Book review: Babasaheb's writings still a signpost to resolving contemporary ills

Chennai: This 412-page anthology of the seminal writings of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar - scholar, economist, modernist political thinker, unparalleled leader of India’s depressed classes and chief architect of free India’s Constitution - appears to have come as a just-in-time reminder when our Republic in its 70th year, wittingly or unwittingly, is revisiting basic issues of Indian polity.   

This collection of writings, with a brilliant introduction by Dr Abhijhit Kundu, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, straddling a whole range of basic issues and concerns that bothered him for close to six decades until perhaps he eventually embraced Buddhism in 1956, en masse with his followers, is like, in his own inimitable phrase, “to be forewarned is to be forearmed.”

Pouring over issues such as caste, religious orthodoxy, inequalities both social and economic, nationalism, the Hindu-Muslim question, whether we can ever be ‘One Nation’ or only ‘People’ in its broadest multi-cultural/linguistic sense- virtually the entire spectrum of modern Indian history and her freedom struggle is covered. In each of these, the thoughts of Dr Ambedkar, having suffered the “mundane regularity of ignominy of early childhood of a Mahar child (Mahar is an Untouchable caste of erstwhile Bombay Presidency), are thorough going to the last if-then logical sequence. And his early suffering gave him ‘inter-subjective empathy’, and not cynicism or an irresponsible nihilism, as Dr Kundu points out.

What comes out reading this collection of Dr Ambedkar’s works – put together under ten sections including, ‘The failed promise, Political Safeguards for the Untouchables, Freedom from the Governing Class, The Pakistan Question, Historicity of the Shudras, Critique of Gandhi and The Annihilation of Caste’-, is that he thoroughly analyses the pros and cons of a proposition, political stand or ideology. Whether one agrees with him or not on every issue, Dr Ambedkar’s vision is enriched by trends in world history and insights of a critical insider, besides concerns of a humanist who at the end of the day wants his little peace of mind and dignity of the individual self. This is a very rare combination that only few great leaders of India’s freedom struggle displayed. And calling a spade a spade was a virtue in political communication then, far removed from the artful duplicities and the aggressive Twitterati of the contemporary political theatre.
Style is also a matter of perspective, not just flavour or taste for good words. Ambedkar’s acerbic style, particularly in his unflinching criticism of the ‘Varnasashrama Dharma’, and what led to ‘stagnation’ in Hinduism, or in his unsparing critique of Gandhi, for above all, “confusing Varna with Jaati”, would continue to be part of the great Indian Philosophical debate.

Gandhiji did see a threat to Hinduism itself if ‘Jaati’ or ‘caste’ was totally rooted out, but Ambedkar firmly believed that the best offensive to unseat the caste hegemony of various ‘jatis’ was free inter-caste marriages, a wavelength that Periyar in Tamil Nadu also shared. But still when Ambedkar admits that he eventually did not press for ‘separate electorate’ for Dalits, in the wake of Gandhi’s ‘Epic Fast unto death’ that led to the ‘Poona Pact’, Ambedkar says he could not i-gnore Gandhi’s health condition, a pointer to the Mahatma’s standing.   
While he traces the historicity and ‘genealogy’ of the ‘Shudras’, Dr Ambedkar philosophical scholarship is at its best, drawing from enormous studies and references to show how the famous ‘Purusha Sukta’ verse in the ‘Rig Veda’, which seeks to justify the rigid hierarchy of the ‘Varna system’, was probably a later interpolation. But Ambedkar, in the same breath says, “the theory I venture to advance” is a triple propositional one, including that “Shudras were Aryans and that the Shudras belonged to the Kshatriya class (Varna).” This was in contrast to Periyar, who taking forward the Justice Party’s historical legacy of Brahmin/Non-Brahmin dichotomy in Hindu society, termed the ‘Shudras’ as non-Aryan in origin.
Notwithstanding the unsettled nature and open-endedness of these issues even in today’s politics, Dr Ambedkar’s life and work does trigger a powerful rethinking of one’s placid suppositions, more so in the backdrop of the widely shared consensus on the need for a more egalitarian socio-economic change. Just as we need Gandhi and Nehru, we also need Ambedkar as the Socratic challenger.

That philosophical impulse, that all received notions from traditions could be suspect, could be one reason why Ambedkar’s approach to resolving the long-felt bickering and tensions in Hindu-Muslim relations was more practical and pragmatic. For Mahatma Gandhi, Hindu-Muslim unity was the sin-qua-non that the Congress incorporated into its programme of Non-Cooperation against the British rule, an irreducible minimum. But Ambedkar in his writings points out that Gandhiji got too entangled with the ‘Khilafat Movement’, while the ‘mutual suspicion’ whether ‘Swaraj’ would mean ‘Hindu Raj’ for the Muslims and vice-versa in a united India, with its attendant underpinnings of the idea of a new ‘nationalism’, was far more complex for Gandhiji’s idealism to have a free flow.
Nonetheless, Dr Ambedkar does not hesitate to point out that views of the ‘Hindu Mahasabha’ then led by V.D. Savarkar on such key issues was not the correct approach and sounded even ‘queerer’ than what the votaries of Pakistan had hoped to harness with Jinnah’s Two-Nation theory. Here is very subtle political thought at play, for someone like Ambedkar could see both sides of the coin, rooted in the Dalits’ centuries of deprivation and suffering outside ‘Hindu Samaj’.

It is in reminding us of that universal, non-egalitarian social order that this volume of writings by Babasaheb continues to be a signpost for students of history and political science. If today a Rajinkanth in Tamil Nadu promises ‘spiritualized politics’, an Ambedkar would ask what he had asked Gandhi. Does it stop the ‘commercialization’ of politics? There are quite a few printing errors in this volume, even as the book requires a Bibliography to enhance its value.