The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate: Caste, Race and Annihilation of Caste

by Arundhati Roy

For Ambedkar, ‘the people’ was not a homogeneous category that glowed with the rosy hue of innate righteousness.

The trouble is that the living are not necessarily more progressive or enlightened than the dead.

Eventually Ambedkar resigned as law minister. In his resignation speech he said: ‘To leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu society, and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap.’70

It means there is a quotient of Brahminism in everybody, regardless of which caste they belong to.

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

If you are powerful, you can live simply, but you cannot be poor. In South Africa, it took a lot of farmland and organic fruit trees to keep Gandhi in poverty.

The battle of the poor and the powerless is one of reclamation, not renunciation.

No questions seem to have arisen as to how one was to carry one’s husband with one. Nor any thoughts on whether satyagraha would be effective, for example, against the hoary tradition of marital rape.

the Mahatma who promoted homespun khadi and the wooden charkha was sponsored by a mill-owner. The man who raged against the machine was kept afloat by industrialists. This arrangement was the precursor to the phenomenon of the corporate-sponsored NGO.