This lecture was part of the History for Peace conference titled 'The Idea of Democracy' hosted at Delhi Public School, Ludhiana on November 12 and 13, 2022.

In a now famous speech delivered while presenting the draft Constitution to the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar said the following: 

“Constitutional morality is not a neutral thing. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.”

At this crucial moment, at the moment of the birth of the Indian Constitution, we find this critical thinker par excellence issuing a warning. He says to his fellow members and to the Indian public that here’s your Constitution, the foundation of your democracy, but at the end of the day, don’t make too much of it. Democracy on paper (the Constitution) is merely a starting point. To ensure a true democracy in India, the real work of instilling democracy in the everyday life of the republic was only just beginning.

            Now why would Ambedkar adopt such a sobering note at a moment when many in the country were celebrating new beginnings? Ambedkar—who wore many hats—was above all else a deep thinker of democracy. This period in history when Ambedkar was drafting the Constitution in the late 1940s was both a time of tremendous uncertainty and opportunity. In fact, when the Constituent Assembly first met in July 1946 India didn’t yet have a formal date for independence—that came much later in early 1947. The turmoil of the final days of the British Raj, the violent early days of the independent India with the partition of the subcontinent and the messy integration of the princely states was yet to happen.

In charting a new course for the new nation, India’s founding thinkers had a number of ideological options from which to draw. The USSR was a key political presence on the global landscape as a somewhat successful communist state albeit with many problems. There was the example of India’s soon-to-be ‘former’ colonial masters i.e. Great Britain and its democracy. Then there was American democracy. On the negative side, World War II had left devastation, loss and trauma in its wake but the protracted Cold War would mark all efforts at rebuilding Europe and the world order. Colonialism was itself not yet a thing of the past though it was being openly critiqued on the international stage. The challenge for the members of the Constituent Assembly was to balance Western modernity with a sense of Indian identity, the legacy of colonial underdevelopment with radical social change they knew was necessary and a commitment to democracy in an undemocratic society that continued to practice a range of social evils from caste to gender inequality.  

We may think of it as a foregone conclusion but the particular choice of democracy and the political form of an electoral democracy based on Universal Adult Franchise with the Constitution as its bedrock was a deliberate and considered choice. And in this choice, among others, Ambedkar’s role looms large. As a deep thinker of democracy however, he understood it as not just that formal structure of politics, elections and legally enforceable rights, but as a philosophy governing everyday life. So, as he handed the Constitution to the nation he reminded all of its citizens that a deep commitment to democracy, democratic conversations and values had to come from somewhere other than the Constitution. Or rather, the Constitution was a step in the right direction but not the end in and of itself.

There are three aspects of Ambedkar’s thinking on democracy that I am going to briefly examine here i.e. the messy relationship between history, identity and democracy; Ambedkar’s critique of caste and his thinking on democracy and finally, his last act of rebellion via his conversion to Buddhism just three months before he died.

Bhima Koregaon monument

In January of 1818 in Bhima Koregaon a small contingent of largely Mahar Dalit soldiers of the East India Company army held off the challenge of a much larger Maratha army under the Peshwas in extremely difficult circumstances. Eventually, the Company was able to send reinforcements and in June that year the Marathas were decisively defeated as a force that could take on the Company once and for all. This was a turning point in the colonial history of India as it extinguished the Maratha challenge to British domination of the subcontinent. For about a hundred years now, Dalits gather every January at Bhima Koregaon to celebrate the heroism, tenacity and commitment to duty of these Mahar soldiers. The question is why don’t we read about this battle in our textbooks? The answer is simple. We don’t read about it because the Dalits were fighting on the British side and not the Maratha side. Of course, most of the East India Company’s army—even after 1857 when it became the British Imperial Army—were constituted of Indian soldiers. This was Britain’s great, not-so-secret weapon i.e. the support of the Indian soldiers in so many of their colonial wars.

Therefore, Bhima Koregaon obviously does not figure in nationalist narratives because it goes against typical ideas of what it means to be in service of the nationalist cause. Dalit history tends to be told between the binary of atrocity or reservation and yet, here you have a moment of commemoration which tells a very different history of dalithood. It commemorates bravery, endurance, and victory of a community that tends to not find public commemoration for those qualities. But this historical moment and its commemoration remain fraught and contested. On the 200th anniversary of the Bhima Koregaon battle, a group of intellectuals and activists gathered to talk about this battle and its historical importance of it. They were later falsely accused of Maoist links and anti-national activity and jailed on extremely thin or non-existent evidentiary basis—many of them are still in jail.

Ambedkar himself visited the site of this monument in 1927. The military had played a key role in Ambedkar’s life as his father had been employed in the army and for all intents and purposes, he had grown up a fauji kid. He later fondly recalled his upbringing in the cantonments and the opportunities it afforded him. In the 1890s, he and his family were very upset that the Mahar contingent was disbanded. The discontinuation was partly because of the bogus martial racist theory of British recruitment to the army but also because the other savarna soldiers were not pleased at all to have Dalits fighting alongside them. So, one of the less known things Ambedkar does when he is Law Member of Linlithgow’s cabinet during WWII is that he has the Mahar contingent reinstated. That is how attached he was to the issue and it was a big win for Dalits in Bombay Presidency and Maharashtra.

This contestation over the meaning and commemoration of the battle of Bhima Koregaon is just one of the many public history wars that has captured headlines in the last decades. The proliferation of statues and commemorative sites, small and large, around the country are representative of the different contestations around what history and whose history we privilege in our textbooks and many other sites of public discourse. Let me dwell on one more instance of such another divisive moment that reveal a certain relationship between history and the nation. For nearly three decades now, controversy has raged around the gigantic parks commissioned by former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati. In Gautam Budh Nagar and Lucknow, these parks are hard to miss and were built in stone with a high degree of craftsmanship at considerable public expense.

The parks have statues of recent political figures like Mayawati herself, Bahujan Samaj Party founder, Kanshi Ram, and Ambedkar, as well as others. Then there are a range of other symbols, often Buddhist, familiar to those of us who live in and are from the Indian subcontinent, for instance—the elephant, the fountains, the stupas, the symbolism of water. There are some British influences, some modern influences but also Mauryan influences in these eclectic spaces. Now, typically a middle- and upper-class and caste dominated media have permanently marked these spaces with tropes of corruption, misuse of public funds, even environmental degradation etc. Yet, we know that historically building activity on this scale has taken place in all sorts of contexts in order to commemorate someone, some community or some moment in history. Why has this particular set of commemorative monuments been singled out for this kind of opprobrium? Beyond our personal, emotional response to this, something of great symbolic importance has happened here. It has to do with the occupation of public space on scale by Dalit history.

Dalit history is notoriously difficult to write. In fact, one scholar calls all of the histories written before the early twentieth century as speculative history.[*] As modern historians we like to verify things—we want to have paper trails, archives, protocols for interpreting those things and we want a historiography. Here, in the early twentieth century, the kinds of histories that were being written were not the kinds of histories that could typically be verified in that way. Yet, they are very important exercises in history-writing. This is because all history-writing to a certain degree is political. So the question we want to ask ourselves is whose history do we privilege in our standard historical narratives of the nation, region, community? Whose heritage do we commemorate? In the interests of justice in the classroom and outside it, these questions are critical. Mayawati’s Dalit monument-building and the celebrations of Dalit bravery at Bhima Koregaon can be read in light of the need for justice in history-writing and therefore in the classroom and outside it.

A People’s Archive on Parliament Street on Ambedkar Jayanti

Many years ago I was working on Parliament Street. On the morning of 14 April 2011, I was going to work and wondered why I couldn’t find any place to park my vehicle. I turned onto Parliament Street and realised it was because of Ambedkar Jayanti. There was tamasha, nautanki, food, people selling balloons, posters with slogans—it was like a fair! And there were bookstalls everywhere. You may recall that Ambedkar is often depicted with a book indicating the high degree of his educational attainment, the many books he wrote and his contribution to the writing of that sacred text of the nation—the Constitution. He understood the power of the book. He was party to the public burning of the Manusmriti in 1927 which he considered to be a foundational endorsement of the caste system by Hindus. These book stalls set up in various places where Ambedkar Jayanti is celebrated to this day brings together a popular and scholarly imagination of Ambedkar including cheaper prints of his speeches and handy editions of a whole host of other anti-caste thinkers we may not be familiar with. Elsewhere I have referred to this as an accidental archive but it is only ‘accidental’ for me as a researcher. On the contrary, it is a carefully curated archive of the intellectual and political universe of this important thinker of democracy.

When I was studying history twenty years ago all we read about Ambedkar was that he was the father of the Constitution. We were not exposed to or encouraged to read his anti-caste writing and his critiques of Hinduism. This neglect is also not accidental because Ambedkar too wasn’t a typical nationalist. He didn’t think that the primary problem and injustice of society in India was British colonialism, unlike many Congressmen and women, most prominently Gandhi. He thought that caste was the primary injustice that had to be dealt with above all else. Therefore he wasn’t as anticolonial as a typical nationalist narrative would have liked him to be and therefore does not make it to our history textbooks. And yet, there are a whole host of people in the critical colonial period who are, in fact, launching all kinds of critiques—early feminist, caste, regionalist, critiques by indigenous people. The remarkable thing about our contemporary moment is how much of their writing is now available online. It is by reading and engaging with these critiques that we can get a sense of the conversations around democracy that were already happening long before India became independent in 1947.

Let’s turn now to the anti-caste critique that we have hinted at but not outlined yet. As a historian, to understand the context of Ambedkar’s caste critique, it is important to understand the chronology and timeline of his life. He was born in 1891 and he died in 1956 which means he lived at the precise time that Indians were engaging with the political and during which Gandhi led millions in a number of mass movements against the injustice of British colonialism. But the other reason we need to have a sense of life chronologies is because people change. No one has the same idea from the moment they were born to the moment they die. Lives like Ambedkar’s are both embedded in their historical context while also shaping that very historical context.

Ambedkar was raised mostly by an aunt as his mother died while he was quite young. He was reportedly the first person from the Mahar community to complete his school education in Bombay Presidency. He then gets a scholarship from the Baroda Princely State to study at Columbia University in New York City. Upon his return to India, he experiences caste discrimination in trying to find a place to stay while working for the Baroda state. He goes back to London, where he qualifies as a barrister and finishes his second Ph.D. (in Economics) and returns to India in 1924. His family has made considerable sacrifices for him to be away for so long and pursue his education. We must remember that New York had also been a charged place while he was there with the Harlem Renaissance led by African Americans who are asserting their culture, their music, their political rights. W. E. B. Dubois, a key thinker here, wrote The Souls of Black Folk which was a revolutionary book. And now Ambedkar too returns to his family and to a very different and politically charged India.

India’s first mass movement has already begun and concluded under the leadership of Gandhi. Not only are the nationalists taking to the streets, performing dharna and picketing, but there are also armed acts of resistance by the revolutionaries. By the end of the ’20s Bhagat Singh and his colleagues became household names for their activism in jail drawing attention to the injustice of colonialism and the injustices in Indian society. There were many interesting and rousing political voices in this crucial decade of political awakening and activism. Ambedkar takes on the voice of a leader for Dalits, an anti-caste thinker, participates in the temple-entry movement and leads the Mahad Satyagraha.

Gandhi's Finest Journalism

Here again, Ambedkar is one of many voices. The first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed a fair bit of Dalit and lower caste activism. There was Swami Acchutanand in United Provinces, Narayana Guru in Kerala, Mangoo Ram in Punjab, Iyothee Thass in Madras, the Namashudras in Bengal. Ambedkar enters this fray and participates both in temple entry movements, with all their contradictions and also in the movement for Dalits to have access to water tanks in Mahad which famously came to be known as Mahad Satyagraha. It was during this movement that he publicly burns the Manusmriti which you know, by accident has become the big law giver for upper caste Hindu society. This is a particularly radical phase in his activism. The 1930s are more about his work in the law especially for trade unions and as a writer of radical critique. He developed an interesting and consequential relationship with Gandhi in whom he had originally had a lot of faith. By the early 1930s it is very clear to Ambedkar that Gandhi is not going to be helpful in the way he wished him to be. He later regrets the Poona Pact with Gandhi in which Dalits agree to give up separate electorates awarded to them by the British for reserved seats.

It is in this decade that he understands and rejects the approach of persuading Hindu caste folk to have a change of heart and give up caste. By 1935 he declared publicly that he had so little faith in Hinduism bound as it was in caste, that he had decided that he would not die a Hindu. In 1936, Ambedkar is invited to the annual conference of the Jat Pat Todak Mandal (Caste Demolition Society) of Lahore but the Mandal leaders got cold feet and asked to see his speech before they went ahead with the programme. Ambedkar sends his incendiary speech and they withdraw their invitation. He published this speech anyway and in it he makes several incisive observations and critiques of caste like:

‘…the caste system is not merely a division of labour, it is also a division of labourers. Civilized society undoubtedly means division of labour but in no civilized society is division of labour accompanied by the unnatural division of labourers into watertight compartments.’

For Ambedkar, the caste system was a graded hierarchy which was completely antithetical to a social and national spirit of togetherness. He adds that caste is maintained through tremendous violence and through the oppression of women. Moreover, caste could not be seen as separate from Hinduism. Caste is Hindu and every Hindu is casteist. It was bad for India and it was bad for people. If you read the text of the speech published as The Annihilation of Caste, as we all must, it is as resonant today as it was when he published it nearly a century ago. As one scholar says, there was democracy before the publication of this text and there was democracy after.[i] The significance of the text cannot be overemphasised.

Ambedkar was deeply committed to three basic principles of democracy i.e. liberty, equality and fraternity. The first two of these could be legislated and indeed the Constitution provides protections for these two but the last, that is fraternity was the hardest to achieve. Therefore, Ambedkar felt that this last of the holy trinity needed out-of-the-box solutions. His theoretical position was that caste is antisocial and anti-fraternity. But fraternity is a foundational principle of a functioning democracy. And so he says:

‘Caste has killed public spirit; it has destroyed the sense of public charity; caste has made public opinion impossible. A Hindu’s public is his caste, his loyalty is restricted only to his caste . . . . There cannot be a more degrading system of social organization than the caste system. It is a system that deadens, paralyses and cripples the people from helpful activity. This is no exaggeration—History bears ample evidence.’

Interestingly, the publication of the text also had a significant impact on Gandhi and it initiated a conversation that was at times testy and confrontational but which was nevertheless formative for both of them. We tend to forget that great ideas emerge in a context and through conversation such as these. Disagreeing while remaining gracious, generous and open minded, is an important art of democracy. Gandhi famously never agreed with Tagore wits whom the disagreements were perhaps deeper than between Gandhi and Ambedkar and yet they respectfully continued their conversation and mutual support.

            While Ambedkar argued that caste and Hinduism were the same, Gandhi stuck to his position that Hinduism was not the same as caste and that untouchability as a practice was completely detrimental to society. According to him the existence of untouchability serves as a mirror for Hindus and Hindus must have a change of heart and reform themselves. Ambedkar did not think such a change of heart was possible. Too many Hindus benefited from the caste system and therefore, a new caste-less religion of love was required to replace Hinduism. He declared that he would not die a Hindu because to die a Hindu was to be implicated in this inhumane caste system.

            Gandhi’s laudable journalistic and ideological effort through his periodical Harijan which he started after his engagement with Ambedkar in the 1930s is a concrete example of the effects of Ambedkar on his thinking. It continued for about 20 years and documented everything that is happening to Harijans (Dalits)—crimes, resistance, accommodation through fact-finding, evidence-gathering and on-ground reporting. Ambedkar, probably looked at this magazine and possibly used the information gathered for his own work. 

Like Gandhi, he thought religion and politics should go together. This is a time when people like Nehru took the approach that since communalism is bad, most religions are bad and prone to violence. So for Nehru, talking through religious metaphor was not benign and was to be rejected whereas Gandhi and Ambedkar thought there is more to this relationship between religion and politics. Ambedkar rejected a religion of rules which emphasized punishment and instead argued that it ought to be replaced by a religion of principles which emphasized moral community. Such a religion could provide the foundation of morality and ethics for a liberating politics. An enlightened society must have both an enlightened law and morality. The law came from the Constitution. But the morality would come from enlightened religion which he thought was Buddhism. 

14 October 1956, Deeksha Bhoomi

Through the 1940s and 50s still the day be converted on 14 October 1956, Ambedkar spent a lot of time thinking, reading, researching and writing about Buddhism and its emancipatory potential for Dalits. Prior to this conversion he had traveled to neighbouring Buddhist countries, he had met Buddhist activists and read their work and had begun to write about how this ancient religion could help India realize liberty, equality and fraternity for all its citizens while providing Indic foundations for love, fellowship and kindness. He portrayed Buddha as the original anti-caste crusader and wrote a book that could serve as a kind of Bible for Buddhists on the subcontinent.

            Like all the great political organizers of his day Ambedkar choreographed his Buddhist conversion ceremony carefully. Announcements were circulated weeks in advance with instructions that all attendees and potential converts must wear white. Handbills summarizing key Buddhist tenets were circulated too. On the appointed day, he accepted the Three Refuges i.e. the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha, from an old Arakanese monk— U Chandramuni—who lived in Kusinagara. After that he administered 22 oaths of his own to the crowd of converts in attendance which included giving up Hindu gods, living a morally upright life and helping propagate kindness and humanity. He hoped to do three things through this conversion. First, he wanted to release Dalits from Hinduism. As we have discussed, he equated Hinduism and caste. Second, he wanted to liberate Dalits from the psychological effects of caste. So it wasn’t just about getting rid of the caste system but also of its psychological demoralizing effects. That’s another reason why he adopts a certain angry, authoritative tone in public. He wished to embody the possibilities of what someone could become if they overcame that demoralization. Third, he thought conversion to Buddhism was necessary for Indian democracy. Buddhism would ensure democracy in everyday life as it supported the trinity of democratic ideals, liberty, equality and fraternity not just at the level of political institutions but in everyday life of the citizenry. In 1952, he argued that the equality of citizens—socially, legally and administratively was a necessary precondition for a successful democracy but there were two things that were important preconditions. One was constitutional morality that we have already spoken about and the other was a public conscience. And the public conscience was the thing that could only be guaranteed by a change in ethics and values and for him that also meant a change of religion to Buddhism. 

And here is the key. Ambedkar didn’t think that this conversion to Buddhism was just for Dalits. Usually his conversion to Buddhism is seen as a partisan and parochial act. But it wasn’t so. He is clearly on record saying in a press conference after the ceremony that he didn’t want this to be just a Dalit conversion. He wanted all Indians to convert to Buddhism because only Buddhism was the true religion of democracy.

Last but not least, why is it important to engage with Ambedkar in our classrooms? His life and his afterlife, I think, help us to think critically about the discipline of history. Whether you are a historian or not there is no avoiding the fact that we are constantly talking about history and that we make arguments around and through the language of history. There are at least three sites of history in India. One is the history of the school textbook. The second is popular history of various kinds including mythological histories. Finally, there’s the history of the historians. These three come together I think to sometimes make a very explosive mix. Ambedkar has gone from being seen as a side act in the anti-colonial movement to an acknowledged but otherwise ignored ‘father of the Indian Constitution’ to a Dalit icon to a philosopher of democracy. He is front and centre of the Dalit awakening and mobilization today. An engagement with Ambedkar opens up many questions about whose history we read, whose contributions to nation-building we acknowledge, justice in the disciplines, the silences and absences in how we think about society in history. The study of Ambedkar opens up new social worlds and experiences and pushes us to take seriously anti-caste thinking from those who have suffered caste’s worst effects. And of course, engaging with Ambedkar in the classroom also prompts us to think about democracy in every day life. It should help us to build an empathy towards people in society whose experiences we don’t understand and that in turn should help us think more critically about our current predicament. It’s also a reminder that inclusive conversation is necessary for inclusive democracy.

Janaki Nair, in a now ousted chapter on clothing in an NCERT history textbook, wrote about a lower caste community in the south and their efforts in the nineteenth century to resist sumptuary laws and wear what they wished.[ii] In particular, they campaigned against a caste injunction preventing women from this community on covering their breasts. Legal proceedings were initiated against Nair for writing about this episode by the concerned community. Nair reflects on what this meant for her as a historian and for her practice of history. On the one hand historians have to do what they do which is search for evidence, make an argument and write a narrative. But as Nair points out, it is not so straightforward in a democracy as charged as ours where history has more of a public life than an academic life. How can we, in such a charge situation, simply brush aside this response from this lower caste community about the depiction of this episode from their historical past? That history is ongoing i.e. it’s not a finished history. Their history of oppression and shame are ongoing. She advocates, and this is the note I will end on, that it is our duty to listen carefully, to continue to sift, and to continue to engage the many meanings of history. History is not a neat, linear narrative with clear conclusions and trajectories as it sometimes appears in our textbooks. It is, in fact, a construction site where everything is a real mess and you have to sift through things, dig, unearth, lay foundations, before something can be built.

Question and Answer Session

Audience member 1: Can you go into Ambedkar’s view of Gandhi, as in (using) khadi as a means of protest against the Britishers?

Gitanjali Surendran: In the same speech in which he writes about democracy as ‘the top dressing’, he dismisses this idealized idea of the village republic and the Gandhian plan of village trusteeship. He regarded much of Gandhi’s ideas of the village republic as rhetorical. For him, villages were dens of tremendous upper caste and patriarchal tyranny. He is committed to a modern economy, to a modern democracy—commitments that Gandhi does not share. I have not read anything that he has directly said about the khadi question but I imagine from what I have read about what he says about the village republic question that it’s something he would dismiss. Weavers must be allowed to do whatever they need to do to make ends meet and to enjoy their life and rights as full citizens of the country. Why romanticize the (caste) oppressions in which that weaving typically happens?

Audience member 2: How do you think India would have been different had the Poona Pact not been signed by Ambedkar?

GS: I cannot answer that. You should tell me how India would have been different had the Poona Pact not been signed! The fact is that it was signed and it produced a very different Ambedkar—angry and critical and a very sharp, well-crystalized Ambedkar. We should remember that it was the negotiations around and signing of the Poona Pact that also propelled Ambedkar to the national stage. That’s all I’ll say but that is a question you should be answering for me because it’s a great ‘What if?’ question.

Audience member 3: You think he would care about the separate electorates?

GS: To answer this question accurately we would have to turn to the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly to see what people were thinking about separate electorates. In fact, scholars argue that one of the reasons separate electorates were so easily dismissed later was because of their association with Muslim separatism. The Constituent Assembly is consequently criticized for failing the Muslim minority that remained in India and other minorities as well and therefore on the minorities’ question. In a sense by rejecting separate electorates that had the taint of communalism and separatism it does not appear to have been discussed seriously as a solution to any other kind of social or political problem either such as lower caste or Dalit representation. 

Audience member 4: In between, a point came up about how Ambedkar’s words and actions will help us to think about these silences within society. Do you think somewhere these silences should remain silences to express a utopian society?

GS: I am not in favour of silence. I am absolutely in favour of messy conversations. There are two other responses I would have to this. By silence I mean the absence of certain types of experiences from the conversation. I am going to give you my personal story—I grew up very much without any kind of awareness of caste, outside the formal one—what we studied as part of Sociology, History etc. I grew up in Delhi and myself come from a mixed background. There was never any discussion about caste or religion. So, it’s really when I went abroad that a German Professor asked me ‘Aren’t you upper caste?’ and isn’t every Indian student here (Oxford) upper caste? I was offended. I said ‘NO, I don’t think that’s the case’. Then of course I thought about it and I understood what he was asking me. I also realised that I was blind to a question that has never been part of my lived experience, as something worth considering. That absence or that silence I think is devastating actually. For Ambedkar, Buddhism and all his other theories are theories of togetherness. How do we live together? A mass conversion of all Indians to Buddhism was his answer to the question of how to live together. If we continue to endorse silences in what we study and the glaring absences of other people’s experience of society and history, then how can we live together? How can we live together if we cannot empathize with anybody else’s experience? Indian democracy can only be more inclusive if it evolves a theory of togetherness. Ambedkar is only one very prominent example—there are others as well who were reimagining religion. Take the example of Vinayak Savarkar who was atheist. He was notoriously unable to define ‘Hindutva’ clearly. For him ‘Hindu’ was simply an identity to be mapped onto ‘Indian’. But his was not a theory of togetherness as it did not involve everybody who was not Hindu or had a different social experience or faith system. In sum, these kinds of silence and absences are a flaw and we need to think about togetherness and how to make that happen in the most enabling way. We need more noise—we need all of you to be very, very noisy.

Audience member 5: You said that for Ambedkar the sole problem was not colonialism, it was caste. But at that time colonialism was a greater problem of national importance. Why did he give more importance to the problem of caste than colonialism?

GS: In some ways the question really is why did they have to choose? The Indian National Congress which was a preeminent political party—not to be confused with the INC today—was an umbrella party i.e. bringing together lots of diversity under its umbrella. It didn’t feel like it could resolve some of the innate tensions that come out of such a diversity. The conversations too to some degree were being thwarted. We say often that India is a diverse country but do we really know what it must have meant to manage an umbrella party of that nature—the first political party of the country, one of the world’s great political parties at the time? What does it mean to incorporate all these different voices, with these different social angularities, personalities and so on. It was a task and therefore the choice was made to actively deal with the political question first and the social question later—Bipin Chandra (a historian) very famously said that the Congress’s movement based itself on the primary contradiction which was the fight against colonialism therefore setting aside the injustices of society—and there are many. Caste was among the most prominent of them.

Gandhi and the Congress had a discourse on caste under the rubric of ‘harijan’. It’s not that Gandhi neglected it. In fact it’s because of him that it becomes a national issue. After all he is an undisputed nationalist leader at this point. He enjoyed a popularity that no other nationalist had before or after that. He was able to put the issue on the table while knowing it could be divisive. So, he adopts this language of protection of the harijan and reform of caste society by holding the harijan up as a mirror for caste. Of course someone like Ambedkar is not happy with that. He doesn’t think that’s going to solve the problem. He also thinks that Gandhi is being too mild towards the upper caste. So my answer to your question simply is, the primary contradiction is chosen in this way because it’s something that could bring the largeset number of people together. It’s almost as if it was an either/or choice. Yet it’s never really that simple, is it? You have the injustice against colonialism but there are many other social injustices as well. My ‘what if’ question to you is, what if we had had all of those battles alongside? What would have happened?

Audience member 6: As students of history how do we improve our approach towards history to improve our sense of society and people?

GS: That’s a lovely question which I hope you’ll be debating for the rest of the conference. I think it’s the question of our times: How do we make our classrooms a space of democratic discussion and discussions about democracy? And where does history play a role? In some ways my talk was about that. a)We need to think about a lot of other people, to go beyond our nationalist narrative. We need to be as inclusive of multiple voices as possible. This also means turning our students and ourselves into investigators and that means exploring our neighbourhoods and looking at the statues and other forms of representation and understanding why those statues are there and others are not there. Maybe understanding a history of Ludhiana that is more inclusive—there’s a whole range of things we could do!

The other thing we need to do —it’s not easily done—our classrooms themselves have to become much more democratic, to allow a lot of contradictory opinion including ones we don’t like to come out to the surface so there is an open discussion and then to have a clear sense of what democratic values exactly you want to persuade your class of. It’s a long term project. When Ambedkar says that the foundations of democracy are just not there in this soil, he has a bit of a point, no? It’s not there in our daily interactions, it’s not there in our families—often we have no choice but to listen to authority and sometimes it’s a much more heavy handed experience than just listening. And so democracy begins at home. It happens in the space that we occupy in the park and our city landscapes. It begins in the kind of research we do, in the kind of exercises we do as students. It begins in the way that we look at the world. There are so many exercises we can do to all become more aware of the issues around our democracy. So our classrooms need to be turned democratic, every argument needs to be taken seriously, the politics should be taken seriously and many discussions should be had.

Audience member 7: Gandhi presents a more traditional view in his ideology which are subtly associated with Hinduism and he gave an idea of allegiance that, kind of, separates the communities and does not promote brotherhood.

GS: I am really glad you are asking such questions about Gandhi because 25 years ago, when I was in school, we couldn’t discuss Gandhi critically. I think Gandhi himself would have been quite happy if we had questioned him a little bit. He was not against criticism at all. He has moments, like everybody does, but mostly he was always in favour of a good conversation. And that’s evident from the way he responded to everybody. He responds to Ambedkar—he didn’t have to but he does. He is not silent. He responds to Tagore. But he responds with a lot of care while standing his own ground. He responds to many others, spends time writing letters and columns for his papers and journals. It’s easy for us to see all that Gandhi did wrong. In the early part of his career he was really arguing for Indians in South Africa to have the same rights as Europeans in South Africa. He wasn’t making that argument for other diasporic communities or for native South Africans necessarily which has prompted charges of racism against him. My response there would be that he might have a very different response to that today—and he certainly had a very different response to Africanist independence movements 30 years later. He had a long career with many different ideas. That said, I agree that like many others at the time he endorsed a certain Hindu populism in his speeches and ideas. Some of the symbols that he deployed were not necessarily purely Hindu by the way. That we tend to think of Ramayana and Mahabharata or the concept of Ram Rajya as exclusively Hindu things is a more recent part of the history of these ideas. These are stories everybody is sharing, one way or another, whether they technically call themselves Hindu or not. The question is whether he laid a foundation for brotherhood (or let’s call it sisterhood or just foundation for society—we have to try to be more inclusive even in our language)? I think Gandhi, to quote Walter Mignolo, was ‘a philosopher of equilibrium’. He’s looking to balance things in society. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want change but he wants that change to be slow and steady whereas Ambedkar is a philosopher of revolution. He favours drastic and quick change. These are two very different approaches to social and historical change. So if you look at Gandhi as a philosopher of equilibrium and Ambedkar as a philosopher of revolution, it helps you understand why they adopt their particular positions and methods. It is interesting though that both abhor violence. So while Ambedkar wanted revolution, he wanted a revolution sans violence.

Audience member 8: I feel both Gandhi and Ambedkar have not helped in camouflaging the Dalit movement but have made it more separatist. As a child I remember growing up in Bombay and the Chettipadi event on 6th December when he converted to Buddhism. There were many people coming in from all over the nation and we as teenagers used to see these crowds every time in December. It was like standing out rather than camouflaging. So in this process of nation building, do you think his cultural idea was all about standing out and not about amalgamation?

GS: There again I have to say that there can be no togetherness if there’s no proper recognition. I would suggest that we all read Gopal Guru on this subject, especially an article he wrote called ‘Dalit Women Speak Differently’. The question you are asking is actually about solidarity—a question that’s very preoccupying for me. In fact, a kind of Dalit political and academic discourse is more recently arguing for a separate recognition of the way Dalits see the world and so on. You have to remember that even the term Dalit meaning “broken or scattered” and the sense of Dalit political community is recent but not without context. Part of Ambedkar’s project was to shake his fellow Dalits out of their demoralized state into political action and identity. The question is if the the argument holds that Dalits see and worship differently, then where is the grounds for solidarity? How are the conversations going to take place between your political leadership of Dalit community as well as your leadership of other communities in different local areas and of course the national parties and so on? There are many models for this. The Marxist model would be, very roughly put: let’s all actually divide ourselves on the basis of class—let’s forget about caste but let’s really think about our common class interests in the context of poverty and so on. The Hindutva argument has been: you are not Dalit, you are a Hindu first and foremost and therefore you are in it with the other Hindus therefore your caste problems don’t really exist. The third is: you’ve been given these reservations in educational institutions and employment sectors, now you work on it and slowly become citizens of the country and slowly shed your caste colours and identity and so on—this is all very well but of course this is a process. I think the answer to your question is just not easy. The conversations need to continue to be had and we need to stop thinking about us and them and instead about how we can have this conversation. We begin from the starting point of understanding why that recognition has to happen—why these spaces are being built in this way, why the stone parks were built, why the statuary is happening, why this kind of a ‘social’ is happening, why this kind of community is happening. Look at the longer history of Dalithood and understand that it is coming from somewhere and participate in it to the extent that you can to understand what the goals of it are. We need to reflect on how we are party to caste in our everyday life. We have to recognize caste mentality around us and within us. Conversations need to happen. This is a process, it will not happen overnight. Democracy takes years to build a firm foundation in a society such as this. And so you consider yourself to be part of that and listen more closely. Judge later, listen first.

Audience member 9: With due respect to Dr. Ambedkar’s ideas and philosophy, don’t you think that he over-expected from democracy? The Constitution came into being in 1950 and immediately he expected social democracy to take over when we were not even ready for a political democracy yet. He burnt the Constitution later and turned to Buddhism. How do you interpret these behaviours between 1950–1956?

GS: I interpret it as though it were coming from a man with a point and in a hurry. I don’t think he burnt the Constitution. He was critical of the Constitution in that he did not want the new nation to sit on its laurels. The work of building a society based on the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity and justice is only beginning. How are we going to have conversations about this? Where is the ethical foundation for democracy? Where is the national moral community that is meant to be India where everyone is in fact equal, free and feels like there’s fraternity? So, I think he was a man in a hurry. Again, we don’t have to like what he did (although I’d like it if you did, it’s fine if you don’t) but we’ll have to understand where it comes from. That is the most important thing for students of history. Was his approach successful? Yes and no, probably. What is the balance sheet there? Usually, his conversion to Buddhism is seen as targeting Hinduism and therefore to break society i.e. as a kind of society-breaking event. But as I hope to have showed you through the documents and through his own statements after that, that is not what he was thinking. He was thinking that this (the conversion to Buddhism) was a way to enable democracy. He did not live long enough to make it happen—he died very shortly after, even before Dalits could all agree, across the country, that Buddhism is the way forward. We have to do a balance sheet of his legacy. Let’s first understand what he was doing and then maybe we’ll have a better sense, if at all, on how to take it forward.

Gita Anjali teaches history at Jindal Global Law School. Her forthcoming book “Democracy’s Dhamma: Buddhism in the Making of Modern India, c 1890-1956” will be out with Cambridge University Press next year.

[*][*] Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009.

[i] Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Risk of Democracy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

[ii] Janaki Nair, “Textbook controversies and the demand for a past: The public lives of history”, History Workshop Journal, 82, Autumn 2016, pp235-254.