On Introducing Ambedkar

-Sankaran Krishna

Sankaran Krishna (krishna@hawaii.edu) teaches

politics at the University of Hawaii.

curtusy:Economic & Political Weekly EPW APRIL 19, 2014 vol xlIX no 16

"For an act of representation

by savarnas to seem fair and

unremarkable to dalits, we

need to have achieved a society

in which to be a dalit is not a

stigma, and to be a savarna

is not a marker of superior

status. Until that day arrives

in India, the dalit objection to

B R Ambedkar’s Annihilation

of Caste being introduced and

annotated by savarnas will

remain a worthy objection"

Arundhati Roy’s “Introduction” to

Navayana’s reissue of B R Ambedkar’s

Annihilation of Caste has

evoked a spectrum of reactions, including

some from dalit intellectuals and

activists. The annotations to Annihilation,

by S Anand, head of Navayana and,

like Roy, an upper-caste person, has

come in for fl ak as well.

Essentially, the critique by a section of

the dalits may be summarised as: (a) two

savarnas, one of them a world celebrity

for her work as a public intellectual

and novelist, fronting a classic on caste

society written by the foremost leader

of the dalits is yet another instance of

upper-caste appropriation of dalit labour

and voice; (b) given the reality of the

caste society we live in, and the extraordinary

infl uence of upper castes in

representing India to itself and abroad,

Ambedkar’s voice will be swam ped by

this “introduction” and “annotation” which

will probably be read by far more people

than will read Ambedkar’s own prose;

(c) it is only dalits who understand the

painful experience of untouchability

and oppression of caste society – hence it

would have been more appropriate for

Navayana to have chosen those with

such experience to do the introduction and

annotation; (d) there are a number of

dalit intellectuals or others who have paid

their dues over the decades with their

politics of solidarity with the credentials

to write the introduction and the annotation

– the choice of Roy and Anand is a

slap in the face to all of them; (e) Roy’s

essay focuses too much on Gandhi and

his multiple foibles – and thus ends up

drawing the eye away from Ambedkar

and his robust critique of caste Hindu society;

and (f) both the marketing strategy

(choice excerpts in mainstream outlets

such as Outlook, Caravan and The Hindu)

and pricing (Rs 450-500) suggest that

the target audience for Annihilation is

savarna society and motivation is profit.

The responses to such critiques –

inclu ding those by Roy and Anand

of such responses would include: (a) the

target audience of Annihilation was and

still remains upper-Hindu society – which

remains resolutely casteist in its practice

if not in rhetoric – and hence fronting the

volume by such savarnas makes sense;

(b) arguing that only dalits can articulate

the thought and politics of Ambe dkar is a

form of essentialising and/or ghettoising

him that is neither politically nor epistemologically

defensible; (c) both in his

lifetime and there after, Ambedkar’s intellect

and politics have been overshadowed

by a most undeser ving Mahatma:

bringing Ambedkar to his rightful stature

will necessarily have to be accompanied

by submitting Gandhi to a welcome

and long-awaited critical scrutiny, one

further enabled by recent historical

scholarship on the man; and (d) freedom

of speech and ideas is a constitutional

guarantee – and no one ought to

legislate who can speak for whom in

a democracy.

Ambedkar’s Democracy

Before rushing to decide whose side I am

on, and quickly drop anchor in a particular

normative position that rapidly

hardens, I would like to think things

through more slowly (and aloud).

Ambedkar’s take on democracy is intriguing

and different. His writings on the

importance of separate and reserved

electorates for dalits; on the inadequacies

of a Constitution that guaranteed

legal but not substantive equality; on the

refusal of caste Hindus to permit the

reform of their religion; and a host of

related issues have received attention.

Yet, outside of electoral arrangements

and the nitty-gritty of legal constitutional

engineering, I am fascinated by his idea

of democracy as something that is fundamentally

associational – a demo cracy

was a society in which everyone interacted

with everyone, dined with them,

married them, spoke with and to others

as equals, studied, debated and learned

together, and were not divided by

notions of hierarchy. It was a full and enriching

interaction amongst all people in

a certain space that defi ned it as a

democracy. Befi tting one of his intellectual

mentors while at Columbia, the

pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, for

Ambedkar the essence of democracy

was the easy commingling of equals in

all forms of associational life – personal,

intellectual and political.

India was and remains a horrendous

departure from that ideal. Perhaps it is

time for us to admit that we are one of

the most egregious departures from that

associational ideal anywhere in the

world. It underlies Ambedkar’s response

to Gandhi when the latter asked him why

he was so critical of Congress: “Gandhiji,

I have no nation. No untouchable worth

the name will be proud of this land.” It

also informs Ambedkar’s des pairing description

of caste Hindu society as a multistoried

building bereft of staircases or

elevators – you were destined to live permanently

and inter- gene ra tio nally into

whatever echelon you were born. The

simple and unescapable fact of the matter

is that nearly seven decades after

Independence both of Ambedkar’s views

regarding India remain very substantially

true: hardly any dalit has any reason

to feel proud to be an Indian, and

the building remains free of staircases

or elevators. That associational democracy

he imagined is no closer today

than it was back in his lifetime.

I fi nd the free speech argument least

persuasive. In India’s structured inequality,

to assert the rights of the likes of

Roy and Anand to introduce and interpret

Ambedkar on the basis of this constitutional

right may be legally defensible

but it morally does little more than

underline dalit powerlessness. I am very

ambivalent about the argument that

only dalits can and should represent

Ambe dkar. That form of nativism, while

understandable especially when it

emerges from those in a position of

weakness, closes dialogue and understanding

rather than opening it up. Nor

am I inclined to agree that too much of

Roy’s “Introduction” deals with Gandhi.

Gandhi has become a universal signifi er

of a vacuous and apolitical brotherhood.

And yet his actions (as distinct from the

contradictory volubility of his 99 volumes

of collected writings) reveal a man

with serious issues when it came to race,

caste, gender, inequality and a host of

other matters. In part, the undeserving

halo that surrounds Gandhi has thrown

the robust intellect and appealing democratic

egalitarianism of the likes of

Ambedkar into the shade. The latter in

any case saw Gandhi as emblematic of

the hypocrisy and hegemony of caste

Hindu society. Deconstructing Gandhi

on the way to introducing Annihilation,

does not seem wrong to me.

Issue of Representation

Inevitably then, we turn to the issue of

representation and representativeness.

Edward Said’s Orientalism begins with

two interesting and appropriate epigraphs

for this moment in our republic. The

fi rst is from Marx on the French peasantry

in The Eighteenth Brumaire of

Louis Bonaparte, “They cannot represent

themselves – they must be represented.”

Despite the enduring and structured

inequalities of economic, cultural

and symbolic capital in India, this is no

longer true for dalits today. There has

long exi sted a thriving and active dalit

intellectual community from whom an

introducer and annotator could well

have been found.

But that brings us to the second of

Said’s epigraphs (from Disraeli’s play

Tancred): “The East is a career.” Hard

as it may be for some to acknowledge,

an edition of Annihilation, with an

introduction by Kancha Ilaiah and annotated

by Gail Omvedt is not likely to

expand the readership of that seminal

work in any signifi cant way, nor is it

likely to make it commercially viable as

a book that sells copiously. At the same

time, I think it highly signifi cant that a

publisher like Navayana senses an

opportunity to publicise Ambedkar’s

writing nationally and internationally

at this moment while also seeing it –

with the “right” introducer no doubt –

as a profi t-making enterprise. Would

that have been possible even a few years

ago? I doubt it.

I suspect it is the publication of works

like Perry Anderson’s Indian Ideology,

(Verso 2013) and Joseph Lelyveld’s

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His

Struggle with India, (2012), alongside

a growing disenchantment with celebrations

of India’s emerging economy

status and its democracy by the usual

for something like this edition of a long

extant book to emerge. There is little

point in aesthetic distaste for the whiff

of commerciali sation of Ambedkar’s

words. In a world saturated by market

capitalism, to not be commercially

viable is the same as being doomed to

obscurity. Or, to paraphrase the Marxist

economist Joan Robinson, the only

thing worse than being exploited by

capitalist marketing is to be ignored

by it.

Inherent in every democracy is the

tension between “representation” and

“representativeness”. When various sections

of society are seen as acceptably

equal, when a certain modicum of egalitarianism

has been achieved, the issue

of representation ceases to be of much

friction. Anyone from the putatively

equal citizenry can represent others in

politics, culture, literature and the like –

they are all seen as seamlessly and interchangeably

“national” in some way. Hardly

any society has achieved such egalitarianism,

though it remains a powerful

chimera animating the struggle for

equality and democracy in many places.

Representation vs

Representativeness

In postcolonial societies such as India,

given deep and sustained caste inequalities

amid persistent poverty, “representation”

has repeatedly – and understandably

– reduced itself to “representativeness”.

If x-caste or y-religion or z-community

constitutes a certain percentage

of the population, one notion of fairness

demands that they be able to access precisely

those percentages of every form of

capital – economic and symbolic. Any

departure from that correspondence is

deemed to be unfair or a result of historical

legacies for better or worse or evidence

of sustained discrimination.

While one may argue that the equation

of “representation” to “representativeness”

sometimes reduces and impoverishes

it, there is no denying the veridical

basis for it.

When some dalits claim that Roy and

Anand cannot introduce or annotate

Ambedkar, and only dalits can, before

rushing to decry that as emblematic

of precisely this sort of reduction of

representation to representativeness,

we should pause to think. For their act

of representation to seem fair and unremarkable

to dalits, we need to have

achieved a society in which to be a dalit

is not a stigma, and to be a savarna is

not a marker of superior status. Until

that day arrives in India, the dalit objection

to Annihilation, being introduced

and annotated by savarnas will remain

a relevant and worthy objection. In other

words, their objection is not a sign of

their essentialism or nativism – it is

rather an index of the failure of the

savarna-led national project. More

precisely, it signals our failure to approximate

Ambe dkar’s vision of democracy

as the mutually enhancing association

of all.