Dr. B.R. AMBEDKAR
On Untouchability
Ambedkar described the Untouchables as belonging to the same religion and culture, yet shunned and ostracised by the community they lived in. The untouchables, observed Ambedkar recognised the sacred as well as the secular laws of India, but they derived no benefit from this. They lived on the outskirts of a village. Segregated from the rest, bound down to a code of behaviour, they lived a life appropriate to a servile state. According to this code, an untouchable could not do anything that raised him or her above his or her appointed station in life. The caste system stamped an individual as untouchable from birth. Thereafter, observed Ambedkar, his social status was fixed, and his economic condition was permanently set. The tragic part was that the Mahomedans, Parsis and Christians shunned and avoided the untouchables, as well as the Hindus. Ambedkar acknowledged that the caste system wasn’t universally absolute in his time; it was true, he wrote, that some untouchables had risen in Indian society. above their usually low status, but the majority had limited mobility, or none, during Britain’s colonial rule. According to Ambedkar, the caste system was irrational. Ambedkar listed these evils of the caste system; it isolated people, infused a sense of inferiority into lower-caste individuals, and divided humanity. The caste system was not merely a social problem, he argued: it traumatised India’s people, its economy, and the discourse between its people, preventing India from developing and sharing knowledge, and wrecking its ability to create and enjoy the fruits of freedom. The philosophy supporting the social stratification system in India had discouraged critical thinking and cooperative effort, encouraging instead treatises that were full of absurd conceits, quaint fancies, and chaotic speculations. The lack of social mobility, notes Ambedkar, had prevented India from developing technology which can aid man in his effort to make a bare living, and a life better than that of the brute. Ambedkar stated that the resultant absence of scientific and technical progress, combined with all the transcendentalism and submission to one’s fate, perpetrated famines, desolated the land, and degraded the consciousness from respecting the civic rights of every fellow human being.
As Ambedkar was educated by the Princely State of Baroda, he was bound to serve it. He was appointed as Military Secretary to the Gaikwad but had to quit within a short time. He described the incident in his autobiography, Waiting for a Visa. Thereafter he tried to find ways to make a living for his growing family. He worked as a private tutor, as an accountant, and established an investment consulting business, but it failed when his clients learned that he was an untouchable. In 1918 he became Professor of Political Economy in the Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai. Even though he was successful with the students, other professors objected to his sharing the same drinking water jug that they all used.
Ambedkar has been invited to testify before the Southborough Committee, which was preparing the Government of India Act, 1919. At this hearing, Ambedkar argued for creating separate electorates and reservations for untouchables and other religious communities. In 1920, he began the publication of the weekly Mooknayak (Leader of the silent) in Mumbai with the help of Shahaji II (1874-1922), Maharaja of Kolhapur.
Ambedkar went on to work as a legal professional. In 1926 he successfully defended three non-Brahmin leaders who had accused the Brahmin community of ruining India and were then subsequently sued for libel. Dhananjay Keer notes that “The victory was resounding, both socially and individually, for the clients and the Doctor.”
Protest
While practicing law in the Bombay High Court, he tried to uplift the untouchables in order to educate them. His first organised attempt to achieve this was the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha, which was intended. to promote education and socio-economic improvement, as well as the welfare of “outcastes”, at the time referred to as depressed classes. For the protection of Dalit rights he started many periodicals like Mook Nayak, Bahishkrit Bharat, and Equality Janta.
He was appointed to the Bombay Presidency Committee to work with the all European Simon Commission in 1925. This commission had sparked great protests across India, and while its report was ignored by most Indians, Ambedkar himself wrote a separate set of recommendations for the future Constitution of India.
By 1927 Ambedkar decided to launch active movements against untouchability. He began with public movements and marches to open up and share public drinking water resources. He also began a struggle for the right to enter Hindu temples. He led a satyagraha in Mahad to fight for the right of the untouchable community to draw water from the main water tank of the town. In a conference in late 1927, Ambedkar publicly condemned the classic Hindu text, the Manusmriti (Laws of Manu), for ideologically justifying the system of caste discrimination and “untouchability”, ceremonially burning copies of the ancient text. On 25th December, 1927, thousand of people burnt copies of Manusmriti under the leadership of Ambedkar.
In 1930, Ambedkar launched Kalaram Temple movement. This was a non-violent movement for which he was preparing for three months. About 15000 volunteers assembled at Kalaram Temple satyagraha making it one of the greatest processions of Nasik. The was headed by a military band, a batch of scouts, women and men walked in discipline, order and determination to see the god for the first time. When they to gate, the gates were closed by Brahmin authorities. This movement was for human dignity and self-respect.
Poona Pact
In 1932, British announced the formation of separate electorate for “Depressed Classes” in the Communal Award, Gandhi fiercely opposed a separate electorate for untouchables, saying he feared that such an arrangement would divide the Hindu community into two groups. Gandhi protested by fasting while imprisoned in the Yerwada Central Jail of Poona. Following the fast, Congress politicians and activists such as Madan Mohan Malaviya and Palwankar Baloo organised joint meetings with Ambedkar and his supporters at Yerwada. On 25th September 1932, the agreement known as Poona Pact was signed between Ambedkar (on behalf of the depressed classes among Hindus) and Madan Mohan Malaviya (on behalf of the other Hindus). The agreement gave reserved seats for the depressed classes in the Provisional legislatures, within the general electorate and not by creating a separate electorate. Due to the pact, the depressed class received 148 seats in the legislature, instead of the 71 as allocated in the Communal Award earlier proposed by the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. The text uses the term “Depressed Classes” to denote untouchables among Hindus who were later called Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes under India Act, 1935, and the later Indian Constitution of 1950.
Annihilation of Caste
The Jat Pat Todak Mandal, a social reformist organisation of Lahore, had, in 1936, invited Dr. B.R. Ambedkar to deliver the presidential address of its annual conference on the topic of the caste system in India. Ambedkar sent the manuscript of his speech titled The Annihilation of Caste’. However, the organising committee found some of his views, particularly his critique of the Vedas and his inclination to leave the Hindu fold, unacceptable.
It, therefore, suggested to Ambedkar that he delete these views, to which he replied that “he would not change a comma” The speech thus remained undelivered. Ambedkar subsequently published it in May 1936.
Among the numerous writings and speeches of Ambedkar that run into thousands of pages, ‘The Annihilation of Caste’ is indeed his magnum opus. Judged by any criterion such as content, logic, argument, language, diction, exposition, urge and, above all, the force, it is a manifesto of social emancipation, and occupies a place similar to what the Communist Manifesto once did in the world communist movement.
Since the book is polemical in nature, Ambedkar did not elaborate much on the agonies, indignities, humiliation and overall sufferings of the Sudras, and particularly the untouchables. He only gave of how they were deprived of education and freedom of occupation and were subjected to stigmatised manual labour, all resulting in their virtual economic slavery, how they were segregated and deprived of basic rights such as drinking water even from public wells, and above all how they were made victims of social persecutions.
But, according to Ambedkar, worse and unparallelled, the Hindu Dharmashastras gave legitimacy to the doctrine of Chaturvanya and the caste system. The infamous Manusmriti dehumanised the Sudras and untouchables, ruled the Hindu psyche for centuries and created the greatest obstacle to any serious attempt at eradicating the caste system. This made Ambedkar publically burn the Manusmriti on the occasion of his historical Mahad Satyagraha in 1927 for establishing the right of untouchables to drink the water of the Chawdar tank in Mahad town in Maharashtra..
In the ‘Annihilation of Caste’, Ambedkar, probably for the first time, raised many profound questions with respect to caste. First, he rejected the defence of caste on the basis of division of labour and argued that it was not merely a division of labour but a division of labourers. The former was voluntary and depended upon one’s choice and aptitude and, therefore, rewarded efficiency. The latter was involuntary, forced, killed initiative and resulted in job aversion and inefficiency. He argued that caste could not be defended on the basis of purity of blood, though pollution is a hallmark of the caste system.
He quoted from D.R. Bhandarkar’s paper “Foreign Elements in the Hindu Population” that “there is hardly any class or caste in India which has not a foreign strain in it, (and that) there is an admixture of alien blood not only among the warrior classes-the Rajputs and the Marathas-but also among the Brahmins who are under the happy delusion that they are free from all foreign elements.” Ambedkar thus argued that caste had no scientific basis. He painfully maintained that Hindu society was a collection of castes, fixed in watertight compartments with graded hierarchy that made an associated corporate life virtually impossible.
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