Review: Rethinking Untouchability by Jesús F Cháirez-Garza
This defence of Ambedkar’s praxis is a study of the leader’s political thought in the years before India’s independence
BR Ambedkar collaborated with the British, and demanded a delay of the independence process. He supported the Muslim League, criticised the Congress, and the leadership of Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel. He mooted the idea of a separate settlement for untouchables within the country. He went to Winston Churchill with his demands and tried to broker an alliance with him. He threatened to cause a revolt when India was in the middle of transitioning to independence. He supported the formation of Pakistan. He threatened to convert to Islam. Even though he criticised the Congress, he joined their government. Ambedkar was not a successful politician electorally. Ambedkar contradicted Gandhi’s idea of the village but also accepted the prevalence of villages as sites of the national question.
All theses statements have been heard in popular discourse and they are not untrue. However, they should be viewed in context. Ambedkar collaborated with the British government because the ruling entity paid attention to the calumnies heaped on the untouchables. When the Congress and others cold shouldered Ambedkar, he sought a referendum from the colonial government. He demanded a delay in the independence process because he was afraid of untouchables being handed over to caste Hindus “bound hand and foot”. He supported the demands of the Muslim League because he saw them as allies under the umbrella of political minorities. Till the Lahore Resolution in 1940, he sought to position the two major minoritarian forces against the rule of the majority Congress. However, this changed with the Lahore Resolution when Jinnah endorsed the creation of a separate Muslim nation state with a Muslim majority. The Muslim League, like the Congress, merely used the untouchables to advance their gains. “The Muslims wanted the support of the Scheduled Castes, but they never gave their support to the Scheduled Castes,” Ambedkar said. Jinnah demanded representation for Muslims and did not consider other minorities in the equation.
After failing to receive support from the biggest majority, Ambedkar expected that the Muslim League would rejoin India as it was to their benefit and that of the Scheduled Castes. Being the third largest minority, the position of the Scheduled Castes would then be that of a balancing power, and they could be an influential force by choosing sides in the formation of the government. He believed that without Muslims, the untouchables, who were minorities in numbers, wealth and in resources, would be left to fend for themselves
Ambedkar was unsuccessful electorally and the 1946 elections devastated his party’s prospects. This was a result of the joint electorates that made Dalits, a political minority, into a hated one and gave the colonial government (the Cabinet Mission) and the Congress the ability to downplay Ambedkar’s demands. The Dalits couldn’t outperform the political machine, propaganda, and finances of the Congress.
The idea of a separate settlement within the country grew out of Ambedkar’s earlier position in 1919 that the Dalits of India constituted a separate entity and thus needed a respectable place where they could live fearlessly and had independent means of survival. Thus, he proposed a Settlement Commission with an annual budget of ₹5 crore. He also met Churchill as “a leader of one party... to another party for a settlement”. He compared his own move to Churchill’s quest – one that took him even to Russia – to draw favourable attention to his country. “I should do the same for the sake of the Scheduled Castes,” he wrote to Vallabhbhai Patel. All these ideas and correspondence are covered in Mexican historian Jesus Cháirez-Garza’s new book, Rethinking Untouchability; The Political Thought of BR Ambedkar.
Myths uncovered
The popular view of MK Gandhi as a gentle and generous soul was not entirely true. He seems to have nursed some ill will towards Ambedkar and ensured he was not caught in the whirlwind of the Congress demand for a Constituent Assembly. He told Vallabhbhai Patel not to trust him or even consider him for a post. Cháirez-Garza draws from personal letters, written around the time of the Constituent Assembly elections, to refute the argument that Gandhi played a part in getting Ambedkar a seat in the Constituent Assembly.
Library shelves are loaded with books on the political, economic, social, and religious thoughts of Ambedkar. In a way, this book is a continuation of that tradition. A tall defence of the leader’s praxis and a study of his political thought until India’s independence, it presents an incisive reading of his original work and other substantive secondary literature. While its insights aren’t novel, they are refreshing with the book remaining present while discussing the past.
The author contextualises Ambedkar within a larger political arena bereft of a foundational vibrancy from which the forces of the Scheduled Castes could draw. In this sense, this volume participates in the long discussions of the social history of Empire led by DN Ahir, Chris Bayly, Shekhar Bandyopadhyay, Saurabh Dube, Faisal Devji and Shruti Kapila. The footprint of that historical formula is present throughout.
I first met Cháirez-Garza when he was a DPhil student at Cambridge University presenting his thesis on Ambedkar in the decades leading up to independence. His historical enquiry impressed me. His scholarship was interesting as he hoped to bring in new dimensions like Franz Boas’s theory of untouchability to the internationalisation of untouchability. I have researched and written about the latter topic. Some of the chapters in this book, which is a collection of Cháirez-Garza’s essays published over the past decade, deal with the same subject. The few chapters that are new are an exciting read.
Though the reader does not get a clear picture or a convincing argument about what the problem of untouchability meant for the international community, the author does give us glimpses of the efforts of Ambedkar and his associate SK Bhole, the High Court judge who wrote a pamphlet drawing attention to the political issues of Dalits.
The United Nations and Ambedkar
The formation of the UN was not only a response to the post-World War consolidation of the anticolonial movement, it was also meant to give a regulated dimension to human rights. Ambedkar wanted the concerns of untouchables to exist within the ambit of the international community. He had rallied for it even at the League of Nations and the Pacific Relations committee, an influential lobbying body, as well as through various submissions to his audiences. What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945) was originally written for the Pacific Relations Committee conference.
The author focuses on Britain as the site for the internationalisation of untouchability. In another chapter, he measures the success of Ambedkar in forging an untouchable class identity by making it a national question of political importance. Ambedkar was successful in making the Congress consider the otherwise irrelevant political unit of the outcastes as a social and spiritual question. This major political minority could threaten the prospects of the majority. Ambedkar did this by subsiding regional unions of multi-castes into common, non-vernacular groups ie untouchables, depressed classes, scheduled castes and Dalit (his All India Scheduled Caste Federation was called Dalit Federation). He used this to solidify his position in the international domain, especially in English-speaking countries, the Commonwealth countries and North America — an aspect I have written about in Dalits in Black America. Ambedkar gave up the idea of taking matters to the UN because he wanted to use it as a threat tactic to bring the Congress and the British government in line with his demand. In a press statement, he said that he was holding off making a formal presentation as the new constituent assembly was being formed. His tactic worked. He was incorporated into the Constituent Assembly.
An impassioned advocate of Dalit rights
Cháirez-Garza understands Ambedkar’s moves as being beyond pragmatism or solo-ideology. He sees Ambedkar’s helplessness when he tries to win over others and acknowledges that he chose different options as a result of failure. This was the case whether he was launching satyagrahas during the crucial period of transitioning to self-government or making the colonial government accountable for their promises, which they later betrayed. When left without an option, he chose the Congress route, not with an open hand but by adroitly announcing his loyalty to a united India. Had he been backed by significant political numbers, he might have played it differently. These aspects of Ambedkar and the results of the divergent views held against him are what propelled him ahead.
For Ambedkar, his views on untouchability were not part of power politics or some numbers game. His approach to the problem of untouchability incorporated the physical mass of the nation-state, ie, villages. Cháirez-Garza looks at Ambedkar’s notion of the romanticised Indian village as actually being a den of segregation and social boycott. Many other untouchable caste leaders such as MC Rajah, Mangoo Ram Mugowalia, Swami Acchutanand, and RR Bhole too held similar opinions. The difference between them and Ambedkar was that the latter had lived most of his life in cities. The son of a military officer, his brush with prevailing untouchability came while in the villages.
Cháirez-Garza emphasises Ambedkar’s personal voyages to different parts of the world and highlights his strong views on villages. While Ambedkar’s activism mostly played out in urban centres, he was unhappy that he had overlooked the Dalits in the countryside and their issues centred around exploitation at the hands of feudal lords. He was aware of the pernicious Hindu village order and its political economy, but had to choose whether to side with colonial paternalistic views or the nationalist view of hierarchy. His choices depended on whether they suited his interests at a particular juncture. Eventually, he did carve out a path of autonomous Dalit entity in the liberation of the masses.
The reader is moved at the desperate position Ambedkar was put in by opponents; at the picture of this lone man taking the betrayals of the Congress, the colonial government, and the Muslim League like a wounded general and rising to protect his community. As anti-colonialism gained traction, Ambedkar standing with his poor, vulnerable people was a sight of profound prophetic admiration. Cháirez-Garza’s scholarship places these debates in the larger international canon, which is one of the strengths of this book.
Ambedkar was a complicated politician and a simple statesman. This has made it challenging to write about him. This goes for me too as I have been delaying a manuscript that was originally scheduled to have been delivered in 2021. Ambedkar is not on board with dogmatic appeals, nor is he adamant about a single ideology. Human liberty is his ideal. His policies are socialist in nature, but they are aggressively democratic in practice. He is a prescriptive lawmaker who adheres to the rule of law and believes in the longer working tenure of ideas, the Constitution being one of them.
Cháirez-Garza dwells on Ambedkar’s intellectual biography and examines the popular notions of the man and his cause. He positions Ambedkar’s embrace of private property as one against socialism and communism. However, inside and outside parliament, Ambedkar famously denounced the existence of Article 31— the right to private property. Speaking at the fourth Constitution Amendment Bill in 1954, Ambedkar announced that he and the drafting committee of the Constitution “do not take any responsibility for that. That is not our draft.” He reminded the house that it was a pre-constitutional article drafted by Pant in 1949.
A man with individual pursuits, his values lay in the sandstone of liberty and dignity. He was unwilling to sacrifice those at the hands of any ideologies presented — nationalism, fascism, communism, liberalism or socialism. With liberties came the protection and honour of minorities — the constituency Ambedkar fought for. In short, he had qualms over isms as they demanded a certain subordination to the idea and its active conduct in human life. They also sacrificed the historically oppressed. If the Communists spoke of the proletariat, they were, nonetheless, a Hindu proletariat, which made the distinction implausible. However, he did eventually submit to the religion of the Buddha and made a distinction of it. What differs here is the vantage of religion as ideology and ideology as religion.
Rethinking Untouchability does not follow a linear structure. As the author was invited to collect his independent work and present it in this monograph, the text is readable but somewhat burdened. Still, this is a fresh and meaningful addition to the ever-increasing corpus of literature on BR Ambedkar.
Suraj Yengde has returned to Harvard University after completing a DPhil thesis at the University of Oxford.