Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (7 page)

BOOK: Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition
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Annihilation of Caste
is the text of a speech Ambedkar was supposed to deliver in Lahore in 1936 to an audience of privileged-caste Hindus. The organisation that had been bold enough to invite him to deliver its presidential address was the
Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (Forum for Break-up of Caste) of Lahore, a ‘radical’ offshoot of the
Arya Samaj. Most of its members were privileged-caste Hindu reformers. They asked to be provided the text of the speech in advance, so that they could print and distribute it. When they read it and realised that Ambedkar was going to launch an intellectual assault on the Vedas and shastras, on Hinduism itself, they wrote to him:

[T]hose of us who would like to see the conference terminate without any untoward incident would prefer that at least the word ‘Veda’ be left out for the time being. I leave this to your good sense. I hope, however, in your concluding paragraphs you will make it clear that the views expressed in the address are your own and that the responsibility does not lie on the Mandal.
81

Ambedkar refused to alter his speech, and so the event was cancelled. His text ought not to have come as such a surprise to the Mandal. Just a few months previously, on 13 October 1935, at the
Depressed Classes Conference in Yeola in the Bombay Presidency (now in the state of Maharashtra), Ambedkar had told an audience of more than ten thousand people:

Because we have the misfortune of calling ourselves Hindus, we are treated thus. If we were members of another faith none would treat us so. Choose any religion which gives you equality of status and treatment. We shall repair our mistake now. I had the misfortune of being born with the stigma of an Untouchable. However, it is not my fault; but I will not die a Hindu, for this is in my power.
82

At that particular moment in time, the threat of religious conversion by an Untouchable leader of Ambedkar’s standing came as the worst possible news to Hindu reformers.

Conversion was by no means new. Seeking to escape the stigma of caste, Untouchable and other degraded labouring castes had begun to convert to other religions centuries ago. Millions had converted to
Islam during the years of Muslim rule. Later, millions more had taken to Sikhism and
Christianity. (Sadly, caste prejudice in the subcontinent trumps religious belief. Though their scriptures do not sanction it, elite Indian Muslims, Sikhs and Christians all practise caste discrimination.
83
Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal all have their own communities of Untouchable
sweepers. So does
Kashmir. But that’s another story.)

The mass conversion of oppressed-caste Hindus, particularly to Islam, continues to sit uncomfortably with Hindu supremacist history writing, which dwells on a golden age of Hinduism that was brought to naught by the cruelty and vandalism of Muslim rule.
84
Vandalism and cruelty there certainly was. Yet it meant different things to different people. Here is Jotiba Phule (1827–90), the earliest of the modern anticaste
intellectuals, on the subject of the Muslim rule and of the so-called golden age of the
Arya Bhats (
Brahmins):

The Muslims, destroying the carved stone images of the cunning Arya Bhats, forcibly enslaved them and brought the Shudras and
Ati-Shudras in great numbers out of their clutches and made them Muslims, including them in the Muslim Religion. Not only this, but they established inter-dining and intermarriage with them and gave them all equal rights. They made them all as happy as themselves and forced the Arya Bhats to see all this.
85

By the turn of the century, however, religious conversion came to have completely different implications in India. A new
set of unfamiliar considerations entered the mix. Opposing an unpopular regime was no longer just a question of a conquering army riding into the capital, overthrowing the monarch and taking the throne. The old idea of empire was metamorphosing into the new idea of the nation state. Modern governance now involved addressing the volatile question of the right to representation: who had the right to represent the Indian people? The Hindus, the Muslims, the Sikhs, the
Christians, the privileged castes, the oppressed castes, the 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 diverse range of
races, castes, tribes and religions—who, between them, spoke more than one thousand languages—had to be transformed into modern citizens of a modern nation. The process of synthetic homogenisation began to have the opposite effect. Even as the modern Indian nation constituted itself, it began to fracture.

Under the new dispensation, demography became vitally important. The empirical taxonomy of the British
census had solidified and freeze-dried the rigid but not entirely inflexible hierarchy of caste, adding its own prejudices and value judgements to the mix, classifying entire communities as ‘criminals’ and ‘warriors’ and so on. The Untouchable castes were entered under the accounting head ‘Hindu’. (In 1930, according to Ambedkar, the Untouchables numbered about 44.5 million.
86
The population of
African Americans in the US around the same time was 8.8 million.) The large-scale exodus of Untouchables from the ‘Hindu fold’ would have been catastrophic for the ‘Hindu’ majority. In pre-partition, undivided Punjab, for example, between 1881 and 1941, the Hindu population dropped from 43.8 per cent to 29.1 per cent, due largely to the conversion of the subordinated castes to Islam, Sikhism and Christianity.
87

Hindu reformers hurried to stem this migration. The
Arya Samaj, founded in 1875 in Lahore by
Dayananda Saraswati (born Mool Shankar, a Gujarati
Brahmin from Kathiawar), was one of the earliest. It preached against the practice of
untouchability and banned idol worship. Dayananda Saraswati initiated the
Shuddhi programme in 1877, to ‘purify the impure’, and, in the early twentieth century, his disciples took this up on a mass scale in North India.

In 1899, Swami
Vivekananda of the Ramakrishna Math—the man who became famous in 1893 when he addressed the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in his sadhu’s robes—said, “Every man going out of the Hindu pale is not only a man less, but an enemy the more.”
88
A raft of new reformist outfits appeared in Punjab, committed to saving Hinduism by winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of Untouchables: the
Shradhananda Dalituddhar Sabha, the
All-India Achhutodhar Committee, the Punjab Achhut Udhar Mandal
89
and the
Jat-Pat Todak Mandal which was part of the Arya Samaj.

The reformers’ use of the words ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’ was new. Until then, they had been used by the British as well as the Mughals, but it was not the way people who were described as Hindus chose to describe themselves. Until the panic over demography began, they had always foregrounded their
jati, their caste identity. “The first and foremost thing that must be recognised is that Hindu society is a myth. The name Hindu is itself a foreign name,” said Ambedkar.

It was given by the Mohammedans to the natives [who lived east of the river Indus] for the purpose of distinguishing themselves. It does not occur in any Sanskrit work prior to the Mohammedan invasion. They did not feel the necessity of a common name, because they had no conception of their having constituted a community. Hindu society as such does not exist. It is only a collection of castes.
90

When reformers began to use the word ‘Hindu’ to describe themselves and their organisations, it had less to do with religion than with trying to forge a unified political constitution out of a divided people. This explains the reformers’ constant references to the ‘Hindu nation’ or the ‘Hindu
race’.
91
This political
Hinduism later came to be called
Hindutva.
92

The issue of demography was addressed openly, and head-on. “In this country, the government is based on numbers,” wrote the editor of
Pratap
, a Kanpur newspaper, on 10 January 1921.

Shuddhi has become a matter of life and death for Hindus. The Muslims have grown from negative quantity into 70 million. The
Christians number four million. 220 million Hindus are finding it hard to live because of 70 million Muslims. If their numbers increase only God knows what will happen. It is true that Shuddhi should be for religious purposes alone, but the Hindus have been obliged by other considerations as well to embrace their other brothers. If the Hindus do not wake up now, they will be finished.
93

Conservative Hindu organisations like the
Hindu Mahasabha took the task beyond rhetoric, and against their own deeply held beliefs and practice began to proselytise energetically against
untouchability. Untouchables had to be prevented from defecting. They had to be assimilated, their proteins broken down. They had to be brought into the Big House, but kept in the servants’ quarters. Here is Ambedkar on the subject:

It is true that Hinduism can absorb many things. The beef-eating Hinduism (or strictly speaking
Brahminism which is the proper name of Hinduism in its earlier stage) absorbed the non-violence theory of
Buddhism and became a religion of vegetarianism. But there is one thing which Hinduism has never been able to do—namely to adjust itself to absorb the Untouchables or to remove the bar of untouchability.
94

While the Hindu reformers went about their business,
anticaste movements led by Untouchables began to organise themselves too.
Swami Achhutanand Harihar presented the
Prince of Wales with a charter of seventeen demands including land reform, separate schools for Untouchable children and separate electorates. Another well-known figure was
Babu Mangoo Ram. He was a member of the revolutionary, anti-imperialist
Ghadar Party established in 1913, predominantly by Punjabi migrants in the United States and Canada. Ghadar (Revolt) was an international movement of Punjabi Indians who had been inspired by the 1857 Mutiny, also called the First War of Independence. Its aim was to overthrow the British by means of armed struggle. (It was, in some ways, India’s first communist party. Unlike the Congress, which had an urban, privileged-caste leadership, the Ghadar Party was closely linked to the Punjab peasantry. Though it has ceased to exist, its memory continues to be a rallying point for several left-wing revolutionary parties in Punjab.) However, when Babu Mangoo Ram returned to India after a decade in the United States, the caste system was waiting for him. He found he was Untouchable again.
95
In 1926, he founded the
Ad Dharm movement, with Ravidas, the
Bhakti sant, as its spiritual hero. Ad Dharmis declared that they were neither Sikh nor Hindu. Many Untouchables left the
Arya Samaj to join the Ad Dharm movement.
96
Babu Mangoo Ram went on to become a comrade of Ambedkar’s.

The anxiety over demography made for turbulent politics. There were other lethal games afoot. The British government had given itself the right to rule India by imperial fiat and had consolidated its power by working closely with the Indian elite, taking care never to upset the status quo.
97
It had drained the wealth of a once-wealthy subcontinent—or, shall we say, drained the wealth of the elite in a once-wealthy subcontinent. It had caused famines in which millions had died while the British
government exported food to England.
98
None of that stopped it from also lighting sly fires that ignited caste and communal tension. In 1905, it partitioned Bengal along communal lines. In 1909, it passed the
Morley–Minto reforms, granting Muslims a separate electorate in the Central as well as Provincial Legislative Councils. It began to question the moral and political legitimacy of anybody who opposed it. How could a people who practised something as primitive as
untouchability talk of
self-rule? How could the Congress party, run by elite, privileged-caste Hindus, claim to represent the Muslims? Or the Untouchables? Coming from the British government, it was surely wicked, but even wicked questions need answers.

The person who stepped into the widening breach was perhaps the most consummate politician the modern world has ever known—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. If the British had their imperial mandate to raise them above the fray, Gandhi had his Mahatmahood.

Gandhi returned to India in 1915 after twenty years of political activity in South Africa, and plunged into the national movement. His first concern, as any politician’s would be, was to stitch together the various constituencies that would allow the Indian National Congress to claim it was the legitimate and sole representative of the emerging nation. It was a formidable task. The temptations and contradictions of attempting to represent everybody—Hindus, Muslims,
Christians, Sikhs, privileged castes, subordinated castes, peasants, farmers, serfs, zamindars, workers and industrialists—were all absorbed into the other-worldly provenance of Gandhi’s Mahatmahood.

BOOK: Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition
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