What Congress And Gandhi Have Done To Untouchables

by B.R. Ambedkar

on our feet and then and then only will Home Rule come to us.. .You cannot be political democrats and at the same time social autocrats. Remember that a man, a social slave, cannot be politically a free man. We all have come here to see the vision of United India, not only politically united

Statement by Rama Iyer. Congress event 1917 Chapter. A Strange Event

Many people would wonder why I describe the passing of the Resolution by the Congress moved and supported in such eloquent terms, as a strange event. But those who know the antecedents will admit that it is not an improper description. It was strange for many reasons. In the first place, the President of the Session was the late Mrs. Annie Besant. She was a well-known public figure and had many things for which she will be remembered by the future historian of India.

There may be other things for which friends of Mrs. Annie Besant may claim for her a place of honour. But I don't know, that she was ever a friend of the Untouchables. So far as I know she felt great antipathy towards the Untouchables. Expressing her opinion on the question whether the children of the Untouchables should or should not be admitted to the common school, Mrs. Annie Besant in an article headed 'The Uplift of the Depressed Classes ' which appeared in the Indian Review for February 1909 said :— "In every nation we find, as the basis of the social Pyramid, a large class of people, ignorant, degraded, unclean in language and habits,

The first type is, as a rule, honest and industrious; the second ought to be under continued control, and forced to labour sufficiently to earn its bread. In India, this class forms one-sixth of the total population, and goes by the generic name of the 'Depressed Classes.' It springs from the aboriginal inhabitants of the country, conquered and enslaved by the Aryan invaders,.. .It is drunken and utterly. indifferent to cleanliness, whether of food, person or dwelling; but

Criminal communities, such as hereditary thieves, live apart, and do not mingle with the scavengers, sweepers, husbandmen and the followers of other simple crafts who make up the huge bulk of the depressed. They are gentle, docile, as a rule industrious, pathetically submissive, merry enough when not in actual want, with

The children of the depressed classes need, first of all, to be taught cleanliness, outside decency of behaviour, and the earliest

rudiments of education, religion and morality. 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 dose neighbourhood of a school-room with children who have received bodies from an ancestry trained in habits of exquisite personal cleanliness, and fed on pure food-stuffs. We have to reuse the Depressed Classes to a similar level of physical purity, not to drag down the dean to the level of the dirty, and until this is done, dose association is undesirable. We are not blaming these children, nor their parents, for being what they are; we are stating a mere palpable fact. The first daily lesson in a school for these children should be a bath, and the putting on of a dean doth; and the second should be a meal of dean wholesome food; those primary needs cannot be supplied in a school intended for children who take their daily bath in the early morning and who come to school well-fed.

Annie Besant