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October 23 - October 26, 2024
Though it is against the law, the Indian Railways is one of the biggest employers of manual scavengers. Its 14,300 trains transport twenty-five million passengers across 65,000 kilometres every day. Their shit is funnelled straight onto the railway tracks through 172,000 open-discharge toilets. This shit, which must amount to several tonnes a day, is cleaned by hand, without gloves or any protective equipment, exclusively by Dalits.
faced its first challenge only a thousand years later, when the Buddhists broke with caste by creating sanghas that admitted everybody, regardless of which caste they belonged to.
Pandita Ramabai, perhaps India’s first feminist, a Marathi Brahmin who rejected Hinduism and converted to Christianity (and challenged that too);
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E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, known as ‘Periyar’
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Ambedkar was Gandhi’s most formidable adversary. He challenged him not just politically or intellectually, but also morally.
has even been the subject of a Hollywood blockbuster that won eight Oscars.
Which movie?
‘British stooge’ (because he accepted an invitation from the British government to the First Round Table Conference in 1930 when Congressmen were being imprisoned for breaking the salt laws),
Gandhi has become all things to all people: Obama loves him and so does the Occupy movement. Anarchists love him and so does the Establishment. Narendra Modi loves him and so does Rahul Gandhi. The poor love him and so do the rich. He is the Saint of the Status Quo.
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.
It is translated from Gujarati by Ambedkar (who suggested more than once that Gandhi ‘deceived’ people, and that his writings in English and Gujarati could be productively compared):
Though he was given to apologizing and agonizing publicly and privately over things like the occasional lapses in his control over his sexual desire,59 he never agonized over the extremely damaging things he had said and done on caste.
‘It is foolish to take solace in the fact that because the Congress is fighting for the freedom of India, it is, therefore, fighting for the freedom of the people of India and of the lowest of the low,’ Ambedkar said. ‘The question whether the Congress is fighting for freedom has very little importance as compared to the question for whose freedom is the Congress fighting.’
‘Gandhiji, I have no Homeland,’ was Ambedkar’s famous reply. ‘No Untouchable worth the name will be proud of this land.’61
Constitutionalism can come in the way of revolution. And the Dalit revolution has not happened yet. We still await it. Before that there cannot be any other, not in India.
Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.’
Like Thomas Jefferson, he believed that unless every generation had the right to create a new Constitution for itself, the earth would belong to ‘the dead and not the living’.66 The trouble is that the living are not necessarily more progressive or enlightened than the dead. There are a number of forces today, political as well as commercial, that are lobbying to rewrite the Constitution in utterly regressive ways.
The President, Rajendra Prasad, threatened to stall the Bill’s passage into law. Hindu sadhus laid siege to Parliament. Industrialists and zamindars warned they would withdraw their support in the coming elections.
‘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.’
How can Hinduism be renounced only because the practice of caste is sanctioned in its foundational texts, which most people have never read?
(Which, at this moment, is experiencing a crisis from which it may not recover.)
What is being referred to?
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.
As the earth warms up, as glaciers melt and forests disappear, Gandhi’s words have turned out to be prophetic. But his horror of modern civilization led him to eulogise a mythical Indian past that was, in his telling, just and beautiful. Ambedkar, on his part, was painfully aware of the iniquity of that past, but in his urgency to move away from it, he failed to recognize the catastrophic dangers of Western modernity.
Even the low is privileged as compared with lower. Each class being privileged, every class is interested in maintaining the system.’
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.
Brahminism makes it impossible to draw a clear line between victims and oppressors, even though the hierarchy of caste makes it more than clear that there are victims and oppressors. (The line between Touchables and Untouchables, for example, is dead clear.)
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.
Dayananda Saraswati (born Mool Shankar, a Gujarati Brahmin from Kathiawar),
Intereating
They had to be assimilated, their proteins broken down.
What kind of analogy is this?
In 1909, it passed the Morley–Minto reforms, granting Muslims a separate electorate in the Central as well as Provincial Legislative Councils.
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The three main constituencies it had to win over were the conservative, privileged-caste Hindus, the Untouchables and the Muslims.
Is this bckwrd projection of today's politcal reality?
Politically, it is used in the opposite way, for the very narrow purpose of assimilation and domination, in which all religions—Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Christianity—are sought to be absorbed. They’re expected to function like small concerns under the umbrella of a larger holding company.
Their bodies at present are ill-odorous and foul with the liquor and strong-smelling food out of which for generations they have been built up; it will need some generations of purer food and living to make their bodies fit to sit in the close neighbourhood of a school room with children who have received bodies trained in habits of exquisite personal cleanliness and fed on pure food stuffs. We have to raise the Depressed Classes to a similar level of purity, not drag the clean to the level of the dirty, and until that is done, close association is undesirable.100
Amzing. Were similr argumenta usedby seggregtionists in America?
Gandhi’s support for Khilafat, however, played straight into the hands of Hindu extremists, who had by then begun to claim that Muslims were not ‘true’ Indians because the centre of gravity of Muslim fealty lay outside of India.
the Government of Pakistan kept its head about one thing: it declared that Untouchable municipal sweepers were part of the country’s ‘essential services’ and impounded them, refusing them permission to move to India. (Who else was going to clean people’s shit in the Land of the Pure?)
TBR wow!
Even today in Pakistan, while various Islamist sects slaughter each other over who is the better, more correct, more faithful Muslim, there does not seem to be much heartache over the very un-Islamic practice of untouchability.
Gandhi’s assassin seemed to feel that he was saving the Mahatma from himself.
His view was that the Gita contained ‘an unheard of defence of murder’. He called it a book that ‘offers a philosophic basis to the theory of Chaturvarna by linking it to the theory of innate, inborn qualities in men’.
It allowed him the bandwidth to make daily broadcasts on the state of his hygiene, his diet, his bowel movements, his enemas and his sex life,
So true
Ordinary politicians oscillate from political expediency to political expediency. A Mahatma can grow from truth to truth.
Good observation, and well put
He was offended that ‘passenger Indians’—Indian merchants who were predominantly Muslim but also privileged-caste Hindus—who had come to South Africa to do business, were being treated on a par with native Black Africans.
Gandhi’s argument was that passenger Indians came to Natal as British subjects and were entitled to equal treatment on the basis of Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation, which asserted the equality of all imperial subjects.
Gandhi petitioned the authorities and had a third entrance opened so that Indians did not need to use the same entrance as the ‘Kaffirs’.
He complains that the ‘Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir’.
What choice of words
Whether they are Hindus or Mahommedans, they are absolutely without any moral or religious instruction worthy of the name. They have not learned enough to educate themselves without any outside help. Placed thus, they are apt to yield to the slightest temptation to tell a lie. After some time, lying with them becomes a habit and a disease. They would lie without any reason, without any prospect of bettering themselves materially, indeed, without knowing what they are doing. They reach a stage in life when their moral faculties have completely collapsed owing to neglect.
Wow, just wow
I have never endeavoured to show that the indentured Indians have been receiving cruel treatment.
The Boers managed to outmanoeuvre and out-brotherhood Gandhi.
The score between black and white stands at present at about 3500 to 8.’
3500 to 8
The connection between racism and casteism was made more than a century before the 2001 Durban conference. Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.
the Pass Laws did not gain much traction. After leading a number of protests against registering and fingerprinting, Gandhi suddenly announced that Indians would agree to be fingerprinted as long as it was voluntary. It would not be the first time that he would make a deal that contradicted what the struggle was about in the first place.
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Gandhi was not trying to overwhelm or destroy a ruling structure; he simply wanted to be friends with it.
