Read Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition Online
Authors: B.R. Ambedkar
Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (14 page)
half the residents were moved out before his visit and the shacks of the residents torn down and neat little huts constructed in their place. The entrances and windows of the huts were screened with matting, and during the length of Gandhi’s visit, were kept sprinkled with water to provide a cooling effect. The local temple was white-washed and new brick paths were laid. In an interview with
Margaret Bourke-White, a photo-journalist for
Life
magazine, one of the men in charge of Gandhi’s visit, Dinanath Tiang of the
Birla Company, explained the improvements in the untouchable colony, “We have cared for Gandhiji’s comfort for the last twenty years.”
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In his history of the Balmiki workers of Delhi, the scholar
Vijay Prashad says when Gandhi staged his visits to the Balmiki Colony on Mandir Marg (formerly Reading Road) in 1946, he refused to eat with the community:
‘You can offer me goat’s milk,’ he said, ‘but I will pay for it. If you are keen that I should take food prepared by you, you can come here and cook my food for me’…Balmiki elders recount tales of Gandhi’s hypocrisy, but only with a sense of uneasiness. When a dalit gave Gandhi nuts, he fed them to his goat, saying that he would eat them later, in the goat’s milk. Most of Gandhi’s food, nuts and grains, came from
Birla House; he did not take these from the dalits. Radical Balmikis took refuge in Ambedkarism which openly confronted Gandhi on these issues.
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Ambedkar realised that the problem of caste would only be
further entrenched unless Untouchables were able to organise, mobilise and become a political constituency with their own representatives. He believed that reserved seats for Untouchables within the Hindu fold, or within the Congress, would just produce pliable candidates—servants who knew how to please their masters. He began to develop the idea of a separate electorate for Untouchables. In 1919, he submitted a written testimony to the
Southborough Committee on electoral reforms. The committee’s brief was to propose a scheme of territorial constituencies based on existing land revenue districts, and separate communal representation for Muslims,
Christians and Sikhs, for a new constitution that was to be drafted to prepare for Home Rule. The Congress boycotted the committee. To his critics, who called him a collaborator and a traitor, Ambedkar said that Home Rule was as much the right of the Untouchable as it was of the Brahmin, and it was the duty of privileged castes to do what they could to put everybody on an equal plane. In his testimony, Ambedkar argued that Untouchables were as separate a social group from Touchable Hindus as Muslims, Christians and Sikhs:
The right of representation and the right to hold office under the State are the two most important rights that make up citizenship. But the
untouchability of the untouchables puts these rights far beyond their reach. In a few places they do not even possess such insignificant rights as personal liberty and personal security, and equality before law is not always assured to them. These are the interests of the Untouchables. And as can be easily seen they can be represented by the Untouchables alone. They are distinctively their own interests and none else can truly voice them … Hence it is evident that we must find the Untouchables to represent their grievances which are their interests and, secondly, we must find them in such numbers as will constitute a force sufficient to claim redress.
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The British government did not, at that point, pay much attention to his testimony, though his presentation did perhaps provide the basis for Ambedkar being invited to the First Round Table Conference ten years later, in 1930.
Around this time, Ambedkar started his first journal,
Mook Nayak
(Leader of the Voiceless). Tilak’s newspaper,
Kesari
, refused to carry even a paid advertisement announcing the publication of
Mook Nayak
.
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The editor of
Mook Nayak
was P.N. Bhatkar, the first Mahar to matriculate and go to college.
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Ambedkar wrote the first thirteen editorials himself. In the first one, he described Hindu society in a chilling metaphor—as a multi-storeyed tower with no staircase and no entrance. Everybody had to die in the storey they were born in.
In May 1920, backed by Chhatrapati Shahu, the Maharaja of Kolhapur, known for his anti-Brahmin views and for pioneering the policy of reservation in education and jobs as far back as 1902, Ambedkar and his colleagues organised the first
All-India Depressed Classes Conference in
Nagpur. It was agreed that no Untouchable representative chosen by a caste-Hindu majority could (or would) genuinely work against
chaturvarna.
The 1920s marked the beginning of an era of direct action by Untouchables for the right to use wells, schools, courts, offices and public transport. In 1924, in what came to be known as the
Vaikom Satyagraha, the
Ezhavas, a community designated Shudra, and the
Pulayas, who were Untouchables, a
gitated to use the public roads that skirted the Mahadeva temple in Vaikom, twenty miles from Kottayam in
Travancore (now in the state of Kerala). One of the leaders of the Vaikom Satyagraha was
George Joseph, a
Syrian
Christian, and an admirer of Gandhi. Gandhi, on his part, disapproved of a “non-Hindu” intervening in what he believed to be an “internal matter” of the Hindus.
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(The same logic had not applied three years before, when he ‘led’ the
Khilafat Movement.) He was also reluctant
to support a full-blown satyagraha in an “Indian-ruled” state. During the course of the Vaikom Satyagraha, George Joseph was imprisoned. He became deeply disillusioned by what he saw as Gandhi’s inexcusable ambivalence on the issue of caste. As the tension in Vaikom rose, C. Rajagopalachari,
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Congress leader and Gandhi’s chief lieutenant, travelled to Vaikom to oversee matters. On 27 May 1924, he reassured the worried privileged-caste Hindus of Vaikom in a public speech:
Let not the people of Vykom or any other place fear that Mahatmaji wants caste abolished. Mahatmaji does not want the caste system abolished but holds that
untouchability should be abolished … Mahatmaji does not want you to dine with
Thiyas or
Pulayas. What he wants is that we must be prepared to touch or go near other human beings as you go near a cow or a horse … Mahatmaji wants you to look upon so-called untouchables as you do at the cow and the dog and other harmless creatures.
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Gandhi himself arrived in Vaikom in March 1925 to arbitrate. He consulted with the
Brahmin priests of the temple—who did not allow him, a non-Brahmin, to enter the sanctum—and the Queen of Travancore, and negotiated a compromise: the roads were realigned so that they were no longer within ‘polluting’ distance from the temple. The contentious portion of the road remained closed to
Christians and Muslims as well as avarnas (Untouchables) who continued to have no right to enter the temple. Saying he was “unable to satisfy the orthodox friends” Gandhi advised the “withdrawal of satyagraha”,
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but the local satyagrahis continued with their struggle. Twelve years later, in November 1936, the Maharaja of Travancore issued the first Temple Entry Proclamation in India.
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If one of Gandhi’s first major political actions was the ‘solution’
to the problem of the
Durban Post Office, Ambedkar’s was the
Mahad Satyagraha of 1927.
In 1923, the Legislative Council of Bombay (whose elections had been boycotted by the Congress) passed a resolution, the Bole Resolution, that allowed Untouchables to use public tanks, wells, schools, courts and dispensaries. In the town of Mahad, the municipality declared that it had no objection if Untouchables used the
Chavadar Tank in the town. Passing a resolution was one thing, acting on it quite another. After four years of mobilisation, the Untouchables gathered courage and, in March 1927, held a two-day conference in Mahad. Money for the conference was raised by public contribution. In an unpublished manuscript, the scholar
Anand Teltumbde quotes Anant Vinayak Chitre, one of the organisers of the Mahad Satyagraha, saying that forty villages contributed Rs 3 each, and a play about
Tukaram was staged in Bombay that made Rs 23, making the total collection Rs 143. Contrast this with Gandhi’s troubles. Just a few months before the Mahad Satyagraha, on 10 January 1927, Gandhi wrote to his industrialist-patron,
G.D. Birla:
My thirst for money is simply unquenchable. I need at least Rs 200,000—for Khadi, Untouchability and education. The dairy work makes another 50,000. Then there is the Ashram expenditure. No work remains unfinished for want of funds, but God gives after severe trials. This also satisfies me. You can give as you like for whatever work you have faith in.
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The Mahad conference was attended by about three thousand Untouchables, and a handful of progressive members of the privileged castes. (V.D. Savarkar, out of jail by now, was one of the supporters of the Mahad Satyagraha.) Ambedkar presided over the meeting. On the morning of the second day people decided to march to the Chavadar Tank and drink water. The privileged
castes watched in horror as a procession of Untouchables walked through the town, four abreast, and drank water from the tank. After the shock subsided came the violent counter-attack, with clubs and sticks. Twenty Untouchables were injured. Ambedkar urged his people to stay firm and not to strike back. A rumour was deliberately spread that the Untouchables planned to enter the
Veereshwar temple, which added a hysterical edge to the violence. The Untouchables scattered. Some found shelter in Muslim homes. For his own safety, Ambedkar spent the night in the police station. Once calm returned, the
Brahmins ‘purified’ the tank with prayers, and with 108 pots of cow dung, cow urine, milk, curd and ghee.
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The symbolic exercise of their rights did not satisfy the Mahad satyagrahis. In June 1927, an advertisement appeared in
Bahishkrit Bharat
(Excluded India), a fortnightly Ambedkar had founded, asking those members of the
Depressed Classes who wished to take the a
gitation further to enlist themselves. The orthodox Hindus of Mahad approached the sub-judge of the town and got a temporary legal injunction against the Untouchables using the tank. Still, the Untouchables decided to hold another conference and regrouped in Mahad in December. Ambedkar’s disenchantment with Gandhi was still some years away. Gandhi had, in fact, spoken approvingly of the Untouchables’ composure in the face of the attacks from the orthodoxy, so his portrait was put up on stage.
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Ten thousand people attended the second Mahad conference. On this occasion Ambedkar and his followers publicly burnt a copy of the
Manusmriti
,
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and Ambedkar gave a stirring speech:
Gentlemen, you have gathered here today in response to the invitation of the Satyagraha Committee. As the Chairman of that Committee, I gratefully welcome you all … This lake at Mahad is public property. The caste Hindus of Mahad are so reasonable that they not only draw water from the lake themselves but freely permit people of any religion to draw water from it, and
accordingly people of other religions, such as Islam, do make use of this permission. Nor do the caste Hindus prevent members of species considered lower than the human, such as birds and beasts, from drinking at the lake. Moreover, they freely permit beasts kept by untouchables to drink at the lake.
The caste Hindus of Mahad prevent the untouchables from drinking the water of the Chavadar Lake not because they suppose that the touch of the Untouchables will pollute the water or that it will evaporate and vanish. Their reason for preventing the Untouchables from drinking it is that they do not wish to acknowledge by such permission that castes declared inferior by sacred tradition are in fact their equals.
It is not as if drinking the water of the Chavadar Lake will make us immortal. We have survived well enough all these days without drinking it. We are not going to the Chavadar Lake merely to drink its water. We are going to the Lake to assert that we too are human beings like others. It must be clear that this meeting has been called to set up the norm of equality …
Time and again Ambedkar returned to the theme of equality. Men may not all be equal, he said, but equality was the only possible governing principle because the classification and assortment of human society was impossible.
To sum up,
untouchability is not a simple matter; it is the mother of all our
poverty and lowliness and it has brought us to the abject state we are in today. If we want to raise ourselves out of it, we must undertake this task. We cannot be saved in any other way. It is a task not for our benefit alone; it is also for the benefit of the nation.
Even this will not be enough. The inequality inherent in the four-castes system must be rooted out … Our work has been begun to bring about a real social revolution. Let no one deceive himself by supposing that it is a diversion to quieten minds entranced with sweet words. The work is sustained by strong feeling, which is the power that drives the movement. No one can now arrest it. I pray to god that the social revolution that begins here today may fulfil
itself by peaceful means. We say to our opponents too: please do not oppose us. Put away the orthodox scriptures. Follow
justice. And we assure you that we shall carry out our programme peacefully.
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