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Force and adoration:Ambedkars maitriA I S H W A R Y K U M A R

IN his final work The Buddha andHis Dhamma, Bhimrao Ambedkarreturns frequently to the concept ofmaitri, which he most often renders,for the first time in his essay on Marx,as fellowship. Maitri or fellowshiptowards all must never be abandoned,he writes in Buddha or Karl Marx.One owes it even to ones enemy. Indeploying maitri in such a fashion,translating it neither as friendship norfraternity, and finding its possibility inthe actions of the soldier, bandit, mag-istrate, and even the executioner, themature Ambedkar departs from thenormative rendering of the concept intwo ways. First, he understands maitricategorically as that which refusesthe foundational distinction between

friendship and hostility. Maitri is agesture that one makes towards theenemy; as such, it militantly exceedsthe moral dictates of friendship andfidelity.

In his final years, immersed intoformulating a rigorously non-humanistand religious critique of religion,Ambedkar deepens the concept ofmaitri further, including in its ambit notmerely the human but also the animal.Maitri, he claims in The Buddha andHis Dhamma, is extending fellowfeeling to all beings, not only to one whois a friend but also to one who is a foe:not only to man but to all living beings.Indeed, creaturely life, Ambedkarargues, is most proper to maitri pre-cisely because the normative concep-

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tion of love (karuna), which humanbeings express only towards their ownspecies, excludes non-humans. Maitri,on the other hand, makes both theadversary and animal its intimate sub-ject. It is inclusive in a way that theChristian conception of love is not.

Maitri too is religious and quotid-ian. Yet unlike love, which harboursdespite its best intentions a sacrificialhierarchy at its source in a remark-able and paradoxical neologism,Ambedkar calls religious love (bhakti),and the love for religion, life-force maitri is anti-sovereignty and non-theological. Acts of sovereignty,manifest in the sovereigns right totake life precisely in the name of keep-ing life sacred and safe, whose mostviolent instance is the death penalty,contaminates the ethical force of maitri.Even if it is marked by an irreduciblereligiosity, then, maitri resists the per-nicious alliance between religion andsovereignty. It does not take life in thename of keeping life unscathed. Nordoes it give life in the name of charityor pardon. Instead, maitri gives life,even to the enemy combatant, in thename of absolute equality, in the nameof forgiveness that refuses to be iden-tified as such.

It is this religion without religion thatAmbedkar thinks of when he recov-ers the encounter between the Buddhaand the dreaded bandit Angulimala inhis masterwork. In that encounter,what converts the violent bandit isneither the sudden dawning of guiltupon him nor his momentary exposureto divine luminescence. What convertshim instead is the truth manifest inthe figure of the Buddha himself. Onlythis love of truth founds the empiri-cal ground of an egalitarian faith andestablishes another mode of belief andadoration, one that exceeds both thereligious and humanist conceptions oflove. Hence Ambedkars perennial

dissatisfaction with love, affirmedagain in The Buddha and His Dhamma,Love is not enough. What is requiredis maitri. Perhaps the proper render-ing of what the mature Ambedkarcalls maitri, then, is neither fraternitynor friendship, even though he alludesto both throughout the 1940s and the1950s, but rather adoration, an immea-surable gift of belief and compassion(mudita) across the abyss of speciesdifference.

What does this radical reconcep-tualization of love, this forceful affir-mation of life as such, gives us mostto think about? What might a religionwithout religion, which would, by itsvery name, also be a religion pro-foundly aware of its own ineluctablecomplicity with force and mastery, callforth? In trying to recover Ambedkarsmoral thinking from normative andhumanist histories of equality, myintention here is simply to recall thatwhat is living, what exists, and mostontologically, what is, for Ambedkar,not that which is same but rather thatwhich is wholly other, wholly unequal,and above all, wholly mortal.

In this politicization of finitude,this foregrounding of the knowledge ofimpermanence (sunnyata), Ambedkardoes not valorize death or sacrifice inthe manner of a satyagrahi, eventhough he does not renounce theimperative of war and general mobi-lization either. Instead, he recoversin the consciousness of finitude thepossibility of an unconditional andcollective sacrifice of interest; a sac-rifice from which equality amongstmortals might emerge. Thus, in Anni-hilation of Caste (1936), two decadesbefore his masterwork, and right inthe midst of his critique of the anti-democratic structure of Platos Repub-lic, Ambedkar had already calledequality a responsibility towards theincommensurable; a responsibility

heterogeneous to calculation, subs-titution, and measure.

A responsibility, in other words,that mobilizes force and what isannihilation (ucched) if not a call toforce in the name of absolute singu-larity, in the name of the unequalsirreproducible and each time uniquebirth and death.1 It is on this affirma-tion of life amidst lifes impermanencethat the mature Ambedkars ahimsaicadoration would come to hinge. In thispaper, I offer an archeology of this ado-ration, of Ambedkars radical attemptto formulate the conditions of a loveproper and adequate to politics. I willnot trace the infinite variations in whichthis excessive love appears in his itin-erary, in neologisms such as love oftruth, love of politics, and so on. I willonly attempt, in a necessarily delimitedfashion, to follow the rhythms andvicissitudes of this adoration, thisegalitarian excess, that the matureAmbedkar eventually calls maitri.

How does the late recovery of ado-ration (maitri) turn the thread ofAmbedkars enduring thinking aboutforce? Does the move away fromsovereignty lead to an attenuation offorce? Or is maitri itself the matura-tion of that militant critique of forcewhich had begun to take shape asearly as Ambedkars Columbia Uni-versity seminars in the 1910s? Is mai-tri, by turns and simultaneously, forceand adoration, founded in love yetnecessarily in excess of it? An excessthat Ambedkar captures in his equivo-cal tribute to Ranade when he declares,I regard my feelings of hatred as areal force. They are only the reflex ofthe love I bear? What kind of love isthis? And what would this force, thisreal force, be?

1. See Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, inBabasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches.Government of Maharashtra, EducationDepartment, henceforth BAWS, Vol. 1, p. 60.

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In a remarkable passage in Phi-losophy of Hinduism that deals withthe relationship between force andconduct, the later Ambedkar leavessome traces that we may follow. Hecompares the instinctive urge to sat-isfy hunger with the impulse to forgea weapon against the enemy. Bothbelong, he argues, to the order ofbiological and psychological force inwhich the body simply makes move-ments that it deems necessary to sur-vive. These movements, which mightentail violence in that they veer towardskilling the enemy or predator, are notimmoral. They are simply unmoral.That is, they cannot be judged by theestablished norms of morality at all, forthese acts are so instinctive, so incal-culable, that they cannot be placed ina world of normative values. They can-not be compared with others, valued,or chosen.

And yet, even if governed byforces not as moral in purpose,Ambedkar says, they are as valuablein result. Forging a weapon againstthe enemy is, thus, an ordinary andoriginary, indeed a pre-ethical, act. Itis unmoral and invaluable because itcomes before any measure of moralvalue, before any judgment of facultyor force has been established. Psy-chologically everyone possesses it;everyone must possess it.

In as much as it is not tainted by thespirit of retaliation, forging a wea-pon that most ancient and originarymovement of the hand belongs tothe order of quotidian and egalitarianforce. It is not chosen, it is givenequally.2 Never does Ambedkar andwe see this emerge in the most mili-tant fashion in Thoughts on Pakistan attenuate the significance of passionand mastery, of competition and hon-our for democracy proper. Instead, he

renounces hostility precisely to reclaimthe equalizing possibilities opened bywar in its purest and most ethicalsense.

Maitri is another name, then, forlove that is founded in difference, in anethical and transformative violenceeven. It is a passion for that which isequal, if only because with it oneshares ones own finitude and anxiety,and in the final instance, ones nothing-ness. Each time singular, maitri is inal-ienable yet shared, given to masteryand equality alike. Inasmuch it doesnot renounce difference, it does notgive up on honour and competitioneither. That controversial question inThoughts, The Hindus have a diffi-cult choice to make: to have a safearmy or a safe border? marks thefounding paradox of that force whichwill conceptually mature and eventu-ally take form as maitri.

Every now and then, Ambedkarsconceptualization of force falls into thelanguage of immunity and measure, ofspiritual purism and national sover-eignty even. Yet by giving it the nameof religious responsibility, he alsoimparts his vision of force an ethicaland immeasurable depth. Incandes-cently announced in the title of Anni-hilation of Caste, calling for anunconditional destruction of irreligion,this force measures itself against noth-ing but truth. Religion, after all, isconcerned with the love of truth.3 Theannihilator (uccehdvadi) holds itselfaccountable to no authority or limit. Inhim, freedom and mastery subsumemeasure; responsibility comes to bemarked by the religiosity of force alone.

As Ambedkar memorably putsit, The moment it degenerates intorules it ceases to be Religion, as it killsresponsibility, which is the essence ofa truly religious act I have, there-

fore, no hesitation in saying that sucha religion must be destroyed and I say,there is nothing irreligious in workingfor the destruction of such a religion.4In sum, annihilating religion in thename of religious responsibility, seek-ing through immeasurable force whatcan only be called, thus, a religionwithout religion. It is the same logic ofimmeasurability that Ambedkar mobi-lizes again when a decade later hemilitantly proclaims, The slogan of ademocratic society must be machineryand more machinery, civilization andmore civilization.5

More machinery than whom? Mea-sured against which other civiliza-tion? Where is this other democracy?Ambedkar does not say he has per-haps America in mind except that thisimmeasurability is grounded in abso-lute equality alone. A very singularthought is at work here, one that oftengets carried away in the most anti-democratic directions. For in Ambed-kar, there are moments when certainforms of masteries, certain variationsof the master-serf relationship even,tend to acquire a peculiar sheen ofjust benevolence, if not equality. Butthen, that is the very nature of demo-cratic action, the very nature of criti-que of force, as Ambedkar himselfconcedes.

One can never safely separateits evil from its egalitarian promises.Indeed, only when one is radically pos-sessed by the idea of immeasurability,only when one is unconditionally givenover to the emancipatory possibilitiesof generalized force, that one canwrite of equality in the manner thatAmbedkar writes of it. A society

2. See Ambedkar, Philosophy of Hinduism.BAWS, Vol. 3, p. 82.

3. Ambedkar, Philosophy of Hinduism. BAWS,Vol. 3, p. 86.

4. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste. BheemPatrika Publications, Jullunder, 1936,pp. 87-885. Ambedkar, What Congress and GandhiHave Done to Untouchables. Classic, Lahore,1977; originally published 1945, p. 295.(Emphasis added)

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which does not believe in democracymay be indifferent to machinery, heclaims, but a democratic society can-not. The former may well contentitself with a life of leisure and culturefor the few and a life of toil and drudg-ery for the many. But not democraticsociety, he repeats. Authentic equal-ity will come, he declares in a dizzy-ing formulation, only when machinetakes the place of man.6

This materialist, almost utopian,dream of the automaton appears in thesame threshold decade between 1930and 1940 that annihilation (ucched),with its explicit call for mastery andmobilization, for religiosity and action,has also entered Ambedkars lexicon.Nothing that Ambedkar writes inthis decade remains untouched by thecategories, figures, tropes, rhetoric,and facts of World War. In works thatappear towards the end of the war,Ambedkar returns to an intermittentbut unconditionally hostile critique offascism. If his responsibility towardsNietzsche and nihilism had alwaysbeen marked by equivocation, hisrepulsion to Nazisms claim to spiritualmastery remained unambiguous. It issuggestive that Ambedkars mostexplicit attempt to rescue Nietzsche,the latters ethical nihilism even bywhich he simply means Nietzschescapacity to understand the immeasur-able virtuosity of force comes inPhilosophy of Hinduism. And thisequivocal defence is mounted pre-cisely as a critique of those who, intheir petty understanding of mastery,have extrapolated and vulgarizedNietzsches thinking of force. Of course,Ambedkar clarifies:

It is not difficult to see that hisphilosophy can be as easily applied toevolve a super state as to superman.This is what the Nazis have done. At

any rate the Nazis trace their ances-try from Nietzsche and regard himas their spiritual parent. Hitler hashimself photographed beside a bust ofNietzsche; he takes the manuscriptsof the master under his own specialguardianship; extracts are chosen fromNietzsches writings and loudly pro-claimed at the ceremonies of Nazism,as the New German Faith. Nor is theclaim by the Nazis of spiritual ances-try with Nietzsche denied by his nearrelations. Nietzsches own cousinRichard Ochler approvingly says thatNietzsches thought is Hitler in actionand that Nietzsche was the foremostpioneer of the Nazi accession topower. Nietzsches own sister, fewmonths before her death, thanks theFuehrer for the honour he graciouslybestows on her brother, declaring thatshe sees in him that incarnation of theSuperman foretold by Zarathustra.7

Yet, precisely because of this vulgarfiliation between philosophy and streetpolitics, Ambedkar sees in fascismswill to mastery not a love of Nietzsche,nor a fidelity to force, but a betrayal ofadoration. How can people who shame-lessly consecrate an all too humanthinker be authentically Nietzschean?Hitler is a perversion Gandhi willterrifyingly say exemplary of whatAmbedkar usually associates withdirect action. This perversion con-taminates the equality that might havebeen accomplished in an authenticallyfought war.8

Fascist action, given over toidolatry, bust-worship, and ceremo-nial politics of the street hence,Ambedkars comparison of the gang-

sterism of the Muslim League andHindu Mahasabha with the NSDAP destroys the purity of war.9 AdoringNietzsche, fascism attempts to anni-hilate tradition, seeks to break awayfrom religion, tries to gather unparal-leled technological energy in theinterest of national reparation, andfails. Nazism, then, is repulsive notbecause it is nihilistic. Instead, it is acolossal failure because it is not prop-erly, ethically, forcefully, annihilative(ucchedvadi).

Ambedkar himself is scrupulous inhis reading of The Anti-Christ andThus Spoke Zarathustra; rigorous indistinguishing Nietzsches own faithfrom the unfaithful interpretation ofhis lovers; careful to mark out oneNietzsche text from another. Accus-tomed by now to being misunderstoodby followers and antagonists alike, heis drawn to that Nietzsche who fore-saw for himself a remote public, cen-turies after his own time to appreciatehim.10 This poignant line, a directreference to the confessional sentencethat appears in the foreword of TheAnti-Christ, also illuminates themature Ambedkars own reconcilia-tion with nationalist grudge over hisown mastery of philosophical sources,or as Nietzsche might put it, hishonest[y] in intellectual matters tothe point of harshness.11

Nietzsches philosophy hadbecome identified, Ambedkar says,with will to power, will to violenceand denial of spiritual values, sacrifice,

6. Ambedkar, What Congress and GandhiHave Done to Untouchables. p. 295.

7. Ambedkar, Philosophy of Hinduism. BAWS,Vol. 3, pp. 74-75.8. Direct action is one of Ambedkars mostinsurgent and prolific expressions. See for oneexample, Ambedkar, Essays on Untouchablesand Untouchability: Political. BAWS, Vol. 5,p. 375.

9. Ambedkar, Pakistan, Or the Partitionof India. Thacker & Co., Bombay, 1945,p. 260.10. Ambedkar, India and the Prerequisitesof Communism. BAWS, Vol. 3, p. 117.11. These [with courage for the forbidden]alone are my readers, my rightful readers, mypredestined readers: what do the rest matter? The rest are merely mankind. Nietzsche,The Anti-Christ. Harmondsworth, London,1968, p. 114.

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servility to and debasement of thecommon man in the interest of thesuperman.12 It is not Nietzsche him-self, not his demand for sacrifice, nothis courage for the forbidden, nothis dream of the Superman thatdebases force. It is the appropriationof sacrifice by the unfaithful few, para-doxically, that vulgarizes it.

Despite his absolute rejection ofequality as sameness, AmbedkarsNietzsche believes any philosopherworthy of the name must uncompro-misingly believe that at the heart ofevery revolution there lies the authen-tic demand for incommensurableequality; that is, equality that refusesto subsume difference. AmbedkarsNietzsche, perhaps most importantly,is a thinker of the future, one who tookcomfort by placing himself amongthe posthumous men, and in whoseideas virtue and force were eman-cipated from their petty crueltiesand hierarchical perversions.13 Evenas he finds deplorable resonancesof the Manusmriti in Thus SpokeZarathustra, Ambedkar refuses todeny the genius of Nietzsches selflessambition: conceiving a mastery thatwould be grounded in disinterest(upeksha).

What Ambedkar always feelscompelled by, then, is the immeasur-able virtuosity of war between equals.The promise of equality that comes byway of mastery, even militarized sov-ereignty, never fails to attract him. Thismastery is not of one over another;instead, this is a relational mastery, awar sans hostility that forges kinshipbetween equals. Everyone mustequally and dutifully prepare for suchan equalitarian war. Nonviolence,

after all, might be construed as truth-ful, meaningful in its ethical, that is, non-hegemonic and non-normative sense,only when everyone is a soldier, wheneveryone has the equal right to sacri-fice, when each has equally masteredthe virtue of selfless war and nonvio-lence alike. Virtue itself, above all,might sometimes necessitate war.We wage war, 0 disciples, thereforewe are called warriors, AmbedkarsBuddha tells his followers. Where-fore, Lord, do we wage war? they askhim. For lofty virtues, for high endeav-our, for sublime wisdom for thesethings do we wage war: therefore weare called warriors. Where virtue is indanger do not avoid fighting, do not bemealy-mouthed. An incommensura-ble equality then, equality not ofmeasure but of immeasurable mas-tery: this is where Ambedkar is mostNietzschean, never shying away fromvirtuous war, never renouncing theethical value of difference and some-times competition amongst equals.

If love, freedom, mastery, honoureven, are necessarily conjoined, whatis, for Ambedkar, mastery proper,mastery that is virtuous and egalitar-ian? Who is worthy of being such amaster? It is that who respects suffer-ing and finitude; who relinquishescivility (vinaya) not even in war; whorenounces transcendence for a scru-pulous ontology grounded in theunequals quotidian and unspecta-cular mortality alone. Thus, fascismsspectacle of spiritual ancestry con-taminates what might have been itsauthentic levelling force.14

Let us briefly pause here, on thisterm levelling force, which is a sin-gular way of describing equality, ofthinking equality as an extenuation offorce. In a vertiginous formulation,Ambedkar describes unfettered sla-

very, that is, the equal right of every-one to own slaves, as an equalitarianprinciple. As long as everyone is amaster, as long as one class (Shudra)alone is not enslaved and devoid ofmastery, slavery retains its levellingforce. Barely three passages earlier,Ambedkar had already declared, Inshort, justice is simply another namefor liberty, equality, and fraternity.15

Now the problem of whether gene-ral slavery, while it is certainly egali-tarian in as much as everyone can bea master, is also just, Ambedkar doesnot resolve. However, it is clear thatfor him equality within the system ofgeneralized slavery ensues from thefact of equality in virtue. Everyone,without discrimination although notwithout competition, is seen as equallydeserving of having property. Whichmeans, rather than being grounded incharity or compassion of one dominantgroup towards another, general sla-very universalizes no, radically frees responsibility and even maitri. Eachtouches another freely; each is obligedto another; each defends his neighbourequally; everyone and not the bene-volent abolitionist alone are equallyresponsible for freedom. Everyone,above all, is righteously and legitima-tely armed. Only in this mastery canauthentic nonviolence and love ofequals take root.

Assuming there is a grievance,assuming there is consciousness ofgrievance, there cannot be a rebellionby the lower orders against the Hindusocial order because the Hindu socialorder denies the masses the right to usearms. Other social orders such as thoseof the Muslims or the Nazis follow theopposite course. They allow equalopportunity to all. They allow freedomto acquire knowledge. They allow theright to bear arms and take upon them-

12. Ambedkar, India and the Prerequisites ofCommunism. BAWS, Vol. 3, p. 117. (Empha-sis added)13. Ambedkar, India and the Prerequisitesof Communism. BAWS, Vol. 3, p. 117.

14. Ambedkar Philosophy of Hinduism.BAWS, Vol. 3, p. 26.

15. Ambedkar Philosophy of Hinduism.BAWS, Vol. 3, p. 25.

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selves the odium of suppressing rebel-lion by force and violence. To denyfreedom of opportunity, to deny free-dom to acquire knowledge, to deny theright of arms is a most cruel wrong. Itmutilates and emasculates man TheNazis had indeed a great deal to learnfrom the Hindus. If they had adoptedthe technique of suppressing themasses devised by the Hindus, theywould have been able to crush the Jewswithout open cruelty and would havealso exhibited themselves as humanemasters.16

This is a giddy passage. After all, thereis something peculiar somethinggiven over to violent measure in acritique of cruelty that neverthelessredraws the world according to ahierarchy of sufferers whose fates,Ambedkar knows fully well, are equalonly in their incommensurable suf-fering. Why this resort to a hierarchyof incommensurable sufferers andunequals? Does such a hierarchy notreduce equality precisely to that whichAmbedkar abhors, which is measure?Why does the untouchable have to bethe most sovereign unequal, mostunequal amongst the worlds unequals?What is at work in this contaminationof Ambedkars immeasurability, hispure ethics, by mastery and measure?

There is, beyond doubt, a strainof radical conservatism in Ambedkarsitinerary; one which is often compelledby a vision in which nothing seemsmore degrading than being banishedfrom the world of senses, barred fromlight and touch, consigned to sha-dows and corners. In a fragment of hisautobiography composed a few yearsbefore Auschwitz, Ambedkar speaksevocatively of his life in a dungeon,away from humanity and light, in thecompany of animals alone. And this

was no incarceration or confinementof the Nazi type. This was life, ordi-nary, routine, solitary, often homeless,and marked by sleeplessness anddeath, right in the heart of modernIndia.

We will have to let go for now thissingular moment in Ambedkarsitinerary of the self indeed that whichbecomes the very ground of his radi-cal selflessness (anatta) for anotheroccasion. Here, let us only mark thatit is this experience and the plea forits singularity that aggressively shapesAmbedkars comprehension of suf-fering of those distant from him in timeand place. And yet, while the demandfor incommensurability sometimesforces him into seeing elements offreedom even in Roman bondage inways he finds unavailable to the Hinduuntouchable, while it forces him intoremorselessly describing even slaveryas a vague gift for the slave, it is alsohis intimate knowledge of servitudeand confinement that enables him torecover from the Jewish migrationfrom Egypt an exemplary religiousforce.

A militant extenuation of force,a general mobilization of virtue onindustrial scale, then, will have alwaysmediated Ambedkars religiosity.A revolutionary and ethical violencewill have, in his eyes, never compro-mised his nonviolence (ahimsa). InAmbedkar, religion and machine,maitri and force, faith and knowledge,often cohabit, inseparable yet hetero-geneous to one another. For whatAmbedkar calls the love of truth is alsoa certain adoration of force, an affir-mation of life in the right to mobilize.Perhaps that is why in The Buddhaand His Dhamma, it is the aporetic andsacrificial figure of the soldier thatreturns most often as the exemplar ofmaitri, as the true affirmer of specieslife as such.

16. Ambedkar, India and the Prerequisitesof Communism. BAWS, Vol. 3, pp. 126-27.(Emphasis added)