unpaid services.
In 1926 Ambedkar was appointed, along with Dr P.G. Solanki, a Gujarati
untouchable leader, to the Bombay Legislative Council. It was the
beginning of a long, distinguished, articulate career as legislator that would
continue until his death. He participated vigorously in council debates;
when he confronted hostile questions—which was often, given his
provocative (to the orthodox) speeches and interruptions—he was always
ready with a reply. Once challenged by nationalists to remember that he was
‘a part of the whole’, he replied, ‘But I am not a part of the whole, I am a
part apart!’
Meanwhile, the first great mass struggle of untouchables was about to
begin. It focussed on the issue of water rights—the most basic human need
but one which was nevertheless denied to those considered to be polluting.
The setting was the small town of Mahad in the Konkan, where the
municipality had already passed a resolution proclaiming its tank open to
untouchables. Links to Bombay were strong here, with many Dalits and
caste Hindus migrating to work in the textile mills. Ambedkar had both a
Dalit base and several supporters among progressive caste Hindus,
particularly the Kayasthas (Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhus or CKPs as
they were known in Maharashtra). These included Anantrao Chitre, a CKP
activist of the Bahishkrut Hitakarni Sabha; Surendranath Tipnis, another
CKP leader who was president of the municipality; and G.N. Sahasrabudhe,
a Brahman of the Social Service League led by the Bombay labour leader
N.M. Joshi. Chitre and Tipnis were later to be elected members of the
Legislative Assembly from Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party, while
Sahasrabudhe went on to become editor of Ambedkar’s weekly Janata,
which he founded in 1930.
On 19 and 20 March 1927 the Bahishkrut Hitakarni Sabha sponsored a
Kolaba District Bahishkrut conference in Mahad. On the second day,
Anantrao Chitre unexpectedly proposed to move to the tank and drink the
water. ‘As decided beforehand I threw a bombshell,’ he reported. The
enthusiastic crowd of 1500 surged forward, went to the tank and began to
drink. As the news spread throughout the town, angry caste Hindus began
to gather and, fearing a further ‘onslaught’ on the temple, they attacked,
beating up many of the offending untouchables. Subsequently, a purification
ceremony was held by Brahmans.
This incident and the rioting and resulting police cases resounded
throughout Maharashtra. Mahad now became a focus of a campaign that
roused the Dalit community throughout the state and won publicity in India
as a whole. Ambedkar announced a satyagraha conference in December to
establish the right to water and also established the Bahishkrut Bharat, a
bimonthly journal of eight to twelve pages that came out until September
and then continued at irregular intervals until 1930. It was published from
an office in Damodar Hall, with Ambedkar dictating most of the material to
a team of enthusiastic students. It reported support meetings and discussions
of the Mahad programme and of the Mahar Watan Bill—the most important
issue pending in the Assembly—and it covered all kinds of meetings of
untouchables or ‘bahishkrut’ gatherings, as they were known at the time, as
well as the ‘untouchability removal’ programmes of the Congress.
Furthermore, it reported on political events of varying kinds and discussed
religious and cultural issues.
Bahishkrut Bharat’s writers criticized the shuddhi (purification)
movement of the Arya Samaj, noting that while the original idea had been
to use shuddhi to create an Arya Samaj purified of caste, now the
destruction of caste was forgotten and the goal became simply to bring
more and more people into the Hindu fold. There was friendly but sharp
criticism of non-Brahman and Satyashodhak activities. Significantly, one
point centred on a demand raised by Dinkarrao Javalkar and Keshavrao
Jedhe, then emerging as the young militant leaders of the movement, that no
Brahman be allowed to take part in the forthcoming satyagraha. Ambedkar
replied that their movement was not against Brahmans as such but against
‘Brahamanic religion’, which included those non-Brahmans involved in it.
He summarized the differences by saying that ‘we are against Brahmanism
but not Brahmans, whereas they are against Brahmans but not Brahmanism’
(Janata 29 July 1927). Finally, reports of religious conversion, especially to
Islam, and discussions of its necessity were held, with Ambedkar
significantly announcing in bold type in his own article, ‘We have to
consider whether the Hindu religion is our own or not’ (Bahishkrut Bharat
29 July 1927). Various temple entry movements—including one in Amraoti
—were reported, and the Mahar Watan Bill was discussed extensively.
By 23 December 1927 tremendous interest had been aroused in the
Mahad tank issue, and some 10,000 to 15,000 Dalits gathered under a
pavilion decorated with a photo of Gandhi. Then the district magistrate
issued an injunction against using the tank. Ambedkar decided to honour
this, and prepared another symbolic but powerful act: a plan to burn the
Manusmriti, which had been established as the traditional law book of
Brahmanic Hinduism. The resolution to burn it was a multi-caste one,
moved by the Brahman Sahasrabudhe and seconded by the Chambhar
leader P.N. Rajbhoj. It was burned on the night of the first day of the
conference. On the third day of the gathering, a militant procession was
held with slogans shouted in the name of the Bhakti saints, Gandhi, Agarkar
and Shahu Maharaj. On the same day Ambedkar held a separate meeting
with the women, who were attending in large numbers. He began by telling
them to leave aside the heavy silver jewellery used by the lower castes and
dress as upper-caste women did, leaving no markers to indicate caste. He
concluded with the advice to educate daughters as well as sons. Mahad
from this time on became an important centre of Ambedkar’s organizing
efforts; a base of activity that had enthusiastic untouchable participation and
important cooperation from a team of upper-caste leaders.
This targeting of one of the sacred ‘shastras’ of Hinduism linked the right
to equal use of public space and facilities with the religious discrimination
from which untouchables suffered. The 1920s had seen an increased
consciousness about untouchable rights; temple entry movements were
being proposed, though the major struggle at the Guruvayoor temple in
Kerala centred simply on the rights of untouchables to use the road crossing
in front of the temple. This Gandhi had helped engineer a compromise on,
while E.V. Ramasamy ‘Periyar’ emerged as a hero of the struggle. A
struggle over the Parvati temple in Pune and then over the Rama temple at
Nashik also began at this time. Ambedkar, however, did not get involved
directly in any of these efforts, though he was the formal leader of the
Nashik satyagraha, but instead focussed on secular citizenship rights and on
actions implying to most the rejection of Hinduism itself. The issue of
Bahishkrut Bharat published at the time of the Mahad conference had in
fact contained a sharp critique of Gandhi’s effort to maintain untouchables
within the fold of Hinduism.
At the same time, Ambedkar did not accept the interpretation of caste in
terms of Aryan conquest. Nor was he willing to fully condemn ‘Hinduism’,
but was reading extensively during this period, buying books on the
literature of the Bhakti movement, Tukaram and Dnyaneswar, and studying
writings of social reformers. In this area as everywhere autonomy was the
theme—his interpretation was to be his own, worked out through his own
effort, his own study, his own experience. He may also have been working
through the tradition of devotionalism symbolized by his father’s
participation in the Kabirpanth, becoming aware of the way in which
Kabir’s radicalism was absorbed within a Brahmanical framework.
His other activities continued. In 1925–26 two politically significant
cases were taken up in his legal practice. One was the defence of Deschace
Dushman, a fiery anti-Brahman booklet written by Dinkarrao Javalkar. In it
Javalkar attacked Lokmanya Tilak and Vishnushastri Chipulunkar in
provocative, vituperative language as ‘enemies of the country’, while
holding up Gandhi as a positive alternative. Jedhe and Javalkar, along with
two other non-Brahman activists, lost the case. Ambedkar took up the
appeal and won their release, arguing bias on the part of the original judge
who had agreed with the depiction of Phule as a pseudo-Christian. In
another case, Ambedkar joined the victorious defence of India and China
written by Philip Spratt, one of the British Communists who had come to
India to build the Communist movement here. This case was also won.
In 1926 Ambedkar also gave evidence before the Royal Commission on
Currency and Finance and published a booklet on the rupee—pound
exchange rate. This analysed the effects of devaluation on different classes
in India and argued for a relatively low value to the rupee. Ambedkar’s
economic capacities were now being recognized by the British government.
As a member of the Bombay Legislative Council, Ambedkar emerged as
a powerful voice. His most important bill was on the Mahar Watan, which
continued as an issue for decades. The Mahars traditionally had village
duties as one of the twelve balutedars, or village servants, for which they
received various perquisites and small allotments of land. The British
regime used the system, assigning the land to the Mahars with revenue
payments that were reduced from the normal rent. Mahars were thus forced
to perform for bureaucrats all kinds of free labour, in unspecified numbers
and at unspecified hours. With non-Brahman support, a similar bill against
the Joshi Watan had passed, ending the legal sanction behind the traditional
payments given to village priests. The only reason for the British
government to oppose the Mahar Watan Bill was clearly because the cost of
the labour involved would have been far too much for them to pay directly.
The Mahar Watan was in fact a prime example of the way British colonial
regime could exploit a feudal type of surplus appropriation for its own use,
and it resisted changing it until the end.
Iin September 1927 Ambedkar gathered a group of caste Hindus,
Christians and untouchables to form the Samta Samaj Sangh, campaigning
for intercaste meals and marriages. Little came of this. Efforts at
intermarriage proved of no avail, when the one potential Maratha candidate
for a marriage with a Mahar girl did not turn up, but the organization also
made hesitant attempts to promote Vedic ceremonies among untouchables,
perhaps evidence that at this point Ambedkar was not ready to fight all
forms of Hinduism.
The 1920s ended with the Simon Commission and proposal for round
table conferences to create a new constitutional framework for India. The
Congress was boycotting the commission, and in a powerful nationalist
wave, the Muslim League and even the Justice Party of Madras also
boycotted it. But Ambedkar and other Dalits (urged on by Periyar in Tamil
Nadu) were determined to testify. In all, eighteen organizations of
untouchables came before the commission. Ambedkar’s long memorandum
was submitted in two parts at the end of May 1928, and his testimony on
behalf of the Bahishkrut Hitakarni Sabha was given on 23 October. His
memorandum called for provincial autonomy and adult suffrage and
rejected community- and caste-based electorates even for Muslims. He
argued that Muslims, untouchables, Anglo-Indians and non-Brahmans
should get reserved seats, and he asked for a 140-member council for
Bombay Province, of which thirty-three would be Muslims and fifteen
untouchables. He also called for representation in public services. In the
emotion-laden atmosphere of nationalism, the students in his law class
walked out in protest. In stark contrast, his Dalit supporters described his
memorandum as a ‘manifesto of untouchable rights’. Thus the 1920s closed
with the fight for Dalit human rights and a growing organizational and vocal
opposition to the spokesmen of Indian nationalism, prefiguring greater
conflicts to come.
 Three

‘Gandhiji, I have no homeland’

 The Round Table Conferences, the Poona Pact and
Nationalist Dilemmas

One of the great failures of the Indian nationalist movement is that it took
place so much at odds with the assertion of Dalits and other oppressed
castes. This need not have happened. Ambedkar, after all, had taken his
very name from a Brahman schoolteacher and had numerous upper-caste
friends. His instincts were fundamentally nationalist. His orientation to
development and economic issues had similarities with those of Nehru and
the leftists, in spite of his critique of their neglect of caste. He even
expressed some hope that Gandhi’s desire to combine social issues with
political concerns would help the untouchables. Yet the Brahmanic Hindu
framework of Gandhi’s concerns led to a major clash with Ambedkar.
Ambedkar’s modified scepticism about the Congress turned into
bitterness with the events of 1930–32, and at the centre of this was
Mahatma Gandhi. This period saw the Round Table Conferences, Gandhi’s
opposition to separate electorates for untouchables, bis fast in protest
against the Ramsey MacDonald Award and the setting up of the Harijan
Sevak Sangh as the main Congress-sponsored organization working with
untouchables.
On 8 August 1930, in preparation for the First Round Table Conference,
Ambedkar called an All-India Depressed Classes Conference in Nagpur.
Resolutions at the conference demanded immediate dominion status,
rejected the Simon Commission report and asked for adult suffrage with
safeguards for untouchables that included representation in legislative
councils (through reserved seats if there were adult suffrage) and
reservation in public service. This approval of reserved seats with a general
electorate contrasted with the demands of other Indian untouchable leaders,
who at that time were asking for separate electorates.
Ambedkar’s presidential speech elaborated on these themes. He argued
forcefully that the multiplicity of castes, races, religions and languages
could not come in the way of India’s readiness for independence. His
eloquent and scathing indictment of imperialism attacked Britain for the
impoverishment of India and for doing nothing to lighten either the burden
of untouchability or the exploitation of peasants and workers. Finally, his
reference to ‘capitalists’ and ‘landlords’ and his characterization of the
Congress leaders as ‘feudalists’ indicate the growing influence of socio-
economic radicalism on his thinking.
The 1930 speech shows Ambedkar as a nationalist. His nationalism was
one in which independence from British rule was a precondition for
creating an egalitarian, caste-free society. This nationalism, like that of
Phule, Periyar and other leaders of the anti-caste movement, centred mostly
on issues involving the construction of the nation as a democracy, not just
on the transfer of power to Indians. It can be described as ‘nation-building’.
His unique contribution was to give this concept a fully modernist thrust—
the society he wanted was democratic and rational, embodying
Enlightenment values, expressed in the French Revolution trinity of liberty,
equality and fraternity. British colonial rule was an obstacle to this. Still, it
was less inimical to untouchables than to elites, who suffered the immediate
loss of power. The low castes, however, had gained concrete benefits from
the opening up of education and employment. Themes such as the
‘destruction of our culture’ and calls to defend tradition could have little
appeal to those who had suffered from the dark side of that tradition. Thus
Ambedkar’s attitude towards the British was more of a tactical one; as he
said later, while they were his enemies, so were upper-caste nationalists,
and ‘we cannot fight two enemies at once’.
The position was symbolized by Koregaon, a village outside Pune, where
Ambedkar began to hold yearly rallies. Here, on 1 January 1818, the British
had fought a decisive battle against the Peshwa’s forces. The British erected
a memorial to the Indian soldiers in the British army who had died during
the battle, and of the forty-nine names recorded on this, twenty-two were
Mahar. In his rallies Ambedkar said succinctly that Mahars had brought the
British to power in India and that Mahars could drive them out. The
implication was that the battle would not be undertaken to restore anything
like the hated caste-feudal regime of the Peshwas. The symbolism of
Koregaon was powerful. Many Maharashtrian Dalits still describe it as the
first battle in the untouchable liberation movement, and even today, masses
gather at Koregaon every year.
In October 1930 Ambedkar departed for London along with M.N.
Srinivasan of Madras as representatives of India’s untouchables to the First
Round Table Conference. They were given an enthusiastic send-off in a
meeting of 10,000 activists and volunteers presided over by the Chambhar
leader S.N. Shivtarkar and with a rousing speech given by K.A. Keluskar.
At the conference, Ambedkar participated in several committee meetings,
always presenting well-articulated arguments. He gave most attention to the
Federal Structure Committee, where he argued for a strong central
government, noting that a government had welfare functions to undertake—
mainly those for such oppressed groups as the untouchables—as well as
those of defence and minimal administration.
He was unequivocal in arguing that the political power needed by
untouchables could only be won in the framework of an independent India.
In his opening speech on 20 November 1930, he restated the themes of his
Nagpur speech.
The bureaucratic form of Government in India should be replaced by a government which will
be a Government of the people, by the people and for the people … The Government of India
does realize the necessity of removing the social evils which are eating into the vitals of Indian
society and which have blighted the lives of the downtrodden classes for years. The
Government of India does realize that the landlords are squeezing the masses dry and that the
capitalists are not giving the leaders a living wage and decent conditions of labour. Yet it is a
most painful thing that it has not dared to touch any of these evils … We feel that nobody can
remove our grievances as well as we can, and we cannot remove them unless we get political
power in our own hands. No share of this political power can evidently come to us as long as
the British Government remains as it is. It is only in a Swaraj constitution that we stand any
chance of getting the political power in our own hands … We know that political power is
passing from the British into the hands of those who wield such tremendous economic, social
and religious sway over our existence. We are willing that it may happen (Ambedkar 1982, 2:
503–04).

But his arguments for a unitary state and adult suffrage with reserved
seats and safeguards for untouchables remained a minority position. The
Round Table Conferences would end by shaping the 193S Government of
India Act, which constituted ‘India’ as a federation of provinces and left
princely states as autonomous units, undemocratic constituents of a
democratizing country. Suffrage was slightly expanded, but still only
qualified 30 million people to vote, and left responsible government at the
provincial level highly qualified by the residual powers given to British-
appointed governors. In spite of earlier commitments to the Depressed
Classes, separate electorates were given only to Muslims and Sikhs.
On his return from the first conference, Ambedkar was again met by an
impressive delegation of the Samta Sainik Dal. Before he left London, he
had purchased a printing press. The British secret police reported a visit of
his to the Daily Worker office, but the Indian police replied that he must
only have been seeking help for the press and that he was on the black list
of both Indian and English Communists. This press was to be used for
Janata, which remained Ambedkar’s weekly newspaper throughout most of
his career.
The first conference was followed by the Congress calling off its Civil
Disobedience movement and a pact between Gandhi and Lord Irwin, then
Viceroy of India, resulting in Gandhi’s appearance at the Second Round
Table Conference with all the prestige of the national movement behind
him. It was this that led to a full-scale confrontation between Gandhi and
Ambedkar, both claiming to be the real representative of India’s
untouchables.
Ambedkar had his first personal meeting with Gandhi in August 1931 in
Bombay. It was an uncomfortable one. When Gandhi talked about what he
had done for the sake of social reform, Ambedkar responded angrily that
‘all old and elderly persons always like to emphasize the point of age’ and
accused the Congress of giving no more than formal recognition to
untouchables and wasting the funds allotted for the work. He concluded,
‘Gandhiji, I have no homeland.’ Gandhi replied that from his reports, ‘I
know you are a person of sterling worth.’ Ambedkar retorted, ‘How can I
call this land my own homeland and this religion my own wherein we are
treated worse than cats and dogs, wherein we cannot get water to drink?’
Later, in a discussion with his secretary Mahadev Desai, Gandhi admitted,
‘Till I went to England, I did not know he was a Harijan. I thought he was
some Brahman who took a deep interest in Harijans and therefore talked
intemperately’ (Keer 1990, 165–68). This reaction was revelatory of the
stereotypes about Dalits that Gandhi held. Ambedkar was called to meet
Gandhi a second time in London on the evening of 26 September, before
Gandhi’s appearance at the Minorities Committee. In spite of initial feelings
of futility, he elaborated his position for three hours, while Gandhi,
spinning, listened mutely. Gandhi’s failure to reply contrasted with his
discussions with Jinnah and disillusioned Ambedkar, who saw Gandhi’s
behaviour as ‘Chanakya niti’, an attempt simply to gauge the position of an
irreconcilable opponent.
Exactly how irreconcilable the positions were became clear during their
confrontation at the conference itself. Speaking to the Minorities
Committee on 8 October 1931, Gandhi called for its adjournment on the
grounds that no compromise could be reached and suggested that informal
consultations would solve the ‘communal problem’. Since he had already
agreed to separate electorates in his talks with Jinnah, the ‘communal
problem’ was clearly that of the untouchables.
After this speech, Ambedkar and Gandhi faced each other with emotion
and eloquence, each claiming to be the spokesperson for the untouchables.
Ambedkar stressed empowerment and political protection of the Dalits.
Gandhi, on the other hand, argued in a paternalist vein, ‘What these people
need more than anything else is protection from social and religious
persecution’ (Ambedkar 1982, 2:661). When the Minorities Committee
failed to reach a consensus, Ambedkar responded to Gandhi’s implication
that as a government appointee he could not be considered a true
representative of untouchables, arguing that, ‘I have not the slightest doubt
that even if the Depressed Classes of India were given the chance of
electing their representative to this Conference, I would all the same find a
place here’ (Ambedkar 1982, 2:661). He denied Gandhi’s claim that the
Congress represented the untouchables by noting that there was little
evidence of that anywhere in the Congress.
 Gandhi went on to make an emotional plea for his claim to represent
untouchables.
The claims advanced on behalf of the Untouchables, that to me is the unkindest cut of all. It
means the perpetual bar-sinister … I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast mass
of the Untouchables. Here I speak not merely on behalf of the Congress, but I speak on my
own behalf, and I claim that I would get, if there was a referendum of the Untouchables, their
vote, and that I would top the poll … I would rather see that Hinduism the than that
Untouchability live … I say that it is not a proper claim by Dr Ambedkar when he seeks to
speak for the whole of the Untouchables of India. It will create a division in Hinduism which I
cannot possibly look forward to with any satisfaction whatsoever … I cannot possibly tolerate
what is in store for Hinduism if there are two divisions set forth in the villages. Those who
speak of the political rights of the Untouchables do not know their India, do not know how
Indian society is today constructed, and therefore I want to say with all the emphasis that I can
command that if I was the only person to resist this thing I would resist it with my life’
(Ambedkar 1982, 2:663–64).

Here, Gandhi was speaking in religious terms, not for Indian interests; as
a Hindu and not a ‘national’ leader. Further, he was identifying Ambedkar’s
claims for empowerment with a separate identity for Dalits at the village
level—just as Muslim claims for separate electorates were being admitted
in terms of their religious identity. It was characteristic of Gandhi that
throughout his life he resisted any implication that Dalits had a separate
identity from the assumed community of Hindus.
The question of untouchable representation broke up the Second Round
Table Conference. It ended in stalemate. All the Indian representatives
returned, and both the Congress and Ambedkar attempted to rally the
support of the untouchables for their position.
Most of the known Dalit activists in the country supported Ambedkar’s
position, and most continued to do so throughout. For instance, Swami
Acchutanand of Uttar Pradesh, founder of the Adi-Hindu movement that
argued for an original egalitarian community on which conquering Aryans
imposed their caste system, toured to rally support. Hyderabad Dalit
leaders, heading a strong, if often factionalized, movement, also did so. But
M.C. Rajah, the dominant Dalit spokesman of the Madras Presidency and a
member of the Central Legislature who had originally called for separate
electorates, changed his position. He joined B.S. Moonje of the Hindu
Mahasabha, who had also originally supported separate electorates. Now
Moonje argued that separate electorates did not necessarily mean that
untouchables constituted a non-Hindu community; it would see them as
similar to Sikhs who the Mahasabha considered Hindus but who had been
granted separate electorates. Now the new Moonje—Rajah pact supported
joint electorates. It claimed the backing of Rajah’s 40,000-member
Depressed Classes Association and had the support of G.A. Gavai of
Nagpur. (Gavai’s support, however, had little mass base, which became
clear when he could do little to counter an oppressive gathering called by
Ambedkar at Kamptee, near Nagpur, on 7 May 1932.) Ambedkar then made
another trip to London at the end of May, lobbying with members of the
British Cabinet for his position. The result of all these manoeuverings was
to swing British support towards Ambedkar, and Ramsey MacDonald’s
Communal Award given on 16 August 1932 provided for separate
electorates for untouchables as well as Muslims and gave them seventy-
eight seats in the Central Legislature, along with a double vote, one in the
general electorate and one in the separate electorate.
In opposition, Gandhi announced an indefinite fast, beginning on 20
September. While Gandhi presented this protest as an attempt to arouse
Hindus against the ‘sin’ of untouchability, his focus was clearly against a
separate identity for Dalits. In a statement sent on 15 September to the
Bombay government, Gandhi stated that his fast, which ‘was resolved upon
in the name of God for His work and, as I believe in all humility, at his
call’, was ‘aimed to statutory separate electorates in any shape or form, for
the depressed classes’. It was thus a fast directed against Ambedkar.
A flurry of activity took place as Congress leaders lobbied for their
position, arranging meetings of Dalit groups to support joint electorates and
consolidating caste Hindu support. The pressure on Ambedkar became
intense, since Gandhi’s assertion that separate electorates would divide
caste Hindus and Dalits in every village was now, ironically, likely to be
proved murderously true if he should die in protest against these. On 19
September a large meeting of ‘Hindu and untouchable leaders’ was called
in Bombay, bringing together Ambedkar, Rajah and P. Baloo (the cricket
player) with Madan Mohan Malaviya, Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, M.R. Jayakar,
Sir Chimanlal Setalvad, C. Rajagopalachari, B.S. Moonje and A.V.
Thakkar, Gandhi’s main disciple in untouchable relief work. Ambedkar was
faced with a situation in which there was no alternative but to surrender,
and a final agreement, the Poona Pact, was hammered out between Sapru
and Ambedkar, and they signed it on 24 September. Gandhi then broke his
fast. There was a fairly emotional meeting, with Ambedkar making a
conciliatory speech that Gandhians described as a ‘change of heart’.
The Poona Pact replaced separate electorates with reservation in joint
electorates, but it provided for a primary election in which four untouchable
candidates would be selected. The winner would be elected from among
these in a second general election based on joint constituencies. In further
compensation for the loss of separate electorates, the number of seats given
to untouchables was nearly doubled (from seventy-eight to 148) to better
approximate their proportion of the population. Ambedkar expressed
himself as satisfied, especially since the proposal for a primary election
appeared to allow untouchables a significant voice of their own. Gandhi
went on to propose the setting up of a special organization, a kind of Anti-
Untouchability League.
Within a short time, however, the warmth of the consensus was lost. By
February 1933 Ambedkar had begun to change his mind about the system
of primaries. Untouchable candidates, he felt, could not afford two
elections; further, it would not give them any greater voice in the final
outcome. He began to agitate for a formula that would require the winning
candidate to get a certain percentage of untouchable votes even in the
general constituency. Differences of opinion were also emerging on issues
regarding the removal of untouchability. Ambedkar believed that temple
entry was a very minor issue but that social and economic issues—
including entry to public services and access to facilities like water—were
the most crucial. By 1932 the satyagraha at the Kalaram temple in Nashik,
which Ambedkar’s lieutenants had been leading, though he himself had
never personally participated, was suspended. Ambedkar was also
beginning to take an interest in peasant issues, seen in a Kolaba District
Peasants Conference held in 1934. As far as caste itself went, he wanted no
half-measures: the system itself should be destroyed. It was over this that
the major differences arose.
Ambedkar had very clear ideas about how the proposed Anti-
Untouchability League should operate. In a letter of 14 November 1932 to
A.V. Thakkar (‘Thakkar Bapa’, who was to be Gandhi’s nominee as head of
the organization), he argued that instead of ‘concentrat[ing] all efforts and
resources on fostering personal virtue by adopting a programme which
includes items such as temperance, gymnasium, cooperation, libraries,
schools, etc.’, the league should ‘concentrate all its energies on a
programme that will affect a change in the social environment of the
Depressed Classes’. Then he outlined a three-fold effort including struggles
for civil rights—access to water, schools, admission in village squares and
public conveyances—that would bring about a ‘social revolution in Hindu
society’ (Ajnat 1993). He also called for campaigns for equal opportunity
by opening up employment and programmes of social intercourse in which
caste Hindus would accept Dalits into their homes as guests or servants.
Ambedkar’s letter was ignored, never even acknowledged. Instead, in a
new inspiration, Gandhi declared that untouchables should be known as
Harijans. The name meant ‘children of God’ with a Vaishnavite implication.
*The league was named the Harijan Sevak Sangh. Ambedkar’s demands for
significant untouchable control over the new organization and for a focus on
annihilating caste were ignored. Control was to be in the hands of caste
Hindus, on the grounds that since untouchability was a Hindu sin, they had
to take the initiative in changing it. Gandhi, as a supporter of an idealized
version of Varnashrama Dharma and quite aware that many members of
Congress were supporters of much sharper versions of caste exclusiveness,
wanted its focus to be limited to issues of untouchability. The well-funded
Harijan Sevak Sangh sprang into action with campaigns focusing on
patronizing upper-caste Hindus working in Dalit slums and promoting
cleanliness, abstinence from alcohol and meat-eating and other Brahmanic
virtues—exactly the focus on personal virtue against which Ambedkar had
argued. Furthermore, Gandhi stressed that the most important item on the
league’s agenda was temple entry because it symbolized the religious
equality of untouchables, or, rather, the ending of the sin of untouchability
within Hinduism. Gandhi even renamed his paper Young India the Harijan.
Ambedkar and other Dalits protested time and again against the term
Harijan. Even the pro-Congress organizations run by Dalits themselves kept
such names as ‘Depressed Classes League’. ‘Dalit’, the term used to
translate such names into Hindi and Marathi, became prevalent about this
time. But it was not until the 1970s brought the militant upsurge of youth
movements such as the Dalit Panthers that it became generalized. ‘Harijan’
remained the dominant designation for Indian untouchables.
The issues involved in this Gandhi—Ambedkar standoff were immense.
Ambedkar stood for a more universalistic position than Gandhi. He argued
throughout the Round Table Conferences for adult suffrage and a more
unitary constitution in which the powers of the states would be minimized.
He and other Dalit leaders asserted that separate electorates for Muslims
were more dangerous than those for Dalits. An article in Bahishkrut Bharat
in 1929 criticized the Nehru Report, a major scheme outlining the
Congress’s proposal for Dominion Status. Ambedkar argued that ‘by giving
political concessions to Muslims the country will be ruined, but Brahmans
won’t …. [B]y giving concessions to non-Brahmans the country won’t be
ruined but Brahmans will be destroyed’ (Bahishkrut Bharat 18 January
1929). He concluded that Moonje and the Hindu Mahasabha, who
originally supported separate electorates, were more progressive than
Gandhi. It may be that in the end Dalits failed to win separate electorates
simply because they had less independent mobilizing power than Muslims.
Nevertheless, as Ambedkar saw it, the Congress’s acceptance of separate
electorates to Muslims but not Dalits was not simply partisan but
Brahmanic.
Gandhi’s position and his championing the cause of ‘Harijan uplift’ work
within the Congress added to his stature as a national leader. He made
Harijan work a part of the Congress’s programme, a commitment to reform
that gave a certain benevolent aura that helped the Congress gain a base
among Dalit voters. It also had important organizational results. Along with
khadi, it provided an action programme to occupy Congress volunteers in
‘constructive work’ when the waves of anti-British struggle were at a low,
maintaining a national network of cadre.
But Gandhi’s entire approach was paternalistic, as was perhaps to be
expected of caste Hindu reformism. He rejected Ambedkar’s claim to
represent untouchables as a separate group because he believed that they
were an inseparable part of his main community. This community was not
really the ‘Indian nation’, because he did not apply the same criteria or the
same emotion to Muslims, recognizing that Muslims had to be integrated
into an Indian national community by a very different process. Why not
untouchables? Because, to put it most starkly, for Gandhi they were already
an inseparable part of the community as Hindus. It was because he wanted
to keep untouchables as part of a Hindu community that he strongly refused
separate political representation. In sum, he envisioned the Indian nation as
being constituted of religiously defined communities.
Gandhi was thus a Hindu nationalist in his own way, one who saw being
a Hindu as a crucial national feature. It pervaded his praxis, his politics, his
defence of an idealized Varnashrama Dharma, his evocation of ‘Ram Raj’
as the ideal India. Gandhi could not separate his political leadership from
his understanding of himself as a Hindu. While he maintained his right to
interpret the Hindu scriptures in any way he wanted, he took for granted
their sacredness. The interpretation of Ram as an ideal ignored the reality
that the story in fact depicted a feudal patriarchal king who sacrificed his
wife to the needs of rule and, more important to Dalits, kills the Shudra
ascetic Shambuk to save the life of a Brahman. Similarly, the interpretation
of the Gita as a manifestation of non-violence ignores the reality that its
purpose is to convince Arjun to go to war.
At a personal level also, the fast represented a failure of non-violence. In
fact Ambedkar posed a unique problem to Gandhi’s whole non-violent
methodology. Ambedkar was not a colonial ruler whose inner guilt or
suppressed psychological tendencies made him vulnerable to universalistic
and moral appeals; he was a leader of the most oppressed group within
Indian society, and one who was perhaps uniquely free from the sense of
shame injected into most untouchables by orthodox Hinduism. Gandhi
could also not appeal to a genuine latent identity with Hinduism. What was
left was only external pressure: though directed against Ambedkar, the
pressure that came through the fast-to-death was one brought by Gandhi’s
caste Hindu followers—the fear of a wide village backlash against Dalits.
As a result, this fast at least genuinely represented a kind of moral
blackmail, and it was this that undoubtedly made Ambedkar’s own
bitterness so strong. While a huge and energetic involvement with the work
of ‘untouchable uplift’ and temple entry followed on Gandhi’s part, he
never had a personal reconciliation with Ambedkar. His later comments,
especially at the time of his conversion, reveal his own sense of bitterness.
Later, in What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables,
Ambedkar unleashed a bitter polemic on how the electoral system set up by
the Poona Pact meant that the untouchables elected in reserved seats would
be controlled by the caste Hindu majority who voted them into office
(Ambedkar 1990, Vol. 9). The Poona Pact remained a symbol of caste
Hindu domination. In the 1980s, the rising Dalit leader Kanshi Ram,
beginning a career, targeted it with demonstrations on 24 September as
inaugurating the chamcha age, the era of dependence (Kanshi Ram 1982).
While his Bahujan Samaj Party sought to overcome this by uniting Dalits
and other Shudra castes, the issues of electoral representation remain. In
multi-caste constituencies with only one winner, it is the majority group that
decides which Dalit candidate is elected. At the very least, this put severe
limits on the ability of Dalits to operate within the framework of a high-
caste-controlled party system.
The attitude towards caste was only a part of the deep-seated differences
in Gandhi’s and Ambedkar’s socio-economic visions. Gandhi was anti-
industrial and idealized a romanticized village India, where people had
limited needs and happily worked in their traditional occupations. To
Ambedkar, villages were ‘cesspools’ that harboured caste oppression and
social and economic backwardness. This had been clear since his earliest
article on smallholdings in agriculture. Speaking on a village panchayat bill
in the Bombay Legislative Council on 6 October 1921, he argued that it was
a ‘very dangerous system … I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that
[these rural republics] have been the bane of public life in India’
(Ambedkar 1982, 2:106). This was, he said, because their ‘local patriotism’
left no room for national identification or civil consciousness. For the
Depressed Classes, village society meant dependence. In contrast, it was the
urban, industrial society hated by Gandhians that represented a way out for
Dalits.
With these major differences, the confrontation between Ambedkar and
Gandhi did not end with the Poona Pact and the new upsurge of
untouchability work in the Congress. Rather it surfaced inevitably once
again over the issue of religious identity when Ambedkar and his followers
vowed to give up Hinduism.
 Four

‘I will not the a Hindu!’

 The Conversion Shock

Ambedkar had not begun his political career with a focus on religion or a
concern with rejecting Hinduism. His dedication to study was focussed on
economic and social issues. His earliest essay on caste, written in 1916, did
not analyse it as irrevocably linked to Hinduism; it argued that Manu had
only justified a system that had previously come into existence. Ambedkar’s
family was conventionally religious and he himself had a rather light-
hearted attitude to some of the ritual requirements of a traditional life cycle.
For instance, when he invited Mahar students for the first celebration of his
father’s shraddh or death memorial, he had Ramabai serve them mutton for
dinner on the grounds that this was what they missed most from home.
Conventions also seemed irrelevant to him at Ramabai’s funeral ceremony,
when he wanted her dressed in a white sari rather than a traditional green
one since this was her favourite colour. There is also not much evidence
from his early years of any great turmoil on religious-philosophical issues,
of questioning the existence of God or of defiance of traditional religious
ideas. He did not see religion as greatly relevant.
He made this clear to all. While he had taken a nominal leading role in
the satyagraha unleashed against the Kalaram temple in Nashik, the actual
organizing was done by his lieutenant, the energetic B.K. ‘Dadasaheb’
Gaikwad. After the initial march, Ambedkar did not take part directly in the
satyagraha, and on 5 March 1934 in a letter to Gaikwad he wrote
I did not launch the temple entry movement because I wanted the Depressed Classes to
become worshippers of idols … or because I believed that temple entry would make them
equal members in and an integral part of Hindu society … [but] only because I felt that that
was the best way of energizing the Depressed Classes and making them conscious of their
position (Ajnat 1993, 55–56).

Instead of simply becoming part of the existing structure, he felt Hindu

society and Hindu theology needed ‘a complete overhauling’ and the Dalits
should ‘concentrate their energy and resources on politics and education’
(Ajnat 1993, 55–56).
 Religion, however, had become interwoven with Indian national identity
in a distorted form as a result of processes taking place under colonialism.
Though the Congress was making an effort to appear as a secular, multi-
religious body, an all-pervasive construction of Hinduism had begun in the
nineteenth century. In fact, before the colonial period, ‘Hindu’ did not
designate a religious identity but was a reference to the area east of the
Indus River, which became known as ‘Hindustan’ or ‘Al-Hind’. The term
‘Hindu’ was rarely used in a religious sense, even under Muslim
domination. Though conflicts clearly existed between Muslims and those
following Brahmanic caste systems, these were most often seen in ethnic
terms—as frequent references to ‘Hindu-Turk’ illustrate. But a powerful
nationalistic reinterpretation began under colonialism. The broadening of
the old Brahmanic religion, with an insistence that all the sects had their
unity in a kind of Vedanta, that they all flowed from the fount of the Vedas,
emerged as an ideology adhered to by almost all upper-caste intellectuals.
Reformers argued that the worst aspects of caste and patriarchy had not
been known in the Vedas and were against the ‘Shastras’; their
organizations proclaimed their loyalties to ancient Vedic traditions in their
very names—Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, Prarthana Samaj. When they
debated with the orthodox, they did so arguing from the same scriptures.
The definition by V.D. Savarkar, considered a major founder of the
Hindutva philosophy, that a Hindu was ‘someone who accepted India as his
holy land and his fatherland’ made explicit what almost everyone assumed.
Hinduism was in a unique sense a national religion; logically, therefore,
Muslims and Christians were foreigners, perhaps descendants of Indian
blood but followers of alien religions.
The divisions within the nationalist elite were not over this identity but
over how to link it with politics. Those who eventually mobilized within
such organizations as the Hindu Mahasabha wanted a direct link, with India
defined as a ‘Hindu nation’. Those who began to formulate a ‘secular’
identity projected India as made up of ‘communities’ of religions (Hindu,
Muslim, Christian, etc.) and the Congress as an organization representing
all of them. Nevertheless, they did not challenge the way in which the
Hindu identity was being presented. This was seen in Gandhi’s assumption
that untouchables were ‘Hindus’. And even in Nehru’s presentation of
Indian history in The Discovery of India, which half-heartedly justified
caste as a harmonious social system and described the Vedas as the origin of
Indian culture, seeing Hinduism emerging from the time of the Magadha
Empire as a nationalistic reaction to Alexander’s invasions. It was only
within the framework of the more radical wing of the non-Brahman
movements, and the emerging Dalit movements that a more thorough
cultural challenge to the growing equation of Indian and Hindu began to
take place. Dalits generally disassociated themselves from the new
Hinduism. And, after the events of 1930–32 made it clear to Ambedkar that
this meant an ongoing subordination, he began to question even more
radically the religious identity itself.
But as these issues began to preoccupy him in the years immediately
following the 1932 events, turmoil and tragedy dogged his personal life. His
law practice never provided him with adequate financial support, and in
spite of supplementing it with teaching first at the Botliwala Institute and
then from 1928 as a professor at the Law College, he found it hard to
manage. His expenses on books and dedication of time to the movement
remained the despair of the women who were trying to manage his family
life. In later years he would lament that he had neglected the health of
Ramabai and his son Yashwant, who was afflicted with rheumatism. He
frequently vowed that one day he would earn enough to send them to
London for treatment. But this changed little of the reality of family illness.
On 26 May 1935 Ramabai passed away at the age of forty. Ambedkar was
left bereft and in some despair. The provincial elections were forthcoming,
and it was expected that, with both the Justice Party in Madras and the Non-
Brahman Party in Maharashtra fading, the main contender would be the
Congress, with only the Muslim League offering some opposition. Thus he
began to broach the notion of quitting politics. The Times of India even
published news of this impending political retirement on 25 July 1935.
But rather than leave politics, he engaged himself more fully On 12
October 1935 Ambedkar had been called to Nashik for a felicitation
ceremony organized by Dadasaheb Gaikwad. In accepting this, he urged
Dalits to become self-reliant, to stand on their own feet and not to depend
on him—and then remarked that they had got nothing from Hindus and that
there seemed little use in staying in the Hindu religion. At a rally that night
he gave a public call for conversion; a resolution was passed declaring that
with no results from the two big satyagrahas going on under Ambedkar’s
leadership—the Kalaram temple satyagraha at Nashik and one at Mahad for
the right to water—it was time to end them. Untouchables should become
autonomous (swatantra) from those regarded as ‘touchables’ and win their
own rights. The next day at a Bombay Presidency Depressed Classes
conference in nearby Yeola, called a Dalit Vargiya Parishad in Marathi—
one of the first recorded uses of the term ‘Dalit’—he proposed a resolution
for conversion before an enthusiastic crowd of 10,000, and declared, ‘I was
born a Hindu and have suffered the consequences of untouchability. I will
not die a Hindu.’
Strikingly, Gandhiji responded two days later through a press statement.
He called Ambedkar’s rejection of Hinduism ‘unbelievable … especially
when untouchability is on its last legs … Religion is not like a house or
cloak which can be changed at will’(Gandhi 1973, 62:376). Gandhi was
constantly concerned with the issue from then on. He reiterated the idea that
Ambedkar and others who were talking of mass conversion were treating
untouchables as a mindless herd under their control. On 22 August 1936 he
wrote in the Harijan, ‘One may hope that wc have seen the last of any
bargaining between Dr Ambedkar and savarnas for the transfer to another
form of several million dumb Harijans as if they were chattel’ (Gandhi
1976, 63:267). In a letter of 7 September to Jugalkishor Birla, he referred to
Ambedkar’s conversion as one done ‘at a stroke of the pen and without the
Harijans being consulted’ (Gandhi 1977, 64:18). Finally, on 6 November,
Gandhi depicted Dalits as mindless followers when he wrote C.F. Andrews
that ‘the poor Harijans have no mind, no intelligence, no sense of difference
between God and not-God. It is absurd for a single individual to talk of
taking all the Harijans with himself. Are they all bricks that they could be
moved from one structure to another?’
 But this mistook the reality. Although Ambedkar’s ‘religious turn’ may
have been a big change for him, for Dalits the move was no spur-of-the-
moment decision and it was not a case of blindly following a leader. Many
conversions to Islam had come by low castes being attracted to a religion of
equality. For Christian missions also, very often conversion was a collective
movement of low castes seeking self-respect. As one booklet published in
1936 by a missionary pointed out, ‘The news had been coming for some
years past, of so many village groups of untouchables asking the nearest
church or mission for a teacher, that it has been impossible to meet the
demand’ (Khairmode 1998a, 6:79). Such mass Dalit conversions, often of
whole villages or regional groups, were social movements for human rights.
The enthusiastic response to Ambedkar’s statement shows the way in which
the issue was a fulcrum of thinking. To some extent it divided the Dalit
community, with many important leaders opposing conversion and many of
the traditionally minded reluctant to take a radical step. But it fit the mood
of large sections of youth emerging in the struggles of the movement.
A period of hectic activity followed. Ambedkar toured Madras in
December 1935. There he met N. Shivraj, a man about his age and a Justice
Party member of the Legislative Council born in a well-to-do Buddhist
family who had been part of the earlier Dalit-based movement led by Pandit
Iyothee Thass. He also heard reports there of discrimination against Dalit
Christians. Shivraj was invited to preside over the Maharashtra
Untouchable Youth Conference held in Pune on 11 and 12 January 1936,
which supported the call for conversion. The necessity of gaining explicit
community backing then inspired a Bombay Provincial Mahar Conference
from 30 May to 2 June, presided over by B.S. Venkatrao of Hyderabad, and
attended by 25,000. Christian, Muslim and Sikh leaders were present, and a
wave of interest in Islam, especially of the modernist variety, was shown by
youth wearing fez or Turkish caps. Ambedkar’s speech on the occasion was
published as ‘Mukti kon pathe?’ (What path to liberation?) in Janata on 20
June. It covered exhaustive reasons why Dalits could no longer remain
within Hinduism, and among them was a reply to the Gandhian idea of
hereditary religion.
 To remain in a religion because it is ancestral is only suited to a fool. No thinking man can
take such a policy. Remaining in a situation in which one finds oneself fits an animal; it cannot
satisfy a human being. The difference between humans and animals is that animals cannot
progress. Humans can.

Following the main conference, a meeting of sants—Mahar renouncers

following the Varkari, Kabir and other traditions—was held in which the
gathered sadhus cut their knotted hair, shaved their beards and threw away
the costumes and implements of their traditions. Patitpavan Das, a sadhu
Dalit leader of Wardha district in eastern Maharashtra, later organized a
similar conference at Amraoti, which saw the burning of Hindu scriptures
and idols.
The sants’ rally was followed by one of nearly opposite composition.
Kamathipura in Bombay was the centre of prostitution, carried on mostly
by Dalits who had been channelled into it through what is known as the
devadas custom—they were muralis, jogtins and dedications of girls to god
and thus turning them into sacred prostitutes. These women held a meeting
in June after the large conference and decided to call Ambedkar, claiming
that they too were considering conversion. Ambedkar agreed and a meeting
was held at Damodar Hall on 16 June. Yet when Ambedkar proclaimed that
their profession was a shame to the Mahar community and that they must
leave it, there was an uproar, and the women poured into the streets, cursing
and yelling. Apparently, their main hope had been to convince Ambedkar to
use his influence to protect them from police harassment. The meeting
aroused one of the earliest debates on prostitution, with most caste Hindu
reformers criticizing Ambedkar for ignoring the severe economic
constraints that drove women to this profession. Ambedkar, however,
believing in self-respect over economic constraints and their ability to
choose and act, refused to see the women simply as victims. In this, he had
wide support from other Dalits.
Reaction to the conversion announcement by leaders of varying religious
groups was one of excitement. Processions of Christian, Muslim and Sikh
notables to his house in Dadar began. Widespread debate broke out among
Hindu groups. Interestingly enough, a position of open support for
conversion to Sikhism was taken by Dr Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha. In
a letter to M.C. Rajah in June 1936, Moonje declared that ‘if Dr Ambedkar
were to announce his decision that he and his followers are prepared to
embrace Sikhism in preference to Islam and Christianity and that he shall
honestly and sincerely cooperate with the Hindus and Sikhs in propagating
their culture and in countering the Muslim movement for drawing the
depressed classes into the Muslim fold’, they would support conversion to
Sikhism and listing of the ‘neo-Sikhs’ among the scheduled castes
(Khairmode 1998a, 6:147). Ambedkar responded that Muslims and
Christians had access to tremendous financial resources that the Sikhs did
not have, and so if Hindus wanted the untouchables to help Hinduism by
not going into a ‘foreign’ religion, then they should help the Sikhs in
removing their financial disabilities.
Moonje’s position was consistent with an emerging Hindutva line that
defined Indian-originated religions as part of Hinduism. Taking up Sikhism
was thus not a conversion in the true sense; it was a change of panth, not of
dharma. But Rajah strongly disagreed, replying in July 1936 to Moonje that
‘communal migration’, as he termed it, of Depressed Classes would simply
create a Sikh—Hindu—Muslim problem. Following Gandhi’s line, he
argued that this was all a matter of ‘political manipulation’ and that such
mass conversion neglected the ‘spiritual’ aspect of religion. Gandhi was
quick to use this, writing in support to Rajah on 26 July and stating that the
removal of untouchability from Hinduism was a ‘a deeply religious duty’
(Khairmode 1998a, 6:154). With regard to Sikhism, he only agreed if Sikhs
themselves accepted that they were part of Hinduism and gave up their
separate electorates.
Here Gandhi was following the orthodox line. Within the Hindu
Mahasabha group, its spokesman was Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya. For
this group, traditional Hinduism was sufficient and could be purged of
caste, and they were not ready to accept Sikhism as a substitute. From 21 to
23 October 1936, in the eighteenth session of the Hindu Mahasabha in
Lahore, the Shankaracharya as president put forth his position of supporting
conversion to Sikhism if that was what untouchables desired. On the second
day delegates from Uttar Pradesh led by Malaviya were refused recognition
as representatives, and a scuffle broke out, with those supporting Malaviya
walking out of the conference. Sikh spokesmen at the conference offered to
welcome Dalit converts, saying, ‘We beseech you to save the Depressed
Classes from embracing either Christianity or Islam, for we cannot tolerate
the idea of their adopting any foreign religion’ (Khairmode 1998a, 6:160).
Divisions within the Hindu Mahasabha itself were thus being sparked by
Ambedkar’s call for conversion.
The interest in Sikhism continued for some time. Ambedkar developed
associations with activists at the Sikh Mission and a khalsa college was
planned in Bombay. In 1935 Ambedkar went on a trip to Europe financed
by the Sikhs. He spent time in London consulting experts about the effects
of conversion on reservations, and in Rome he got a design prepared by
architects along neoclassical lines for the college. He also had his last visit
with his friend ‘F’, Fanny Fitzgerald.
As part of the interest in Sikhism, a ‘team’ of sixteen was sent to
Amritsar on 25 September 1936 for religious training. Of these their leader,
Barve, and a couple of others converted on their return and began to wander
propagating the religion. However, differences of opinion developed
between Ambedkar and his Sikh friends, possibly over the issue of control
of the conversion process and the institutions being created, and he broke
his connections with them.
Another interesting series of events took place with regard to Buddhism.
Among the prominent individual converts of the time was Dharmanand
Kosambi, whose son was to become a famous Marxist scholar. Kosambi
met Ambedkar in October 1935, and immediately afterwards went to
discuss the issue of conversion with Gandhi. Ambedkar, he told Gandhi,
was close to Buddhism, and asked for funds to build a Buddhist vihar in
Parel. Gandhi immediately turned to Jugalkishor Birla, sitting nearby, who
presented Kosambi with a cheque for Rs 17,500. Out of this came plans for
a ‘Bahujan Buddhist Bihar’ in Parel. But an initial meeting was broken up
primarily out of rivalry between two Chambhar leaders, Sitaram Shivtarkar,
who was taking part in the meeting, and his opponent Balkrishna
Deorukhkar. In any event, nothing came of the Bahujan vihar, perhaps
because Ambedkar was not ready to throw his support to anything financed
by Gandhian money.
Finally, the issue of conversion again brought Ambedkar into fierce
debate with Gandhi. In December 1935 the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, an
organization devoted to the abolition of casteism through intercaste
marriages, invited Ambedkar to the Punjab to deliver a lecture. The
organization had been founded in the 1920s by Sant Ram (1887–1988), a
Punjabi low-caste man, with the support of some prominent Arya Samaj
leaders. However, when Ambedkar sent a copy of his presidential speech in
April, it aroused an interorganizational conflict, and he was asked to make
some changes. The correspondence carried on for nearly three months, until
finally Ambedkar said that they should invite someone whose speech they
approved of. He finally had the speech printed himself. The English version
of 1500 copies quickly sold out; and Tamil, Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi,
Punjabi and Malayalam translations were made within a few years and
widely circulated, with Sant Ram himself publishing and translating the
Punjabi version. The second edition was published with a reply by Gandhi
reprinted from his weekly Harijan and a rejoinder by Ambedkar. And, so
strong was the essay, so controversial the issue—along with Ambedkar’s
appearance at a Sikh conference around the same time—that the invitation
to speak was withdrawn.
This essay, ‘The annihilation of caste’, was a bold declaration of war on
Hinduism. Its basic point was simple. In India the greatest barrier to the
advance of the untouchables was Hinduism itself. Property, wrote
Ambedkar in response to the socialists, was not the only source of power;
religion and social status also could, at various stages in history, generate
power. India needed not an economic revolution, but a social-religious one.
The political revolution led by Chandragupta was preceded by the religious and social
revolution of Buddha. The political revolution led by Shivaji was preceded by the religious
and social reform brought about the saints of Maharashtra. The political revolution of the
Sikhs was preceded by the religious and social revolution led by Guru Nanak (Ambedkar
1979, 1:44).
 Notably, this differentiated ‘reform’ from ‘revolution’. A famous essay
by M.G. Ranade in the nineteenth century on ‘The rise of the Maratha
power’ had argued that the movement—referring to the Varkaris such as
Tukaram and Dnyaneswar, plus the very different politically oriented
revivalism of Ramdas—had prepared the foundation for nationalism in
Maharashtra. Indeed, sants such as Tukaram and Cokhamela represented a
radical anti-caste voice in the social life and literature of Maharashtra.
Ambedkar had engaged in a good deal of reading of the literature of this
sant tradition during the 1920s. Not many written notes on this have
survived, but his formulation in ‘The annihilation of caste’ indicates that in
the final analysis he saw the Varkari tradition as reformist, not
revolutionary, allowing low-caste protest to be absorbed into Hinduism.
What then was needed? Hinduism itself had to be questioned because it
supported chaturvarnya, the main source of India’s social evils.
You must … destroy the sacredness and divinity with which Caste has become invested. In the
last analysis, this means you must destroy the authority of the Shastras and the Vedas … You
must take the stand that Buddha took. You must take the stand which Guru Nanak took. You
must not only discard the Shastras, you must deny their authority, as did Buddha and Nanak.
You must have courage to tell the Hindus that what is wrong with them is their religion—the
religion which has produced in them this notion of the sacredness of Caste (Ambedkar 1979,
1:69).

This was not only an assessment of Hinduism but an assessment of

Buddhism and Sikhism: at that point he considered these to be the only two
indigenous religious traditions that had defied Brahmanism in a
fundamental way. His thinking was clearly shifting away from solutions of
conversion to Christianity and Islam to the resources offered by Indian
tradition.
Gandhi’s reply came in an article in the Harijan. As a defence, it claimed
simply that untouchability was not an essential part of the Hindu scriptures.
Gandhi insisted that reason and spiritual experience were tests for accepting
anything as the word of God, but saw nothing essential in the scriptures as
traditionally defined to object to on the basis of his reason and spirituality.
He was free with his reinterpretations, but was never ready to renounce any
of the traditional scriptures, not even Manu, or to say forthrightly that
sections of these were wrong. Most significantly, in defending Hinduism, he
also defended an idealized version of caste.
Caste has nothing to do with religion … it is harmful to both spiritual and national growth.
Varna and Ashrama are institutions which have nothing to do with castes. The law of Varna
teaches us that we have each one of us to earn our bread by following the ancestral calling. It
defines not our rights but our duties … [I]t also follows that there is no calling too low and
none too high. All are good, lawful and absolutely equal in status. The callings of a Brahman
—spiritual teacher—and a scavenger are equal, and their due performance carries equal merit
before God and at one time seems to have carried identical reward before man … Arrogance
of a superior status by and of one Varna over another is a denial of the law. And there is
nothing in the law of Varna to warrant a belief in untouchability. (The essence of Hinduism is
contained in its enunciation of one and only God as Truth and its bold acceptance of Ahimsa
as the law of the human family.) (Ambedkar 1979, 1:83).

Thus Gandhi reiterated not only his belief in the four varnas but also in
svadharma, following the traditional caste duty, whether as a Brahman,
farmer, craftsman or scavenger. It was a position that was unacceptable to
militant Dalits, and Ambedkar rejected it.
For his part, after the conversion announcement, Ambedkar was in no
particular hurry. It is fairly clear that he had no inherent attraction to
Christianity or Islam, though he saw them as having vast resources to offer
Dalits. But a change of religion would have to be a process, one that would
start not only with him, but with the choices of the masses of the
community—in this case, primarily Mahars, the group he was most sure of
carrying with him. His early inclinations towards Sikhism and Buddhism
were clear from his 1936 article and from his speech at the Mahar youth
conference where he made reference to the saying of the Buddha ‘be your
own lamps’ as a guide to self-reliance. He had also named his house after
Rajgriha, the capital of Magadha where the Buddha had done most of his
preaching. But he was not a man to make choices lightly. The decision
inaugurated a period of study, both of the Hindu scriptures to clarify beyond
a doubt their role in the oppression embodied in the caste hierarchy and
then of Buddhism.
After 1932 Ambedkar never considered Gandhi a true reformer, but
rather a defender of caste-bound Hinduism, a romantic idealizing India’s
villages and seeking simply a continuation of the status quo, dressed up a
bit, but without fundamental change. He pronounced his verdict in harsh
terms in a 1939 lecture on ‘Federation versus freedom’. ‘In my mind there
is no doubt that the Gandhi age is the dark age of India. It is an age in which
people instead of looking for their ideals in the future are returning to
antiquity’ (Ambedkar 1979, 1:352).
 Five

‘Against capitalism and Brahmanism’

 Years of Class Radicalism

Bhils, Gonds, Dravids, their Bharat was beautiful.

They were the people, the culture was theirs, the rule was theirs;
The Aryas infiltrated all this, they brought their power to Bharat
And Dravidians were suppressed …
Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, all became owners
Drinking the blood of slaves, making Shudras into machines.
The Brahmans, Kshatriyas and banias got the ownership rights …
Congress, Hindu Mahasabha, Muslim League, are all agents of the rich.
The Independent Labour Party is our true home …
Take up the weapon of Janata,
Throw off the bloody magic of the owners atrocities.
Rise workers! Rise peasants! Hindustan is ours,
Humanity will be built on labour,
This is our birthright.
—Kamalsingh Baliram Ramteke,
Janata 21 June 1941

The enthusiastic mass response to Ambedkar’s renunciation of Hinduism

not only kept him involved in politics but also drove him further in the
direction of radicalism. This was to become an all-encompassing, socio-
economic radicalism. In 1936 he formed his first political party to represent
the Dalits’ cause directly in the forthcoming elections. It was not a party
with a specific caste but rather one with a working-class identity: the
Independent Labour Party (ILP).
Its programme, published in Janata, was a social democratic one, as
advanced as any socialist programme of the time. It accepted the ‘principle
of state management and ownership of industry wherever it was in the
interest of the people’, and it promised to ‘amend or alter any economic
system that was unjust to any class or section of the people’. It promised to
bring legislation to regulate the employment of factory workers, including
fixing their work hours, making payment of adequate wages and providing
bonus and pension schemes. It promised a general scheme of social
insurance. It also proposed legislation ‘to protect agricultural tenants from
the exactions and evictions by landlords in general and in particular the
tenants under (a) the khoti system and (b) the taluqdari system’, that is, the
forms of zamindari prevalent in the Konkan region of Bombay and the
Vidarbha region of the Central Provinces (Janata 8 August 1936).
Ambedkar’s swing to class radicalism had been forecast in 1930 in his
speech at the Depressed Classes Conference in the change of name of his
biweekly from Bahishkrut Bharat to Janata. Published regularly from then
on, under the editorship of G.N. Sahasrabudhe, Janata began to feature lead
articles with large headlines targeting the atrocities of capitalists and
landlords. Articles covered not only Dalit conferences and meetings but
also working-class strikes and peasant uprisings, which were occurring with
more regularity. Poems illustrated the radical thrust of the Dalits’ aspiration
in a combination of class and anti-caste rhetoric.
The growing presence of the socialist and communist left in India’s
workforce underlay this political evolution. Marxism had been a subject of
commentary and debate among the Dalit political cadre from the beginning,
seen in articles in the Bahishkrut Bharat and Janata that analysed Marxist
theory and communist policy. There was also pressure for radicalism from
the Dalit base itself, for the Mahars were primarily tenants, peasants and
workers. Many dedicated working-class activists rose from these, such as
L.N. Hardas of Nagpur, who organized beedi workers and campaigned as
an ILP candidate until his early and tragic death at thirty-five. A radical
position appealed not only to such men and women but also to a group of
young caste Hindus who began to associate themselves with Ambedkar.
In the August 1937 elections the ILP put up eighteen candidates in
Bombay Province, twelve in reserved seats and six in general seats.
Fourteen candidates were put up in the Central Provinces. Fifteen men were
elected in Bombay—one Matang, one Holar, three Kayasthas and ten
Mahars. At the national level, the Congress took the majority of votes in
1937, with 711 of 1585 provincial election seats and absolute majorities in
five provinces. It won eighty-one out of 138 reserved seats nationally. Yet in
the regions where Dalits were organized in their own parties, they
succeeded in shutting out the Congress in the reserved seats. In Bombay
Province the Congress won only five of the reserved seats, almost entirely
in non-Marathi-speaking areas. In the Central Provinces, of nineteen seats,
the Congress again won five, in Hindi-speaking areas. In Bengal, where the
Namshudras and Ragvanshis had begun to mobilize and formed an alliance
with the Muslim Krishak Prajak Party, the Congress could win only six of
thirty reserved seats. In the Madras Presidency, however, where the
untouchables remained disorganized and the Justice Party weakened, the
Congress won twenty-six of the thirty seats. Although the elections
represented an overall victory for the Congress, the results showed that the
other political forces still held considerable sway. In particular, while the
non-Brahman movements in both Bombay and Madras showed signs of
weakening, Dalit and Muslim mobilization was rising. For instance, in
Bombay Province the ILP was now the main opposition party.
Party winners also showed the nature of Ambedkar’s support base.
Among caste Hindus, the predominance of Kayasthas was striking. They
would become the main group of Ambedkar’s upper-caste supporters. As a
literate, educated and fairly well-to-do community, they were opposed to
Brahmans who traditionally considered them Shudras. (Among the well-
known pamphleteering supporters of the non-Brahman movement was
Keshavaram Sitaram Thakre, whose son Balasaheb Thackeray became the
leader of the semi-fascist Shiv Sena in the late twentieth century.)
Ambedkar continued to have a few lifelong Brahman friends and
supporters, but they were exceptions rather than the rule.
Similarly, the list of victors showed that the ILP was fundamentally a
Mahar-based party. Mangs (Matangs), the other large untouchable
community in Maharashtra, were poorer and more backward; they produced
few activists and little mass backing for the movement. The other major
untouchable group, the Chambhars (leather-workers) were, unlike the
Chamars of North India, a relatively small group in Maharashtra and a bit
better off. Generally, their living quarters were considered ‘inside the
village’, as opposed to those of Mahars and Mangs who were ‘outside the
village’. Ambedkar had numerous Chambhar supporters, but they remained
individualistic and wavering. The earliest, Sitaram Shivtarkar, was
controversial among Ambedkar’s Mahar followers and left after the
conversion slogan. Another Chambhar leader, Balkrishna Deorukhkar
(1884–1947), was a rival of Shivtarkar and joined the ILP only after the
latter left Ambedkar. The most important Chambhar activist was P.N.
Rajbhoj (1905–84), who joined the movement at the time of the Bahishkrut
Hitakarni Sabha, was attracted by Gandhi and went to the Congress for a
period before returning to Ambedkar for good in 1942 at the time of the
Scheduled Caste Federation (SCF).
Almost every region in India has two major and competitive Dalit castes,
and almost everywhere the social base of the Dalit movement was
established among the larger and more economically and educationally
advanced of these. The Chamars in North India, Malas in Andhra and
Paraiyas in Tamil Nadu provided support and leadership for the most
militant organizations, in contrast to their traditional rivals, often smaller,
poorer and less organized. These, for instance the Chuhras in the North,
Mangs/Matangas in Maharashtra and Madigas in Andhra, were attracted in
reaction to the Congress or (especially in later periods) Hindutva
organizations.
The class identity of Ambedkar’s new party became clear when the fight
against the khoti landlord system in the Konkan heated up and produced
one of the major peasant mobilizations of colonial India. Five of the elected
members of the ILP came from the Konkan, and two of them (Anantrao
Chitre and Subedhar Ghatge, a Mahar) had been active in the Mahad
satyagraha. The Konkan was one of the two areas in Maharashtra and the
only part of Bombay Presidency still dominated by a landlord system. In
this it was characteristic of the wet coastal areas of India. In the dry inland
areas of peasant cultivation, which characterized most of Maharashtra,
ryotwari systems prevailed. The khot landlords of the Konkan were
Marathas and Chitpavan Brahmans, a widespread and wealthy caste which
had its origins in this region. The tenants were Mahars, Kunbis and some
other peasant castes such as the Agris. * In the 1920s the first anti-khot
legislation was introduced by S.K. Bole, an Agri leader of the Non-
Brahman Party, and by the early 1930s tenants began to organize with
vigour. An anti-landlord struggle took place in the Konkan in the early
1930s, when Chitre along with a local Kunbi leader formed a peasants’
union, and it was declared illegal in 1932. When this ban was lifted in 1934,
the third session of the Kolaba District Peasants Conference was called on
16 December, and Ambedkar presided over it. Then in 1937 struggles again
heated up, and Ambedkar toured the Konkan to organize meetings of khoti
tenants. The 19 February 1937 edition of Janata reported a delegation of
these peasants meeting Ambedkar to ask for abolition. Ambedkar replied
that he would seek it but the Konkan peasant class must not beg from Idiots
and tyrants and rather join in militant struggle. He added that they must
counteract the false propaganda of khots and the Congress that the landlords
were their protectors. In fact, he declared, the Congress was the supporter of
shetjis, bhatjis, sawkars and zamindars.
In September 1937 Ambedkar tabled his first legislation after the
elections, a bill for abolition of the khoti system. This was accompanied by
the first march of peasants to Bombay. Shamrao Parulekar, a CKP member
of the ILP elected from the Konkan, and Chitre joined in leading this march
and they, along with the Gujarati peasant leader Indulal Yagnik and
Communist organizer S.A. Dange, were the main speakers in the final rally.
The Communists then joined Ambedkar in his campaign and held large
rallies, including one of 3000 peasants waving the red flag at Chari on 17
October and featuring Communist activists such as B.T. Ranadive and G.S.
Sardesai. Unity with Kunbis was heightened when a Kunbi leader joined
the movement at the end of the year, with the slogan Adi potoba mag
Vithoba (First our stomachs, then God), to stress unity. Meetings of 10,000
to 15,000 peasants were then held. Ironically, citing the god of the
egalitarian Varkari tradition as a symbol of the caste hierarchy that must be
put aside illustrated why Ambedkar was increasingly turning anti-Hindu:
even anti-caste Bhakti movements, including the Varkaris and the
Kabirpanthis, had been absorbed into the defence of orthodoxy.
The climax of this organizing was a march of 20,000 peasants to the
Bombay Council Hall on 12 January 1938. It was one of the biggest of the
colonial period, comparable to the figure of 15,000 claimed at the All-India
Kisan Congress rally in December 1936 during the Faizpur session of the
Congress. Slogans included ‘Destroy the khot system’, ‘Crush sowkar rule’
and ‘Long live Dr Ambedkar’. Ambedkar himself presided over the rally,
and the speakers included Chitre, Yagnik, D.V. Pradhan, another important
CKP associate of Ambedkar who was organizing municipal workers, and
two Communists. Ambedkar’s speech illustrated his growing radicalism.
Really seen, there are only two castes in the world the first that of the rich, and the second that
of the poor. Besides that there is a middle class. This class is responsible for the destruction of
all movements (Janata 15 January 1938)!

He went on to argue for organization and for awareness that the Congress
was supporting the wealthy. Then he made one of his major declarations of
sympathy for Marxism.
I have definitely read studiously more books on the Communist philosophy than all the
Communist leaders here. However beautiful the Communist philosophy is in those books …
the test of this philosophy has to be given in practice. And if work is done from that
perspective, I feel that the labour and length of time needed to win success in Russia will not
be so much in India. And so in regard to the toilers’ class struggle, I feel the Communist
philosophy is close to us (Janata 15 January 1938).

The qualification regarding social issues became clear when, on 12 and

13 February 1938, Ambedkar called a Depressed Classes workers
conference at Manmad, the railway centre of Maharashtra. Noting that this
was the first meeting of Dalits as workers, he explained that ‘social
grievances are grievances under the load of which our very manhood is
crushed’. Hence there were two enemies of the working class in India:
Brahmanism and capitalism. He charged his critics on the left with failing
to admit Brahmanism as a target. ‘By Brahmanism I mean the negation of
the spirit of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity …. [I]t is rampant in classes
and is not confined to the Brahmins alone, though they are the originators of
it’ (Khairmode 1998b, 7:88–90). Nor was opposition to Brahmanism simply
a matter of gaining social rights, such as inter-dining and intermarriage.
Ambedkar cited citizenship rights and economic opportunities as the two
major social structures of Brahmanism. Millions were denied the use of
public wells, conveyances, roads and restaurants, though all of these were
maintained out of public funds. Economic opportunities were also stratified
in terms of caste. For instance, Dalits could not be clerks, although Indian
Christian, Anglo-Indian and caste Hindu non-matriculates were regularly
employed in that capacity. Likewise, Dalit railway workers remained
gangmen and were rarely employed as porters because porters often worked
as domestic servants, and in railway workshops they were not admitted as
mechanics. He concluded noting that Marx had never seen class as a
decisive factor in social equality, and that in Europe nationality continued to
divide workers just as caste did in India. He urged the workers to support
the only political party standing for their interest, the ILP (Khairmode
1998b, 7:91).
In fact, almost without exception the left movement in India
philosophically and systematically neglected caste. The Communists
considered it an issue that would be automatically resolved in the fight for
socialism and characterized Ambedkar as a ‘petty bourgeois misleader’.
The socialists also treated caste as secondary. Nehru provides a prime
example. He wrote about feeling annoyed with Gandhi for having chosen as
a focus for his 1932 fast the incidental issue of separate electorates, though
he later marvelled at the way it energized people. Nonetheless, he continued
to believe that the basic question was economic: untouchables were a
landless proletariat. In reply to a question about caste in an interview on 4
February 1936 in London, he said, ‘Take the depressed classes, they really
are the proletariat in the economic sense; the others are the better off
people. All these matters are to be converted into economic terms, and then
we can understand the position better’ (Nehru 1975, 7:108–09). Later, in his
presidential address to the 1936 Lucknow Congress on 12 April, he
declared, ‘For a socialist [the problem of untouchability presents no
difficulties] for under socialism there can be no differentiation and
victimisation’ (Nehru 1975, 7:182). So deep was this conviction of the
primacy of economics over all other forms of differentiation such as caste,
gender and ethnicity that it is no wonder that Ambedkar became
increasingly suspicious of Indian socialists.
The neglect of caste issues had its theoretical foundations in the
philosophical assumptions of Marxism, and Ambedkar took this issue up in
an article in the Janata, originally written in 1936 and reprinted in 1938 as a
front-page article. He attacked the base superstructure analogy of Marxism.
 The base is not the building. On the basis of economic relations a building is erected of
religious, social and political institutions. This building has just as much reality as the base. If
we want to change the base, then first the building that has been constructed on it has to be
knocked down. In the same way, if we want to change the economic relations of society, then
first the existing social, political and other institutions will have to be destroyed.

He went on to argue that to build the strength of the working class, the
mental hold of religious slavery would have to be destroyed; thus,
eradicating caste was the precondition of a united working-class struggle
(Janata 25 June 1938). Destruction of caste was taken as the main task of
the ‘democratic stage’ of a two-stage revolution. The article severely
criticized the Congress socialists (who at this time included the
Communists and whose policy was to bring the left within the Congress)
and Nehru, arguing that the fight against untouchability would have to be
built without their help. Both articles and poems published in the Janata
(such as the one cited at the opening of this chapter) illustrated the
combining of anti-caste and class radical themes.
Ambedkar’s movement-level alliance with Communists took another turn
during a major industrial dispute. In an effort to check the growing
influence of Communists and other radicals, the Congress ministry of
Bombay Province introduced an Industrial Disputes Bill before the
legislature. This bill, the first of many ‘Black Acts’ against the working
class, made conciliation compulsory and, under very ill-defined conditions,
strikes illegal. With an eloquent defence of the right to strike ‘as simply
another name for the right to freedom’, Ambedkar took the lead in
condemning it. In one of his several speeches against the bill, he argued on
15 September 1938 that ‘it should really be called the Workers Civil
Liberties Suspension Act’ because ‘[u]nder the conditions prescribed by
this Bill there is no possibility of any free union growing up in the country’.
He went on to call it a ‘bad, bloody and brutal’ piece of legislation
(Ambedkar 1982, 2:232).
Shamrao Parulekar, an ILP member who was about to join the
Communist Party and who had attended a conference of the International
Labour Organization in Geneva and returned to India on 8 September 1938,
called for a one-day strike. Ambedkar then announced that the strike would
be organized by the ILP’s executive committee. The council of action
formed for the strike included the ILP, the Communists and moderates,
while socialists and Royists disassociated themselves from it on the grounds
that it was an anti-Congress political strike.
Held on 7 November, the strike was a historic event for the Bombay
working class. Leaders of various organizations took part in mobilizing
workers, with Ambedkar supported by his 2000-strong Samta Sainik Dal.
Their efforts culminated in a public rally of over one lakh addressed by
Dange and Ambedkar. There was total participation of Dalit workers,
including not only those among the most militantly organized textile
workers but also Dalit municipal workers. The event turned violent, and
clashes with the police left 633 workers injured and two dead, including a
Mahar member of the ILP, Bhagoji Waghmare. Their sacrifice was hailed
afterwards in Ambedkarite jalsas using the tamasha tradition, which had
first been made a radical cultural weapon by the Satyashodhak movement.
In Bombay, Ambedkar joined a procession and meeting organized by the
Communist-Party-led labour unions in honour of the dead workers.
Speakers stressed that the two had died in a struggle that would not end
without the establishment of workers’ rule.
The ongoing contentious issue was Mahar watan, which brought Dalits
into renewed conflict with the British government. They demanded the
transfer of watan lands into ordinary ryotwari holdings, on which the owner
would pay land revenue but have full control over the land, while any
services they performed would be for wages. The government refused their
demands, citing cost as the reason. One estimate was that it would cost Rs
30 lakh for the labour performed by the Mahar watandars. Throughout
1939-40 Ambedkar organized meetings of Mahar and Mang watandars and
threatened militant anti-government struggles if there was no response.
With some electoral and mass movement success behind him, Ambedkar
turned to the task of building a broad political front that would be an
alternative to the Congress. This meant looking to Dalit movements in other
parts of India, to non-Brahman trends everywhere, to Muslims and other
minorities, and to autonomously rising working-class and peasant
movements.
In western India the effort was hampered by the fact that the non-
Brahman political thrust in Bombay Province was dying away as young
leaders like Keshavrao Jedhe and Dinkarrao Javalkar led a movement into
the Congress. Janata carried an editorial on 9 October 1937 against this
break-up, lamenting the lack of great leaders as in the days of Phule and
Shahu Maharaj. Ambedkar felt that the non-Brahmans were being
politically naive. In a speech on the memorial day of the Mahad satyagraha,
he said, ‘Mahars have now become conscious; speaking of Maharashtra
only, only the Brahmans and Mahars understand politics’ (Janata 30 March
1940). The Marathas would become slaves of the Congress, he predicted.
Finally, he was quoted in the Bombay Sentinel of 14 July 1942 as saying
that the Non-Brahman Party had in it the germ of the great principle of
democracy: ‘… [B]y breaking up the party the non-Brahmans have
committed political suicide’ (Government of Maharashtra 1982, 252–53).
Now in its strongholds of Bombay and the Central Provinces, with the Non-
Brahman Party gone, the ILP was more or less politically isolated.
At the national level things were slightly different. Though the Congress
had emerged from the 1937 elections with 711 of 1585 provincial Assembly
seats and absolute majorities in five provinces, its dominance was not
unchallenged. Opposition parties included a number of regional Muslim-
based parties such as the Krishak Praja Party in Bengal, which was allied
with the Namshudras, the main Dalit group of the region, as well as the
Unionist Party in the Punjab, which brought together mainly both Hindu
and Muslim Jat farmers and had won the support of Mangoo Ram’s Ad-
Dharm Movement. Furthermore, peasant movements were developing
outside the Congress’s control.
The natural ally on a national scale would have been the non-Brahman
movement in Madras Presidency, the Justice Party. This was the most
powerful opposing party in the country for a long time, and its ideology was
in many ways similar to Ambedkar’s, but its influence was faltering in the
1930s. A new party, the Self-Respect Movement of Periyar (E.V.
Ramasamy), was rising from outside the party and emerging as a vigorous
force friendly to Ambedkar. A 1931 editorial in Periyar’s paper Kudi Arasu
had condemned Gandhi’s opposition to separate electorates, and members
of the Justice Party and Self-Respect Movement held protest meetings at
that time and passed resolutions asking for implementation of the
Communal Award. Periyar himself came to Bombay in January 1940 after
leading a successful anti-Hindi agitation, and he held meetings in the Tamil-
speaking settlements of Dharavi, a large slum area of Bombay. There he
argued that Brahman domination had kept the masses under religious,
economic, political and social subjugation and that the way out was to
create a separate Tamil Nadu Province. Periyar held talks with Jinnah and
Ambedkar at this time.
Yet in Madras Province itself alienation was growing between the
untouchables and non-Brahman majority castes. Periyar could get little
Dalit support. M.C. Rajah was still the most influential leader, while
Ambedkar’s supporters N. Shivraj and T.S. Srinivasan had little mass base
of their own.
Ambedkar also showed interest in the rising kisan movement in the
country. The Janata ignored efforts by Jagjivan Ram to form a Bihar State
Agricultural Labourers League to counter the Bihar Kisan Sabha and
reported on the kisan movement instead. At the end of December 1938
Ambedkar had a dramatic personal meeting with its leader, Swami
Sahajanand, to discuss the Congress’s position. Sahajanand believed that
peasants needed an independent class organization and should join the
Congress as a broad anti-imperialist organization. This was the basic
Communist–socialist line of the time. Ambedkar tried to counter it by
saying that the Congress was only bolstering the interests of capitalists and
others, while its support to the ‘Federation’ proposed in the Government of
India Act of 1935 was undemocratic.
Ambedkar wanted to build up an anti-Congress front on the grounds of
opposition to Federation, that is, to project a more democratic structure for
independent India. He put forward his position in a speech, ‘Federation
versus freedom’, to the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune
on 29 January 1939. He stressed the undemocratic nature of the proposed
federal structure, which kept paramountcy, that is, relations with the
princely states, as a reserved subject and left the princes with inordinate
powers. He criticized the Congress for a lack of any clear policy regarding
the structure of an independent India, noting that at the Second RoundTable
Conference Gandhi ‘was so busy getting the British to recognize him as the
dictator of India that he forgot that the important question was not with
whom the settlement should be made but what would be the terms of the
settlement.’ Gandhi, said Ambedkar, ‘forgot that he was attending a
political conference and went there as though he were going to a Vaishnava
Shrine singing Narsi Mehta’s songs’ (Ambedkar 1979, 1:281–353). To
Sahajanand and other pro-Congress mass leaders, Ambedkar argued that if
Congress opposed the federation, then he would support the party; he also
offered his support to Subhas Chandra Bose if he broke away from the
Congress to form an independent party that opposed the constitutional
proposals. This was an attempt to build a radical democratic front that
would be an alternative to the Congress.
The main obstacle to the growth of such an alternative national front in
India was the Communist Party itself. The Communist and socialist left
should have been natural allies of Ambedkar, given their agreement at the
time on working-class and peasant issues. However, few of the left’s upper-
caste leaders appreciated or understood the reality of caste oppression, and
the strong economic focus of Marxism consolidated the leaders to see the
problems of Dalits and non-Brahmans as separate issues, with these
‘cultural’ issues decidedly secondary. They could understand nationalism
within a Marxist framework but not caste. The socialists had been in the
Congress from the beginning. The Communists, however, oscillated. By the
late 1930s, reacting against their earlier policy of ‘class against class’ which
had characterized all non-Communist political forces as reactionary, they
had swung to support the Congress as the major ‘anti-imperialist front’ in
India. Thus they set themselves the task of bringing all the working-class
and peasant organizations and activists under their influence into the
Congress Socialist Party (CSP). Because the CSP was officially a part of the
Congress, this meant entering the Congress and giving up attempts to form
workers’ or peasants’ parties. In Tamil Nadu in 1936 this meant bringing
many young radicals out of the Samadharma [socialist] Self-Respect
League, which they had organized and Periyar supported. In Maharashtra
they could not shake the organizational base of the ILP, but they could
deprive it of a cadre. Overall, the Communists’ policy left Ambedkar and
the Dalit forces he represented isolated, unable to do anything to build a
front to counter the Congress. Just as Gandhi was Ambedkar’s main
opponent in the nationalist movement, so the Communists proved to be the
undoing of Ambedkar’s effort to transcend the Congress.
 Six

‘We can be a nation, provided …’

 War, Peace and Pakistan

Slowly, as the world headed into the Second WorldWar, the class struggles
of the 1930s began to fade, their place taken by the national solidarity in the
face of war and religious-communal solidarity. India was increasingly seen
as a country constituted not by contending castes or classes but by widely
differing religious communities, and increasingly this depiction was
becoming a reality, with differences turning into conflict and contradiction.
As contention between Hindus and Muslims increased, the idea of the
creation of Pakistan, a pure homeland, became a beacon of hope for
Muslims.
Casting its shadow over all global conflicts was the mighty confrontation
taking shape between the fascist and democratic capitalist nations. In the
face of a growing nationalist movement and Japanese aggression
threatening its eastern borders, the question of the role of India in the
looming battle began to preoccupy the political leadership. The Congress
wanted to take advantage of Britain’s need for India as a base for military
action and financial help. Most in it wanted to ignore war needs altogether
and simply fight for independence. A few, like Nehru, argued ineffectually
for conditional support to the anti-fascist war effort. Outside the Congress,
followers of the still-revered Subash Chandra Bose actively took the
support of Nazi Germany and Japan to mobilize an armed struggle.
Communist policy veered according to the situation of the Soviet Union.
After Stalin’s pact with Hitler, the Communists characterized the war to be
one between two sets of imperialists and urged the Congress to militant
opposition. Once Germany attacked, however, the party declared the fight to
be a ‘people’s war’ and openly supported the British. These oscillations left
them with little credibility in India. Those in the Congress, including
Gandhi, who wanted to solely focus on their own struggle, gained the upper
hand.
In September 1939 Viceroy Lord Linlithgow proclaimed a state of war
between India and the Nazi forces. Though the Congress was invited for
discussions with the British rulers, its demands for a significant transfer of
power before the war were not met, and the Congress ministries in the
provinces resigned in protest on 22 December. Their resignation sparked
Hindu-Muslim antagonism, for the Congress ministries had thoroughly
alienated Muslims in the regions of their dominance, and Jinnah, the
unlikely, suave leader of the Muslim League, responded by declaring the
day of resignation a ‘Day of Deliverance’ from Congress tyranny.
Ambedkar quickly announced his support, and ILP activists took part in the
celebrations. The mood was the same among Dalits elsewhere, not only in
Bengal, where they had a political alliance with Muslims, but also in the
Madras Presidency, where M.C. Rajah announced that Dalits supported the
move.
Ambedkar himself had no hesitation in supporting the war effort. This
followed what had always been his position regarding the nationalist
movement. Although he believed independence would provide the only
political framework within which oppressed groups could get real power, he
was more concerned with what kind of nation would come to exist
afterwards than with the process of gaining independence. He saw the war
against fascism as a life-and-death democratic struggle. For him, an
independence coming on the basis of Britain’s defeat by fascists could
never lead to any true equality.
It was with regard to Pakistan, and not questions of caste, that he was
doing his most intense political thinking of the time. ‘I was the philosopher
… of Pakistan,’ he was to say later. He wrote a lengthy book first published
in 1940 as Thoughts on Pakistan and republished as Pakistan and the
Partition of India in 1946 (reprinted in Ambedkar 1990, Vol. 8). This was
his first major essay in social history and philosophy. In it he put the issue
with analytical sharpness and a logic that led to the conclusion that the
creation of Pakistan was inevitable, not because states had to be based on
religion but because the developing political mood of Muslims made it so.
Moreover, it would be in the interest of not only Muslims but also Hindus,
since the alternative of autonomous power to Muslim-majority regions
would make a centralized state impossible. He presented the argument
dialectically, first giving the Muslim case for Pakistan, next the Hindu case
against it, and then analysed the arguments in a tone of neutrality. Among
the points he discussed were the communal composition of the army and its
significance in an independent country, a subject avoided by almost
everyone else.
But the question that pervaded the analysis was the definition of
nationalism. In the strict sense, he argued, India could not be called one
nation. It is true, Ambedkar noted, that in the time of Hsuan Tsang, the
famous seventh-century Chinese traveller, Punjab, Sindh and Kashmir and
even Afghanistan were classified as part of India. Muslim invasions,
however, had changed this irrevocably. First, destruction and forcible
conversion had left a bitterness between Hindus and Muslims so deeply
seated that a century of political activity under colonialism had not
assuaged it. Second, ‘the deep deposit of Islamic culture over the original
Aryan culture in this north-west corner of India’ was decisive; compared to
it, ‘the remnants of Hindu and Buddhist culture are just shrubs’ (Ambedkar
1990, 8:65). If culture was to be the basis of a nation, as the Hindu
nationalists avowed, then they must concede that Muslims had every right
to demand a national political framework in the areas of Islamic cultural
hegemony. The predominance of Hindu culture ten centuries earlier could
not determine the present. The India of today was indeed one of widely
different religious and cultural identities with a history of some conflict.
Ambedkar, however, did not believe that nations had to be necessarily
based on a common religious-cultural identity; there were in fact several
examples of multicultural nations. ‘If Muslims want to be a different nation,
it was not necessarily because they have to be but because they want to be.’
He noted, ‘The view that seems to guide Mr Jinnah is that Indians are only
a people and that they can never be a nation’ (Ambedkar 1990, 8:353).
Nevertheless, he argued that a people could grow into a nation. It was a
question of choice, and he did not see separatism as a good choice. A Hindu
Raj along with a Muslim Raj could not be a solution ‘since Hinduism is a
menace to liberty, equality and fraternity’ (Ambedkar 1990, 8:358). But the
strength of Hindutva was also a function of reaction to Muslim political
assertion. If Muslims did not press their political identity but instead
emphasized common cause with the majority of Hindus, they could
maintain the unity of the nation. Ambedkar cited as examples the case of
most Indian provinces between 1920 and 1937, when Muslims worked for
reforms with non-Brahmans and Dalits. Thus rejection of the Brahmanic
claim to hegemony could be the basis of unity for the majority of people
including the religious minorities, non-Brahmans and Dalits.
But given the Muslims’ stubborn demand for Pakistan, Ambedkar argued
that it should be conceded; the alternative could only be freezing Muslim
and Hindu communal identities in the political framework of separate
electorates and provincial autonomy that would be necessary to keep
Muslims in India. Muslims, however, should concede to Hindustan the
Hindu majority areas of Punjab and Bengal. Once Pakistan was created, the
Muslims in India would have no motivation for a separate political identity
and would make common cause with Dalits and lower-class Hindus. This
would also take away much of the basis for a Hindu Raj.
In his analysis of Islam, Ambedkar tended to exaggerate the violence
involved in the Muslim presence in India. He also neglected many elements
of common and synthetic culture, both the political symbiosis worked out
by Mughals and Rajputs and the more mass-oriented teachings of the Sufis
and sants. He was not very sympathetic to Islam, and later his book would
be used by Hindutva forces, though only by distorting his overall
arguments. By this time he was coming to believe that the destruction of
monasteries during the early Turkish Muslim conquests was the final factor
responsible for the disappearance of Buddhism in India. This does not
mean, however, that he saw Muslim conversions, even forced conversions,
in the same way that the Hindu nationalists did. Along with much of the
non-Brahman movement, he had a different perspective on conversion
because he was convinced of the discrimination and oppression involved in
Hindu culture and its caste hierarchy. This perspective had been put most
forcefully by Jotirao Phule in his 1883 Shetkarya Asud. Phule argued that
some centuries ago the Muslim rulers ‘becoming compassionate to the
lakhs of Shudras and Ati-Shudras, had forcibly made them into Muslims,
liberating them from the snare of the Arya religion, and taking them with
them as Muslims, made them happy’ (Phule 1991, 288). Like some Hindu
nationalists, Ambedkar believed there was forcible conversion of low castes
by Muslim conquerors, but unlike them, he saw this as a benefit for the
converted indigenous Muslims. Most of the non-Brahman leaders in fact
accepted the idea that Islam had mainly spread in India as an equalitarian
alternative to the oppressive caste hierarchy of Brahmanism.
Interestingly enough, this first long analytical essay on social history by
Ambedkar showed no reflection of the economic theory of history that he
claimed to have found so useful on economic issues. Rather, he ignored
economics to stress cultural and political factors. The resulting work,
though leaving out economic interests and class divisions within the
religious groups, was still a nuanced approach that assessed conflicting
claims to national ideals in relation to a sociocultural reality.
Although reviewers perceived Thoughts on Partition as an argument in
support of the creation of Pakistan, Ambedkar saw the issue as essentially
open-ended. He summarized his position in February 1940 when he noted
that he disagreed with both the Congress’s position that India was a nation
and the Muslim League’s that it could never be a nation: ‘My confident
hope is that we can be a nation provided proper processes of social
amalgamation can be put forth’ (Government of Maharashtra 1982, 31).
The notion that an Indian nation was not an immutable reality but a
project that had to be consciously undertaken was unique at the time. As
Ambedkar noted, it contrasted both with the growing fundamentalist
Muslim assertion that Islam provided the basis for their nationhood and
with the Congress’s faith that India was already a nation, a faith that rested
essentially on unstated assumptions that made the Hindu identity, deriving
from the ancient Vedas, the foundation of national identity. The Hindu
Mahasabha was putting the case for a Hindu Raj most forcefully, but the
underlying assumptions were accepted by a majority of Congressman
(Omvedt 2002). Even in the Discovery of India Nehru, who sought to be
sympathetic to Islam and recognize its contributions to Indian culture, saw
the process and resulting synthesis as within the framework of a Hindu-
Brahmanic culture that was ultimately defined as including caste and the
Vedas as the earliest books. Whereas Buddhism was universal, Nehru
suggested, Hinduism had emerged as a kind of national religion. But Nehru,
looking to economic development as the crucial factor, offered no way to
consciously build feelings of a common national identity.
In contrast, Ambedkar’s position that the nation was still to be created,
that it had to be a conscious, thought-out process, drew much from the
thinking of the non-Brahman movement. Phule too had initiated this when
he had written in his posthumously published Sarvajanik Satyadharma
Pustak that
Due to the false self-interested religion of the Aryans, the cunning Arya Bhat-Brahmans
consider the ignorant Shudras to be inferior; the ignorant Shudras consider the ignorant
Mahars to be inferior; and the ignorant Mahars consider the ignorant Mangs to be inferior …
since marriage and social relations are forbidden among them all, naturally their various
customs, eating habits, and rituals don’t match each other. How can such a conglomerate of 18
grains be united to become a “nation” of integrated people (Phule 1982, 407)?

Thus Ambedkar saw the process of creating a nation as linked to a

thorough critique of the Brahmanic aspects of Indian tradition and a
recognition of non-Brahman contributions, such as those of Buddhism, as a
basis for religious plurality. This was a position that would have required
Muslims and elite nationalists to radically modify their stands.
But there was no sign of such a broad nation-creating process in the
1940s. The Congress was not ready to challenge varnashrama or Brahman
social dominance in any fundamental way; nor were Muslims showing
much interest in the positions of the anti-caste movement. They failed to
understand that the Hindu dominance to which they were reacting was
enveloped in a Brahmanic framework which identified India as Hindu in its
most ancient cultural core, and that stamping Islam (and Christianity) as
alien religions was related to the varnashrama structures which oppressed
the low castes. In the resulting absence of a process of nation-building,
Ambedkar began to see the creation of Pakistan as inevitable. He believed
that it was possible, while the nation was still in the process of being
created, for two different religious communities to live together in the same
nation. In Thoughts on Pakistan, he cited many examples of the coexistence
of different religious and linguistic communities. Nevertheless, he noted
that Muslims were demanding so many safeguards and such a large degree
of provincial autonomy in any united India that a strong central government
would be impossible. In 1955 he would make a series of proposals before
the SCF executive committee for Muslim safeguards and a degree of
provincial autonomy that would allow a united India. But he probably did
not have much hope that they would be accepted.
The war and growing alienation between Hindus and Muslims in India
during the 1940s provided the framework in which Ambedkar and other
Dalit leaders attempted to assert themselves. In March 1942, amidst the
growing Japanese threat in Asia, Churchill appointed a new mission headed
by Sir Stafford Cripps to bring about a negotiated political settlement in
India. The Cripps Mission put forward proposals that would keep British
power for the present but offer India dominion status and a constitutional
assembly after the war. Both the Congress and the Muslim League rejected
it. Dalits also rejected it, becauses there was no mention of Dalit
representation or separate electorates. Ambedkar and M.C. Rajah were
among the Indian representatives who meet Cripps on 30 March to argue
their case, and on 3 April they sent a joint letter protesting against the lack
of representation and demanding separate electorates. The proposals, they
said, ‘are merely to place [the Depressed Classes] under an unmitigated
system of Hindu rule’ (Khairmode 1998c, 9:107).
Following the failure of the Cripps Mission, the Congress declared its
Quit India struggle in August. For over two years the country was
enveloped in serious turmoil. Mass struggle was a testimony to the inability
of the British to hold on to India and to the claim of the Congress to
represent the most significant number of conscious and mobilized Indians.
Yet it also left unresolved the most serious issue facing the construction of
an independent India, namely Pakistan. Now the country was irrevocably
split.
In spite of Dalit assertion, the British were not ready to grant the Dalits
separate electorates, but they did recognize Ambedkar’s qualities as a
political and economic thinker, and they appreciated the significance of the
caste issue. On 2 July 1942 Ambedkar was selected as one of the Indian
members of the Viceroy’s newly expanded Cabinet, and he was given the
portfolio of labour. He departed for New Delhi, finding a house on
Prithviraj Road and furnishing it with the help of his American missionary
friend, Mildred Drescher. She was a close friend who lived in Bombay and
had provided a refuge for him in her home when he visited the city and
wanted to avoid being besieged by political supplicants. Now, with her help
in setting up a household in Delhi, he was to take his place in the national
political arena.
Politically, the events of the period led to a major change for the Dalit
movement as a whole. The ILP’s broad class alliance had not borne results.
The British were questioning how Ambedkar could be a representative of
the scheduled castes when he did not have a specific scheduled caste
organization behind him. Therefore, Ambedkar held discussions with Dalit
leaders in Delhi and decided to wind up the Independent Labour Party. A
third session of the Depressed Classes Conference was called in Nagpur in
July 1942. The main conference took place on 18 and 19 July, and women
and the Samta Sainik Dal held separate meetings on 20 July. The
conference was chaired by N. Shivraj of Madras, because Ambedkar was a
member of the Viceroy’s council and so his direct political participation was
ruled out.
On 18 July, 75,000 people gathered in Nagpur. Guard duty was provided
by Ambedkar’s youth organization of volunteers, the Samta Sainik Dal,
founded at the beginning of the 1930s. By the 1940s, it had spread
throughout the Marathi region and its Nagpur organization had found an
enthusiastic leader in Waman Godbole, who established branches
throughout the city. The youth paraded in red shirts and khaki pants, with
golden belts for the leaders of the platoons and companies, a design chosen
by Ambedkar. It was with reference to these mobilized volunteers that
Ambedkar made his famous statement ‘Goats and sheep are sacrificed, not
tigers’. The militant Mahar youth in the Samta Sainik Dal were determined
to be tigers.
 The organization formed at the conference was named the Scheduled
Caste Federation. Whereas the earlier ILP had carried a red flag, now the
young volunteers sang of the blue flag of the SCF.
We will give our life for the blue flag.
Millions will bow before the blue flag.

Whatever Bhim wants, we will do.

We will see our blood flow for the blue flag!

Unlike the ILP, the SCF took shape as a genuinely national party. It drew
on the organizational accomplishments and emerging leadership of Dalit
movements that flourished in the major provinces of India in the 1920s.
Important representatives of almost every province came to Nagpur. From
Madras came leaders like Shivraj. From Bengal came Jogendranath
Mandal, emerging as the most effective leader of the large Namashudra
group. He returned to Bengal to organize the SCF there. From Hyderabad
came all the factions of the divided Mala-based Dalit movement, including
B.S. Venkatrao, a fairly wealthy contractor in the public works department
and a powerful speaker, and J. Subbiah, who was to be Ambedkar’s most
reliable lieutenant in Hyderabad. A new group came from Uttar Pradesh,
most of them men who had been inspired by the Adi-Hindu movement of
Swami Acchutanand. It was from this period that Ambedkar’s movement
widened to northern and north-west India. Finally, in Maharashtra itself, the
entire team from western Maharashtra under Dadasaheb Gaikwad and the
Vidarbha leaders arrived, with the Chambhar leader P.N. Rajbhoj quitting
the Congress to support Ambedkar. The only major leader missing was
M.C. Rajah.
Different provincial political characteristics were reflected in the different
political tendencies of these representatives. Above all, the Hindu–Muslim
divide had a varied impact on Dalits in various parts of India. While
Ambedkar himself and most northern leaders were cautious, those from
heavily Muslim areas, especially Hyderabad and Bengal, were influenced
by the call for a Muslim–Dalit alliance. Mandal and Venkatrao were pro-
Muslim. Venkatswamy ended up supporting the demand for an independent
Hyderabad state, while Jogendranath Mandal’s close relations with Muslims
resulted in his becoming the first head of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly
until, disillusioned, he returned to India and died a poor man. But all these
developments were in the future. In 1942, the SCF was clearly emerging as
a powerful voice of Dalits throughout India.
The conference took some important decisions. Its delegates found the
proposals of the Cripps Mission unacceptable and protested them. They also
declared that no constitution would be acceptable to the scheduled castes
unless it recognized that they were ‘distinct from the Hindus and constituted
an important element in the national life of India’ (Khairmode 1998c,
9:122). They called for financial provisions for primary and advanced
education, for representation in public services and government, for
separate electorates and for rural restructuring. ‘So long as the scheduled
castes continue to live on the outskirts of the village, with no source of
livelihood and in small numbers compared to the Hindus, they will continue
to remain untouchables and subject to tyranny and opposition of the Hindus
and will not be able to enjoy free and full life’ (Khairmode 1998c, 9:124).
Thus a radical change in the village system should include the
establishment of separate villages on cultivable government land as a step
towards local economic and political autonomy.
The 1942 Nagpur conference marked the beginning of a new era of
organizing. While the class radicalism of the ILP had been given up, the
national scope of the SCF indicated a new stage of the Dalit movement in
India as a whole. Movements that had begun independently in various
provinces were now coming together and asserting their presence to help
the Dalit movement emerge in the face of staunch Congress opposition as
an autonomous force at the national level. And Bhimrao Ambedkar was
their acknowledged and sole leader.
 Seven

‘The law of Manu … replaced by the law of Mahar’

 Shaping Independent India

With the SCF firmly established and his residence secured, Ambedkar
began to emerge as one of the important, if controversial, political figures of
the capital. Journalists began to visit him. Some were hostile like the pro-
Gandhi Louis Fischer, who scathingly wrote of him in a 1946 book as ‘the
bitterest man I met in India’, adding that he was ‘anti-Gandhi, pro-Pakistan
and the most pro-British Indian I encountered’ (Khairmode 1999, 8:17). In
contrast, American journalist Beverly Nicholls described him as ‘bulky,
dynamic. Very charming manners, but nervy … Seemed to be on his guard,
as though ready to parry taunts from all directions. Well after all it’s only to
be expected’ (Khairmode 1999, 8:33). Ambedkar was clearly not only as
controversial as ever, but his old trait of always being ready to take on a
verbal fight remained. He exercised it in all his discussions in the
parliamentary councils and assemblies. Frequently interrupted, often by
unfriendly comments, he responded in kind. With these skirmishes
punctuating his calmly reasoned arguments, even in parliament, he was
succeeding, almost single-handedly, in keeping the issues of caste and
untouchability in the public eye.
He was gaining recognition as a writer and prominent critic of the
Congress. This was propelled with the publication of his second major book
in June 1945, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables
(reprinted as Ambedkar 1990, Vol. 9). He had written it primarily while he
was in Bombay, working at the home of Mildred Drescher, and she had
arranged an American edition, titled People at Bay. The Indian edition was,
strikingly, dedicated to his old London friend ‘F’. The book was a bitter
attack on Gandhi and on the Congress policy which won him immediate
publicity not only in India but worldwide.
The establishment of the SCF was followed by a lull in political action.
Ambedkar left the organizational work to his lieutenants. In Maharashtra,
Dadasaheb Gaikwad served as his second in command. However, when
Gaikwad became a recruiting officer during the war, his place was taken by
one ‘Madkebuwa’, or Ganpat Mahadev Jadhav. He was unpopular, and
youth working under him revolted due to lack of pay and what they
considered his bad behaviour. Some attempted to raise a ruckus during one
of the SCF meetings. This was the beginning of factionalism that would
result in the breakup of the party after Ambedkar’s death. On his part,
Ambedkar periodically expressed his dissatisfaction with the rising
generation of educated youth, and in 1956, writing to his secretary Nanak
Chand Rattu he complained that the ‘educated few … have proved to be a
worthless lot, with no sympathies for their downtrodden brethren … Not
one of them is prepared to do social work’; they were, he said, ‘fighting
among themselves for leadership and power’ (Rattu 1997, 93).
The formation of the SCF meant that Ambedkar had to give up all
attempts to build any broad united front or engage in mass struggles on
general working-class or peasant issues. This was not due to lack of desire
but to the necessities of the times. With independence on the way and with
politics revolving around the standoff between the Muslim League and the
Congress, Ambedkar had to focus on gaining political rights for Dalits
within whatever structure was formed for an independent India.
Aside from his responsibilities as labour minister, which were
considerable, Ambedkar found time in Delhi for his extensive research and
writing. His reading was shifting to ancient Indian history, examining
particularly the relationships between caste and Brahmanism. His efforts
resulted in several unpublished manuscripts and two major books, Who
Were the Shudras: How They Came to Be the Fourth Varna in the Indo-
Aryan Society (published in 1947) and The Untouchables: Who Were They
and Why They Became Untouchables (published in 1948; the two books
were reprinted together as Ambedkar 1990, Vol. 7). Ambedkar also took
part in labour conference and saw to one immediate programme of Dalits—
promoting re-entry in the military. The exclusion that had been imposed in
the 1890s was again being challenged, as Ambedkar took up the cause and
managed to establish three Mahar battalions.
Meanwhile, Pakistan continued to be the major issue haunting India.
Ambedkar returned to the question in a speech before the executive
committee of the SCF on 6 May 1945, ‘Communal deadlock and a way to
resolve it’. In it he opposed the idea of a constituent assembly, which had
been part of the Cripps proposals, on the grounds that untouchables were
excluded from it. Instead he proposed a united India that provided
representation to all three major communities (Hindus, Muslims and
untouchables) in the executive and separate electorates with generous
representation for minorities in the provinces. Provinces were to be grouped
so that the Muslim-majority areas, mainly in what was later to become
Pakistan, would be together.
This was close to what would be the final proposal of Cripps in the last
Cabinet mission, but it was never seriously considered. The Muslim League
continued to demand Pakistan while Gandhi was now insisting that Pakistan
could not be formed except on his dead body. Events, though, were moving
inexorably towards the formation of Pakistan, and in the process Dalits
were being marginalized. With the 1942 agitation now well in the past and
with the aim of reaching some understanding in the forefront of everyone’s
mind, Congress leaders were released from jail and Lord Wavell, Viceroy
since 1943, began discussions with Nehru, Gandhi and Jinnah. These were
about forming a central government with the two main parties, and an all-
party meeting was called for October 1944. With this background,
Bhulabhai Desai negotiated with Jinnah on behalf of the Congress. They
formulated a plan to join the central government in which only the two
parties would be represented, though provision was made for communal
representation. When the Wavell Agreement was finally signed, Ambedkar
and six other members, including liberals, dissented. The SCF sent a
statement of opposition to the prime minister when it appeared that a
proposal would be accepted that would give the untouchables only one seat.
While these political negotiations were going on, Ambedkar undertook a
major initiative for Dalit education. He had long envisaged a college
oriented to Dalits; the original idea for the Sikh Khalsa College in Bombay
had been part of this. In 1945 he drew up proposals for the Peoples’
Education Society and got a promise of Rs 6 lakh from the government.
The diwan of Baroda state, however, refused an appeal for a grant of Rs 11
lakh. Nevertheless, the society was established in July 1945, and in April
1946 the Siddhartha College of Arts was founded. The Milind College was
later established in Aurangabad.
During this period Ambedkar was also taking part in the beginnings of
India’s irrigation policy. His ministry included not only the labour portfolio
but also irrigation, power and other public works. On 3 January 1945 he
addressed a joint meeting of representatives of the Central, Bengal and
Bihar governments in Calcutta on the issue of flood control. A disastrous
flood of the Damodar River in 1945 had led to the setting up of what was to
become the Damodar Valley Project. Ambedkar projected his plan as
modelled on the Tennessee Valley Project. He then set up the central
waterways, irrigation and navigation committee, with Dr A.N. Khosla, a
noted engineer, as its first chairman. Ambedkar was also involved in the
planning of the Hirakud Dam in Orissa. For all these he projected his
conception of the role of ‘big dams’ in the development of India, which
were to be multipurpose projects that would include irrigation, electricity
generation and water transport. As part of the Viceroy’s council, he was
also involved in the earliest post-war planning, as a member of the
reconstruction committee and head of the subordinate irrigation and
electricity committees. Here he had full scope to develop his views on the
significance of industrialization and the roles of electric power and
irrigation and to give a thrust to the overall economic planning of
independent India (see Thorat 1998 for the only full study of this period).
Then came the general elections of March 1945, the first Assembly
elections held in India since 1937 and the first in which the SCF was
fighting as a party of Dalits on an all-India basis. They revealed a stark
division along religious lines. The Congress swept the general
constituencies, the Muslim League captured nearly all the Muslim seats, but
the SCF could not make a showing. Almost all the SCF candidates lost,
except for two in Madras and Punjab. There were numerous reasons for
this. For one, the Congress was inclined to brook no opposition and
aggressively projected itself as the party of independence, and in many
areas this aggression included slander, intimidation and violence. In
Nagpur, for instance, the young activist Vasant Moon described how all the
Dalit polling booths were placed in caste Hindu wards. There, where the
SCF was the only political party daring to oppose the Congress, militant
resistance took place, including flag marches of the Samta Sainik Dal. The
heated atmosphere before the elections saw hatred being whipped up
against Dalits, with slogans like Maharo ke rakth piunga! (We will drink
the blood of Mahars!) and wall writings branding Ambedkar a traitor. All
this led to the eruption of what became known as ‘Mahar–Hindu’ riots. The
Mahars, led by their tough wrestlers and the squads of the Samta Sainik
Dal, made a good showing. Songs that later emerged as part of a growing
cultural movement recall this period in proud boasts, such as ‘Ask the brave
Shivaji how we fought’ and ‘We killed their young men one by one’(Moon
2001).
Besides the violence, though, and the general gerrymandering,
Ambedkar’s analysis showed how the electoral process itself had aided the
Congress victory. According to the provisions of the law resulting from the
Poona Pact, primary elections, in which only Dalits voted, were supposed to
be held in constituencies where there were more than four Dalit candidates.
These were held in only forty constituencies out of 151 and were designed
to select four candidates. In Bombay Presidency, SCF candidates had polled
28,489 votes to 5333 of the Congress and won five of twelve seats,
compared to three by the Congress. In the Central Provinces, their other
strong area, they had polled 8685 votes to 1131 of the Congress and won
eleven of twenty seats to five by the Congress. In Madras they also did well,
polling 30,199 to the Congress’s 27,838 votes and winning twenty-four
seats compared to Congress’s ten. In Uttar Pradesh, finally, a relatively new
area of organizing, they polled 3093 votes to 4101 and won five of twelve
seats compared to four by the Congress. In Bengal the greater number of
seats was captured by independents. Overall, the SCF won fifty-one seats
compared to thirty-eight by the Congress out of 168, and polled 91,595
votes compared to 1,03,449 by the Congress and 1,19,273 by independents.
It was not a bad showing, and it was clear that the SCF had considerable
strength in Bombay and the Central Provinces and was a major force in
Madras Presidency. Meanwhile, in Bengal the independently organizing
Namshudras and other Dalit groups were also resisting absorption into the
Congress.
Ambedkar’s objections to the Poona Pact—that even with reserved seats
caste Hindu votes would dominate in general constituencies—were clearly
vindicated. It was obvious that even if there were primaries, the Congress
candidates just needed to make a showing by becoming part of the four-
candidate panel and then would win with the help of caste Hindu votes in
the general elections. The overall result was that India was moving towards
independence with two of its large minorities, Muslims and Dalits, feeling
left out.
The election results showed that Dalits continued to be shut out
politically. Lord Wavell’s plan was for the executive council to be made up
of Muslims chosen by the Muslim League and Hindus chosen by the
National Congress, which would include Dalits. The untouchables were no
longer treated as an independent political force. Cripps remarked that the
SCF had ‘failed in the elections and we could not artificially restore its
position. The Depressed Classes will, of course, have their full
representation through the Congress-affiliated organization’ (Khairmode
1998c, 9:85). Thus a ministry was announced on 16 June, which included
five Congress members, five League members and five minorities; Jagjivan
Ram represented the untouchables. Jinnah protested that this actually meant
one more Congress representative and responded by nominating
Jogendranath Mandal. Ambedkar welcomed this, with the reservation that it
did not represent a true autonomy, because Dalits were now being divided
among and dependent on the powerful political parties.
On 25 and 26 August 1946 in an executive committee meeting of the
SCF, Ambedkar responded to the defeat by announcing the launch of a
national-level satyagraha in the Congress’s provinces. Thousands courted
arrest, most militantly in Nagpur and Pune. In addition, Ambedkar
continued to lobby, travelling to London in November 1946 to meet
Winston Churchill and other leaders. This time he had the sympathy of the
Conservative Party, a contradiction to his general labour orientation but one
which grew out of the fact that the Labour Party identified with the type of
socialism represented by the Congress, which tended to exclude non-class
issues.
For the same meeting Ambedkar wrote a memorandum on the issues
related to the constitution, the communal problem and the rights of
scheduled castes. Published a year later as States and Minorities, this was as
much an economic manifesto as a social one. It proposed a United States of
India without right of secession. It called for separate electorates, separate
village settlements and strong measures against social boycott of
untouchables and put forth a programme for what Ambedkar called ‘state
socialism’, the nationalization of basic industries, and the nationalization of
land and its organization in collectives. This manifesto marked the height of
his economic radicalism. It had a strong section on fundamental rights,
including the clause ‘nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty
and property without due process of law’, but noted that the power of
capitalists could not be called a promoter of freedom. He wrote, ‘Obviously
this liberty is liberty to the landlords to increase rents, for capitalists to
increase hours of work and reduce rate of wages.’ State socialism, it argued,
‘is essential for the rapid industrial development of India’ (Ambedkar 1979,
1:410–12). Ambedkar called this ‘state socialism’ because it was to be
written into the constitution and be beyond the power of Parliament to
change.
Among various constitutional proposals, this was an attention-getter.
Ambedkar was thus not only present when the Constituent Assembly began
its meetings (for he was elected from Bengal after he lost in Bombay
Province) but he was a potential star, a person of controversy and
considerable reputation. On 13 December 1946 a resolution for
independence had been passed in the Assembly. Nehru proposed it, and
after an exchange between M.R. Jayakar and Shyam Prasad Mukherji,
Ambedkar was asked to speak.
Although the nationalist leaders must have been prepared to listen to him
with trepidation, his actual comments were encouraging and inspiring. He
began by reiterating his position in States and Minorities, expressing the
wish that the declaration of objectives had gone further to support a
socialist economy and nationalization of industry and land. He also noted
the lack of any statement regarding fundamental rights. Then he expressed
his desire for a united India: ‘I know today we are a group of warring camps
and I may go even to the extent of conferring that I am probably one of the
leaders of such a camp. But Sir, with all this, I am quite convinced that
given time and circumstances, nothing in this world will prevent this
country from becoming one’ (Khairmode 1998c, 9:219). This statement
evoked cheers and applause, as did his expressed hope that Muslims would
one day see that a united India would be better for them. To keep the
Muslim League in a united India, though he himself preferred a strong
centre (applause again), he argued once again that grouping, that is, division
of provinces into sections that would include the separate majority areas of
Muslims, would be necessary (Khairmode 1998c, 9:221–22).
This speech helped change the attitude of Congress leaders like Nehru
with regard to Ambedkar. Ambedkar was opposing partition, he was
speaking up for a united government, he supported a strong centre and his
left sympathies were well known. Whatever claims that the Congress might
have made to be the sole representative of untouchables, however
thoroughly the SCF had been defeated in the general elections, it had
established its base firmly in the Marathi-speaking areas, in much of the
Tamil-speaking areas and even in parts of Uttar Pradesh. Leaders like Nehru
and Sardar Patel recognized this fact. The SCF’s considerable mobilization
power, not to mention the voting pattern of Dalits themselves, was clear to
political leaders. With this background, when barrister M.R. Jayakar
resigned his position in the Constituent Assembly from Bombay Province,
Nehru and Sardar Patel suggested Ambedkar’s name to fill the vacancy in
July 1947. Thus Ambedkar came to the Constituent Assembly with the
Congress’s support. On 29 August he was made a member of the drafting
committee elected for the constitution, and then he was chosen as its
chairman. Thus when the draft Constitution of India was presented for
approval on 4 November 1948, it was done by an ex-untouchable.
 It was about this time that an important event occurred in Ambedkar’s
personal life. He had been going to the clinic of Dr Madhav Malvankar in
Bombay for treatment of diabetes, a heart condition and high blood
pressure. In January 1948 during one of these visits he renewed his
acquaintance with Dr Sharda Kabir, an assistant to Malvankar. The
relationship became amicable, and on 15 April 1948 the two were married,
his wife taking the new name (a custom in Maharashtra) of Savita.
Ambedkar now had both a companion and a home nurse. While his health
problems remained, Savita found, just as Ramabai had, that there was no
way to control her husband’s tendency to overwork, but she did provide him
much-needed companionship.
Indeed, he had warned her about this in a couple of letters to her mother
prior to their marriage. In one written on 1 January 1948, he gave a
penetrating and rather eloquent self-description.
I am a difficult man. Ordinarily I am quiet as water and humble as grass. But when I get into a
temper I am ungovernable and unmanageable. I am a man of silence. There is a charge against
me that I don’t speak to women. But I don’t even speak to men unless they are my intimates. I
am a man of moods. At times I talk endlessly, at other times I do not utter a word. At times I
am very serious. At times I am full of humour. I am no gay person; pleasures of life do not
attract me. My companions have to bear the burden of my austerity and asceticism. My books
have become my companions. They are dearer to me than wife and children (Rattu 1997, 204).

This marriage has continued to be controversial among his followers and

is one of the remaining puzzles of his life. Many of them hated Savita, even
blaming her for Ambedkar’s death; some defend her. As far as the overall
community is concerned, while Ramabai continues to hold the position of
beloved wife for all Maharashtra followers of Ambedkar, a very striking
response is found in songs written by Dalit women: ‘I’m Baba to the
community, so who should I marry?’ It is not so surprising, according to
them, that he had looked to a Brahman woman as a wife! There was also a
song about his supposed English friend, now known not as ‘F’ but Lucy.
Thus it was with some apparent stability in his personal life that
Ambedkar took part in the process of the making of the Constitution. His
membership in the drafting committee and his later induction into the
Cabinet were recognition of his considerable skills as a constitutional
lawyer and as leader of the untouchables. Much emotion is involved in
assessing his work on the Constitution. Many credit him as the father of the
Constitution, hailing him as the modern Manu who gave India a new and
democratic regime. Some of these go further to argue that any changes in
the Constitution would be an affront to Ambedkar. At the other extreme are
the critics, often vituperous, who downplay any independent role by him,
citing his later statements when he called himself ‘simply a hack’ to
emphasize that the Constitution had emerged out of a long process that was
mainly guided by Congress politics and that, even at the level of drafting,
the main role had been played by the bureaucratic adviser, Sir Benegal Rau.
Perhaps the most intelligent and balanced view is that of Nehru’s
biographer Michael Brecher, who described Ambedkar as the chief
architect, or more correctly, the field general of the campaign for a new
Constitution (Brecher 1959).
In drafting the Constitution, there were often stormy debates on countless
controversial issues. On all of these Ambedkar expressed his opinion,
moderated the discussion and pushed for a consensus. On crucial issues
such as the need for a strong centre, his position was similar to that of the
Congress leadership. With regard to scheduled castes, he won what he
wanted by and large in terms of reservations in public service and reserved
seats. Moreover, he helped gain facilities for a group defined as ‘socially
and educationally backward classes’, leading to the issue of reservations for
‘OBCs’ (roughly, the former Shudras) that would arise again and again in
the following years. There was no longer any talk of separate electorates,
but then it had always been Ambedkar’s position that if there were adult
suffrage and safeguards, reservations would suffice.
Before his final speech on the Constitution, given on 25 November 1949,
numerous members of Parliament paid him accolades. Some, including the
non-Brahman leader Keshavrao Jedhe, made the inevitable comparison
between Ambedkar and Manu, heralding a new era for India. H.J.
Khandekar, another Maharashtrian, said, ‘I call this Constitution the Mahar
Law because Dr Ambedkar is a Mahar and now … we shall have the law of
Manu replaced by the law of Mahar and I hope that unlike the law of Manu
under which there was never a prosperity in this country, the Mahar law
will make India virtually paradise’ (Ambedkar 1994, 13:1201).
Ambedkar’s speech described the committee’s immense work completed
in a relatively short period of time and gave credit to Rau, other members of
the drafting committee and the chief draftsman, S.N. Mukherjee. He noted
that there were only two major condemnations of the Constitution. These
were by the Communists, who wanted nothing to do with parliamentary
democracy, and the socialists, who wanted unlimited powers to nationalize
or socialize all private property and overthrow the state. To the socialists, he
pointed out the scope for change, and he quoted the famous statement of
Thomas Jefferson which argued for the right of every generation to revise a
constitution on the grounds that one generation had no right to bind
succeeding generations, ‘for this would mean that the earth belongs to the
dead and not to the living’. Ambedkar endorsed this as absolutely true. In
his view, the Constitution had no seal of infallibility (Ambedkar 1994, Vol.
13).
He went on to argue that in the new democracy both violence and
satyagraha as methods of social change must be given up. Even more
inimical to democracy, he noted, was the tendency of Indians to make gurus
into semi-divine beings. ‘Bhakti (hero worship) in religion may be a road to
the salvation of the soul, but in politics bhakti is a sure road to degradation
and eventual dictatorship.’ He went on to argue that the new Indian society
must be based on social democracy, a way of life which recognizes liberty,
equality and fraternity. Although he perceived liberty as necessary for
individual initiative, Ambedkar was more concerned with equality and
fraternity. Equality had been largely absent in Indian society, and as long as
the contradiction between equality in political life and social inequality
remained, democracy was in danger. ‘We must remove this contradiction at
the earliest possible moment,’ he proposed, ‘or else those who suffer from
inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this
Assembly has so laboriously built up’ (Ambedkar 1994, 13:1216). He was
to repeat this statement later in speeches, reaffirming the need for social and
economic equality.
 Finally, he reiterated his theory about the development of India as a
nation. India was in reality a nation in the making, not a nation as such.
‘The sooner we realize that we are not as yet a nation in the social and
psychological sense, the better for us … For only then we shall realize the
necessity of becoming a nation and seriously think of ways and means of
realizing the goal.’ India’s anti-social caste system made the realization of
liberty, equality and fraternity so difficult, much more so than in the United
States. He noted that political power in India had long been the monopoly
of a few, while the many are not only beasts of burden but also beasts of
prey. But these downtrodden had now become impatient to govern
themselves. He explained that this ‘urge for self-realization in the
downtrodden classes must not be allowed to devolve into a class struggle or
class war’ (Ambedkar 1994, 13:1217–18). To avoid this, the establishment
of equality and fraternity was necessary.
This speech was a climactic moment in Ambedkar’s life. He went on to
be named minister of law in the new Cabinet, but his work on the
Constitution gave him an indelible place in the country’s formation. For
Dalits, the modern Manu has been a symbol of progress, of the step forward
for independent India.
 Eight

‘Building a palace on a dung heap’

 The Post-Independence Years

The slaughter of Partition wrote in blood the cost of the inability to resolve
the dilemma of Hindu–Muslim relations. India began its life as an
independent country with a shadow hanging over it, one that was bound to
affect Dalits as well as others. Dalits in fact were being increasingly caught
in the middle of the Hindu–Muslim conflagration. Among refugees from
Pakistan were large numbers of untouchables. The Pakistan government
was reluctant to allow them to leave, since they provided menial labour as
well as cleaned latrines and swept, tasks which it felt would be hard to find
others to do.
Even when the untouchables could escape as refugees, they were
oppressed by the Hindu and Jat Sikhs of East Punjab. Although Ambedkar
carried on a correspondence with Nehru in December 1947 to try to win
them justice, little changed. The untouchable refugees could not get land for
settlement in villages since it was assumed that they were landless. They
were rehabilitated in Delhi itself, but in kaccha houses, and they were much
worse off than other refugees. Caste Hindu and Sikh refugees were settled
in well-built houses in the city or given land in villages.
In Hyderabad another tense situation developed. It was the largest
princely state in India, its ruler an autocrat who conceded little to popular
democratic aspirations. Here, though, there was a centuries-old Deccani
culture, which had in fact given birth to the first form of ‘Hindi/Urdu’ or
Hindustani. The population included a number of Dalits, some of whom
turned to Islam. The Dalit movement in this state was strong but
factionalized. Its base was primarily the Malas, the Telugu-speaking
equivalent of the Mahars. The more educationally backward Madigas were
slower to mobilize, and when they did so, they kept aloof from the Malas
and tended to support the Congress and a Hindu identity. Mahars from the
Marathi-speaking areas of current-day Marathwada were also slow to
mobilize and did so independently from the Hyderabad leadership.
 Of the rambunctious Dalit movement, though all had attended the SCF’s
founding meeting in 1942, many fell away, leaving J. Subbiah to become
the organization’s leader. He proved to be flashy and assertive but not very
good at organization-building. Another important leader, B.S. Venkatrao, a
wealthy contractor who had been president of the Mahar conference
supporting conversion in 1936, tended to associate with Muslims. It was a
militant activist who was part of the Deccani Muslim culture, Shyam
Sunder, who became the leader of the pro-Nizam group. The Nizam had
been giving concessions, most notably grants of wasteland to Dalits, which
proved a source of attraction in the Marathi-speaking Marathwada region,
where Congress was dominant and lacked the radical orientation of the pro-
Communist group in Telangana. Shyam Sunder’s group supported
independence for Hyderabad and convinced Venkatrao to join them.
Ambedkar, however, opposed this. In November 1947 he issued a call.
The Scheduled Castes of Hyderabad should under no circumstances side with the Nizam and
the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen. Whatever the tyranny and oppression which the Hindus practice
upon us, it must not warp our vision and swerve us from our duty. The Scheduled Castes need
freedom, and their whole movement has been one of freedom … [Thus] they cannot support
the Nizam (Government of Maharashtra 1982, 350).

But Dalits in Hyderabad were caught in a pincer of growing violence

between Muslims and Hindus. By 1948, as Muslims began to arm
themselves throughout the state, atrocities against Dalits by the extremist
Razakars were being reported. Ambedkar, with Rajbhoj and Shivraj, as
president of the SCF, toured the state in January 1948, starting from
Aurangabad and Nashik. The Congress then endorsed military intervention,
the ‘Police Action’. This should have provided the basis for the
establishment of a democratic regime, but the caste Hindu peasants who
had fled and then returned directed their fury against their most helpless
opponents, the Dalits, while the army stood by. There were numerous
reports of brutal attacks by caste Hindus, who charged the Dalits with
siding with the Nizam. At the heart of this was the land issue—the land
which Dalits had been given by the Nizam and which the caste peasants
were trying to grab back. Rajbhoj then toured the region, working with the
Marathwada secretary of the SCF, B.S. More, to report on the situation.
Finally, in January 1949, Ambedkar made another tour. He was met by
large crowds of Dalits at every railway station, including a huge rally of one
lakh in Aurangabad itself. Marathwada Dalits may have been slow in
organizing, but now they were militant. The land issue then developed into
one of the first ‘land satyagrahas’ in independent India, and it was
organized by the SCF.
While all this was going on, Ambedkar continued his research and
writing. He had earlier written Who Were the Shudras: How They Came to
Be the Fourth Varna in the Indo-Aryan Society, dedicated to Jotirao Phule.
It analysed the position of the non-untouchable ‘low castes’ in Indian
society. He then took up the question of Dalits in The Untouchables: Who
Were They and Why They Became Untouchables. This had been written in
1947 and was dedicated to the Dalit sants Nandnar, Ravidas and
Cokhamela. He continued to work on his analysis of ancient Indian
conflicts and the origin of caste. His drafts are collected in ‘Revolution and
counter-revolution in ancient India’ (published in Ambedkar 1987, 3:1514
—37). His evolving position was one that differentiated him from most of
the theoretical work on caste done up to that time.
Ambedkar was never interested in the ‘Aryan theory’, which formed the
framework by which so many Indians—following the European leads—
interpreted caste, explaining varna divisions as resulting from the conquest
of indigenous inhabitants by Aryan invaders. This had become the favoured
position among Dalits too. Following Phule, they had ‘turned the theory on
its head’ to depict the original indigenous society as one of equality and
prosperity. This was an essentially racial theory that Ambedkar refused to
endorse. He opposed it most strongly in Who Were the Shudras, where he
denied that there was any racial difference and that Aryans came from
outside India, citing lack of evidence in the Rig Veda. This book described
the Shudras originally as an Aryan tribe, in conflict with Brahmans and
finally degraded by being denied initiation rites. However, even here the
ethnic distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans was admitted when he
noted that the ‘low-class Hindus’ of his day were of a ‘different stock’,
racially different from the original Shudras of the Indo-Aryan society
(Ambedkar 1990, 7:10). Then, in The Untouchables, he took a more
agnostic position on the ‘Aryan question’, asserting that it was not known
whether the term ‘Aryan’ was indicative of race. This work tended to accept
the existence of two racial groups, describing the Nagas—spread all over
India at the time, with their own distinct language—as being equivalent to
the ancient Dravidians. The difference between the South and most of the
North, according to Ambedkar, was simply that the northerners had
eventually accepted Aryan forms of language. However, though the Nagas
fascinated him and he saw them as ancestors of Mahars in Maharashtra, he
continued to argue against the racial theory of caste. There were
untouchables in every province, and they were not significantly different
from Brahmans of that province in terms of physical characteristics. He
could not accept the Aryan theory as an adequate explanation of caste. His
argument that ‘caste is not a racial division but a division of races’ echoed
his denial of the traditional Marxist interpretation that saw caste as a
reflection of a social division of labour. As he asserted in his 1936 essay
‘Annihilation of caste’ and in other publications, ‘caste is not a division of
labour, it is also a division of labourers’ (Ambedkar 1979, 1:47).
In his effort to work out a full theory, seen partially in the notes of
‘Revolution and counter-revolution’, he stressed the ideological conflict
between Brahmanism and Buddhism as the main dialectic of Indian history.
Early Aryan society was tribal and backward, but Buddhism represented a
revolution that was backed by the Mauryan emperors. The counter-
revolution came with the establishment of the caste system, proclaimed by
Manu and heralded with the revolt of the Brahman feudatory of the
Mauryas, Pushyamitra Shunga. This involved the degradation of Shudras
and other low castes and of women. It was a theory that gave primacy to
political and ideological factors in the processes of Indian history. In
explaining untouchability specifically, Ambedkar established a Buddhist
connection. He argued in Who Were the Untouchables? that untouchables
were defeated tribes or ‘Broken Men’ who lived outside the villages of the
more victorious tribes and, since they were mostly Buddhist and refused to
give up their religion, they were subjected to the worst forms of degradation
by Brahmans. To combat the appeal of Buddhism and its scathing critique
of animal sacrifice, Brahmans took up vegetarianism and made beef eating
the greatest symbol of pollution, though they had originally been the
biggest beef-eaters. This then became the symbol of degradation for broken
men living outside the village, that they continued to eat beef as a major
source of food. Untouchability itself, he concluded, became established
between the fourth and sixth centuries AD: ‘Untouchability was born some
time about 400 AD … out of the struggle for supremacy between Buddhism
and Brahmanism which has so completely moulded the history of India and
the study of which is so woefully neglected by students of Indian history’
(Ambedkar 1990, 7:379).
Contemporary concerns were also a subject of analysis. At about the
same time as he published works on the origins of caste a small booklet on
Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province was published. It had been his
statement submitted to the States Reorganization Commission in October
1947. It argued that Bombay must be a part of Maharashtra. Later, in
Thoughts for Linguistic States, published in 1955 (reprinted in Ambedkar
1979, 1:99–l27), he took the position that while states should be created on
a linguistic basis, large states, including Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya
Pradesh, should be broken up. ‘One state, one language’ did not imply ‘one
language, one state’, which was an ‘absurd formula’ with no precedence.
The requirements of efficient administration and the often differing needs of
different regions suggested the advantage of smaller states, while from the
point of view of Dalits, it would give local Dalit communities a slightly
greater advantage in facing the numerically powerful dominant peasant
communities. In regard to the Marathi-speaking areas, Ambedkar suggested
four states; three would be based on the major regions of western
Maharashtra including the Konkan, Marthwada and Vidarbha, while for the
fourth, he suggested making Bombay an independent ‘city state’. The essay
also referred to the North—South social division of India, to the fear
southerners had of being dominated by the large states of the Hindi-
speaking North, which was backward in comparison to the progressive
South.
The most controversial and public of Ambedkar’s activities in the turmoil
of the early independence years, though, was his effort to get the Hindu
Code Bill passed. This piece of legislation was in many ways a culmination
of women’s social reform efforts that had been going on since the colonial
period. Under traditional Brahmanic law as it was applied in British courts
—often at the cost of more liberal customary laws of the lower castes—
women had no right to divorce, could be forced to live with their husbands
and had very few rights of inheritance. They could not legally control
money or open bank accounts under their own names. Since the 1930s there
had been legislative efforts to remedy this resourceless position of women,
in particular to give them rights of divorce and inheritance. The government
had appointed a Hindu Code Committee in 1941, which proposed two bills
for this. However, they failed due to adamant opposition from the orthodox.
A revised bill was submitted in March 1943, and after the first discussions
in Parliament they were sent back to an experts committee chaired by B.N.
Rau and under the guidance of Ambedkar as law minister. In the
preparation of the new bill, Ambedkar made some changes in the draft,
notably by taking the Dayabhaga traditional legal system, in which
individual heirs have full property rights, as the basis for the reformed law
rather than the originally proposed Mitakshara, in which individual claims
were subject to ‘coparcenary’ restrictions. This orientation to individual
rights was consistent with his overall philosophy.
The new bill was submitted on 16 August 1948. It was to have a difficult
history. For three years it remained pending under contentious debate, with
the orthodox attacking it by proclaiming the sacred nature of Hindu
marriage. Marriage and the family were declared as the true foundation of
Hindu society, and dissolving a marriage would ruin a society that had
endured for millennia. Women who supported the bill were attacked as ‘far
too aggressive’, as women ‘who have recourse to gawdy and gorgeous saris
… [and] paint themselves’. One traditionalist asked if laws would be made
to require husbands to cook. Opposing the bill, Shyam Prasad Mukherji
threatened that if the bill were passed the whirlwind would come. He
attacked the maladjustment of the sexes in western countries and argued
that any changes must be voluntary (Ambedkar 1995, 14, bk 2:891, 1002).
Outside Parliament, the orthodox mobilized in morchas and demonstrations,
especially in Delhi and Calcutta. One morcha was of sadhus, at which
Shantabai Dani, a young woman lieutenant of Ambedkar, remembers
Ambedkar telling the demonstrators, ‘I don’t understand why you sadhus
are concerned with inheritance’ (Interview, Shantabai Dani, 3 January
1976).
The bill came up for its final reading on 18 September 1951. The debate
dragged on, with days spent arguing over a single clause. On 20 September
Ambedkar made a long speech responding to the criticisms, asserting that
the argument about the unchanged nature of Hindu society and its survival
meant nothing. Rather, he pointed out, the question was of the quality of
what had survived. The new marriage system proposed was not, he said, an
imitation of the West but was based on the values of liberty, equality and
fraternity found in the Constitution. In contrast, he said, the ‘sacramental
marriage’ of the traditionalists ‘is polygamy for the man and perpetual
slavery for the woman’ (Ambedkar 1995, 14, bk 2:1161). Following this, he
was heavily attacked in the press and accused of insulting Hindu ideals such
as Ram and Sita. Apparently, to change Hindu social legislation was even
more of a sin for an untouchable than to be part of the drafting of the
Constitution.
The bill finally failed. Nehru, who had vowed to support it, never issued
a whip and was clearly unable and unwilling to bring the traditionally
minded members of the Congress into line. This was the final straw for
Ambedkar, who was ailing and disgusted with the government in any case.
On 10 August he wrote Nehru saying that he was thinking of resigning and
that the failure of the new Hindu Code Bill confirmed his decision. He
submitted his resignation on 27 September and gave a statement in
Parliament on 10 October 1951. The bill’s failure was one of a multitude of
reasons behind his resignation. Among these were the fact that he had
wanted to head the Planning Commission and not simply the law ministry.
He accused the government of the continuing neglect of the scheduled
castes. He referred to India’s foreign policy, saying that friendship with
China had led to alienation from the United States, which he, in contrast to
Nehru, considered closer as a democratic power. In regard to the always
controversial issue of Kashmir, he suggested its partition, with Muslim
areas given to Pakistan.
But it was the Hindu Code Bill that was the main issue of contention, and
he concluded his letter of resignation and speech with a statement about its
importance that rings strong even today.
The Hindu code was the greatest social reform measure ever undertaken by the Legislature in
this country. No law … in the past or … the future can be compared to it in its significance. To
leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex which is the soul of Hindu
society untouched and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a
farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap (Ambedkar 1995, 14, bk
1:1325). *

It was a striking image. It suggested that the economic radicalism shown

by the emergence of a planned, state-directed and substantially state-owned
economy was not matched by social radicalism. In Ambedkar’s view, Nehru
had yielded before the Brahmanic Hindu orthodoxy of the members of
Parliament. The image of the dung heap was also a reversal of the old base-
superstructure imagery of Marxism; now it was patriarchy and caste—‘for
class and class’ here clearly had a caste reference—which constituted the
foundation, while the building on it represented economic relations. Just as
significant, perhaps, was his reference to foreign policy, which seemed to
indicate a growing alienation from the socialist countries. This was clearly
fuelled by China’s takeover of Tibet, the major Buddhist country to the
north of India.
All of this lay in the background of a rethinking of his economic policies,
which became clear in the manifesto issued by the SCF for the January
1952 elections. There was no mention in it of socialism, very little of state-
owned industries. There was a call only for nationalization of insurance.
Instead, regarding Indian poverty, the stress was on economic growth.
Prohibition was denounced as sheer madness on the grounds that taxation
could be a major source of revenue. Ambedkar viewed economic policy on
a pragmatic basis.
The policy of the Party is not tied to any particular dogma or ideology such as communism,
socialism, Gandhism … [T]he Party will be ready to adopt any plan of social and economic
betterment of the people irrespective of its origin and provided it is consistent with its
principles. Its outlook on life will be purely rational and modern … (Khairmode 2000a,
10:153).

The organization of industry would ‘not be bound by any dogma or

pattern’. A decision whether to keep an enterprise or nationalize it (make it
part of the ‘public sector’) would be made depending on whether such
nationalization was possible and essential; there would be no ‘preconceived
pattern’. This insistence on pragmatism and an effective developmental
policy was new, but Ambedkar continued his concern for welfare and
industrialization. In agriculture, the manifesto supported mechanization,
with equipment to be provided by the state; it urged the establishment of
large-scale farms on a collective or cooperative base and demanded that
untouchables be given lands that were classed as ‘waste’ or ‘fallow’
wasteland. This continued Ambedkar’s negative attitude to peasant
cultivation. The manifesto supported linguistic provinces. It stated that in
making electoral alliances priority would be given to parties representing
the backward classes and the scheduled tribes; if necessary the SCF would
change its name to the Backward Classes Federation to represent OBCs. (In
a sense, this was a forecasting of the policy adopted by the Bahujan Samaj
Party in the 1980s.) No alliances in the forthcoming elections would be
made with the Congress, with communal parties or with the Communists.
The manifesto suggested that the party should develop into something like
the British Labour Party, which had also been the inspiration for the ILP,
but in a more ideological incarnation.
During the election campaign, though the SCF allied itself with the
Socialist Party, Ambedkar stressed again that this was for electoral purposes
only, that he followed no ‘ism’—that realism and rationalism were the basis
of the party’s programme. His growing tendency to centre on democracy
rather than socialism was evident also when, on 22 December 1952, he
delivered a speech on parliamentary democracy for the District Law Club
Library at Poona. Before this he had reviewed a copy of an old essay by
John Dewey on the subject. He stressed as preconditions for democracy
equality before the law, a moral order in society, the functioning of a public
conscience and the lack of glaring inequalities in society. His thinking on
international issues was elaborated in a 26 August 1954 speech in the Rajya
Sahba in which he again attacked the pro-Russian policy of the government,
saying communism was ‘like a forest fire! It goes on burning and
consuming anything and everything that comes in its way’ (Khairmode
2000b, 11:103). He took his primary examples from the Soviet Union in
eastern Europe, but also referred to allowing ‘the Chinese to take
possession of Lhasa’. Tibet, after his Kathmandu visit and the growing
concern with Buddhism, may well have been on his mind.
All these speeches, manifestos and lectures represented a clear retreat
from his earlier argument for an economic pattern of state socialism. He
was still concerned about state action, as evidenced by his interest in the
Planning Commission, but his reiteration that there would be no dogma, no
preconceived pattern, indicated a conscious break with Marxist economics.
He was, in other words, becoming a social democrat. His writings and
speeches suggest that this process was connected with his growing
inclination towards Buddhism. In fact Marxism had its strength as a
totalitarian doctrine; take away the ‘religious’ aspect of this, the totalism,
and it is susceptible to what is otherwise called ‘revisionism’. In any case,
Ambedkar was comparing Marxist thinking with Buddhism, and the
comparison was inevitably going to affect his views on economic
organization too.
In 1956 Ambedkar addressed the World Buddhist Conference in
Kathmandu on ‘Marxism versus Buddhism’. This talk reflected an
unpublished essay entitled ‘Buddha or Karl Marx’ (published in Ambedkar
1987, 3:441–62). In it he outlined the propositions of Marxism—including
class conflict, exploitation, and nationalization or abolition of private
property—as a solution to human ills or dukka. He noted that many of the
propositions had been demolished by logic and experience. Still, he said, a
‘residue of fire’ remained. This included the concept of class conflict,
private property as the basis of exploitation and the necessity for the
abolition of private property, and the notion that ‘the function of philosophy
is to reconstruct the world’. In the rest of the essay he made it clear that he
no longer saw nationalism as the form of abolition; rather, the voluntary
communism of the Bhikku Sangh was a better substitute. He retold one of
the early suttas of the basic Buddhist scriptures, the Cakavattisutta of the
Digha Nikaya, in which a kingdom falls for lack of providing wealth to the
destitute. The story suggested that the welfare functions of the state were
crucial. But he also stressed the emphasis on householders (private
individuals) acquiring wealth legitimately and justly. Ambedkar’s reading
of the Pali texts, which give a good deal of respect to merchants and to the
acquisition of wealth and to the enjoyment of that acquisition as long as it
was done honestly, was clearly having an impact on his overall economic
thinking.
He concluded the essay with a reference to the need for liberty, equality
and fraternity.
The French Revolution was welcomed because of its slogan. It failed to produce equality. We
welcome the Russian Revolution because it aims to produce equality. But it cannot be too
much emphasised that in producing equality society cannot afford to sacrifice fraternity or
liberty … It seems that the three can coexist only if one follows the way of the Buddha
(Ambedkar 1987, 3:462).

Buddhism was, in other words, leading Ambedkar to a more pragmatic

approach to economic organization, an approach reflected in the manifesto
of the SCF for the 1952 elections.
Electoral success, however, continued to elude the party. The SCF won
few seats. Rajbhoj and B.C. Kamble were elected to Parliament and the
Bombay Legislative Assembly respectively, but no others won. The magic
of the Congress as the winner of independence still carried the day.
However, it would not be until the 1957 elections, when the SCF (in its new
form of the Republican Party of India) contested as part of the Samyukta
Maharashtra Samiti, a broad alliance with the left parties aiming at
constituting a separate state of Marathi speakers, that it would win a
substantial victory. But this was to come after Ambedkar’s death. In 1952
both Socialists and Dalits fared badly. Ambedkar himself lost in his
stronghold of Bombay, blaming the defeat on the Communists. Indeed, the
voting bases for the Communists and Ambedkar were in the same area of
Bombay—the textile mills, where Dalits and OBCs had long settled and
laboured. Ambedkar took the case to court in January 1952, charging
electoral fraud against the Communists, headed by S.A. Dange. The
argument was simple: in the electoral system of the time, reserved
constituencies were lumped with general constituencies, and voters had two
votes, one for each seat. There were 78,000 invalid votes, half of these for
Dange, and Ambedkar claimed that Communists had propagated against
him that voters cast both their votes for one candidate, which was illegal.
Although he lost the case, Ambedkar’s anger was not assuaged. He
continued to hold a seat in Parliament, as a member of the Rajya Sabha, but
this meant an ongoing dependence on the Congress.
Nevertheless, internationally his importance was increasingly recognized.
In June 1952 he won another honour—an honorary doctor of law degree
from his old alma mater, Columbia University. He went to the United
States, also visiting a hospital for his continuing health problems. The
citation listed his degrees and described him as ‘a framer of the
Constitution, member of the Cabinet and of the Council of State, one of
India’s leading citizens, a great social reformer and a valiant upholder of
human rights’ (Khairmode 2000a, 10:280). Whether such human rights
would be implemented in an independent India, whether the dung heap
underlying the building of a society of social justice would be cleared, was
still uncertain.
 Nine

‘Buddham sharanam gacchami’

 The Final Years

As independent India moved into the future, claiming to implement a

socialist pattern of society without decisively resolving the issues of its
caste-ridden, patriarchal society, Ambedkar was increasingly moving
towards Buddhism, the religion he saw as a liberating force.
There were, however, a number of issues that also preoccupied him as the
decade of the 1950s moved on. Most important were the future of Dalit
political formations and the question of Maharashtra as a linguistic
province.
The question of political representation was one of transforming the SCF
into a party with a broader thrust. While the party had clearly gained a
national presence, its form had not been one chosen by Ambedkar. His
earliest ideal, represented in the Independent Labour Party, had been a party
based on Dalits but putting forward a programme in the interests of all the
poor; it had in fact appealed to a section of non-Dalit voters also. It was
only because the government had demanded evidence of his
representativeness of untouchable interests that he had formed a party
limited to Dalits. Now, with some of the demands of Dalits won, at least in
regard to reservation, and with the necessity of competing politically in
open electorates based on adult franchise, the issue of broadening the party
emerged once more. This was also related to a general movement towards
giving a transformative, wider scope for Dalit leadership in independent
India. With Ambedkar moving towards a broader identity on all fronts, it
was natural that he should propose to broaden and transform his political
party too.
The heritage he decided to associate with was a democratic one rather
than a socialist one, another confirmation of the change in the direction of
his political and economic thinking. The new party would, he said, be
founded on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, but it would no
longer have the militant working-class identity that the earlier ILP, with its
red flag, had claimed. Instead, Ambedkar chose a name for the party that
symbolized, for him, the end of slavery in the United States—the
Republican Party, the party of Lincoln. The Republican Party of India (RPI)
would be one with a broadly social democratic programme, but one directed
against forms of caste enslavement that still existed in India. While in terms
of cadre it was and would remain an incarnation of the old SCF, a party
almost entirely of Dalits, its broader aspirations were now clearly identified
with all oppressed sections of society. The RPI was formally established
only after Ambedkar’s death, but its basis was the outline that he had
provided.
The other pending issue was that of linguistic states, particularly
Maharashtra. Demands for establishing states on a linguistic basis were
rising in India, spearheaded by the demand for a Telugu-speaking state, and
in 1953, in the charged atmosphere following the death during fasting of an
old Congress activist, Ambedkar spoke in the Rajya Sabha in support of this
demand. By 1955-56 Marathi-speakers were forcefully demanding
Samyukta Maharashtra with Bombay included and, again, Ambedkar gave
his support. His earlier suggestion for four Marathi-speaking states was now
moot and the movement for a united Maharashtra was getting impressive
mass support. Ambedkar was staunchly against the Congress proposal to
constitute Gujarati- and Marathi-speaking states but keep Bombay city
separate, as a bilingual Bombay state. This, he said, given the context of
Gujarati capital and a largely Marathi working class, would be nothing
more than making Bombay a ‘Maharwada of Gujarat’. Ambedkar took part
in major mass rallies for a united Maharashtra, and after his death the
Republican Party formally joined the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, a
broad alliance that included mainly leftist parties. This helped it to achieve
its first significant electoral victories, in both the state legislature and the
Lok Sabha in 1957.
Nevertheless, in the face of all the other preoccupations, in spite of
continued ill health and pressures of writing, it was above all the question
of religious conversion that was foremost in Ambedkar’s mind. By the
1940s Buddhism was beginning to seem an inevitable choice for Indian
Dalits.
 At one level this was the culmination of a long trend of Dalit collective
inclination to Buddhism. While India had seen individual upper-caste
conversions to Buddhism from the rediscovery of the religion as a major
part of India’s heritage from the nineteenth century onwards, the first mass
revival of Buddhism had been led by a Dalit. This was Pandit Iyothee Thass
of Tamil Nadu, who had sought out Colonel Olcott of the Theosophical
Society in Madras and then went to Sri Lanka to meet the great Sri Lankan
monk Anagarika Dharmapala and other Lankan Buddhists. He and his
followers then established the Sakya Buddhist Society in 1901. The name
came from the Buddha’s Sakya clan, who were believed by Iyothee Thass
and his followers to be the ancestors of the Tamil Paraiyas. For the
followers of Iyothee Thass, then, the turn to Buddhism was actually a return
to the ancient religion of Dalits. Other Dalit leaders in the 1920s had also
shown an inclination to Buddhism. These included Bhagyareddy Varma, the
distinguished first-generation leader of the Hyderabad Adi-Hindu
movement, and Acchutananda of Utter Pradesh, who pioneered the Adi-
Hindu movement there and believed that sants like Ravidas and Kabir were
in fact propagating a form of Buddhism. A turn to Buddhism was also
discussed among Kerala Dalits and OBCs in the 1920s, though in the end
the Vedantic approach of Shri Narayana Guru prevailed.
In 1940 Ambedkar republished Laxmi Narasu’s important survey, The
Essence of Buddhism. This gave a modernistic interpretation of Buddhism,
denying karma as rebirth and emphasizing the social aspects of the
teaching. As Narasu (1993, 32) wrote
Physiologically considered, an individual reincarnates in his progeny, and his physical karma
is transmitted to them. Ethically considered, the psychic life of an individual cannot be
separated from the psychic life of the community of which he is a member.

This social and moralistic interpretation of Buddhism given by Narasu

and other Sakya Buddhists prefigured Ambedkar’s later interpretation in
The Buddha and His Dhamma. Ambedkar also began to write articles in the
Janata elaborating on the meaning and significance of Buddhism.
Buddhism was an improbable choice in view of the criterion that many
thought was important in the 1930s: the need to be associated with a
financially and organizationally powerful community. Though Buddhism
was a religion that had a world presence, it had no effective presence in
India; the southern Sakya Buddhist Society had died away in the 1920s and
had nothing to offer Dalits in terms of resources. However, these early
concerns with the resources that Dalits could gain from conversion were
now much less relevant to Ambedkar. Dalits had shown by this time a fair
amount of power on their own to generate organizational strength and some
funding. In this context, Buddhism had something else to offer: as the major
Buddhist community in India, Dalits could shape the future of the religion
in the land of its birth.
At the same time, there was something like a groundswell in favour of
Buddhism in various Dalit communities, especially in Maharashtra. Vasant
Moon’s autobiography, Growing Up Untouchable in India (2001), gives
something of the flavour of this in Nagpur. Militant, educated youth,
rejecting their identity as ‘Harijan’ and ready to engage in street fighting
against caste Hindu bullies were spearheading a cultural renaissance. They
were challenging the old customs, refusing to participate in Hindu festivals
and smashing the idols that represented to them a religion of slavery. They
confronted and debated with traditional buwas, babas and sadhus, and many
of these were brought into the movement. The educated youth started
libraries and sought out the few upper-caste Buddhists in the area, calling
them for lectures and organizing discussions. By the 1950s this collective
turn towards Buddhism was becoming clear.
Throughout this period, even after his resignation as law minister from
the Union Cabinet, Ambedkar maintained his Delhi residence. His health
continued to be bad. He suffered from diabetes, rheumatism, high blood
pressure and frequent and severe leg pain. In spite of all this, he continued
to keep long hours, often writing late into the night.
His study now focussed on Buddhism. In his search for the original texts,
he began to learn Pali, putting together a dictionary, rewriting the
definitions from an existing dictionary and giving Marathi and Gujarati
word equivalents. From 1949 he had been propagating Buddhism in private
discussions. In 1950 he published an article in the Journal of the
Mahabodhi Society entitled ‘The Buddha and the future of his religion’,
which argued that Buddhism was a religion for the whole world: ‘If the new
world which be it realized is very different from the old must have a
religion and the new world needs a religion far more than the old world did
then it can only be the religion of the Buddha’ (Sangharakshita 1986, 71).
In December 1950 he attended the World Buddhist Conference and in July
1951 he formed the Bharatiya Bauddha Janasangh, which became the
Bharatiya Bauddha Mahasabha in May 1955.
Ambedkar’s arguments for Buddhism as an appropriate religion centred
on its morality and rationality. The ‘new world’, as he noted, needed
religion-as-morality which Buddhism was the supreme example of just as
the tumultuous society of the first millennium BCE had. It was a world in
turmoil, one with tremendous potential for economic development, but with
increasingly visible poverty and backwardness haunting those who could
see this poverty posed against the prosperity and power of an elite world—a
world facing massive psychological and spiritual concerns brought about by
the processes of change, social movements, wars, fascism, the Holocaust
and nuclear destruction. The promises of economic development
themselves were so enveloped in commercialism and technological ‘fixes’
that the need for moral grounding was clear. It was the morality represented
by Buddhism rather than socialism that Ambedkar was looking to for a
solution.
In 1954, during a trip to Burma, Ambedkar made a proposal for
sponsoring a campaign for Buddhist conversion in India. Speaking on 19
July to the Buddhist Sasana Council of Burma, he argued that the ground
was fertile in India: in the birthplace of the religion, where the Buddha was
already known, if only as an avatar of Vishnu, people were receptive. But
he cautioned them against repeating the mistake of the Christian
missionaries who had begun with a focus on Brahmans, thinking that others
would then follow. Instead, the focus from the very beginning should be on
‘the lower classes … Untouchables and the backward classes.’ And a
simple ‘Buddhist gospel’ that summed up the vast Buddhist literature had to
be prepared.
 But the Burmese were not willing to sponsor this, and Ambedkar was
ready to undertake it on his own. He thus began writing a book intended as
a simple, eloquent and rationalistic Buddhist gospel. Ambedkar was not
about to give Dalits a conventional version of Buddhism. The introduction
to The Buddha and His Dhamma cites four crucial areas in which he found
normal interpretations of Buddhism unacceptable. These included the idea
that Siddhartha left home after seeing a dead man, a sick man and an old
man, the idea of rebirth, the notion that ‘all is sorrow’ and the usual form of
the Buddhist sangha as an organization apart from society. His statement
about dukka (suffering or sorrow) sums this up. In rejecting the four noble
truths, he writes, ‘This formula cuts at the root of Buddhism. If life is
sorrow, death is sorrow and rebirth is sorrow, then there is an end of
everything … The four Aryan Truths are a great stumbling block in the way
of non-Buddhists accepting the gospel of Buddhism’ (Ambedkar 1992, 11
:ii). He wanted, in other words, a religion that was clearly not world-
rejecting, but was this-worldly in the sense of providing a morality that
could have the potential of ‘reconstructing the world’ on a basis of liberty,
equality and fraternity.
In the rest of The Buddha and His Dhamma, he proceeded to offer this
understanding of Buddhism. While rejecting karma as rebirth and
transmigration, he reinterpreted it to mean a moral law in which all actions
had consequences, though these were not necessarily to be borne by any
particular individual but would work themselves out at the social level. He
called this by the Pali term of ‘kamma’ to distinguish it from the
Brahmanical idea of ‘karma’. Again, Siddhartha was depicted as
renouncing his home not on a religiously motivated quest provoked by
seeing sickness, old age and death, but to avoid a war of irrigation waters
between the Sakya and Koliya clans (this in fact drew on an ancient story
found in the Jatakas). And when this conflict was resolved, he determined
that rather than return home, he would go on to solve the larger problem of
conflict and clashes within society.
‘The problem of war is a problem of conflict. It is only part of a larger
problem. This conflict is going on not only between kings and nations but
between nobles and Brahmans, between householders, between [friends and
family members] … The conflict between nations is occasional. But the
conflict between classes is constant and perpetual. It is this which is the root
of all suffering in the world. I have to find a solution to this problem of
social conflict’ (Ambedkar 1992, 11:57–58).
The issue is posed almost as if Siddhartha were seeking a solution to the
problem dealt with by Marxism in terms of exploitation. Indeed,
Ambedkar’s understanding of dukka saw it almost in terms of exploitation,
social suffering. In any case, instead of finding it in collective revolution
and socialism, he found the answer in moral and psychological
enlightenment. This theme is repeated in Ambedkar’s definition of
‘nibbana’ in terms of three ideas: ‘Of these the happiness of a sentient being
as distinction from the salvation of the soul is one. The second idea is the
happiness of the sentient being in Samsara while he is alive … The third
idea which underlies his conception of Nibbana is the exercise of control
over the flames of the passions which are always on fire’ (Ambedkar 1992,
11:234). This control over the fire of passions and emotions is the basis for
collective human control over social life, and it is depicted as the basic
factor in the Buddha’s Enlightenment. It is this that he sets out to preach,
and just to underline its this-worldly approach, Ambedkar describes the first
five listeners as responding with the words ‘never in the history of the world
has salvation been conceived as the blessing of happiness to be attained by
man in this life and on this earth by righteousness born out of his own
efforts’(Ambedkar 1992, 11:130–31). While almost all of the book (and all
of the Buddha’s own teachings) is taken from actual Pali suttas, this
response of the first followers appears to be an addition of Ambedkar’s,
designed to stress the moral nature of the Buddhist dhamma. In the same
way, he spends a good deal of effort contrasting Buddhist ‘dhamma’ from
the Brahmanical caste-ridden ‘dharma’.
This was, in part, providing Buddhist answers to Marxist questions. It
was clearly a rejection of collectivistic materialism: psychological and
moral solutions were stressed. Yet it was different from the purely spiritual
orientation of the traditional forms of Buddhism, including Theravada. The
goal, as Ambedkar put it, was reconstruction of the world, a goal that he
had held from very early in his life. But the answers of Marxism no longer
held much fascination for him. Buddhism did, but it was a reinterpreted
Buddhism, a kind of psychological materialism. In distinguishing between
‘dhamma’ and ‘religion’, Ambedkar argued that for traditional religions,
morality was secondary and derivative; to Buddhists, dhamma was
morality, though it was a sacred morality, necessary to bind society together.
This basic insight provided a framework for the book, Ambedkar’s manual
of Buddhism, which included a collection of stories of the Buddha, his
disciples and his teachings drawn from the major Pali scriptures. The stories
emphasized how followers, both men and women, came from all
communities and all levels of society; they emphasized the wisdom of the
Buddha and the difference of his teachings from Hinduism; and they
emphasized rationality. On questions of interpretation, Ambedkar wrote,
reason was to be the guide, for the Buddha ‘was nothing if not rational’. It
was a form of Buddhism that could be justified by scholarly research, but it
awakened some antagonism from existing Buddhist orders, particularly the
Hindu-dominated Mahabodhi society.
These were relevant only in terms of the larger Hindu society. When the
book was ready, in mid 1957, Ambedkar wrote a letter to Nehru asking for
government support of Rs 20,000 for publishing it. Nehru wrote in reply
that he could not manage it, but was forwarding the book to S.
Radhakrishnan, at that time heading a committee that had been formed to
commemorate what was considered the 2500th anniversary of the
Mahaparinibbana. Radhakrishnan’s own interpretation of Buddhism, seen in
his translation of the Dhammapada, had emphasized its similarity to
Vedanta and the teachings of the Gita, and The Buddha and His Dhamma
clearly did not fit into this. The antagonism to Buddhism within orthodox
Brahmanism, which had only been partially masked by the effort to
reinterpret it as part of Hinduism, was made clear by the refusal to publicize
any other interpretation.
But Ambedkar and his followers no longer had many expectations from
the political leadership. Preparations continued for their own public
acceptance of a new religion, so long announced, so fervently hoped for by
many and opposed by others. The auspicious date of 14 October was
chosen. Ambedkar had originally announced that the ceremony of
‘dhammadiksha’ would be held in Bombay, which was from where he did
much of his organizing. But a delegation from Nagpur, led by the militant
organizer of the Samta Sainik Dal, Waman Godbole, put forward the case
for that city with great persuasiveness. Nagpur, in contrast to Bombay, he
argued, had a historic connection with Buddhism; it was an ancient centre
of the religion. They had a site, four acres of land acquired by a
sympathizer, and they could provide an organization that would protect
Babasaheb from the Hindu reaction that they feared.
Who would preside over the ceremony? There was no existing
organization adequate for that in India. The Mahabodhi society was famous,
but it had also become monopolized by traditional-minded Hindus: as the
English bhikku Sangharakshita, meeting Ambedkar in Bombay, reported,
the Mahabodhi society was headed then by the Jan Sangh leader Shyam
Prasad Mukherji. Ambedkar decided that the oldest Buddhist monk in India
at the time, a Burmese living in a monastery at Kusinagara, would be the
one to give him diksha, the vows of Buddhism.
The final ceremony was a huge one and it demonstrated not simply
Ambedkar’s hold over his people but a massive emotional commitment to
entering into a new faith. People poured into the grounds from villages and
towns all over Maharasthra, dressed in their finest white clothes. By the
week of the ceremony four lakh men, women and children who had
formerly been considered untouchables had virtually taken over the city.
Before the huge crowd, Ambedkar took diksha. Sangharakshita also reports
that he was at first unwilling to take the third of the traditional three
‘refuges’ (in the Buddha, the dhamma and the sangha) which identified a
person as a Buddhist. He had been a strong critic of the existing sangha,
feeling that it should become an organization dedicated also to social
service, and undoubtedly reacting against the casteism unconsciously
shown by the Sinhala monks and the Indian monks—mostly of Brahman
origin—he had met. However, he relented (Sangharakshita 1986, 136–37).
Then he turned around and, in an unprecedented gesture, himself
administered the vows to his followers. He added an additional twenty-one
vows that involved renunciation of all aspects of Brahmanic Hinduism.
Following his guidance, the massive crowd renounced the worship of
Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Ram and Krishna, and vowed not to follow the
shraddh ceremony, but instead to obey the precepts of Buddhism, not to lie,
not to steal and not to drink alcohol. Dalits in their collective oath dedicated
themselves to a new life, taking refuge in the Buddha, dhamma and sangha
from the hierarchies and atrocities they had experienced under Hinduism. It
was the climax of a career of studying, political action and all-around
leadership of one of the most oppressed populations of the world, the
untouchables of India.
 Conclusion

Dr Ambedkar and the Freedom Struggle of Dalits

Less than two months after the huge conversion ceremony, Bhimrao
Ambedkar was dead, found on the morning of 6 December, slumped over
the papers he had been working on late at night. His death was followed by
an outpouring of grief as great as the mobilization of hope that had
appeared with the dhammadiksha. Dalits throughout India but especially
Maharashtra wept as if it were their own father who had died, and people
from all over the world sent their tributes.
Ambedkar left behind him a massive collection of notes and books on a
variety of themes. His project of writing on the Bhakti sants of Maharashtra
was never even begun, but his unfinished manuscripts, including
‘Revolution and counter-revolution in ancient India’ and ‘Untouchables:
The Children of India’s ghetto’, were extremely significant. In his last
studies he was projecting an alternative sociocultural history of India. As in
a Marxist interpretation, his would emphasize conflict and contradiction;
but in contrast to Marxism, this would be seen in primarily ideological-
religious terms, the mortal conflict between Brahmanism and Buddhism.
Ambedkar’s life had spanned the first part of the twentieth century and all
the decisive phases of India’s freedom struggle. However, he had fought for
a correlated but different freedom struggle, one for the liberation of the
most oppressed sections of Indian society. This was a liberation movement
wider and deeper than that of fighting colonialism, focusing on the kind of
new nation that was to be built. This struggle did not emerge in a vacuum; it
was the zenith of protracted and widespread movements of those classified
as ‘Shudras’ and ‘Untouchables’ in the traditional hierarchy. Many ‘organic
intellectuals’ rose from among the Dalit-Bahujan masses to give voice to
this struggle and to theorize it—men like Jotirao Phule, Iyothee Thass,
Periyar, Mangoo Ram and Acchutanand. More than the well-known upper-
caste intellectuals of colonial India, these were the true modernizers, the
heralds of a new Enlightenment. It was understandable that Ambedkar,
emerging from the lowest section of India’s caste-oppressed to gain an
education that few could equal, would take a stand not as a proponent of a
revitalized, Vedic and Vedantic-centred tradition but of revolution, the
revolution of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ proclaimed first in the French
Revolution and gradually sweeping the world. It was even more striking
that he could find the roots of this in India itself, in the message of the
Buddha proclaimed thousands of years before.
His freedom fight, the freedom fight of Dalits, had many aspects. It began
with the simple demand to drink water from a public well, just as Dalits
earlier had fought for simple rights of using public roads, transport and
schools. Legislatures and municipalities had been passing resolutions for
some years making the facilities open to all, but these had been ignored.
Ambedkar’s movement to implement the claim to the source of all of life’s
nourishment, which was also a movement to constitute public space as truly
public, met with resistance from the orthodox and was transformed into a
cultural challenge when Dalits and caste Hindus under his leadership
burned the Manusmriti, the ancient Brahmanic code that was the cultural-
legal symbol of caste slavery. And this challenge to Brahmanic tradition led
Ambedkar, in spite of his own nationalism, in spite of his own initial hopes
in the new leader, into an overall confrontation with the most famous name
in India’s national movement: Mahatma Gandhi. From the time of the
Round Table Conference to Ambedkar’s proclamation in 1935 that ‘I will
not die a Hindu’, the politics of this confrontation resounded throughout
India.
The confrontation was not with an openly traditionalist leader of the
Congress, but with someone who had the image of a reformist, someone
who sought to identify with India’s poor and to overcome the division
between social reform and political reform that had existed up to then. Yet,
as it turned out, Gandhi’s reformism did not satisfy Dalit aspirations
precisely because it was rooted in the framework of a Hinduism that did not
challenge the roots of varnashrama dharma. Gandhi gained inspiration from
the Vaishnavite Bhakti movement, but without the true burning for equality
that had characterized the most radical Bhakti sants, people like Kabir,
Ravidas and Tukaram, who had rejected priestly rituals and hierarchy as
well as Muslim orthodoxy. Gandhi’s Vaishnavism was rather the milder,
orthodox form found in the Gujarati Vallabhaite movement. It meant that
never until the end of his life did he denounce even the most extreme
expressions of caste inequality found in the Brahmanic scriptures. He
proclaimed his faith in a superficially modernized varnashrama dharma that
included the affirmation of ‘swadharma’, the idea that children should
follow the professions of their fathers. This he sought to qualify with the
values that all occupations should be equally respected. This in turn was
linked to his anti-industrialism and his romanticization of traditional village
society and its social system as one of harmony and stability. The idea of
Ram Raj symbolized this in terms that the most illiterate Indian could
understand. For Dalits, though, Ram Raj meant a regime that had
persecuted untouchables like Shambuk who had tried to step out of their
place. Dalits of the modern world, following Ambedkar, were determined to
leave their place, even to destroy it.
This confrontation would not have been so important if Gandhi had only
been acting as a leader of Hindu society, but he claimed the leadership of
the nationalist movement, and with all of his concern for Hindu—Muslim
unity, he projected his religious identifications on that movement. Gandhi,
as many Congressmen, could not separate his Hinduism from his
nationalism. India’s nationalist movement was thus taking shape under the
shadow of what is today called the ‘Hindutva’ ideology, a more or less
conscious Hindu nation. It was forerunners like Savarkar who proclaimed
Hinduism as the national religion of the Indian subcontinent, but Gandhi
himself did not take so different a position when he fervently argued that
untouchables should not convert to an ‘alien’ religion. His way of
establishing unity with Muslims was through affirming the religious needs
of each, and in doing so continuing the assumption that India was made up
of religious communities.
The confrontation between Gandhi and Ambedkar was thus not simply a
confrontation of two idiosyncratic leaders but of two deeply divergent
conceptions of the Indian nation itself. It was this perspective that
Ambedkar was seeking to develop, which his unpublished manuscripts and
a few completed books such as Who Were the Shudras? were beginning to
outline.
Ambedkar’s organizing began with economic radicalism. He took up the
issues of tenant farmers and workers, allying with Communists in major
strikes and in fighting landlordism in the Konkan. The flag of his first party,
the ILP, was red like theirs. He took his left phase quite far, to the point of
looking for inspiration to Marxism for his economic policy, which he
described for some time as ‘state socialism’. Yet in the end he found
Marxism inadequate, not only because of its neglect of ideological and
cultural issues and most importantly its total blindness to caste in the Indian
context but also because it was not sufficiently democratic. Towards the end
of his life he was moving towards an economics of a liberal social welfare
state, with planning, with a focus on industrialization, but with a strong
emphasis on pragmatism, using competition to fuel the growth of the
economy and of the state to ensure social justice. Though he proclaimed
clearly his differences with Marxism, its stamp remained on him all his life,
even on the way he interpreted Buddhism. His similarities with a more
orthodox Marxism continued to be a profound concern for economic
development and industrialization as the way out of poverty. This remains
the most crucial dividing line from the Gandhian vision whose romanticism
attracts so many in today’s world.
With his breadth of economic and cultural analysis, Ambedkar should
have stood in the forefront of the men whose ideas shaped India. Yet he is
barely admitted into their ranks. With the failure of a broad political
alliance, in spite of his many writings and policies on the crucial issues of
the time, from the question of Pakistan to that of the economic structuring
of independent India, Ambedkar has retained a place in the collective
memory of India primarily as the leader of India’s untouchables. With his
movement no longer a political threat to Congress dominance, his
leadership qualities could be recognized and used when he was made chair
of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, and then law minister
in the first cabinet of independent India. But this was a failure of the
broader transformative project that Dalits and non-Brahmans had sought to
project for the new nation, a failure which in the end laid the way open for a
renewed and often ugly and brutal growth of militant Hindutva forces in
independent India. Ambedkar’s words, when he resigned after the failure to
pass a reformed law for marriage and inheritance, the Hindu Code Bill,
eloquently capture what has characterized much of the growth of
independent India: ‘building a castle on a dung heap’. What he considered
the dung heap was of course the cultural and social inheritance of
varnashrama dharma against which he posed the Enlightenment values of
liberty, equality and fraternity. The fight remains.
TWO: ‘WE ARE AGAINST BRAHMANISM BUT NOT BRAHMANS …’: BEGINNING THE FIGHT
FOR DALIT HUMAN RIGHTS

* This incident was related to the author by Shankarrao Kharat in 1975.

 THREE: ‘GANDHIJI, I HAVE NO HOMELAND’: THE ROUND TABLE CONFERENCES, THE
POONA PACT AND NATIONALIST DILEMMAS

* He later argued that an untouchable had suggested this term.

 FIVE: ‘AGAINST CAPITALISM AND BRAHMANISM’: YEARS OF CLASS RADICALISM

* Partly because of the land situation, the distinction between Marathas and
Kunbis was sharper in the Konkan than in the inland areas of
Maharashtra.
 EIGHT: ‘BUILDING A PALACE ON A DUNG HEAP’: THE POST-INDEPENDENCE YEARS

* It should be noted that here Ambedkar was using ‘class’ to refer to caste,
as was frequently done at the time and in the Constitutional debates
themselves, e.g. ‘Depressed Classes’, ‘Other Backward Classes’. Later
this ambivalent use of the term in the pre-independence period was used
to argue that reservation for ‘OBCs’ should include economic criteria.
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 Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to more people than I can name for support, inspiration and
information used in this short biography of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, which
draws on years of coming to understand and writing about this giant of
India.
I owe thanks to Eleanor Zelliot, the pioneer in the field of Dalit and
Ambedkar studies, who has been a well of information and constant source
of advice and support and information to me as well as to so many others. I
have learned much from discussions and seminars with scholars such as G.
Aloysius, Kancha Ilaiah, S.K. and Vimal Thorat, Narendra Jadhav, P.
Jogdand and S.M. Michael; and I owe special thanks to Surendra Jondhale
for years of engagement in debate, discussion and friendship, as well as the
important seminar on ‘Reconstructing the world: Ambedkar’s Buddhism’ in
1998. Sushrut Jadhav and other participants at the December 2002 seminar
on ‘Caste and mental discourses’ made an important contribution in
bringing forth the psychological costs of caste—a reality which clearly
Ambedkar also had to face. I also owe thanks to Lokamitra and other
workers of the Trailokya Bauddha Mahasangh in Pune for help on both
Ambedkar and Buddhism, and to Sharad Patil and Vasant and Meenakshi
Moon for their help and mental stimulation over the years.
This biography draws on my earlier research for books such as
Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition
in India (1993), Dalits and the Democratic Revolution (1994) and
Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste (2003). This
book’s period of gestation was supported by a variety of sources of income
—fifteen months of teaching at Pune University, six months at the National
Institute for Social Work and Social Sciences (NISWASS) in Bhubaneswar,
writing on caste and related issues of ‘Ambedkarism’ for the Hindu. All
these experiences stimulated my thinking as well as made time for research
possible. I owe thanks to S.M. Dahiwale, Ram Bapat, Gopal Guru and other
colleagues at Pune University, and to Raj Kumar, R.K. Nayak and
Ramashray Roy at NISWASS. Finally, I owe thanks to N. Ravi and Malini
Parthasarthy at the Hindu for providing a platform for writing and debate on
current and past issues raised by the Dalit movement.
The Dalit movement which Ambedkar’s life and struggle did so much to
shape did not belong only to Maharashtra or even to his own contributions.
It was under his leadership that movements rising in disparate areas under
disparate conditions took shape—and these disparities remain important.
For an understanding of the Dalit movement in Tamil Nadu, I owe thanks to
Antony Raj, Dr Krishnasami, Thol Thirunavalan and Ravi Kumar, for that
in Punjab to L.S. Balley, Dr Amar Singh, G.S. Bal and others, to Ross
Mallick for generously providing material and insights on the Bengal
Namashudra movement, and to Bojja Tharakkam, V. Laxminarayan and
many others for the other non-Maharashtra areas of the movement.
Immediate support during the writing was provided by friends of
Buddhist Circle, a Dalit-run yahoogroup whose centre is in Delhi, who gave
both technical and scholarly help—computer access, books and references
to more sources about Ambedkar than I could manage to use—in particular
Mangesh Dahiwale, Dhanraj and Minakshi Gedam, Santosh and all the
Vasant Kunj friends, and to Mahesh Sagar, Sakya Umanathan, Babasevak
and many others. Dalit web sites and e-mail interaction have blossomed in
the past few years, and I have found material on the groups managed by
Mangesh Dahiwale, K.P. Singh and Satinath Choudhary particularly useful.
I was a senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library during
the writing and editing of the book, which also draws in part on my project
‘Perspectives of the anti-caste movement on social-economic development’.
I owe thanks to the library staff for their unfailing help, to my colleagues
for stimulating discussion and especially to O.P. Kejariwal for his generous
support and encouragement.
I would also like to thank Prakash Ambedkar for his support and the use
of citations from Dr Ambedkar’s writings.
And for patience and support during the writing, I thank my family,
Bharat, Indutai and Jyoti for patience and support, especially Bharat, whose
support and stimulation over the years made up for the too-small period of
time snatched from his organizing responsibilities.
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