Annihilation of caste by arundhati roy biography
The Doctor and the Saint
[I]
ANNIHILATION Indicate CASTE is the nearly eighty-year-old text of a speech lose one\'s train of thought was never delivered.* When I foremost read it I felt chimp though somebody had walked minor road a dim room and open the windows. Reading Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar bridges the break in proceedings between what most Indians purpose schooled to believe in topmost the reality we experience the whole number day of our lives.
My father was a Hindu, capital Brahmo. I never met him until I was an of age. I grew up with clean up mother, in a Syrian Christianly family in Ayemenem, a in short supply village in communist-ruled Kerala. Countryside yet all around me were the fissures and cracks disregard caste. Ayemenem had its fiddle with separate “Parayan” church where “Parayan” priests preached to an “untouchable” congregation.
Caste was implied pluck out peoples’ names, in the go rancid people referred to each mocker, in the work they blunt, in the clothes they wore, in the marriages that were arranged, in the language astonishment spoke. Even so, I conditions encountered the notion of social class in a single school manual.
Reading Ambedkar alerted me be obliged to a gaping hole in outline pedagogical universe. Reading him as well made it clear why drift hole exists and why delight will continue to exist \'til Indian society undergoes radical, insurrectionary change.
Revolutions can, and again and again have, begun with reading.
Ambedkar was a prolific writer. Alarmingly his work, unlike the circulars of Gandhi, Nehru or Vivekananda, does not shine out disapproval you from the shelves leave undone libraries and bookshops.
Of her majesty many volumes, Annihilation of Caste is his most radical contents. It is not an cause directed at Hindu fundamentalists pretend to be extremists, but at those who consider themselves moderate, those whom Ambedkar called “the best freedom Hindus”—and some academics call “left-wing Hindus.”1 Ambedkar’s point is lapse to believe in the Hindi shastras and to simultaneously ponder of oneself as liberal eat moderate is a contradiction mess terms.
When the text personage Annihilation of Caste was publicized, the man who is commonly called the “greatest of Hindus”—Mahatma Gandhi—responded to Ambedkar’s provocation. Their debate was not a advanced one. Both men were their generation’s emissaries of a momentous social, political and philosophical dispute that had begun long rearwards and has still by clumsy means ended.
Ambedkar, the inaccessible, was heir to an anticaste intellectual tradition that goes in response to 200–100 BCE. The training of caste, which is held to have its genesis injure the Purusha Sukta hymn2 impossible to differentiate the Rig Veda (1200–900 BCE), faced its first challenge sui generis incomparabl a thousand years later, as the Buddhists broke with rank by creating sanghas that manifest everybody, regardless of which blood they belonged to.
Yet blood endured and evolved. In rectitude mid-twelfth century, the Veerashaivas neat by Basava challenged caste answer South India, and were deflated. From the fourteenth century vanguard, the beloved Bhakti poet-saints—Cokhamela, Ravidas, Kabir, Tukaram, Mira, Janabai—became, person in charge remain, the poets of grandeur anticaste tradition.
In the 19th and early twentieth centuries came Jotirao Phule and his Satyashodhak Samaj in western India; Pandita Ramabai, perhaps India’s first libber, a Marathi Brahmin who unpopular Hinduism and converted to Religion (and challenged that, too); Guiding light Achutanand Harihar, who led authority Adi Hindu movement, started grandeur Bharatiya Achhut Mahasabha (Parliament look up to Indian Untouchables), and edited Achhut, the first Dalit journal; Ayyankali and Sree Narayana Guru, who shook up the old embargo in Malabar and Travancore; take the iconoclast Iyothee Thass limit his Sakya Buddhists, who ridiculed Brahmin supremacy in the Dravidian world.
Among Ambedkar’s contemporaries expect the anticaste tradition were E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, known as “Periyar” in the Madras Presidency; Jogendranath Mandal of Bengal; and Baboo Mangoo Ram, who founded depiction Ad Dharm movement in leadership Punjab that rejected both Faith and Hinduism. These were Ambedkar’s people.
Gandhi, a Vaishya, calved into a Gujarati Bania kinsmen, was the latest in ingenious long tradition of privileged-caste Hindoo reformers and their organisations: Rajah Ram Mohan Roy, who supported the Brahmo Samaj in 1828; Swami Dayananda Saraswati, who supported the Arya Samaj in 1875; Swami Vivekananda, who established high-mindedness Ramakrishna Mission in 1897; current a host of other, auxiliary contemporary reformist organisations.3
Putting the Ambedkar–Gandhi debate into context for those unfamiliar with its history abstruse its protagonists will require detours into their very different civil trajectories.
For this was next to no means just a unrealistic debate between two men who held different opinions. Each minor very separate interest groups, queue their battle unfolded in illustriousness heart of India’s national augment. What they said and upfront continues to have an gigantic bearing on contemporary politics. Their differences were (and remain) hostile.
Both are deeply loved distinguished often deified by their rooms. It pleases neither constituency hit upon have the other’s story rich, though the two are ineluctably linked. Ambedkar was Gandhi’s peak formidable adversary. He challenged him not just politically or subjectively, but also morally. To possess excised Ambedkar from Gandhi’s building, which is the story miracle all grew up on, stick to a travesty.
Equally, to leaving Gandhi while writing about Ambedkar is to do Ambedkar calligraphic disservice, because Gandhi loomed shield Ambedkar’s world in myriad elitist un-wonderful ways.
THE INDIAN Genetic MOVEMENT, as we know, difficult to understand a stellar cast. It has even been the subject present a Hollywood blockbuster that won eight Oscars.
In India, astonishment have made a pastime pale holding opinion polls and proclamation books and magazines in which our constellation of founding fathers (mothers don’t make the cut) are arranged and rearranged central part various hierarchies and formations. Statesman does have his bitter critics, but he still tops high-mindedness charts.
For others to yet get a look-in, the Pa of the Nation has in depth be segregated, put into first-class separate category: Who, after Maharishi Gandhi, is the greatest Indian?4
Ambedkar (who, incidentally, did not unchanging have a walk-on part infiltrate Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, though primacy film was co-funded by dignity Indian government) almost always bring abouts it into the final torridity.
He is chosen more bring back the part he played interject drafting the Indian constitution ahead of for the politics and righteousness passion that were at prestige core of his life extra thinking. You definitely get influence sense that his presence frontier the lists is the go by of positive discrimination, a want to be politically correct.
Influence caveats continue to be murmured: “opportunist” (because he served by reason of Labour Member of the Land Viceroy’s Executive Council, between 1942 and 1946), “British stooge” (because he accepted an invitation put on the back burner the British government to character First Round Table Conference, conduct yourself 1930, when Congressmen were beingness imprisoned for breaking the table salt laws), “separatist” (because he craved separate electorates for untouchables), reprove “anti-national” (because he endorsed righteousness Muslim League’s case for Pakistan, and because he suggested defer Jammu and Kashmir be trifurcated).5
Notwithstanding the name-calling, the fact assessment that neither Ambedkar nor Solon allows us to pin acquiescent labels on them that inspection “pro-imperialist” or “anti-imperialist.” Their disorder complicates and perhaps enriches weighing scales understanding of imperialism as plight as the struggle against close-fisted.
History has been kind on top of Gandhi. He was deified uncongenial millions of people in authority own lifetime. His godliness has become a universal and, make available seems, eternal phenomenon. It’s wail just that the metaphor has outstripped the man. It has entirely reinvented him (which court case why a critique of Statesman need not automatically be entranced to be a critique work out all Gandhians).
Gandhi has change all things to all people: Obama loves him and deadpan does the Occupy movement. Anarchists love him and so does the establishment. Narendra Modi loves him and so does Rahul Gandhi. The poor love him and so do the affluent.
He is the Saint behoove the Status Quo.
Gandhi’s activity and his writing—48,000 pages tied into 98 volumes of nonchalant works—have been disaggregated and kill off, event by event, decree by sentence, until no unbalanced narrative remains, if indeed apropos ever was one.
The offend is that Gandhi actually articulate everything and its opposite. Join cherry pickers, he offers specified a bewildering variety of cherries that you have to awe if there was something rendering matter with the tree.
For example, there’s his well-known species of an Arcadian paradise envelop “The Pyramid vs. the Pelagic Circle,” written in 1946:
Independence must begin at the from top to toe.
Thus every village will distrust a republic or panchayat obtaining full powers. It follows, thus, that every village has be in breach of be self-sustained and capable sum managing its affairs even bung the extent of defending upturn against the whole world… Hoax this structure composed of untold villages there will be ever-widening, never-ascending circles.
Life will arrange be a pyramid with authority apex sustained by the explanation. But it will be intimation oceanic circle whose centre desire be the individual always motive to perish for the village… Therefore the outermost circumference disposition not wield power to splinter the inner circle but drive give strength to all imprisoned and derive its own suspicious from it.6
Then there is jurisdiction endorsement of the caste means in 1921 in Navajivan.
Go out with is translated from Gujarati gross Ambedkar (who suggested more mystify once that Gandhi “deceived” be sociable, and that his writings hold English and Gujarati could emerging productively compared):7
Caste is another term for control. Caste puts clean limit on enjoyment.
Caste does not allow a person round on transgress caste limits in profit of his enjoyment. That interest the meaning of such position restrictions as inter-dining and inter-marriage… These being my views Rabid am opposed to all those who are out to shelve crash the Caste System.8
Is this clump the very antithesis of “ever-widening and never ascending circles”?
It’s true that these statements were made 25 years apart. Does that mean that Gandhi transformed, that he changed his views on caste? He did, refer to a glacial pace. From believing in the caste system return all its minutiae, he stiff to saying that the quaternion thousand separate castes should “fuse” themselves into the four varnas (what Ambedkar called the “parent” of the caste system).
On the way the end of Gandhi’s discernment (when his views were stiffnecked views and did not dart the risk of translating change political action), he said deviate he no longer objected tackle inter-dining and intermarriage between castes. Sometimes he said that comb he believed in the varna system, a person’s varna naught to be decided by their worth and not their commencement (which was also the Arya Samaj position).
Ambedkar pointed horrid the absurdity of this idea: “How are you going lambast compel people who have concluded a higher status based power their birth, without reference turn into their worth, to vacate stray status? How are you even-handed to compel people to appreciate the status due to straighten up man in accordance to worth who is occupying great lower status based on rulership birth?”9 He went on go ask what would happen chance on women—whether their status would rectify decided upon their own valuation or their husbands’ worth.
Notwithstanding stories and anecdotes from Gandhi’s followers about Gandhi’s love support untouchables and the inter-caste weddings he attended, in the 98 volumes of his writing, Statesman never decisively and categorically give up his belief in chaturvarna, class system of four varnas. Sift through he was given to apologising and agonising publicly and perfidiously over things like occasional lapses in his control over top sexual desire,10 he never agonized over the extremely damaging factors he had said and realize on caste.
Still, why throng together eschew the negative and rotation instead on what was moderately good about Gandhi, use it give permission bring out the best spiky people? It is a be allowed question, and one that those who have built shrines smash into Gandhi have probably answered mind themselves. After all, it court case possible to admire the weigh up of great composers, writers, architects, sportspersons and musicians whose views are inimical to our drive down.
The difference is that Statesman was not a composer plead writer or musician or team member actor. He offered himself to violent as a visionary, a ghostly, a moralist, a great approving, the man who brought selfpossessed a mighty empire armed exclusive with Truth and Righteousness. Notwithstanding how do we reconcile the plan of the non-violent Gandhi, authority Gandhi who spoke truth peak power, Gandhi the nemesis pattern injustice, the gentle Gandhi, class androgynous Gandhi, Gandhi the female parent, the Gandhi who (allegedly) feminised politics and created space go for women to enter the national arena, the eco-Gandhi, the Statesman of the ready wit take precedence some great one-liners—how do awe reconcile all this with Gandhi’s views (and deeds) on caste?
What do we do pick up again this structure of moral religiousness that rests so comfortably enter a foundation of utterly hard, institutionalised injustice? Is it small to say Gandhi was chic, and let it go infuriated that? There is no disquiet that Gandhi was an exceptional and fascinating man, but through India’s struggle for freedom, exact he really speak truth bring out power?
Did he really supposedly himself with the poorest annotation the poor, the most susceptible of his people?
“It evenhanded foolish to take solace ton the fact that because authority Congress is fighting for decency freedom of India, it legal action, therefore, fighting for the permission of the people of Bharat and of the lowest a variety of the low,” Ambedkar said.
“The question whether the Congress commission fighting for freedom has realize little importance as compared farm the question for whose publication is the Congress fighting.”11
In 1931, when Ambedkar met Gandhi carry the first time, Gandhi touchy him about his sharp ban of the Congress (which, pounce on was assumed, was tantamount accomplish criticising the struggle for blue blood the gentry homeland).
“Gandhiji, I have thumb Homeland,” was Ambedkar’s famous response. “No Untouchable worth the designation will be proud of that land.”12
History has been unkind completed Ambedkar. First it contained him, and then it glorified him. It has made him India’s Leader of the Untouchables, goodness king of the ghetto. Criterion has hidden away his data.
It has stripped away class radical intellect and the boiling insolence.
All the same, Ambedkar’s followers have kept his estate alive in creative ways. Helpful of those ways is pull out turn him into a bomb mass-produced statues. The Ambedkar human being is a radical and excite object.13 It has been manipulate forth into the world root for claim the space—both physical deliver virtual, public and private—that keep to the Dalit’s due.
Dalits put on used Ambedkar’s statue to affirm their civil rights—to claim flat that is owed them, bottled water that is theirs, commons they are denied access to. Glory Ambedkar statue that is cropped on the commons and rallied around always holds a tome in its hand. Significantly, dump book is not Annihilation designate Caste with its liberating, mutineer rage.
It is a reproduction of the Indian Constitution dump Ambedkar played a vital segregate in conceptualising—the document that moment, for better or for shoddier, governs the life of from time to time single Indian citizen.
Using prestige Constitution as a subversive item is one thing. Being unmodified by it is quite substitute.
Ambedkar’s circumstances forced him relax be a revolutionary and do as you are told simultaneously put his foot happening the door of the founding whenever he got a crash into to. His genius lay link with his ability to use both these aspects of himself efficiently, and to great effect. Assumed through the prism of influence present, however, it has done on purpose that he left behind a-one dual and sometimes confusing legacy: Ambedkar the radical, and Ambedkar the father of the Soldier Constitution.
Constitutionalism can come fell the way of revolution. Perch the Dalit revolution has watchword a long way happened yet. We still look for it. Before that there cannot be any other, not hold back India.
This is not treaty suggest that writing a structure cannot be a radical have some bearing on. It can be, it could have been, and Ambedkar enervated his best to make dash one.
However, by his attention admission, he did not wholly succeed.
As India hurtled toward independence, both Ambedkar and Solon were seriously concerned about honesty fate of minorities, particularly Muslims and untouchables, but they responded to the approaching birth replica the new nation in learn different ways. Gandhi distanced mortal physically more and more from significance business of nation building.
Purchase him, the Congress party’s weigh up was done. He wanted ethics party dissolved. He believed (quite rightly) that the state minuscule violence in a concentrated have a word with organised form, that because raise was not a human thing, because it was soulless, organized owed its very existence make sure of violence.14 In Gandhi’s understanding, swaraj, or self-rule, lived in honesty moral heart of his give out, though he made it diaphanous that by “his people” operate did not mean the collect community alone:
It has antique said that Indian swaraj drive be the rule of illustriousness majority community, i.e., the Hindus.
There could not be top-notch greater mistake than that. Supposing it were to be genuine, I for one would turn down to call it swaraj pointer would fight it with hubbub the strength at my right lane, for to me Hind Swaraj is the rule of consummate the people, is the center of justice.15
For Ambedkar, “the people” was not a homogeneous classify that glowed with the reddish hue of innate righteousness.
Let go knew that, regardless of what Gandhi said, it would surely be the majority community dump decided what form swaraj would take. The prospect of India’s untouchables being ruled by fold up other than the moral soul of India’s predominantly Hindu grouping filled him with foreboding. Ambedkar became anxious, even desperate, put in plain words manoeuvre himself into becoming unembellished member of the Constituent Meeting, a position that would empower him to influence the athletic and the spirit of justness constitution for the emerging technique in real and practical shipway.
For this he was much prepared to set aside wreath pride, and his misgivings soldier on with his old foe, the Assembly party.
Ambedkar’s main concern was to privilege and legalise “constitutional morality” over the traditional, organized morality of the caste path. Speaking in the Constituent Company on 4 November 1948, closure said, “Constitutional morality is whimper a natural sentiment.
It has to be cultivated. We obligated to realise that our people control yet to learn it. Commonwealth in India is only exceptional top-dressing on an Indian contaminate which is essentially undemocratic.”16
Ambedkar was seriously disappointed with the terminating draft of the constitution. Get done, he did succeed in at any rate in place certain rights concentrate on safeguards that would, as faraway as the subordinated castes were concerned, make it a certificate that was more enlightened prior to the society it was drafted for.
(For others, however, on the topic of India’s adivasis, the constitution nasty out to be just monumental extension of colonial practice.) Ambedkar thought of the constitution though a work in progress. Liking Thomas Jefferson, he believed desert unless every generation had rank right to create a spanking constitution for itself, the lie would belong to “the fusty and not the living.”17 (The trouble is that the board are not necessarily more increasing or enlightened than the archaic.
There are a number symbolize forces today, political as mutate as commercial, that are lobbying to rewrite the constitution inconvenience utterly regressive ways.)
Though Ambedkar was a lawyer, he difficult to understand no illusions about law-making. In that law minister in post-independence Bharat, he worked for months send-up a draft of the Hindi Code Bill.
He believed wind the caste system advanced upturn by controlling women, and look after of his major concerns was to make Hindu personal decree more equitable for women.18 Magnanimity bill he proposed sanctioned disunion and expanded the property affirm of widows and daughters. Excellence Constituent Assembly dragged its assault over it for four geezerhood (from 1947 to 1951) queue then blocked it.19 The executive, Rajendra Prasad, threatened to stool the bill’s passage into blame.
Hindu sadhus laid siege regard Parliament. Industrialists and zamindars warned they would withdraw their centre in the coming elections.20 At the end of the day Ambedkar resigned as law missionary. In his resignation speech noteworthy said: “To leave inequality halfway class and class, between gender and sex, which is birth soul of Hindu society, become more intense to go on passing lawmaking relating to economic problems equitable to make a farce draw round our Constitution and to fabricate a palace on a secondhand goods heap.”21
More than anything else, what Ambedkar brought to a far-flung, multifaceted political struggle, with go into detail than its fair share quite a lot of sectarianism, obscurantism and skulduggery, was intelligence.
[II]
ANNIHILATION OF CASTE is description text of a speech Ambedkar was supposed to deliver mould Lahore, in 1936, to untainted audience of privileged-caste Hindus. Picture organisation that had been fearless enough to invite him goslow deliver its presidential address was the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (the Forum for the Break-up dominate Caste) of Lahore, an member of the Arya Samaj.
Summit of its members were privileged-caste Hindu reformers. They asked oversee be provided the text imbursement the speech in advance, in this fashion that they could print enjoin distribute it. When they scan it and realised that Ambedkar was going to launch key intellectual assault on the Vedas and shastras, on Hinduism strike, they wrote to him:
Those of us who would love to see the conference bring or come to an end without any untoward incident would prefer that at least rendering word ‘Veda’ be left fan for the time being.
Crazed leave this to your good sense. I hope, however, suspend your concluding paragraphs you wish make it clear that nobility views expressed in the discourse are your own and guarantee the responsibility does not pollute on the Mandal.22
Ambedkar refused pause alter his speech, and fair the event was cancelled.
Potentate text ought not to receive come as such a admiration to the Mandal. Just unadulterated few months previously, on 13 October 1935, at the Downcast Classes Conference in Yeola underneath the Bombay Presidency (now detainee the state of Maharashtra), Ambedkar had told an audience give an account of more than ten thousand people:
Because we have the breezy of calling ourselves Hindus, incredulity are treated thus.
If incredulity were members of another credence none would treat us and. Choose any religion which gives you equality of status lecture treatment. We shall repair chitchat mistake now. I had rank misfortune of being born hostile to the stigma of an Harijan. However, it is not wooly fault; but I will call for die a Hindu, for that is in my power.23
At put off particular moment in time, righteousness threat of religious conversion in and out of an untouchable leader of Ambedkar’s standing came as the gain the advantage over possible news to Hindu reformers.
Conversion was by no pathway new. Seeking to escape authority stigma of caste, untouchable stand for other degraded labouring castes esoteric begun to convert to block out religions centuries ago. Millions challenging converted to Islam during justness years of Muslim rule. Subsequent, millions more had taken know Sikhism and Christianity.
(Sadly, standing prejudice in the subcontinent trumps religious belief. Though their good book do not sanction it, restricted Indian Muslims, Sikhs and Christians all practise caste discrimination.24 Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal all be endowed with their own communities of outlaw sweepers. So does Kashmir.)
The mass conversion of oppressed-caste Hindus, particularly to Islam, continues border on sit uncomfortably with Hindu fanatic history writing, which dwells case a golden age of Faith that was brought to zero by the cruelty and ransack of Muslim rule.25 Vandalism existing cruelty there certainly was.
Thus far it meant different things advice different people. Here is Jotirao Phule (1827–1890), the earliest cut into the modern anticaste intellectuals, come upon the subject of Muslim rein in and of the so-called luxurious age of the Arya Bhats (Brahmins):
The Muslims, destroying ethics carved stone images of interpretation cunning Arya Bhats, forcibly downtrodden them and brought the Shudras and Ati-Shudras in great book out of their clutches topmost made them Muslims, including them in the Muslim Religion.
Remote only this, but they entrenched inter-dining and intermarriage with them and gave them all the same as rights. They made them drop as happy as themselves abstruse forced the Arya Bhats communication see all this.26
By the disk of the century, however, spiritualminded conversion came to have tick different implications in India.
Precise new set of unfamiliar considerations entered the mix. Opposing bully unpopular regime was no someone just a question of clean conquering army riding into excellence capital, overthrowing the monarch nearby taking the throne. The ancient idea of empire was altering into the new idea heed the nation state. Modern administration now involved addressing the changeable question of the right verge on representation: who had the give birth to to represent the Indian people?
The Hindus, the Muslims, righteousness Sikhs, the Christians, the complete castes, the oppressed castes, primacy farmers, the workers? How would the “self” in self-rule—the “swa” in swaraj—be constituted? Who would decide? Suddenly, a people who belonged to an impossibly assorted range of races, castes, tribes and religions—who, between them, rung more than one thousand languages—had to be transformed into original citizens of a modern allot.
The process of synthetic blend began to have the opposing effect. Even as the pristine Indian nation constituted itself, department store began to fracture.
Under ethics new dispensation, demography became vitally important. The empirical taxonomy round the British census had coagulate and freeze-dried the rigid nevertheless not entirely inflexible hierarchy oppress caste, adding its own prejudices and value judgements to excellence mix, classifying entire communities type “criminals” and “warriors” and to such a degree accord on.
The untouchable castes were entered under the accounting tendency “Hindu.” (In 1930, according cork Ambedkar, the untouchables numbered slow 44.5 million.27 The population several African Americans in the Pooled States around the same tight was 8.8 million.) The large-scale exodus of untouchables from distinction Hindu fold would have back number catastrophic for the “Hindu” maturation.
In pre-partition, undivided Punjab, transport example, between 1881 and 1941, the Hindu population dropped spread 43.8 percent to 29.1 proportion, due largely to the flux of the subordinated castes tutorial Islam, Sikhism and Christianity.28
Hindu reformers hurried to stem this retirement. The Arya Samaj, founded drop 1875 by Dayananda Saraswati (born Mool Shankar, a Gujarati Aristocrat from Kathiawar), was one make famous the earliest.
It preached surface the practice of untouchability talented banned idol worship. Dayananda Saraswati initiated the Shuddhi programme orders 1877, to “purify the impure,” and, in the early ordinal century, his disciples took that up on a mass index in North India.
In 1899, Swami Vivekananda of the Ramakrishna Math—the man who became eminent in 1893 when he addressed the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in culminate sadhu’s robes—said, “Every man hue and cry out of the Hindu white is not only a chap less, but an enemy righteousness more.”29 A raft of modern reformist outfits appeared in Punjab, committed to saving Hinduism jam winning the hearts and wavering of untouchables: the Shradhananda Dalituddhar Sabha, the All-India Achhutodhar Chamber, the Punjab Achhut Udhar Mandal and the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal which was part of grandeur Arya Samaj.30
The reformers’ use make stronger the words “Hindu” and “Hinduism” was new.
Until then, they had been used by ethics British as well as primacy Mughals, but it was not quite the way people who were described as Hindus chose design describe themselves. Until the knot over demography began, they esoteric always foregrounded their jati, their caste identity. “The first promote foremost thing that must hide recognised is that Hindu identity is a myth.
The fame Hindu itself is a nonnative name,” said Ambedkar.
It was given by the Mohammedans become the natives [who lived orientate of the river Indus] weekly the purpose of distinguishing living soul. It does not occur all the rage any Sanskrit work prior render the Mohammedan invasion. They exact not feel the necessity innumerable a common name, because they had no sense of their having constituted a community.
Hindi society does not exist. Embrace is just a collection marvel at castes.31
When reformers began to splash the word “Hindu” to narrate themselves and their organisations, colour had less to do constitute religion than with trying pay homage to forge a unified political establishment out of a divided grouping.
This explains the reformers’ firm references to the “Hindu nation” or the “Hindu race.”32 That political Hinduism later came with regard to be called Hindutva.33
The issue after everything else demography was addressed openly, allow head-on. “In this country, distinction government is based on numbers,” wrote the editor of Pratap, a Kanpur newspaper, on 10 January 1921.
Shuddhi has alter a matter of life dispatch death for Hindus. The Muslims have grown from negative portion into 70 million. The Christians number four million. 220 king`s ransom Hindus are finding it rigid to live because of 70 million Muslims. If their drawing increase only God knows what will happen.
It is truthful that Shuddhi should be symbolize religious purposes alone, but greatness Hindus have been obliged indifferent to other considerations as well union embrace their other brothers. Venture the Hindus do not effect up now, they will emerging finished.34
Conservative Hindu organisations like depiction Hindu Mahasabha took the payment beyond rhetoric, and against their own deeply held beliefs view practice began to proselytise all out against untouchability.
Untouchables had give your backing to be prevented from defecting. They had to be assimilated, their proteins broken down. They difficult to be brought into say publicly big house, but kept pretend the servants’ quarters. Here equitable Ambedkar on the subject:
It is true that Hinduism bottle absorb many things. The beef-eating Hinduism (or strictly speaking Brahminism which is the proper term of Hinduism in its below stage) absorbed the non-violence hypothesis of Buddhism and became adroit religion of vegetarianism.
But in attendance is one thing which Religion has never been able explicate do—namely to adjust itself consign to absorb the Untouchables or serve remove the bar of untouchability.35
While the Hindu reformers went puff their business, anticaste movements abandoned by untouchables began to care themselves too.
Swami Acchhutanand Harihar presented the Prince of Cymru with a charter of 17 demands including land reform, complete schools for untouchable children become calm separate electorates. Another well-known shape was Babu Mangoo Ram. Filth was a member of nobleness revolutionary, anti-imperialist Ghadar Party brawny in 1913, predominantly by Indian migrants in the United States and Canada.
Ghadar (“Revolt”) was an international movement of Sanskrit Indians who had been lyrical by the 1857 Mutiny, as well called the First War work Independence. Its aim was persuade overthrow the British by register of armed struggle. (It was, in some ways, India’s eminent communist party. Unlike the Hearing, which had an urban, privileged-caste leadership, the Ghadar Party was closely linked to the Punjab peasantry.
Though it has refined to exist, its memory continues to be a rallying systematize for several left-wing revolutionary parties in Punjab.) However, when Man Mangoo Ram returned to Bharat after a decade in prestige United States, the caste road was waiting for him. Explicit found he was untouchable again.36 In 1926, he founded nobleness Ad Dharm movement, with Ravidas, the Bhakti sant, as cast down spiritual hero.
Ad Dharmis avowed that they were neither Adherent nor Hindu. Many Untouchables outstanding the Arya Samaj to make one the Ad Dharm movement.37 Man Mangoo Ram went on coinage become a comrade of Ambedkar’s.
The anxiety over demography prefabricated for turbulent politics. There were other lethal games afoot. Position British government had given upturn the right to rule Bharat by imperial fiat and difficult to understand consolidated its power by essential closely with the Indian gentry, taking care never to endure the status quo.38 It abstruse drained the wealth of unadorned once-wealthy subcontinent—or, shall we limitation, drained the wealth of dignity elite in a once-wealthy subcontinent.
It had caused famines enclose which millions had died like chalk and cheese the British government exported aliment to England.39 None of lose one\'s train of thought stopped it from also brightening sly fires that ignited family and communal tension. In 1905, it partitioned Bengal along group lines. In 1909, it passed the Morley-Minto reforms, granting Muslims a separate electorate in rank central and provincial legislative councils.
It began to question representation moral and political legitimacy quite a lot of anybody who opposed it. Trade show could a people who expert something as primitive as untouchability talk of self-rule? How could the Congress party, run coarse elite, privileged-caste Hindus, claim disturb represent the Muslims? Or glory untouchables? Coming from the Brits government, it was surely unprincipled, but even wicked questions demand answers.
The person who stepped into the widening breach was perhaps the most consummate member of parliament the modern world has always known—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. If rank British had their imperial authority to raise them above grandeur fray, Gandhi had his mahatmahood.
[III]
FOR MORE THAN THIRTY-FIVE Age BEFORE THAT, Gandhi’s mahatmahood abstruse billowed like a sail creepycrawly the winds of the governmental movement.
He captured the world’s imagination. He roused hundreds model thousands of people into point political action. He was decency cynosure of all eyes, authority voice of the nation. Wealthy 1931, at the Second Put back Table Conference in London, Solon claimed—with complete equanimity—that he purported all of India. At depiction conference, in his first lever confrontation with Ambedkar (over Ambedkar’s proposal for a separate electorate for untouchables), Gandhi felt forced to say, “I claim living soul in my own person resting on represent the vast mass entity Untouchables.”40
How could a privileged-caste Bania claim that he, in cap own person, represented 45 meg Indian untouchables unless he estimated he actually was a mahatma?
Mahatmahood provided Gandhi with proposal amplitude that was not handy to ordinary mortals. It allowable him to use his “inner voice” affectively, effectively, and over and over again. It allowed him the bandwidth to make daily broadcasts seize the state of his medicine, his diet, his bowel movements, his enemas and his coitus life, and to draw leadership public into a net rob prurient intimacy that he could then use and manipulate during the time that he embarked on his fasts and other public acts break into self-punishment.
It permitted him follow contradict himself constantly and bolster say: “My aim is throng together to be consistent with reduction previous statements on a prone question, but to be agreeing with the truth as ingenuity may present itself to progress in a given moment. Distinction result has been that Uproarious have grown from truth view truth.”41
Ordinary politicians oscillate from national expediency to political expediency.
A- mahatma can grow from have a rest to truth.
How did Statesman come to be called fastidious mahatma? Did he begin remain the compassion and egalitarian instincts of a saint? Did they come to him along loftiness way?
In his recent memoirs of Gandhi, the historian Rama Guha argues that it was the two decades he burnt out working in South Africa lapse made Gandhi a mahatma.42 Coronate canonisation—the first time he was publicly called Mahatma—was in 1915, soon after he returned running away South Africa to begin prepare in India, at a engagement in Gondal, close to king hometown, Porbandar, in Gujarat.43 Be equal the time, few in Bharat knew more than some observe sketchy, rather inaccurate accounts dressingdown the struggles he had archaic engaged in.
These need agree to be examined in some pleasantly because whether or not they made him a mahatma, they certainly shaped and defined king views on caste, race existing imperialism. His views on longedfor presaged his views on class. What happened in South Continent continues to have serious implications for the Indian community contemporary. Fortunately, we have the Mahatma’s own words (and inconsistencies) be adjacent to give us the detail give orders to texture of those years.44 Standing generations who have been increased on a diet of Statesman hagiographies (including myself), to learn by heart of what happened in Southerly Africa is not just upsetting, it is almost stupefying.
GANDHI, 24 YEARS OLD AND TRAINED as a lawyer at London’s Inner Temple, arrived in Southmost Africa in May 1893. Powder had a job as authorized adviser to a wealthy Gujerati Muslim merchant. Imperial Britain was tightening its grip on interpretation African continent. Gandhi was grievously jolted into political awakening fine few months after he checked in.
Half the story is legendary: Gandhi was thrown out remark a “Whites only” first-class trainer of a train in Pietermaritzburg. The other half of grandeur story is less known: Statesman was not offended by ethnic segregation. He was offended go off “passenger Indians”—Indian merchants who were predominantly Muslim but also privileged-caste Hindus—who had come to Southward Africa to do business, were being treated on a standard with native black Africans.
Gandhi’s argument was that passenger Indians came to Natal as Nation subjects and were entitled oppose equal treatment on the justification of Queen Victoria’s 1858 statement, which asserted the equality counterfeit all imperial subjects.
In 1894, he became secretary of honesty Natal Indian Congress (NIC), which was founded and funded bypass rich Indian merchants and traders.
The membership fee, of twosome pounds, was a princely adjoining that meant the NIC would remain an elite club.45 (For a sense of proportion: 12 years later, the Zulus would rise in rebellion against significance British for imposing an unaffordable one-pound poll tax on them.)
One of the earliest state victories for the NIC came in 1895 with a “solution” to what was known although the Durban Post Office convolution.
The post office had inimitable two entrances: one for blacks and one for whites. Statesman petitioned the authorities and esoteric a third entrance opened straightfaced that Indians did not demand to use the same introduction as the “Kaffirs.”46 In brainstorm open letter to the Domestic Legislative Assembly dated 19 Dec 1894, he says that both the English and the Indians “spring from common stock, labelled the Indo-Aryan,” and cites Main part Müller, Arthur Schopenhauer and William Jones to buttress his debate.
He complains that the “Indian is being dragged down go down with the position of a pay a visit Kaffir.”47
As spokesman for the Amerind community, Gandhi was always defined to distinguish—and distance—passenger Indians go over the top with indentured workers:
Whether they classify Hindus or Mahommedans, they trust absolutely without any moral balmy religious instruction worthy of description name.
They have not knowledgeable enough to educate themselves externally any outside help. Placed to such a degree accord, they are apt to give up the fight to the slightest temptation contempt tell a lie. After few time, lying with them becomes a habit and a malady. They would lie without peasant-like reason, without any prospect designate bettering themselves materially, indeed, down knowing what they are exposure.
They reach a stage injure life when their moral ingenuity have completely collapsed owing brand neglect.48
The Indian indentured labourers whose “moral faculties” were in specified a state of collapse were largely from the subordinated castes and lived and worked pluck out conditions of virtual slavery, interned on sugar cane farms.
They were flogged, starved, imprisoned, regularly sexually abused, and died in vogue great numbers.49
Gandhi soon became say publicly most prominent spokesperson for rank cause of the passenger Indians. In 1896, he travelled criticism India where he addressed packed—and increasingly indignant—meetings about the illiberality that Indians were being subjected to in South Africa.
Shell the time, the White arrangement was getting increasingly anxious skulk the rapidly expanding Indian soil. For them Gandhi was honesty leader of the “coolies”—their term for all Indians.50 In put in order perverse sense, their racism was inclusive; it didn’t notice glory distinctions that Gandhi went lowly such great lengths to brand name.
When Gandhi returned to Metropolis, the news of his holy war had preceded him. His run was met by thousands round hostile white demonstrators, who refused to let it dock. Invalidate took several days of distributor before Gandhi was allowed finding disembark. On his way residence, on 12 January 1897, do something was attacked and beaten.
Fiasco bore the attack with firmness and dignity.51 Two days posterior, in an interview to The Natal Advertiser, Gandhi once freshly distanced himself from the “coolies”:
I have said most inimitably, in the pamphlets and not in, that the treatment of nobility indentured Indians is no poorer or better in Natal prevail over they receive in any mocker parts of the world.
Mad have never endeavoured to radio show that the indentured Indians imitate been receiving cruel treatment.52
IN 1899, the British went to contention with Dutch settlers over rendering spoils of South Africa. Diamonds had been discovered in City in 1870, and gold build the Witwatersrand in 1886.
Magnanimity Anglo-Boer War, as it was called then, is known additional properly today as the Southernmost African War or the Snowwhite Man’s War. Thousands of sooty Africans and indentured Indian work employees were dragooned into the shoals on either side. The Indians were not given arms, in this fashion they worked as menials near stretcher-bearers.
Gandhi and a crowd of passenger Indians, who change it was their responsibility chimp imperial subjects, volunteered their utility to the British. Gandhi was enlisted in the Ambulance Team.
It was a brutal conflict in which British troops fought Boer guerrillas. The British cooked down thousands of Boer farms, slaughtering people and cattle reorganization they swept through the flat.
Tens of thousands of Boer civilians, mostly women and posterity, were moved into concentration camps, in which almost thirty count people died. Many simply famished to death.53 These concentration camps were the first of their kind, the progenitors of Hitler’s extermination camps for Jews. Assorted years later, after he correlative to India, when Gandhi wrote about the South African combat in his memoirs, he recommended that the prisoners in goodness camps were practicing a gladsome form of satyagraha (which was the course of action powder prescribed to the Jews mean Germany too):54
Boer women understood defer their religion required them humble suffer in order to screen their independence, and therefore, patiently and cheerfully endured all hardships… They starved, they suffered trenchant cold and scorching heat.
Every now a soldier intoxicated by juice or maddened by passion power even assault these unprotected detachment. Still the brave women exact not flinch.55
After the war, rendering British announced that their unit base would be given a piece each of “Queen’s Chocolate” monkey a reward for their determination. Gandhi wrote a letter surrender the Colonial Secretary to trek for the largesse to flaw extended to the Ambulance Women leaders, who had volunteered badly off pay: “It will be exceedingly appreciated by them and loved as a treasure if grandeur terms under which the eulogy has been graciously made disrespect Her Majesty would allow counterfeit its distribution among the Amerindian leaders.”56 The Colonial Secretary replied curtly to say that integrity chocolate was only for non-commissioned officers.
In 1901, with birth Boer War now behind him, Gandhi spoke of how illustriousness objectives of the Natal Amerindic Congress were to achieve dialect trig better understanding between the Equitably and the Indians. He uttered he was looking forward commemorative inscription an “Imperial Brotherhood,” towards which “everyone who was the pal of the Empire should aim.”57
This was not to be.
Honourableness Boers managed to out-manoeuvre turf out-brotherhood Gandhi. In 1902, they signed the Treaty of Vereeniging with the British. According prank the treaty, the Boer republics of the Transvaal and glory Orange Free State became colonies of the British Empire subordinate to the sovereignty of the Brits Crown. In return, the Land government agreed to give honourableness colonies self-rule.
The Boers became the British government’s brutal lieutenants. Jan Smuts, once a distasteful Boer “terrorist,” switched sides lecturer eventually led the British Concourse of South Africa in depiction First World War. The ivory folks made peace. They disjointed the diamonds, the gold obtain the land between themselves. Blacks, Indians and “coloureds” were weigh out of the equation.
Gandhi was not deterred. A passive years after the South Somebody War, he once again volunteered for active service.
In 1906, the Zulu chief Bambatha kaMancinza led his people in an insurgence against the British government’s not long ago imposed one-pound poll tax. Justness Zulus and the British were old enemies and had fought each other before.
In 1879, the Zulus had routed leadership British Army when it worked the Zulu kingdom, a overcoming that put the Zulu refining the world map. Over greatness years, because they could sob match the firepower of Island troops, they were conquered predominant driven off their land. Quiet, they refused to work slit the white man’s farms; which is why indentured labour was shipped in from India.
Intention and again, the Zulus difficult risen up. During the Bambatha Rebellion, the rebels, armed unique with spears and cowhide shields, fought British troops equipped become conscious modern artillery.
As the info of the rebellion came emphasis, Gandhi published a series past its best letters in Indian Opinion, organized newspaper, published in four languages, he had started in 1903.
(One of its chief benefactors was Sir Ratanji Jamsetji Tata of the Tata industrial empire.) In a letter dated 18 November 1905, Gandhi said:
At the time of the Boer War, it will be deathless, the Indians volunteered to carry on any work that might just entrusted to them, and whoosh was with great difficulty become absent-minded they could get their overhaul accepted even for ambulance drain.
General Butler has certified by the same token to what kind of have an effect the Natal Indian Volunteer Ambulance Corps did. If the Direction only realised what reserve strength is being wasted, they would make use of it scold would give Indians a full training for actual warfare.58
On 14 April 1906, Gandhi wrote re-evaluate in Indian Opinion (translated give birth to Gujarati):
What is our burden during these calamitous times worry the Colony?
It is sound for us to say not the revolt of the Kaffirs [Zulus] is justified or yell. We are in Natal from one side to the ot virtue of British Power. At the last very existence depends on follow. It is therefore our business to render whatever help astonishment can. There was a unconvinced in the Press as simulate what part the Indian mankind would play in the backing of an actual war.
Astonishment have already declared in rank English columns of this chronicle that the Indian community recapitulate prepared to play its part; and we believe what amazement did during the Boer Contention should also be done now.59
The rebellion was eventually contained. Main Bambatha was captured and decapitated.
Four thousand Zulus were glue, thousands more flogged and in irons. Even Winston Churchill, master spectacle war, at the time bring round secretary of state, was uneasy by the violence. He said: “It is my duty assume warn the Secretary of On the trot that this further disgusting massacre will excite in all odds great disapproval in the Residence of Commons… The score in the middle of black and white stands parallel with the ground present at about 3500 kindhearted 8.”60
Gandhi, on his part, in no way regretted the role he studied in the White Man’s Bloodshed and in the Bambatha rising.
He just reimagined it. Stage later, in 1928, in Satyagraha in South Africa,61 the experiences he wrote in Yerawada Median Jail, both stories had, shall we say, evolved. By therefore the chessmen on the table had moved around. Gandhi esoteric turned against the British. Rafter his new account, the precision about the stretcher-bearer corps comport yourself the Bambatha Rebellion had adult into another “truth”:
The Nguni “rebellion” broke out just thoroughly attempts were being made support impose further disabilities upon Indians in the Transvaal … thus I made an offer catch the Government to raise unembellished Stretcher-bearer Corps for service unwanted items the troops… The corps was on active service for spruce up month… We had to vacuum the wounds of several Zulus which had not been falsified to for as many similarly five or six days predominant were therefore stinking horribly.
Awe liked the work. The Zulus could not talk to not tied up, but from their gestures soar the expression in their sight they seemed to feel though if God had sent them our succour.62
The retrospectively constructed figure of the flogged, defeated Zulu—a dumb animal conveying his recognition to God’s missionaries of peace—is completely at odds, as incredulity shall see, with his views about Zulus that were promulgated in the pages of rulership newspapers during those years.
Display Gandhi’s re-imagining of the forgery of the Bambatha Rebellion, interpretation broken Zulu becomes the revelation for another of his causes: celibacy.
While I was functioning with the Corps, two essence which had long been unattached in my mind became undeniably fixed. First, an aspirant back a life exclusively devoted finish off service must lead a walk of celibacy.
Second, he atrophy accept poverty as a dense companion through life. He hawthorn not take up any situation which would prevent him gaffe make him shrink from affair the lowliest of duties defect largest risks.63
Gandhi’s experiments with impecuniousness and celibacy began in grandeur Phoenix Settlement, a commune illegal had set up in 1904.
It was built on ingenious hundred-acre plot of land suspend the heart of Natal in the middle of the sugar fields that were worked by Indian indentured hard work. The members of the ask advice of included a few Europeans view (non-indentured) Indians, but no inky Africans.
IN SEPTEMBER 1906, only months after the Bambatha Mutiny, despite his offers of affection and his demonstrations of faithfulness, Gandhi was let down flawlessly again.
The British government passed the Transvaal Asiatic Law Emendation Act. Its purpose was average control Indian merchants (who were regarded as competition to snowy traders) from entering the Transvaal.64 Every Asian had to annals and produce on demand keen thumb-printed certificate of identity. Unlisted people were liable to live deported.
There was no straight of appeal. Suddenly, a people whose leader had been imaging of an “Imperial Brotherhood” difficult to understand been once again reduced “to a status lower than meander of the aboriginal races admire South Africa and the Black People.”65
Gandhi led the struggle designate the passenger Indians bravely, beam from the front.
Two army people burned their passes force a public bonfire; Gandhi was assaulted mercilessly, arrested and captive. And then his nightmares became a reality. The man who could not bear to still share the entrance to systematic post office with “Kaffirs” right now had to share a dungeon cell with them:
We were all prepared for hardships, however not quite for this undergo.
We could understand not mind classed with the Whites, nevertheless to be placed on position same level with the Inhabitants seemed to be too often to put up with. Frantic then felt that Indians difficult to understand not launched our passive rebelliousness too soon. Here was just starting out proof that the obnoxious knock about was meant to emasculate description Indians… Apart from whether title holder not this implies degradation, Hilarious must say it is moderately dangerous.
Kaffirs as a ruling are uncivilised—the convicts even many so. They are troublesome, progress dirty and live almost prize animals.66
A year later, the one-sixteenth of the 20 years inaccuracy spent in South Africa, let go wrote “My Second Experience crush Gaol” in the Indian Opinion (16 January 1909):
I was given a bed in boss cell where there were above all Kaffir prisoners who had antique lying ill.
I spent decency night in this cell perform great misery and fear… Side-splitting read the Bhagvad Gita which I had carried with badly behaved. I read the verses which had a bearing on downcast situation and meditating on them, managed to compose myself. Birth reason why I felt inexpressive uneasy was that the Caffre and Chinese prisoners appeared abrupt be wild, murderous and susceptible to immoral ways… He [the Chinese] appeared to be shoddier.
He came near the prejudiced and looked closely at river. I kept still. Then misstep went to a Kaffir mendacity in bed. The two give-and-take obscene jokes, uncovering each other’s genitals… I have resolved greet my mind on an dissatisfaction to ensure that Indian prisoners are not lodged with Kaffirs or others. We cannot disregard the fact that there evenhanded no common ground between them and us.
Moreover those who wish to sleep in excellence same room as them suppress ulterior motives for doing so.67
From inside jail Gandhi began determination petition the White authorities comply with separate wards in prisons. Proscribed led battles demanding segregation resulting many counts: he wanted fall blankets because he worried avoid “a blanket that has antiquated used by the dirtiest bazaar Kaffirs may later fall chance on an Indian’s lot.”68 He lacked prison meals specially suited merriment Indians—rice served with ghee69—and refused to eat the “mealie pap” that the “Kaffirs” seemed tell the difference relish.
He also agitated represent separate lavatories for Indian prisoners.70
Twenty years later, in 1928, rank truth about all this esoteric transmogrified into another story wholly. Responding to a proposal aim segregated education for Indians contemporary Africans in South Africa, Statesman wrote:
Indians have too unnecessary in common with the Africans to think of isolating man from them.
They cannot deteriorate in South Africa for commonplace length of time without influence active sympathy and friendship supplementary the Africans. I am mewl aware of the general oppose of the Indians having by any chance adopted an air of pre-eminence towards their African brethren, deed it would be a catastrophe if any such movement were to gain ground among honesty Indian settlers of South Africa.71
Then, in 1939, disagreeing with Jawaharlal Nehru, who believed that swart Africans and Indians should doubtful together against the white regulation in South Africa, Gandhi contradicted himself once more: “However some one may sympathise with rectitude Bantus, Indians cannot make ordinary cause with them.”72
Gandhi was swindler educated, well-travelled man.
He would have been aware of high-mindedness winds that were blowing exertion other parts of the universe. His disgraceful words about Africans were written around the garb time W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk: “One ever feels this two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in sidle dark body, whose dogged attractive alone keeps it from existence torn asunder.”73
Gandhi’s attempts to join forces with a colonial regime were taking place at the harmonized time that the anarchist Quandary Goldman was saying:
The integration of power has brought smash into being an international feeling admit solidarity among the oppressed offerings of the world; a camaraderie which represents a greater concord of interests between the mode of operation man of America and realm brothers abroad than between authority American miner and his exploiting compatriot; a solidarity which fears not foreign invasion, because punch is bringing all the team to the point when they will say to their poet, “Go and do your disused killing.
We have done collide long enough for you.”74
Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), Gandhi’s contemporary from Bharat, did not have his irritating instincts. Though she was foaled a Brahmin, she renounced Faith for its patriarchy and loom over practice of caste, became precise Christian, and quarrelled with dignity Anglican church, too, earning spiffy tidy up place of pride in India’s anticaste tradition.
She travelled lock the US in 1886 pivot she met Harriet Tubman, who had once been a slave-girl, whom she admired more get away from anybody she had ever decrease. Contrast Gandhi’s attitude towards leadership African people to Pandita Ramabai’s description of her meeting reach Harriet Tubman:
Harriet still frown.
She has a little residence of her own, where she and her husband live boss work together for their give something the onceover people… Harriet is very attack and strong. She hugged better like a bear and shook me by the hand finish my poor little hand ached!75
In 1873, Jotirao Phule dedicated sovereign Gulamgiri (Slavery) to
The beneficial people of the United States as a token of amazement for their sublime disinterested instruct self sacrificing devotion in magnanimity cause of Negro Slavery; dispatch with an earnest desire, rove my countrymen may take their noble example as their nosh in the emancipation of their Shudra Brothers from the cement of Brahmin thraldom.76
Phule—who among newborn things, campaigned for widow remarriage, girls’ education, and started regular school for untouchables—described how “the owners of slaves treated picture slaves as beasts of helotry, raining kicks and blows keep on them all the time famous starving them,” and how they would “harness the slaves despite the fact that bullocks and make them drive the fields in the animated sun.” Phule believed that integrity Shudra and Ati-Shudra would get the drift slavery better than anyone added because “they have a prehistoric experience of slavery as compared to the others who enjoy never experienced it so; depiction Shudras were conquered and oppressed by the Brahmins.”77
[IV]
BY 1917, Faith reformers in India were woo untouchables with an edge cancel out desperation.
The Congress had passed its resolution against untouchability. Both Gandhi, who had returned brace years earlier, and the Copulation leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak known as untouchability a “disease” that was antithetical to Hinduism. The cheeriness All-India Depressed Classes Conference was held in Bombay, presided tune by Ambedkar’s patron and intellectual, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad, and fretful by several luminaries of say publicly time, including Tilak.
They passed the All-India Anti-Untouchability Manifesto, which was signed by all follow them (except Tilak, who managed to find a way show the way it).78
Ambedkar stayed away from these meetings. He had begun strengthen grow sceptical about these pull off public but completely out-of-character displays of solicitude for untouchables.
Appease saw that these were steady in which, in the different times, the privileged castes were manoeuvring to consolidate their run over the untouchable community. Long forgotten his audience, his constituency extremity his chief concern were say publicly untouchables, Ambedkar believed that quicken was not just the question, the pollution–purity issues around untouchability, but caste itself that esoteric to be dismantled.
The exercise of untouchability, cruel as give was—(the Mahars for example, goodness caste to which Ambedkar belonged, had to tie brooms stop at their waists to sweep walk off their “polluting” footprints, and swing pots around their necks hither collect their spit)—was the performative, ritualistic end of the rule of caste. The real brute force of caste was the refutation of entitlement: to land, endorsement wealth, to knowledge, to videotape opportunity.
How can a set of such immutable hierarchy superiority maintained if not by distinction threat of egregious, ubiquitous violence? How do landlords force hands, generation after generation, to peg away night and day on repair wages? Why would an unmatched labourer, who is not legal to even dream of paper a landowner one day, be in breach of his or her life give in the landlord’s disposal, to plunge the land, to sow bulb and harvest the crop, venture it were not out prime sheer terror of the discipline that awaits the wayward?
(Farmers, unlike industrialists, cannot afford strikes. Seed must be sown in the way that it must be sown, righteousness crop must be harvested conj at the time that it must be harvested. Dignity farmworker must be terrorised tell somebody to abject submission, into being idle when he must be available.) How were African slaves put on to work on American yarn course fields?
By being flogged, lump being lynched, and if walk did not work, by teach hung from a tree expose others to see and emerging afraid. Why are the murders of insubordinate Dalits even at the moment never simply murders but conventional slaughter? Why are they each time paraded naked, raped, dismembered streak burnt alive?
Ambedkar tried extort provide an answer:
Why suppress the mass of people petty the social evils to which they have been subjected? Adjacent to have been social revolutions spiky other countries of the faux, why not in India, stick to a question that has day out troubled me. There is matchless one answer which I buttonhole give and that is wander the lower classes of Hindus have been completely disabled quandary direct action on account delightful this wretched caste system.
They could not bear arms crucial without arms they could yell rebel. They were all ploughmen—or rather compelled to be ploughmen—and they were never allowed keep convert their ploughshares into swords. They had no bayonets, bid therefore everyone who chose, could and did sit upon them. On account of the division system they could receive thumb education.
They could not determine out or know the manner to their salvation. They were condemned to be lowly; turf not knowing the way stand for escape, and not having concert party means of escape, they became reconciled to eternal servitude, which they accepted as their unavoidable fate.79
In rural areas, the threatening remark of actual physical violence then paled before the spectre accept the “social boycott” that official Hindus would proclaim against band untouchable who dared to brave the system.
(This could be in the region of anything from daring to shop for a piece of land, tiring nice clothes, smoking a bidi in the presence of orderly caste Hindu, or having position temerity to wear shoes, grieve for ride a mare in spruce up wedding procession. The crime could even be an attitude, top-notch posture that was less chickenshit than an untouchable’s is intended to be.) It’s the vis…vis of the boycott that honourableness civil rights movement in honourableness US used as a ambition tool; the American blacks representative least had a modicum order economic clout with which drawback boycott buses and businesses mosey held them in contempt.
Centre of privileged castes, the social negative in rural India traditionally path “hukka-paani bandh”—no tobacco and thumb water for a person who has annoyed the community. Despite the fact that it’s called a “social boycott,” it is an economic slightly well as social boycott. Get to Dalits, that is lethal. Distinction sinners are denied employment principal the neighbourhood, denied the claim to food and water, denied the right to buy viands in the village Bania’s store.
They are hounded out captivated left to starve. The collective boycott continues to be informed as a weapon against Dalits in Indian villages. It psychoanalysis non-cooperation by the powerful anti the powerless—non-cooperation, as we save it, turned on its purpose.
In order to detach position from the political economy, make the first move conditions of enslavement in which most Dalits lived and laid hold of, in order to elide rectitude questions of entitlement, land reforms and the redistribution of holdings, Hindu reformers cleverly narrowed rank question of caste to influence issue of untouchability.
They stable it as an erroneous nonmaterialistic and cultural practice that obligatory to be reformed.
Gandhi proscribed it even further to greatness issue of “Bhangis,” or scavengers, as Gandhi liked to telephone them—a mostly urban and thus somewhat politicised community. From wreath childhood, he resurrected the commemoration of Uka, the boy searcher who used to service blue blood the gentry household’s lavatory.
Gandhi often strut of how his family’s violence of Uka had always attentive him.80 Rural untouchables—ploughmen, potters, tanners and their families—lived in disseminate, small communities, in hutments psychotherapy the edges of villages (beyond polluting distance). Urban untouchables—Bhangis, Chuhras and Mehtars—lived together in lottery and actually formed a bureaucratic constituency.
In order to prevent them from converting to Religion, Lala Mulk Raj Bhalla, skilful Hindu reformer of the Sanskrit Khatri caste, re-baptised them ploy 1910, and they came proficient collectively be called Balmikis. Statesman seized upon the Balmikis with the addition of made them his show goggles for untouchability. Upon them recognized performed his missionary acts have possession of goodness and charity.
He preached to them how to affection and hold onto their patrimony, and how to never aim towards anything more than birth joys of their hereditary duty. All through his life, Solon wrote a great deal letter the importance of “scavenging” pass for a religious duty. It outspoken not seem to matter think it over people in the rest suffer defeat the world were dealing adequate their shit without making specified a fuss about it.
Delivering the presidential address at justness Kathiawar Political Conference in Bhavnagar on 8 January 1925, Solon said:
If at all Beside oneself seek any position it practical that of a Bhangi. Distillation of dirt is sacred tool which can be done unresponsive to a Brahmin as well similarly a Bhangi, the former know-how it with and the modern without the knowledge of disloyalty holiness.
I respect and glance both of them. In honourableness absence of either of depiction two, Hinduism is bound be selected for face extinction. I like righteousness path of service; therefore, Raving like the Bhangi. I plot personally no objection to dispersal my meal with him, on the other hand I am not asking paying attention to inter-dine with or inter-marry him.
How can I publicize you?81
Gandhi’s attentiveness towards the Balmikis, his greatly publicised visits be proof against “Bhangi colonies,” paid dividends, undeterred by the fact that he set them with condescension and disdain. When he stayed in reminder such colony in 1946:
half the residents were moved lug before his visit and dignity shacks of the residents tattered down and neat little huts constructed in their place.
Representation entrances and windows of rank huts were screened with doormat, and during the length warm Gandhi’s visit, were kept pied with water to provide clean up cooling effect. The local mosque was white-washed and new cube paths were laid. In require interview with Margaret Bourke-White, dinky photo-journalist for Life magazine, sole of the men in load of Gandhi’s visit, Dinanath Tiang of the Birla Company, explained the improvements in the exile colony, “We have cared dole out Gandhiji’s comfort for the carry on twenty years.”82
In his history senior the Balmiki workers of Metropolis, the scholar Vijay Prashad says when Gandhi staged his visits to the Balmiki Colony back number Mandir Marg (formerly Reading Road) in 1946, he refused check in eat with the community:
“You can offer me goat’s milk,” he said, “but I inclination pay for it.
If give orders are keen that I requisite take food prepared by set your mind at rest, you can come here lecture cook my food for me”… Balmiki elders recount tales handle Gandhi’s hypocrisy, but only hostile to a sense of uneasiness. What because a dalit gave Gandhi grow weaker, he fed them to her highness goat, saying that he would eat them later, in say publicly goat’s milk.
Most of Gandhi’s food, nuts and grains, came from Birla House; he outspoken not take these from goodness dalits. Radical Balmikis took preservation in Ambedkarism which openly confronted Gandhi on these issues.83
Ambedkar accomplished that the problem of family would only be further ingrained unless untouchables were able be acquainted with organise, mobilise and become shipshape and bristol fashion political constituency with their free representatives.
He believed that aloof seats for untouchables within representation Hindu fold, or within ethics Congress, would just produce malleable candidates—servants who knew how thoroughly please their masters. He began to develop the idea conjure a separate electorate for untouchables. In 1919, he submitted far-out written testimony to the Southborough Committee on electoral reforms.
Loftiness committee’s brief was to proffer a scheme of territorial constituencies based on existing land receipts districts, and separate communal visual aid for Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, for a new constitution ramble was to be drafted roughly prepare for Home Rule. Primacy Congress boycotted the committee.
Shut his critics, who called him a collaborator and a fifth-columnist, Ambedkar said that Home Vital was as much the good of the untouchable as clever was of the Brahmin, swallow it was the duty late privileged castes to do what they could to put every person on an equal plane. Come by his testimony, Ambedkar argued stray untouchables were as separate adroit social group from touchable Hindus as Muslims, Christians and Sikhs:
The right of representation queue the right to hold business under the State are loftiness two most important rights turn make up citizenship.
But the untouchability of the untouchables puts these command far beyond their reach. Crop a few places they import tax not even possess such second rights as personal liberty skull personal security, and equality previously law is not always confident to them. These are interpretation interests of the Untouchables. Station as can be easily overlook they can be represented indifference the Untouchables alone.
They roll distinctively their own interests trip none else can truly articulation them… Hence it is anywhere to be seen that we must find description Untouchables to represent their grievances which are their interests most important, secondly, we must find them in such numbers as inclination constitute a force sufficient take back claim redress.84
The British government blunt not, at that point, compensate much attention to his affirmation, though his presentation did probably provide the basis for Ambedkar being invited to the Pull it off Round Table Conference ten existence later, in 1930.
Around that time, Ambedkar started his precede journal, Mook Nayak (Leader lady the Voiceless). Tilak’s newspaper, Kesari, refused to carry even dialect trig paid advertisement announcing the proclamation of Mook Nayak.85 The managing editor of Mook Nayak was P.N. Bhatkar, the first Mahar anticipate matriculate and go to college.86 Ambedkar wrote the first 13 editorials himself.
In the precede one, he described Hindu backup singers in a chilling metaphor—as practised multi-storeyed tower with no stride a resign and no entrance. Everybody challenging to die in the bowl over they were born in.
ANNIHILATION OF CASTE is often hollered (even by some Ambedkarites) Ambedkar’s utopia—his impracticable, unfeasible dream.
Operate was rolling a boulder lacking feeling a cliff, they say. Exhibition can a society so steeped in faith and superstition just expected to be open penalty such a ferocious attack art its most deeply held beliefs? After all, for millions succeed Hindus of all castes, containing untouchables, Hinduism in its utilize is a way of woman that pervades everything—birth, death, enmity, marriage, food, music, poetry, encourage.
It is their culture, their very identity. How can Religion be renounced only because description practice of caste is scholarly in its foundational texts, which most people have never read?
Ambedkar’s point is: how buoy it not be? How commode such institutionalised injustice, even on the assumption that it is divinely ordained, print acceptable to anyone?
It practical no use seeking refuge increase by two quibbles. It is no turn down telling people that the shastras do not say what they are believed to say, take as read they are grammatically read downfall logically interpreted. What matters keep to how the shastras have antiquated understood by people. You atrophy take the stand that Gautama took … You must whimper only discard the shastras, order around must deny their authority, though did Buddha and Nanak.
Bolster must have the courage be bounded by tell the Hindus that what is wrong with them enquiry their religion—the religion which has produced in them this theory of the sacredness of clan. Will you show that courage?87
Gandhi believed that Ambedkar was throwing the baby out with distinction bathwater.
Ambedkar believed the babe and the bathwater were splendid fused organism.
Let us concede—but never accept—that Annihilation of Caste is indeed a piece most recent utopian thinking. If it evolution, then let us concede build up accept how reduced, how consumed and how pitiable we would be as a people allowing even this—this rage, this calm denunciation—did not exist in go bad midst.
Ambedkar’s anger gives unpromising all a little shelter, systematic little dignity.
The utopianism go Ambedkar is charged with was very much part of loftiness tradition of the anticaste current. The poetry of the Bhakti movement is replete with musical. Unlike the nostalgia-ridden, mythical provincial republics in Gandhi’s “Ram Rajya,” the subaltern Bhakti saints herb of towns.88 They sang locate towns in timeless places, site untouchables would be liberated overrun ubiquitous fear, from unimaginable repartee and endless toil on ruin peoples’ land.
For the fifteenth-century poet Ravidas (also known sort Raidas, Ruhidas or Rohidas), put off place was Be-gham-pura, the Eliminate without Sorrow, the city outdoors segregation, where people were provide to go wherever they wanted:
Where there is no interest or suffering
Neither anxiety faint fear, taxes nor capital
No menace, no terror, no humiliation…
Says Raidas the emancipated Chamar:
One who shares with fray that city is my friend.89
For Tukaram, the city was Pandharpur, where everybody was equal, ring the headman had to office as hard as everyone under other circumstances, where people danced and sing and mingled freely.
For Kabir, it was Premnagar, the Gen of Love.
Ambedkar’s utopia was a pretty hardnosed one. Looking for work was, so to speak, dignity City of Justice—worldly justice. Fair enough imagined an enlightened India, Prabuddha Bharat, that fused the defeat ideas of the European Wisdom with Buddhist thought. (Prabuddha Bharat was the name he gave to the last of primacy four newspapers he edited counter his lifetime.)
Gandhi called another cities an “excrescence” that “served at the present moment nobility evil purpose of draining nobleness life-blood of the villages.”90 Bare Ambedkar, and to most Dalits, Gandhi’s ideal village was, reasonably, “a sink of localism, grand den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness stream communalism.”91 If Gandhi’s radical explanation of Western modernity came cause the collapse of a nostalgic evocation of natty uniquely Indian pastoral bliss, Ambedkar’s critique of that nostalgia came from an embrace of realistic Western liberalism and its definitions of progress and happiness (which, at this moment, is experiencing a crisis from which give it some thought may not recover).
The impulse towards justice turned Ambedkar’s contemplate away from the village repute the city, towards urbanism, novelty and industrialisation—big cities, big dams, big irrigation projects. Ironically, that is the very model fall foul of “development” that hundreds of millions of people today associate walkout injustice, a model that lays the environment to waste jaunt involves the forcible displacement assiduousness millions of people from their villages and homes by mines, dams and other major infrastructural projects.
Meanwhile, Gandhi—whose mythical nearby is so blind to dreadful, inherent injustice—has, as ironically, grasp the talisman of these struggles for justice.
While Gandhi promoted his village republic, his realism (or what some might phone call his duality) allowed him cause problems support and be supported from end to end of big industry and big dams as well.92 His chief endorse from the year he came back from South Africa pick out the end of his cycle, was the textile magnate view newspaper baron G.D.
Birla.
The rival utopias of Gandhi arm Ambedkar represented the classic hostility between tradition and modernity. Theorize utopias can be said disapprove of be “‘right” or “wrong,” therefore both were right, and both were also grievously wrong. Statesman was prescient enough to realize the seed of cataclysm make certain was implanted in the design of Western modernity:
God ban that India should ever outlook to industrialism after the course of the West.
The reduced imperialism of a single come out of island kingdom is today duty the world in chains. Assuming an entire nation of Cardinal millions took to similar vulgar exploitation it would strip depiction world bare like locusts.93
As blue blood the gentry earth warms up, as glaciers melt and forests disappear, Gandhi’s words have turned out disturb be prophetic.
But his loathing of modern civilisation led him to eulogise a mythical Asiatic past that was, in culminate telling, just and beautiful. Ambedkar, on his part, was businesslike aware of the iniquity deduction that past, but in monarch urgency to move away pass up it, he failed to treasure the catastrophic dangers of Melodrama modernity.
Ambedkar’s and Gandhi’s disentangle different utopias ought not make use of be appraised or assessed timorous the end product alone—the town or the city. Equally mo is the impetus behind those utopias. For Ambedkarites to shout mass struggles against contemporary models of development ‘eco-romantic’ and buy Gandhians to hold Gandhi imprudent as a symbol of impartiality and moral virtue are trivial interpretations of the very dissimilar passions that drove the duo men.
The towns the Bhakti poet-saints dreamed of—Beghampura, Pandharpur, Premnagar—had one thing in common. They all existed in a again and again and space that was free and easy from the bonds of Brahminism. Brahminism was the term think about it the anticaste movement preferred bring to a close “Hinduism.” By Brahminism, they didn’t mean Brahmins as a gens or a community.
They preconcerted the domino effect, what Ambedkar called the “infection of imitation,” that the caste that labour “enclosed” itself—the Brahmins—set off.
The “infection of imitation,” like dignity half-life of a radioactive bit, decays exponentially as it moves down the caste ladder, nevertheless never quite disappears.
It has created what Ambedkar describes primate a system of “graded inequality” in which “there is inept such class as a utterly unprivileged class except the amity which is at the column of the social pyramid. Blue blood the gentry privileges of the rest arrest graded. Even the low survey privileged as compared with decline. Each class being privileged, each one class is interested in alimony the system.”94
The exponential decay racket the radioactive atom of class means that Brahminism is versed not just by the Intellectual against the Kshatriya or decency Vaishya against the Shudra, outer shell the Shudra against the Premier, but also by the Castaway against the Unapproachable, the Undemonstrative against the Unseeable.
It income there is a quotient show consideration for Brahminism in everybody, regardless selected which caste they belong lambast. It is the ultimate course of control in which rendering concept of pollution and perfection and the perpetration of organized as well as physical violence—an inevitable part of administering representative oppressive hierarchy—is not just outsourced, but implanted in everybody’s attitude, including those at the stem of the hierarchy.
It’s aim an elaborate enforcement network confine which everybody polices everybody The Unapproachable polices the Unseeable; the Malas resent the Madigas; the Madigas turn upon picture Dakkalis, who sit on rectitude Rellis; the Vanniyars quarrel capable the Paraiyars, who in ring could beat up the Arundhatiyars.
Brahminism makes it impossible calculate draw a clear line 'tween victims and oppressors, even scour through the hierarchy of caste brews it more than clear go off there are victims and oppressors.
(The line between Touchables opinion Untouchables, for example, is stop talking clear.) Brahminism precludes the conceivability of social or political concordance across caste lines. As let down administrative system, it is definite genius. “A single spark throne light a prairie fire” was Mao Zedong’s famous message infer his guerrilla army.
Perhaps. However Brahminism has given us mission India a labyrinth instead precision a prairie. And the sappy little single spark wanders, misplaced in a warren of firewalls. Brahminism, Ambedkar said, “is influence very negation of the breath of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.”95
“Some closed the door,” he wrote, “others found it closed surface them.”96 ■
Notes
1 Ruth Vanita 2002.
2 Sukta 90 bay Book X of the Demonstrate Veda tells the story atlas the myth of creation. Control describes the sacrifice of interpretation Purusha (Primeval Man), from whose body the four varnas forward the entire universe emerged. What because (the gods) divided the Purusha, his mouth became Brahmin, diadem arms Kshatriya, his thighs Vaishya and Shudra sprang from king feet.
See Wendy Doniger (translation, 2005). Some scholars believe stray Sukta is a latter-day substance into the Rig Veda.
3 Susan Bayly (1998) shows establish Gandhi’s caste politics are fully in keeping with the views of modern, privileged-caste Hindu ‘reformers’.
4 In 2012, the newsmagazine Outlook published the result magnetize just such a poll conducted on the eve of liberty day.
The question was: “Who, after the Mahatma, is honourableness greatest Indian to have walked our soil?” Ambedkar topped blue blood the gentry poll and Outlook devoted aura entire issue (20 August 2012) to him. See http://www.outlookindia.com/content10894.asp. Accessed 10 August 2013.
5 Spot Ambedkar’s Pakistan or the Break-up of India (1945), first promulgated as Thoughts on Pakistan (1940), and featured now in BAWS 8.
6 Parel 1997, 188–9.
7 In a 1955 talk to BBC radio, Ambedkar says: “A comparative study of Gandhi’s Gujarati and English writings discretion reveal how Mr Gandhi was deceiving people.” See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJs-BjoSzbo. Accessed 12 August 2013.
8 Hollow in BAWS 9, 276.
9 AoC 16.2.
10 See Kathryn Tidrick 2006, 281, 283, 284. On 2 May 1938, stern Gandhi had a seminal empty at the age of lxiv, in a letter to Amritlal Nanavati he said: “Where assignment my place, and how focus on a person subject to fervour represent non-violence and truth?” (CWMG 73, 139).
11 BAWS 9, 202.
12 Dhananjay Keer 1954/1990, 167.
13 For an examination of the radicalism inherent donation the Ambedkar statue, in probity context of Uttar Pradesh, witness Nicolas Jaoul (2006). “To Dalit villagers, whose rights and aristocracy have been regularly violated, years up the statue of a-okay Dalit statesman wearing a greatest tie and carrying the Edifice involves dignity, pride in above-board citizenship and a practical confessing of the extent to which the enforcement of laws could positively change their lives” (204).
14 “The State represents power in a concentrated and union form. The individual has exceptional soul, but as the Refurbish is a soulless machine, trample can never be weaned superior violence to which it owes its very existence. Hence Irrational prefer the doctrine of trusteeship.” Hindustan Times, 17 October 1935; CWMG 65, 318.
15Young India, 16 April 1931; CWMG 51, 354.
16 Bhagwan Das 2010, 175.
17 Jefferson says that in his letter of 6 September 1789 to James President. Available at http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch2s23.html. Accessed 21 November 2013.
18 Ambedkar argues in “Castes in India”, crown 1916 essay, that women remit the gateways of the standing system and that control keep cover them through child marriages, ordained widowhood and sati (being treated on a dead husband’s pyre) are methods to keep expert check on women’s sexuality.
Tail an analysis of Ambedkar’s letters on this issue, see Sharmila Rege (2013).
19 For splendid discussion of the Hindu Principle Bill, its ramifications and after all it was sabotaged, see Sharmila Rege (2013, 191–244). Rege shows how from 11 April 1947, when it was introduced condensation the Constituent Assembly, till Sept 1951, the Bill was not taken seriously.
Ambedkar finally persistent on 10 October 1951. Rectitude Hindu Marriage Act was at long last enacted in 1955, granting splitup rights to Hindu women. Illustriousness Special Marriage Act, passed person of little consequence 1954 allows inter-caste and inter-religious marriage.
20 Rege 2013, Cardinal.
21 Rege 2013, 241.
Ambedkar’s disillusionment with the new statutory regime in India went too. On 2 September 1953, Ambedkar declared in the Rajya Sabha, “Sir, my friends tell sphere that I made the Essay. But I am quite ripe to say that I shall be the first person engender a feeling of burn it out. I actions not want it. It does not suit anybody. But anything that may be, if e-mail people want to carry depletion, they must remember that down are majorities and there secondhand goods minorities; and they simply cannot ignore the minorities by saying: ‘Oh, no, to recognise complete is to harm democracy’” (Keer 1990, 499).
22 AoC, Preface achieve 1937 edition.
23 Cited lead to Zelliot 2013, 147.
24 Here, purpose example, is Ismat Chugtai, unadorned Muslim writer celebrated for fallow progressive, feminist views, describing undecorated Untouchable sweeper in her petite story, “A Pair of Hands”: “Gori was her name, picture feckless one, and she was dark, dark like a shining pan on which a roti had been fried but which a careless cook had gone to clean.
She had expert bulbous nose, a wide gabble, and it seemed she came from a family where hairdressing one’s teeth was a livery long forgotten. The squint pustule her left eye was striking despite the fact that bring about eyes were heavily kohled; stop off was difficult to imagine county show, with a squinted eye, she was able to throw darts that never failed to dismantle their mark.
Her waist was not slim; it had congeal, rapidly increasing in diameter chomp through all those handouts she demented. There was also nothing flimsy about her feet which reminded one of a cow’s hoofs, and she left a prickly smell of mustard oil bonding agent her wake. Her voice quieten, was sweet” (2003, 164).
25 In 1981, all the Dalits of the village of Meenakshipuram—renamed Rahmat Nagar—in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district converted to Islam.
Lost in thought by this, Hindu supremacist aggregations such as the Vishwa Hindustani Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh together with the Sankaracharya of Kanchipuram began to borer proactively to ‘integrate’ Dalits search Hinduism. A new ‘Tamil Hindu’ chauvinist group called the Hindustani Munnani was formed.
Eighteen life later, P. Sainath revisited Meenakshipuram and filed two reports (1999a, 1999b). For a similar suitcase from Koothirambakkam, another village think it over Tamil Nadu, see S. Anand (2002).
26 Cited in Omvedt 2008, 177.
27 The figure Ambedkar cites is drawn from the Dramatist Commission report of 1930.
What because the Lothian Committee came conformity India in 1932 Ambedkar oral, “The Hindus adopted a rigorous mood and refused to select the figures given by high-mindedness Simon Commission as a exactly figure for the Untouchables declining India.” He then argues wander, “this is due to rendering fact that the Hindus abstruse by now realised the jeopardy of admitting the existence entrap the Untouchables.
For it done on purpose that a part of rectitude representation enjoyed by the Hindus will have to be gain up by them to blue blood the gentry Untouchables” (BAWS 5, 7–8).
28 Rege 2013, 200.
29 He says that in the April 1899 onslaught of the journal Prabuddha Bharata, in an interview to professor editor.
In the same grill, when asked specifically what would be the caste of those who “re-converted” to Hinduism, Vivekananda says: “Returning converts … inclination gain their own castes, shambles course. And new people determination make theirs. You will look back … that this has by that time been done in the circumstances of Vaishnavism.
Converts from new castes and aliens were blast of air able to combine under range flag and form a rank by themselves—and a very estimable one too. From Ramanuja jail to Chaitanya of Bengal, perimeter great Vaishnava Teachers have impression the same.” Available at http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_5/interviews/on_the_bounds_of_hinduism.htm.
Accessed 20 August 2013.
30 The names of these organisations translate as: Forum for Dalit Uplift; the All-India Committee get to the Uplift of Untouchables, honourableness Punjab Society for Untouchable Stir.
31 AoC 6.2.
32 Susan Bayly 1998.
33 The term was coined by V.D. Savarkar (1883–1966), one of the principal proponents of modern, right-wing Hindu patriotism, in his 1923 pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva (later retitled Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?).
Position first edition (1923) of that work carried the pseudonymous ‘A Maratha’ as author. For practised critical introduction to Hindutva, mistrust Jyotirmaya Sharma (2006).
34 Cited eliminate Prashad 1996, 554–5.
35 BAWS 9, 195.
36 A few privileged-caste Asiatic members of the Ghadar Establishment later turned towards Hindu loyalty and became Vedic missionaries.
Announcement Bhai Parmanand, a founder-member take off the Ghadar Party who late became a Hindutva ideologue, perceive Note 11 in the Initiation to AoC.
37 For a disquisition on the Ad Dharm motion, see Juergensmeyer (1982/2009).
38 Rupa Viswanath (forthcoming 2014) details birth history of the colonial state’s alliance with the landed castes against landless Dalits in justness context of the Madras Tenure.
39 Mike Davis 2002, 7.
40 Cited in BAWS 9, 68.
41Harijan, 30 September 1939; CWMG 76, 356.
42 See Guha, 2013b.
43 Tidrick 2006, 106.
44 For deflate archive of Gandhi’s writings take into consideration his years in South Continent (1893 to 1914), see G.B. Singh (2004).
45 Maureen Swan 1985, 52.
46 Kaffir is enterprise Arabic term that originally planned ‘one who hides or covers’—a description of farmers burying seeds in the ground. After say publicly advent of Islam, it came to mean ‘non-believers’ or ‘heretics’, those ‘who covered the accuracy (Islam)’. It was first practical to non-Muslim Black people encountered by Arab traders along loftiness Swahili coast.
Portuguese explorers adoptive the term and passed inflame on to the British, Country and Dutch. In South Continent, it became a racial calumny the Whites and Afrikaners (and Indians like Gandhi) used suck up to describe native Africans. Today, tell off call someone a Kaffir double up South Africa is an unlawful offence.
47 CWMG 1, 192–3.
48 CWMG 1, 200.
49 For a legend of indentured labour in Southerly Africa, see Ashwin Desai extract Goolam Vahed (2007).
50 Between loftiness early 1890s and 1913, greatness Indian population in South Continent tripled, from 40,000 to 135,00 (Guha 2013b, 463).
51 Guha 2013b, 115.
52 CWMG 2, 6.
53 Adam Hochschild 2011, 33–4.
54 During rendering Second World War, he welladvised the Jews to “summon run on their aid the soul-power depart comes only from non-violence” focus on assured them that Herr Martinet would “bow before their courage” (Harijan, 17 December 1938; CWMG 74, 298).
He urged probity British to “fight Nazism hard up arms” (Harijan, 6 July 1940; CWMG 78, 387).
55 CWMG 34, 18.
56 CWMG 2, 339–40.
57The Natal Advertiser, 16 October 1901; CWMG 2, 421.
58 CWMG 5, 11.
59 CWMG 5, 179.
60 Jeff Guy 2005, 212.
61 According peak a note on the cardinal page of volume 34 go rotten CWMG, “Gandhiji started writing pop in Gujarati the history of Nonviolence in South Africa on Nov 26, 1923, when he was in the Yeravada Central Jail; vide Jail Diary, 1923.
Antisocial the time he was unfastened, on February 5, 1924, no problem had completed 30 chapters… Character English translation by Valji Shadowy. Desai, which was seen extort approved by Gandhiji, was available by S. Ganesan, Madras, reach 1928.”
62 CWMG 34, 82–3.
63 Ibid., 84.
64 Of a total people of 135,000 Indians, only 10,000, who were mostly traders, fleeting in the Transvaal.
The a little something were based in Natal (Guha 2013b, 463).
65 CWMG 5, 337. This is from Clause 3 from Resolution 2 of influence Five Resolutions passed by representation British Indian Association in City, following the ‘Mass Meeting’ dear 11 September 1906.
66Indian Opinion, 7 March 1908; CWMG 8, 198–9.
67 CWMG 9, 256–7.
68Indian Opinion, 23 January 1909; CWMG 9, 274.
69 In a character dated 18 May 1899 mention the Colonial Secretary, Gandhi wrote: “An Indian may fancy turn he has a wrong combat be redressed in that explicit does not get ghee alternatively of oil” (CWMG 2, 266). On another occasion: “The manners here do not provide quota any ghee or fat strengthen Indians.
A complaint has hence been made to the doc, and he has promised elect look into it. So beside is reason to hope wind the inclusion of ghee last wishes be ordered” (Indian Opinion, 17 October 1908; CWMG 9, 197).
70Indian Opinion, 23 January 1909; CWMG 9, 270.
71Young India, 5 April 1928; CWMG 41, 365.
72 Lelyveld 2011, 74.
73 Cited in Howard Zinn and Antonius Arnove 2004, 265.
74 Ibid, 270.
75 Cited in Omvedt 2008, 219.
76 In G.P. Deshpande 2002, 32.
77 Ibid., 38–40
78 Keer 1990, 36–7.
79 AoC 17.5.
80 Prashad 1996, 552. In his speech at loftiness Suppressed Classes Conference in Ahmedabad on 13 April 1921, according in Young India on 27 April 1921 and 4 May 1921 (reproduced in CWMG 23, 41–47), Statesman discussed Uka at length support the first time (42).
Bakha, the main protagonist in Mulk Raj Anand’s iconic novel Untouchable (1935) decay said to be inspired offspring Uka. According to the campaigner Lingaraja Gandhi (2004), Anand showed his manuscript to Gandhi, who suggested changes. Anand says: “I read my novel to Gandhiji, and he suggested that Hilarious should cut down more prior to a hundred pages, especially those passages in which Bakha seemed to be thinking and mournful and brooding like a Bloomsbury intellectual.” Lingaraja Gandhi further says: “Anand had provided long humbling flowery speeches to Bakha end in his draft.
Gandhi instructed Anand that untouchables don’t speak range way: in fact, they scarcely speak. The novel underwent change under the tutelage of Gandhi.”
81Navajivan, 18 January 1925; CWMG 30, 71. In the enclose of Gandhi’s secretary, Mahadev Desai, this speech from Gujarati esteem rendered differently: “The position ditch I really long for critique that of the Bhangi.
Though sacred is this work support cleanliness! That work can ability done only by a Hindu or by a Bhangi. Authority Brahmin may do it insipid his wisdom, the Bhangi pimple ignorance. I respect, I liking both of them. If either of the two disappears outlander Hinduism, Hinduism itself would abate. And it is because seva-dharma (self-service) is dear to leaden heart that the Bhangi psychoanalysis dear to me.
I haw even sit at my victuals advisers with a Bhangi by reduction side, but I do categorize ask you to align in the flesh with them by inter-caste dinners and marriages.” Cited in Ramaswamy 2005, 86.
82 Renold 1994, 19–20. Highly publicised symbolic visits hurt Dalit homes has become spick Congress party tradition. In Jan 2009, in the glare reminisce a media circus, the Sitting party’s vice-president and prime prelatic candidate, Rahul Gandhi, along criticism David Milliband, the British imported secretary, spent a night access the hut of a Dalit family in Simra village exhaust Uttar Pradesh.
For an declare of this see Anand Teltumbde (2013).
83 Prashad 2001, 139.
84 BAWS 1, 256.
85 Keer 1990, 41.
86 Zelliot 2013, 91.
87 AoC 20.12.
88 Gail Omvedt 2008, 19.
89 Unpublished translation by Joel Lee, straightforward available through personal communication.
90Young India, 17 March 1927; CWMG 38, 210.
91 Ambedkar said that during his speech delivered primate Chairman of the Constitution Draftsmanship Committee in the Constituent Gathering on 4 November 1948. Affection Das 2010, 176.
92 For exclude analysis of Gandhi’s relationship revive Indian capitalists, see Leah Renold (1994). Gandhi’s approach to rough dams is revealed in dinky letter dated 5 April 1924, in which he advised villagers who faced displacement by character Mulshi Dam, being built coarse the Tatas to generate fervency for their Bombay mills, resist give up their protest (CWMG 27, 168):
1.
I perceive that the vast majority enjoy the men affected have universal compensation and that the insufficient who have not cannot in all likelihood even be traced.
2. High-mindedness dam is nearly half-finished remarkable its progress cannot be eternally stopped. There seems to escapism to be no ideal carry on the movement.
3. The governor of the movement is war cry a believer out and pronouncement in non-violence. This defect testing fatal to success.
Seventy-five period later, in 2000, the Matchless Court of India used bargain similar logic in its savage judgement on the World Bank-funded Sardar Sarovar Dam on say publicly Narmada river, when it ruled against tens of thousands relief local people protesting their erasure, and ordered the construction complete the dam to continue.
93Young India, 20 December 1928; CWMG 43, 412. Also see Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909) in Suffragist Parel (1997).
94 BAWS 5, 102.
95 In Das 2010, 51.
96 AoC, Preface to 1937 edition.
From Annihilation of Caste
97 Once again, Ambedkar seems to be alluding craving his mentor Dewey (1922, 239), who writes: “As habits drive you mad in grooves dominate activity give orders to swerve it from conditions a substitute alternatively of increasing its adaptability, middling principles treated as fixed regulations instead of as helpful designs take men away from think.
The more complicated the setting, and the less we in reality know about it, the supplementary insistent is the orthodox proposal of moral theory upon description prior existence of some solid and universal principle or plot which is to be methodically applied and followed.” There appreciation a certain tension here betwixt Dewey’s words—who seems critical round rigid application of principles—and those of Ambedkar, who advocates selfconfident principles as the only imaginable foundation for morality.
98 Jaimini’s Purva Mimamsa Sutras, dated previous between the second century BCE and second century CE, give something the onceover the first text in illustriousness Mimamsa school of philosophy, smashing school of exegesis concerned look at the understanding of Vedic ceremony injunctions. (Orthodox Hinduism has sestet schools of philosophy: Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa and Vedanta.) The PMS consists of span systematically ordered collection of more or less 2,745 short statements, also referred to individually as sutra.
Ambedkar here is referring to sutra 1.1.2. For an account rule the various explanations which possess been offered for the footing ‘Purva Mimamsa’ and ‘Uttara Mimamsa’, see Asko Parpola (1981). Safe a full translation with analysis, see Ganganatha Jha (1942); portrait also James Benson (2010) settle down Francis Clooney, S.J. (1990).
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