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Economic & Political Weekly EPW APRIL 19, 2014 vol xlIX no 16 23

On Introducing Ambedkar

Sankaran Krishna

For an act of representation by savarnas to seem fair and unremarkable to dalits, we need to have achieved a society in which to be a dalit is not a stigma, and to be a savarna is not a marker of superior status. Until that day arrives in India, the dalit objection to B R Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste being introduced and annotated by savarnas will remain a worthy objection.

Arundhati Roy’s “Introduction” toNavayana’s reissue of B R Ambed- kar’s Annihilation of Caste has

evoked a spectrum of reactions, includ-ing some from dalit intellectuals and activists. The annotations to Annihila-tion, by S Anand, head of Navayana and, like Roy, an upper-caste person, has come in for fl ak as well.

Essentially, the critique by a section of the dalits may be summarised as: (a) two savarnas, one of them a world celebrity for her work as a public intellectual and novelist, fronting a classic on caste society written by the foremost leader of the dalits is yet another instance of upper-caste appropriation of dalit labour and voice; (b) given the reality of the caste society we live in, and the extra-ordinary infl uence of upper castes in representing India to itself and abroad, Ambedkar’s voice will be swam ped by this “introduction” and “annotation” which will probably be read by far more people than will read Ambedkar’s own prose; (c) it is only dalits who understand the painful experience of untouchability and oppression of caste society – hence it would have been more appropriate for Navayana to have chosen those with such experience to do the introduction and annotation; (d) there are a number of dalit intellectuals or others who have paid their dues over the decades with their politics of solidarity with the credentials to write the introduction and the anno-tation – the choice of Roy and Anand is a slap in the face to all of them; (e) Roy’s essay focuses too much on Gandhi and his multiple foibles – and thus ends up drawing the eye away from Ambedkar and his robust critique of caste Hindu so-ciety; and (f) both the marketing strategy (choice excerpts in mainstream outlets such as Outlook, Caravan and The Hindu) and pricing (Rs 450-500) suggest that the target audience for Annihilation is savarna society and motivation is profi t.

The responses to such critiques – inclu ding those by Roy and Anand –

have ranged widely as well. A summary of such responses would include: (a) the target audience of Annihilation was and still remains upper-Hindu society – which remains resolutely casteist in its practice if not in rhetoric – and hence fronting the volume by such savarnas makes sense; (b) arguing that only dalits can articulate the thought and politics of Ambe dkar is a form of essentialising and/or ghettoising him that is neither politically nor epis-temologically defensible; (c) both in his lifetime and there after, Ambedkar’s in-tellect and politics have been overshad-owed by a most undeser ving Mahatma: bringing Ambedkar to his rightful stature will necessarily have to be accompanied by submitting Gandhi to a welcome and long-awaited critical scrutiny, one further enabled by recent historical scholarship on the man; and (d) freedom of speech and ideas is a constitutional guarantee – and no one ought to legislate who can speak for whom in a democracy.

Ambedkar’s Democracy

Before rushing to decide whose side I am on, and quickly drop anchor in a parti-cular normative position that rapidly hardens, I would like to think things through more slowly (and aloud). Ambedkar’s take on democracy is intri-guing and different. His writings on the importance of separate and reserved electorates for dalits; on the inadequa-cies of a Constitution that guaranteed legal but not substantive equality; on the refusal of caste Hindus to permit the reform of their religion; and a host of related issues have received attention. Yet, outside of electoral arrangements and the nitty-gritty of legal constitutional engineering, I am fascinated by his idea of democracy as something that is fun-damentally associational – a demo cracy was a society in which everyone inter-acted with everyone, dined with them, married them, spoke with and to others as equals, studied, debated and learned together, and were not divided by notions of hierarchy. It was a full and en-riching interaction amongst all people in a certain space that defi ned it as a democracy. Befi tting one of his intellec-tual mentors while at Columbia, the

I would like to thank Srirupa Roy for comments on an earlier draft – the usual disclaimers apply.

Sankaran Krishna (krishna@hawaii.edu) teaches politics at the University of Hawaii.

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pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, for Ambedkar the essence of democracy was the easy commingling of equals in all forms of associational life – personal, intellectual and political.

India was and remains a horrendous departure from that ideal. Perhaps it is time for us to admit that we are one of the most egregious departures from that associational ideal anywhere in the world. It underlies Ambedkar’s response to Gandhi when the latter asked him why he was so critical of Congress: “Gandhiji, I have no nation. No untouchable worth the name will be proud of this land.” It also informs Ambedkar’s des pairing des-cription of caste Hindu society as a multi-storied building bereft of staircases or elevators – you were destined to live per-manently and inter- gene ra tio nally into whatever echelon you were born. The simple and unescapable fact of the mat-ter is that nearly seven decades after Independence both of Ambedkar’s views regarding India remain very substan-tially true: hardly any dalit has any rea-son to feel proud to be an Indian, and the building remains free of staircases or elevators. That associational demo-cracy he imagined is no closer today than it was back in his lifetime.

I fi nd the free speech argument least persuasive. In India’s structured inequa-lity, to assert the rights of the likes of Roy and Anand to introduce and inter-pret Ambedkar on the basis of this con-stitutional right may be legally defensi-ble but it morally does little more than underline dalit powerlessness. I am very ambivalent about the argument that only dalits can and should represent Ambe dkar. That form of nativism, while understandable especially when it emerges from those in a position of weakness, closes dialogue and under-standing rather than opening it up. Nor am I inclined to agree that too much of Roy’s “Introduction” deals with Gandhi. Gandhi has become a universal signifi er of a vacuous and apolitical brotherhood. And yet his actions (as distinct from the contradictory volubility of his 99 vol-umes of collected writings) reveal a man with serious issues when it came to race, caste, gender, inequality and a host of other matters. In part, the undeserving

halo that surrounds Gandhi has thrown the robust intellect and appealing demo-cratic egalitarianism of the likes of Ambedkar into the shade. The latter in any case saw Gandhi as emblematic of the hypocrisy and hegemony of caste Hindu society. Deconstructing Gandhi on the way to introducing Annihilation, does not seem wrong to me.

Issue of Representation

Inevitably then, we turn to the issue of representation and representativeness.Edward Said’s Orientalism begins with two interesting and appropriate epigra-phs for this moment in our republic. The fi rst is from Marx on the French peas-antry in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “They cannot repre-sent themselves – they must be repre-sented.” Despite the enduring and struc-tured inequalities of economic, cultural and symbolic capital in India, this is no longer true for dalits today. There has long exi sted a thriving and active dalit intellectual community from whom an introducer and annotator could well have been found.

But that brings us to the second of Said’s epigraphs (from Disraeli’s play Tancred): “The East is a career.” Hard as it may be for some to acknowledge, an edition of Annihilation, with an introduction by Kancha Ilaiah and an-notated by Gail Omvedt is not likely to expand the readership of that seminal work in any signifi cant way, nor is it likely to make it commercially viable as a book that sells copiously. At the same time, I think it highly signifi cant that a publisher like Navayana senses an opportunity to publicise Ambedkar’s writing nationally and internationally at this moment while also seeing it – with the “right” introducer no doubt – as a profi t-making enterprise. Would that have been possible even a few years ago? I doubt it.

I suspect it is the publication of works like Perry Anderson’s Indian Ideology, (Verso 2013) and Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, (2012), alongside a growing disenchantment with cele-brations of India’s emerging economy status and its democracy by the usual

suspects that have combined to subtly alter the zeitgeist and create the space for something like this edition of a long extant book to emerge. There is little point in aesthetic distaste for the whiff of commerciali sation of Ambedkar’s words. In a world saturated by market capitalism, to not be commercially viable is the same as being doomed to obscurity. Or, to paraphrase the Marxist economist Joan Robinson, the only thing worse than being exploited by capitalist marketing is to be ignored by it.

Inherent in every democracy is the tension between “representation” and “representativeness”. When various sec-tions of society are seen as acceptably equal, when a certain modicum of egali-tarianism has been achieved, the issue of representation ceases to be of much friction. Anyone from the putatively equal citizenry can represent others in politics, culture, literature and the like – they are all seen as seamlessly and inter-changeably “national” in some way. Har-dly any society has achieved such egali-tarianism, though it remains a powerful chimera animating the struggle for equality and democracy in many places.

Representation vs Representativeness

In postcolonial societies such as India, given deep and sustained caste inequali-ties amid persistent poverty, “represen-tation” has repeatedly – and understand-ably – reduced itself to “representative-ness”. If x-caste or y-religion or z-com-munity constitutes a certain percentage of the population, one notion of fairness demands that they be able to access pre-cisely those percentages of every form of capital – economic and symbolic. Any departure from that correspondence is deemed to be unfair or a result of histor-ical legacies for better or worse or evi-dence of sustained discrimination. While one may argue that the equation of “representation” to “representative-ness” sometimes reduces and impover-ishes it, there is no denying the veridical basis for it.

When some dalits claim that Roy and Anand cannot introduce or annotate Ambedkar, and only dalits can, before

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rushing to decry that as emblematic of precisely this sort of reduction of representation to representativeness, we should pause to think. For their act of representation to seem fair and unre-markable to dalits, we need to have achieved a society in which to be a dalit

is not a stigma, and to be a savarna is not a marker of superior status. Until that day arrives in India, the dalit objec-tion to Annihilation, being introduced and annotated by savarnas will remain a relevant and worthy objection. In oth-er words, their objection is not a sign of

their essentialism or nativism – it is rather an index of the failure of the savarna-led national project. More precisely, it signals our failure to appro-ximate Ambe dkar’s vision of democracy as the mutually enhancing association of all.