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Among the first Indians to embrace it were the Bengali Brahmins of Calcutta.
‘The idea that English language and European knowledge was needed to revive Hindu society—or, more precisely, aryadharma—was a central consideration for the Indian proponents of English education in the nineteenth century’.
Indeed, it was pragmatism that led Ambedkar, over the course of his life, to shift his economic thinking away from Marxism to something closer to welfare capitalism.
reflexive pride
what it means to be White better than any White person, Ambedkar serves a parallel role for upper-caste folks.
website Round Table India, on the YouTube channel Dalit Camera,
Roy too finds their major differences irreconcilable, where praising Ambedkar can imply diminishing Gandhi—and vice versa.
his attempts to tackle untouchability after the Poona Pact through the organization Harijan Sevak Sangh, which didn’t admit any ‘untouchables’ in leadership roles
Older Indian Marxists meanwhile recall that Brahmins and Dalits in their organizations maintained separate pitchers of water.
(parts of the Indian Left could also increase their relevance by abandoning their doctrinaire aversion to capitalism and instead promoting a ‘welfare capitalism’ that harnesses the power of markets to raise living standards
with strong regulatory oversight and redistribution to reduce economic inequality).
As Ambedkar wrote about the ‘untouchables’, ‘The want and poverty which has been their lot is nothing to them as compared to the insult and indignity which they have to bear as a result of the vicious social order.’
Indeed, the origins of identity politics lie in oppressive social beliefs and practices that may overlap with but are not subsumed under a class conflict conceived in economic terms.
Essentialism is the idea that certain people have a primary social identity that derives from an innate and immutable essence within them.
trickle-down model of social justice.
‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,’ wrote the scholar Ernst Renan.
Behind the rhetoric, only 3 percent of Congress members were Muslims in the 1930s, when a quarter of the population was Muslim.
Most menacing of all, Gandhi confided to a colleague, might not Untouchables, accorded separate identity, then gang up with ‘Muslim hooligans and kill caste Hindus’?
Anderson claims that success in the nationalist struggle came not from the mass mobilization of Satyagraha, but from Gandhi’s rebuilding of Congress,
