Understanding Caste: From Buddha to Ambedkar and Beyond by Gail Omvedt

Author:Gail Omvedt [Omvedt, Gail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Indian History
ISBN: 9788125045731
Google: 3oQnNAEACAAJ
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
Published: 2011-06-14T22:00:00+00:00

It has to be noted here that in us­ing the term ‘shu­dra’ Ambed­kar was clearly not re­fer­ring to the un­touch­ables, whom he saw as ‘bro­ken men’ set­tled out­side the vil­lages; he was re­fer­ring to the non-brah­man masses whom he saw, along with un­touch­ables and trib­als, as vic­tims of the caste sys­tem. By the 1940s, how­ever, his hope that there would be a uni­fied strug­gle was at a low ebb, and he was in his po­lit­i­cal writ­ings treat­ing “Hin­dus” as a “ma­jor­ity” that in­cluded non-brah­mans and was posed against such mi­nori­ties as Mus­lims and dal­its.

Nev­er­the­less, Ambed­kar’s longer-term strat­egy was to break up that ma­jor­ity, to dis­solve Hin­duism it­self, and do so by build­ing a unity of dal­its and mid­dle castes (non-brah­mans) which would be both a caste and a class unity of peas­ants and work­ers, against the brah­man-bour­geois Con­gress. The last years of his life saw a re­turn to this kind of united front, ex­pressed in the change of his Sched­uled Caste Fed­er­a­tion into the (hope­fully non-caste) Re­pub­li­can Party. It par­tic­i­pated in the Samyukta Ma­ha­rash­tra Samiti, or­gan­ised to fight for a Marathi-speak­ing state and which was ac­tu­ally the first full left-demo­cratic front of op­po­si­tion par­ties. Ambed­kar, in fact, had ar­gued that the united front should con­tinue even af­ter the win­ning of a Marathi-speak­ing state, and fight for the in­ter­ests of the ru­ral poor; and a mas­sive land satya­graha led by his lieu­tenant Dadasa­heb Gaik­wad and com­mu­nist peas­ant lead­ers fol­lowed in both 1956 and 1965.

Yet, the end of Ambed­kar’s life is re­mem­bered by the in­nu­mer­able num­ber of dalit fol­low­ers nei­ther for the class unity of peas­ants and work­ers, nor for the re­newed ef­fort at form­ing the Re­pub­li­can Party as a broad-based or­gan­i­sa­tion, but for his con­ver­sion to Bud­dhism along with nearly a mil­lion dal­its in Nag­pur. For Ambed­kar, and for the mil­i­tant dal­its who fol­lowed him, Hin­duism, in the fi­nal anal­y­sis, re­mained a re­li­gion of caste that had to be re­nounced and de­stroyed if the masses of In­dia were to win lib­er­a­tion. He had writ­ten in 1936, in con­fronta­tion with Gandhi and Pun­jab anti-caste rad­i­cals, that it was nec­es­sary to deal with re­li­gion. In­dian so­cial­ists, he noted:

will be com­pelled to take ac­count of caste af­ter the rev­o­lu­tion if (they) do not take ac­count of it be­fore rev­o­lu­tion. This is only an­other way of say­ing that, turn in any di­rec­tion you like, caste is the mon­ster that crosses your path You can­not have po­lit­i­cal re­form, you can­not have eco­nomic re­form, un­less you kill this mon­ster. (Ambed­kar 1979, 47)

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