Annihilation of the casteist mindset

This is not a review as such but a reflection on a few aspects of the speech Annihilation of Caste by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, written to be presented in 1936 at an anti-caste association in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan.

There is nothing like caste as an unchanging category. Slavery was once upon a time a reality. What made it real was that there was something called the slave mentality and likewise a master mentality. Slavery disappeared once the mentality changed. The same is true of colonialism and patriarchy. What exists, therefore, is the casteist mentality or mindset because it involves a set of mental attitudes towards reality. The mindset of the believer in caste as a category is what makes caste real. It is a mindset that is faithfully distributed across the spectrum and Dalits and other oppressed groups are as guilty of internalizing the casteist mindset as are their so-called “upper” caste oppressors.

As much as Ambedkar genuinely hated the culture of cronyism or hero-worship, the kind that comes from a servile sense of gratitude, that permeated the Congress Party in his view, I am sure he would have been sickened by the hagiography surrounding his name which is being done by his Dalit supporters and the pseudo-admirers usually from the upper castes who pretend to understand his struggle. The constant and unbearable tendency among a certain section of Dalit intellectuals to accuse everybody who disagrees with them as being casteist or anti-Ambedkarite, or to use Ambedkar as the measuring scale against which the statement of every other caste person is looked at, this surely does not help the cause of Dalit liberation but rather exacerbates caste-based divisions. Most of the people who invoke his name and make comments, whether Dalits or others, I am certain haven’t read a single work written by Ambedkar cover to cover. The document Annihilation of Caste falls in the list of works everyone wants to talk about and praise or criticize without a careful reading.

Where the argument fundamentally fails is that it puts social and political issues above ethical issues. In fact the ethical component is nowhere in sight and is reduced to making categorical statements. The worst thing about caste system is that it creates a hierarchy of those who are superior and those who are inferior owing to their birth. In his biting critique of the upper castes, Ambedkar actually buys into the sinister logic of caste rather than engage with or reject it. He merely is reversing the equation in categorizing the upper castes as morally evil because they belong to caste as a system of reality. The statement below I am quoting even from a polemical point of view carries the scent of sectarianism in how it homogenizes everyone born “upper” caste as being morally incapable of rising above their situation.

“As a matter of fact, a Hindu does treat all those who are not of his caste as though they were aliens, who could be discriminated against with impunity, and against whom any fraud or trick may be practised without shame. This is to say that there can be a better or a worse Hindu. But a good Hindu there cannot be. This is so not because there is anything wrong with his personal character. In fact what is wrong is the entire basis of his relationship to his fellows. The best of men cannot be moral if the basis of relationship between them and their fellows is fundamentally a wrong relationship. To a slave, his master may be better or worse. But there cannot be a good master. A good man cannot be a master, and a master cannot be a good man.”

Going by the above statement all the Christians who lived in Western Europe or America in the 18^th and 19^th centuries would be guilty of slavery and colonialism and there would not be a “good” Christian—only “better or worse.” On a more practical level, I really want to know who is the “Hindu” that Dr. Ambdekar is referring to? I go by the Gandhian distinction that religion and caste are two different things. A “lower” caste Hindu has a worldview that is not the same as that of the Brahmin Hindu just as a black Christian, a Latino Catholic and an English Anglican are all Christians in principle without subscribing to the same worldview which is connected to specific social circumstances. The “Hindu” is, broadly speaking, a member of a social order but that doesn’t mean Hinduism (if at all there is a worldview that binds everyone born into the social order) should be reduced to a caste system as if to say that different castes did not have their own gods or forms of worship.

Gandhi might be guilty of naïve idealism in his defense of the varnas and ashramas because he claims that there is no difference between spiritual teaching and scavenging and one is as good as another. In principle, perhaps many people might not make this distinction either. In practice, needless to say there would hardly be any upper caste person who would be willing to do scavenging with the same commitment as any other work least of all scavenging. The defense Gandhi offers is therefore weak and rather pointless and might be applicable to him but not to upper caste Hindus in general.

Seen as a theory challenging upper caste hegemony, Ambedkar’s “annihilation” argument is not without flaws. In Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance, James C. Scott argues against the concept of hegemony when he says that it, “ignores the extent to which most subordinate classes are able, on the basis of their daily material experience, to penetrate and demystify the prevailing ideology.” In addition, Scott adds, “theories of hegemony frequently confound what is inevitable with what is just, an error that subordinate classes rarely, if ever, make.” I don’t think the lower castes of India ever made the mistake of confusing the ideal with the real or did not make an attempt to use the ideal against the real whenever it suited them.

Arguing against the “inevitability” of any system of domination, Scott says, “if one accepts that the serf, the slave, and the untouchable will have trouble imagining social arrangements other than feudalism, slavery, or caste, they will certainly not find it difficult to imagine reversing the distribution of status and rewards within that social order. In a great many societies, such a simple feat of the imagination is not just an abstract exercise: It is historically embedded in existing ritual practice.” Ambedkar’s argument rests on the “inevitability” of caste system owing to its hegemonic character. It makes it look like there never were any attempts towards resistance from the bottom and that what is essentially wrong with caste is that it is an immutable entity.

More importantly, I am not sure if Ambedkar ever made a careful reading of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. He would have known that human nature is a little more complex than his personal experience with the caste system as an untouchable. People are not good or bad because they are born into a particular caste or community. The history of power is the history of an idea and no one is particularly averse to the temptations of power. Human nature cannot be reduced to notions of race, class or gender and by extension caste as well. Shakespeare makes Iago say: “I am not what I am” only for his audience to recognize the ambivalence that defines what the self is in relation to existence and identity. In realizing that birth is an accident we realize that identity beyond a point is a fiction albeit a dangerously real one.

For instance in his reply to Gandhi on the undelivered speech, Ambedkar says: “That the sanctity of Caste and Varna can be destroyed only by discarding the divine authority of the Shastras.” I seriously am interested in knowing how many Hindus have actually read or know about the Shastras. Hinduism is not a religion of the book like the religions of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. What we call Hinduism is a colonial bringing together of a set of traditions unless we are making a reference to the social order and social orders cannot be confused with ideologies. They are about power both at the interpersonal and the systemic level.

Annihilation of caste is a product of colonialism and in fact throws light on colonial constructions of religion and caste, especially in the politics of resistance. Ambedkar might not be particularly different in his perception of caste along Manichean lines of “inferior” and “superior.” When Gandhi says, “The Vedas, Upanishads, Smritis and Puranas, including the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are the Hindu Scriptures,” he is falling into the same colonial understanding of Hinduism as a monolithic religion which was never the case in reality. Gandhi’s politics, which includes his understanding of Hinduism, are anti-colonial while Ambedkar is addressing the issues of a colony within a colony that form the lower strata of the caste system.

In his book A History of India, Burton Stein makes the point that goes against the argument subscribing to the absolutist nature of caste as made in Annihilation of Caste:

“Neither caste nor religion nor place, the ancient determinants of affinity, has a meaning unchanged from that expressed in medieval dharmashastras. Perhaps such continuity was not to be expected, but the reduction of the ties binding people to particular places and to filaments of ideology, which are thus incapable of protecting ancient historical interests, is a striking characteristic of the contemporary age.” (Stein 229)

“Along with sects and communities, caste relations had always responded to changing historical circumstances. How else could the essences and traditions of some supposed antiquity have been maintained in the face of such changes as the enormous expansion of agrarian over pastoral economies, the Muslim domination of northern India or the imposition of European dominance?” (Stein 238)

Ambekdar is right in rejecting Gandhi’s defense of Hindu religion in the way “It lives in the experiences of its saints and seers, in their lives and sayings,” to make the argument that they were against caste system.

“With regard to the saints, one must admit that howsoever different and elevating their teachings may have been as compared to those of the merely learned, they have been lamentably ineffective. They have been ineffective for two reasons. Firstly, none of the saints ever attacked the Caste System. On the contrary—they were staunch believers in the System of Castes. Most of them lived and died as members of the castes to which they respectively belonged. So passionately attached was Jnyandeo to his status as a Brahmin that when the Brahmins of Paithan would not admit him to their fold, he moved heaven and earth to get his status as a Brahmin recognized by the Brahmin fraternity.”

Burton Stein echoes Ambedkar’s point when he says:

“Notwithstanding the bhakti ideology that supposedly made all devotees equal, some remained clearly more equal than others, even within the ‘pure’ precincts of the shrine, and the distinction between polluting and pure castes was scrupulously preserved.” (Stein 157)

Like all great people Ambedkar was a man of his times determined by its demands and subject to its prejudices. I don’t think he transcended them. His 1955 interview with the BBC on Gandhi is filled with rancor and contempt towards the Mahatma. For a person who is said to have embraced Buddhism, I think such virulence is truly unbecoming. In fact, whatever his political limitations might have been and there were plenty in this regard, Gandhi lived up to the principles of the Eightfold path and the Sermon on the Mount from the New Testament more than any man of his generation. In the same interview, I cannot understand to this day how Ambedkar could make a statement saying that the Labour Party was “stupid” in giving freedom to India too quickly and that “Swaraj” ought to have come slowly rather than the way it did. I mean, after two hundred years of British Rule of India!

What is great about Ambedkar is that like Malcolm X he is the manhood of the oppressed lower-castes. He gives them the ability to stand up not only to the evil of caste system but also to that of the centuries-old repression of human dignity and pride of the untouchables. He can see that unless they fight back the unforgivable upper caste male arrogance with every means possible against the indignities heaped on them, they don’t stand a survival chance in a casteist social order. Again like Malcolm X, it can get too narrow and black and white. The annihilation of caste will not happen because the oppressed communities will one day occupy the positions of their upper caste opponents. An egalitarian society is born through an egalitarian attitude to people and life.

In the History channel version of the Spartacus miniseries, played to perfection by Goran Višnjić, the slave leader rejects being honored by his followers because he see that that exactly is what would make a difference between the Romans and the slave revolutionaries—an absence of hierarchy. I don’t see that in Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. Neither is Ambedkar a utopian revolutionary such as Martin Luther King nor is he someone whose thinking underwent strange and unexpected transformations such as it was with the black intellectual W. E. B. Dubois. He definitely has an insight into the nature of caste system as its victim. But he cannot connect it either to colonialism or imperialism or class or patriarchy. What about Dalit women whose plight is both attached with Dalit men and who are simultaneously victimized at the level of class and gender? For Ambedkar caste and caste society seem to have a life of their own independent of other factors.

Theoretically speaking, caste can only go away when its role is eliminated in the functioning of the state. Caste-based reservations for instance could possibly be replaced with class and gender-based reservations. In the year 2014, I sincerely don’t believe that the caste conflict is as intensive as class conflict. All poor and downtrodden people are not Dalits and not all Dalits are poor and downtrodden. We need to include the poor and the downtrodden and make sure that they get a decent life irrespective of their background instead of wasting time talking and thinking of caste as if it were an absolute category. If the majority of the deprived happen to be Dalits, all the more reason why they should be given economic-based reservations.

Who is it that needs caste as a category to exist? The one who benefits from it either economically or emotionally or usually both. It is Dalits and other beneficiaries of state policy through affirmative action who see reservations as a form of entry into jobs in the public sector or who wish to gain political power—it is them and the disgruntled upper castes who see their social status eroding on a day to day basis that need the caste system to be kept alive. The corporate state needs an indoctrinated workforce that will not ask any questions. I cannot imagine a reason why an MNC would not like to incorporate a brilliant Dalit into its fold. At the end of the day, he or she is a paid employee in the service of capital and profit is the issue more than anything else.

Like colonialism, the parameters of globalization have significantly changed the dynamics of the social order in the attempts to create a homogenous workforce. This broadly impacts race, gender, caste, region, language and communal discourses. In my view, Annihilation of Caste is a reflection on its own times and not a futuristic document that throws light on what caste relations are today. It does not deal with caste as a psychological reality which changes along with other things. What needs to be annihilated is the mindset not caste which will wither away once the mindset has changed. The Pakistani political thinker Eqbal Ahmad with characteristic humaneness speaks of an incident in Confronting Empire which throws light on what this change is all about.

“Change occurs, and when it does it happens very fast. When I arrived for the first time as a student, the United States was living in the spell of racism. There were lynchings in the South. When I went to travel with a Japanese and a Brazilian friend to Memphis, for about four hours, from about 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., we couldn’t find a hotel that would admit us because we were colored. One was yellow, one was brown, and one was black. We finally found a space in the ghetto. Exactly two years later, we were integrating the lunch counters and hotels. Just ten years later, I would return to Memphis and stay at the Sheraton Hotel. I want to tell you when I got there, I got out of the taxi, and the bellboy who picked up my luggage was white. I was so happy to see that that I tipped him ten dollars, which I could ill afford, when he brought me to my room. After he left, I sat and cried. The change was marvelous. And it took some struggle to bring about that change. We still have a long way to go, but change has occurred.” (My italics)

Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is currently Associate Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.