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February 5 - February 14, 2021
I will confess to being disturbed and taken aback at the scale and dishonesty of the mythology and falsehood that have obscured the facts of that story. Not by Gandhi as much as by his myth-makers.
Revolutions can begin, and often have begun, with reading.
“To the Untouchables,” Ambedkar said, with the sort of nerve that present-day intellectuals in India find hard to summon, “Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors.”5
Ask any village policeman in India what his job is and he’ll probably tell you it is to ‘keep the peace’. That is done, most of the time, by upholding the caste system. Dalit aspirations are a breach of peace. Annihilation of Caste is a breach of peace.
The origins of caste will continue to be debated by anthropologists for years to come, but its organising principles, based on a hierarchical, sliding scale of entitlements and duties, of purity and pollution, and the ways in which they were, and still are, policed and enforced, are not all that hard to understand. The
Ambedkar’s point is that to believe in the Hindu shastras and to simultaneously think of oneself as liberal or moderate is a contradiction in terms.
The trouble is that Gandhi actually said everything and its opposite. To cherry pickers, he offers such a bewildering variety of cherries that you have to wonder if there was something the matter with the tree.
Ambedkar’s main concern was to privilege and legalise “constitutional morality” over the traditional, social morality of the caste system.
Prabuddha Bharat was, in fact, the name he gave to the last of the four newspapers he edited in his lifetime.
74 To Ambedkar, and to most Dalits, Gandhi’s ideal village was, understandably, “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism”.75
God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 millions took to similar economic exploitation it would strip the world bare like locusts.77
By Brahminism, they didn’t mean Brahmins as a caste or a community. They meant the domino effect, what Ambedkar called the “infection of imitation”, that the caste that first “enclosed” itself—the Brahmins—set off. “Some closed the door,” he wrote, “others found it closed against them”.78
The exponential decay of the radioactive atom of caste means that Brahminism is practised not just by the Brahmin against the Kshatriya or the Vaishya against the Shudra, or the Shudra against the Untouchable, but also by the Untouchable against the Unapproachable, the Unapproachable against the Unseeable. It means there is a quotient of Brahminism in everybody, regardless of which caste they belong to.
Even as the modern Indian nation constituted itself, it began to fracture.
Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.
Gandhi was not trying to overwhelm or destroy a ruling structure; he simply wanted to be friends with it.
Gandhi always said that he wanted to live like the poorest of the poor. The question is, can poverty be simulated? Poverty, after all, is not just a question of having no money or no possessions. Poverty is about having no power. As
If you are powerful, you can live simply, but you cannot be poor.
Gandhi’s genius was that he yoked his other-worldly search for moksha to a very worldly, political cause and performed both, like a fusion dance, for a live audience, in a live-in theatre.
It could have been the beginning of the revolution that India needed and is still waiting for, but the Dalit Panthers swiftly lost their bearings and disintegrated.
Unfortunately, by viewing the Adivasi community through the lens of Western liberalism, Ambedkar’s writing, which is otherwise so relevant in today’s context, suddenly becomes dated.
A Temple Entry Bill was tabled in the Central Legislature in 1933. Gandhi and the Congress supported it enthusiastically. But when it became apparent that the privileged castes were seriously opposed to it, they backed out.253
