1 The ‘wealth of information’ that Ambedkar speaks of, refers to the colonial ethnographic enterprise that through the mechanisms of census and survey attempted to collect, classify and codify identities in a heterogenous social space. In the aftermath of the 1857 revolt, the British colonial regime looked to create and mobilize a codified body of ethnographic knowledge to promulgate a totalizing governance of the subcontinent. According to Cohn, ‘The census represents a model of the Victorian encyclopedic quest for total knowledge’ (Cohn 1996, 8). Yet, the resulting ‘wealth of information’ did not just produce knowledge in the abstract but became the basis on which colonial rule over the subcontinent, in accordance with the customs of the land, was established. Scholars of the colonial archive have shown variously how particular forms this knowledge of native communities, when appropriated by the colonizers, transformed the workings of society, pitched the enumerated communities against each other, while also becoming a vehicle through which certain castes could achieve better status for themselves and the means for protesting British rule (Cohn 1987; Appadurai 1993). Eventually, as Ambedkar did, such information was also mobilized against Brahmanical dominance and was used in mounting a political challenge to Gandhi’s claim of representing all Hindus. For the scholar Nicholas Dirks, following his mentor and advisor Bernard Cohn, they are proof that the Brahmin-centric model of the caste system was a colonial construction, a claim that has been heavily critiqued on the grounds of placing too much importance on the role of the British and ignoring the evidence of the precolonial workings of the caste system (Dirks 2001). Also, for Dirks, caste was socio-politically constituted rather than through religious interdiction. Alternatively, Christopher Bayly posits a bi-directional dialectic of power. He argues for a pre-colonial system of knowledge within which the mechanisms of caste figured, only to be transmuted by the imposition of a colonial overlord (Bayly 1988). This conceptualization has now paved the way for studying alternative mechanisms of power that existed within the colonized people. Historian Sumit Guha (2017) traces, among other things, the Portugese racial lineage of the British understanding of caste. He also deduces the different geographic and socio-political factors that led to the creation of variant modalities of caste in different regions across South Asia. Guha complicates the history of caste through numerous examples that illustrate how maintenance of power and historical contingencies shaped caste consolidations, and how caste was a fluid and always changing identity marker. See also Susan Bayly (1999).
2 The conundrum of classifying various practices that fall within the superset ‘Hindu’ was also present in Census reports prior to 1910. In the 1901 Census report under the commissionership of ethnographer H.H. Risley, considerable attention was paid to distinguish animism from Hinduism. Risley regards animism as a lower order religion reducible to belief in magic, whereas Hinduism for him was important for its transcendental metaphysics. He also avers that animism would lead naturally to a pantheistic faith like Hinduism, which in turn was bound to transform into monotheism (Risley and Gait 1901, 357–9). This conception of development of religion echoes the theory set forth by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel divides religion into three stages: the first is ‘Natural Religion’ in which the divine is identified with natural phenomena such as light, wildlife and plants. The second stage is ‘Religion in the Form of Art’. Here, the gods are represented sensuously in human forms, and tend to stand in for human failings and nobility. The third stage, unsurprisingly, is ‘Revealed Religion’, synonymous with Christianity. In this stage the divine becomes human; god is alienated from himself and takes the human form. To what extent Risley was influenced by Hegel is hard to ascertain, but British philosophy during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century was in thrall of him (Mander 2011)—F.H. Bradley and J.M.E. McTaggart and even Bertrand Russell in his early years, for instance. In fact, Victorian England was quite fascinated by the post-unification romantic movements in Germany. The influence ran deep, with many English thinkers and artists looking to ‘culturally superior’ Germany to escape the rigid and mercantile life in England (Davis 2007). Risley here seems to be studying Hinduism through a Hegelian lens, though he cannot exactly define Hinduism, mired as it is in a multiplicity of beliefs and practices. His definition of Hinduism was not too wide off the mark: ‘The most obvious characteristics of the ordinary Hindu are his acceptance of the Brahmanical supremacy and of the caste system, and when it is a question of whether a member of the Animistic tribes has or has not entered the fold of Hinduism, this seems the proper test to apply’ (1901, 360). The Census Commissioner for 1911, when the separation of the Animists and Untouchables was made from Hindus, was E.A. Gait, co-author of the 1901 report with Risley. Also see the first riddle “The Difficulty of Knowing Why One is a Hindu” in the annotated edition of Ambedkar’s Riddles in Hinduism (2016, 58–65). Risley also practised the racist pseudo-science of anthropometry and used it extensively in his field researches. More on this on p. 133–4 note 21.
3 The 1931 Census was the last to enumerate all castes; subsequently, following the Census Act of 1948, only the Scheduled Castes and Tribes were enumerated by caste. Ahead of the 2001 Census, it was under consideration if caste was a category appropriate for the census. The debate was renewed in 2011 (Deshpande and John 2010) and the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) was conducted as part of the 2011 Census, partial findings of which were revealed by the central government in July 2015. (See Ghosh 2015, for a critique of the methodology of the SECC where the caste data was collected but not released.)
4 Ambedkar rejects the Aryan invasion theory in an earlier chapter of the The Untouchables, “Racial Difference as the Origin of Untouchability”. However, in the decade leading up to this annotated edition, some path-breaking DNA research combined with developments in archaelogy and linguistics have demonstrated that the self-styled Sanskrit-speaking Aryans did migrate to the northern subcontinent from West Eurasia around 2,000–1,500 BCE, and that they had little to do with the Harappans who on their part came from Zargos in Iran around 7000 BCE and went on to mix with the more ancient Out-of-Africa Indians to form the linguistic group called Dravidian. Genetic research based on an avalanche of new DNA evidence has been explained by the geneticist David Reich in Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (2018). The political repercussions for a right-wing government in officially admitting that the Indo-Aryans (or the makers of the Vedic corpus) did come from elsewhere over three thousand years ago made ‘nationalist’ scientists look for acceptable ways of describing the facts. Even if the ‘Aryans’ had blended and mingled inextricably with the earlier populations that had settled here and with the subsequent waves of migrants over centuries, safer terminology was coined by the state-run Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad: “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI) and “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI). What the science and facts nevertheless tell us is that the Brahmins tend to have more ANI (or West Eurasian) ancestry than the groups they live among, even those speaking the same language (Reich 2018, 133–5). Reich offers us this bald fact: ‘the degree of genetic differentiation among Indian jati groups living side by side in the same village is typically two to three times higher than the genetic differentiation between northern and southern Europeans’ (2018, 143). While Ambedkar did not put much blame or premium on the Aryan Invasion Theory, he did come close to seeing where the genetic evidence leads us now. He does this as early as in 1916 in an anthropology conference paper in Columbia University, “Castes in India”: ‘Caste in India means an artificial chopping off of the population into fixed and definite units, each one prevented from fusing into another through the custom of endogamy. Thus the conclusion is inevitable that Endogamy is the only characteristic that is peculiar to caste, and if we succeed in showing how endogamy is maintained, we shall practically have proved the genesis and also the mechanism of Caste.’ (2013, 84–5). What this artificial chopping up leads to, in the language of genetics, is a ‘population bottleneck’. ‘These’, says Reich, ‘occur when relatively small numbers of individuals have many offspring and their descendants too have many offspring and remain genetically isolated from the people who surround them due to social or geographic barriers’ (2018, 146). Reich concludes that population bottlenecks in India are often exceedingly old, dating back to over between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago. He tells us how the trading caste of Vysya in the Andhra region, constituting about five million people, would live cheek by jowl with other social groups over millennia and yet maintain severe endogamous integrity. ‘Even an average rate of influx into the Vysya of as little as 1 percent per generation would have erased the genetic signal of a population bottleneck.’ Yet, this does not happen. With such in-breeding, like with the Ashkenazi Jews community to which Reich belongs, what does happen is this: among Vysyas ‘there’s prolonged muscle paralysis in response to muscle relaxants given prior to surgery’. Ambedkar ends his preface to Annihilation of Caste by calling the upholders of caste ‘sick’ and that this ‘sickness is causing danger to the health and happiness of other Indians’. What he meant figuratively has come to be the reality. See also the prefatory essay “A Fool’s Errand” (p. 65).
5 Either Ambedkar errs in recording the year of the address or a proof error has been introduced by the editors of the BAWS (Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches) volumes. The same quote appears in B.R. Nanda’s biography of G.K. Gokhale, Gokhale: The Indian Moderates and The British Raj (1977, 328–9). Here, the year of the address is given as 1906, when, for the first time, a delegation of Muslim leaders headed by the Aga Khan III made concrete political demands for Mohamedan representation. Thirty-five prominent Muslims met Lord Minto in Simla (the deputation came to be known as the Simla Deputation) on 1 October 1906 and demanded separate representation to counter the Hindu–Congress hegemony.
6 Sir Sultan Muhammed Shah, Aga Khan III (1877–1957), was one of the founders and the first president of the All-India Muslim League. His petition to the then viceroy resulted in the Minto– Morley reforms, or the Indian Councils Act of 1909.
7 [For the text of the address see my Pakistan, p. 431]. In this work (1945), Ambedkar writes: ‘These demands were granted and given effect to in the Act of 1909. Under this Act the Mohammedans were given (1) the right to elect their representatives, (2) the right to elect their representatives by separate electorates, (3) the right to vote in the general electorates as well, and (4) the right to weightage in representation’ (Ambedkar 1990c, 251).
8 [Italics not in the original.]
9 The struggle for separate representation for Muslims in pre-independence India has a complex history. There is a general consensus which tends to explain away the phenomenon of ‘Pakistan’ as the product of the machinations of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, lacking in both a cogent plan for nation-building and popular support, or as bargaining tool for more representation. See Jaffrelot 2002 for a critique of this position. Ayesha Jalal’s influential 1985 study, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, presents the thesis that it was the concern of majority–minority relations in India, and the exegencies of dealing with this problem in the context of imminent independence, which was a driving factor in the Partition. Others highlight how support for Pakistan was generated in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (now Uttar Pradesh). The new state was envisaged not just as a refuge for Indian Muslims but also an Islamic utopia which would revitalize the Islamic world and be a successor to the Turkish Caliphate. The contribution of a section of the Deobandi Ulema and their collaboration with the Muslim League in creating a hybrid of the modern state and an Islamic nation is seen as the central driver of the two-nation theory (See Dhulipala 2015). Faisal Devji’s Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (2013) rejects such a ground-up instrumental understanding of Pakistan as well as Jalal’s theory of minoritarian concern (which he accuses of reducing ‘Pakistan’s history into nothing more than a failed conspiracy’ [2013, 7]). Devji cuts through the ‘police report’ style investigation of history which tries to glean intentions and motives, all of which he claims can only be assigned retrospectively, and examines how religion as ideology unified a people into the ‘imagined community’ of Pakistan, in place of blood or geographic ties to hold together the people who came to populate the new land. Ambedkar’s critical support for Pakistan was not insignificant. His book Thoughts on Pakistan (later retitled Pakistan or the Partition of India) was first published in 1940 and was used by both Gandhi and Jinnah against each other (Dhulipala 2015). Shabnum Tejani examined how Ambedkar maps out what it is that constitutes nationhood: ‘Nationality is a social feeling. It is a feeling of corporate sentiment of oneness which makes those who are charged with it feel that they are kith and kin’ (Ambedkar 1946, 31). It is a feeling simultaneously of inclusion, ‘a feeling of fellowship’, and exclusion, ‘anti-fellowship’ (Tejani 2013b). Tejani also notes Ambedkar’s keen support for separate electorates for all minority communities for he ‘believed that although electorates should be structured to reflect the communal divisions in India, their effect would not perpetuate these divisions, but, in bringing people who would not normally meet into public service, it would foster a new like-mindedness’ (112).
10 In his paper, “Census enumeration, religious identity and communal polarisation in India” (2013), R.D. Bhagat points out that religion as a question in the Census of the United Kingdom was not included until 2001. The United States does not include it even today. Why then did the colonial regime impose this classification on India? As Edward W. Said critically argued, for the colonizers, the colonies were more real in their imagination of the ‘Orient’, than in the concrete multiplicity and difference of their realities. Within this framework, the heterogeneous, polytheistic—in a word, alien—cultures of the subcontinent that the colonizer encountered required a certain form of codification in order for it to make sense to the colonial regime. Caste was the most inconceivable and particular form encountered in the Subcontinent which had to be codified and archived through the ethnographic studies that compiled the ‘history of the peoples of India’ by assimilating various forms of knowledge—privileging Brahmin scholars—into a colonial project that would govern. (See also p. 121–2 note 1.) Bhagat emphasizes the definitional obsession of the British ethnographers whose myopic perception of the subcontinent required them to segregate socio-cultural forms of living into religion(s), and further subject them to the monotheistic standards of Abrahamic religion consequently ignoring all evidence of heterogeneity. This led to the creation of concrete distinctions between Hindus, Animists, and tribals. Such fixing of religious identity and mathematizing their strength was crucial as far as the politics that followed was concerned. The struggle for representation in local bodies had a distinct communal character and the demand for rights were often articulated from the position of a particular community (Bhagat 2013, 438). At the same time, the methodology of the Census revealed the extent and magnitude of Untouchability, and the boundlessness of the caste system across the subcontinent.
11 [This operation came soon after the address given by Muslim community to Lord Minto in 1909 in which they asked for a separate and adequate representation for the Muslim community. The Hindu smelt a rat in it. As the Census Commissioner observed: ‘Incidentally, the enquiry generated a certain amount of heat, because unfortunately it happened to be made at a time when the rival claims of Hindus and Mohammedans to representation on the Legislative Councils were being debated and some of the former feared that it would lead to the exclusion of certain classes from the category of Hindus and would thus react unfavourably on their political importance’. Part I. p. 116.]
12 [See Census of India (1911). Part 1. p. 117] This decision to take the ‘Hindu’ as the definitive centrality and classify others who are not-so-Hindu originates in the first ever partial Census of 1872, Report of the Census of Bengal 1872 by H. Beverley.
13 A different kind of hegemonization is underway in contemporary times with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh labelling the Adivasis as ‘vanvasi’ (literally forest-dwellers). To this effect, the RSS set up the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram to counter the Christian missionary influence in tribal areas, especially in the field of education. Yet, the VKA makes no attempt to adopt tribal languages in its instruction, contributing to their increased disappearance. The propagation of Sanskritized Victorian values has also disturbed the more progressive tendencies found in tribal cultures, especially affecting gender roles (Sundar 2002). Several state school textbooks actively denigrate Adivasi communities: ‘A second-grade textbook that Bonda children are made to learn has this to say: “Bonda life is very strange indeed. They live in tiny huts built of mud. The entrance to these huts is rather narrow. They enter the huts by bending forward…”’ (Sundar 2002, 380).
14 Ambedkar, surprisingly, leaves out the criterion of burying the dead. Daya Pawar in his autobiography Baluta (2015) writes, ‘In those days, we Mahars buried our dead; we did not cremate them as we do now. When we watched Babasaheb being cremated at Chaityabhoomi, we were watching the end of a tradition’ (205). However, in his paper titled “The Mahars: Who Were They and How They Became Untouchable?”, Ambedkar directly addresses this aspect of Mahar tradition: ‘[T]he Mahars [buried] the dead body when as a matter of theory and practice the Marathas and the Kshatriyas have the custom of burning the dead. The existence of this custom of burying the dead must be admitted…’ (Ambedkar 2003, 141)
15 [See Census of 1911 for Assam p. 40; for Bengal, Bihar and Orisa p. 282; for CP. p. 73; for Madras p. 51; for Punjab p. 109; for U.P. p. 121; for Baroda p. 55; for Mysore p. 53; for Rajputana p. 94—105; for Travancore p. 198]
16 [Hindu Manners and Customs (3rd Edition) p. 61 f.n.] Jean-Antoine Dubois or Abbé Dubois (1765–1848) was a French missionary who arrived in Pondicherry in the wake of the French Revolution on a proselytizing mission. Travelling across South India and living according to the traditions of the natives, he prepared the book Character, Manners and Customs of the People of India and of their Institutions Religious and Civil which became an influential ethnographic text for both the British and the French colonizers. Based on first-hand experiences rather than textual analyses, Dubois’s work reveals the French obsession with the glory of Brahmanical society. For him it was imperative to bring the ‘cultured’ Brahmins towards Christianity and he was contemptuous of the ‘Pariah’ converts, a common attitude among most missionaries of his time (Mohan 2004). ‘While Dubois did mention other castes, it was merely in one single chapter describing the hundreds of groups of low castes, and he dismissed the lower castes—untouchables and pariahs—in passing, as entirely beyond the pale of civilization. […] What is interesting is that the abbé chose to focus on the Brahmans, considering that his primary reason for undertaking an observation of Indian society was to better effect conversions among Indians. By his own admission, the bulk of converts to Christianity continued to be the lowest castes—untouchables and pariahs. Lower castes were willing to convert to Christianity in exchange for a higher social status, material benefit, and the possibility of gaining employment with the colonizers. For Dubois this was of little spiritual interest compared with the conversion of a Brahman’ (Mohan 2004, 233). In her study of Dubois’s influence on colonial ethnography, Jyoti Mohan notes his baffling silence on the very existence of Muslims, even while he lived in Mysore under Muslim rulers. She also notes the difference between the French and British attitude towards Indians: whereas the former were deeply enamoured by native customs and believed in a colonization which accommodated them, the latter were more contemptuous. Though the British relied heavily on Dubois’ extensive studies, they were pointedly dismissive of those aspects of his work which displayed an admiration of local culture.
17 The Paraiyars and Pallars are the most numerous Dalit castes in the Tamil-speaking region of the erstwhile Madras presidency. Rupa Viswanath (2014) says the Paraiyars were agrestic slaves till the colonial period, forced into a range of menial occupations in the northern districts of the state. The Pallars, predominant in the southern regions, were farm workers though today some of their spokespersons, abetted by the right-wing, claim they were originally wetland farmers and even rulers and never untouchable and wish to be excluded from the Scheduled Caste list (Krishnasamy 2018). The Chakkiliyars, who have now embraced the more ‘respectable’ though Hinduized label of ‘Arundhatiyar’, are traditionally leather workers predominant in the western districts of the state. Often native speakers of Telugu, they are also known as Madiga across Tamil, Telugu and Kannada-speaking regions.
18 [Gazetteer of Tanjore District (1906), p. 80] M.C. Rajah writes in The Oppressed Hindus (1925), which is considered the first ever nonfiction book in English by an Untouchable in India: ‘It is not so well known that the Brahmin who considers himself polluted by the touch, the presence or the shadow of an Adi Dravida, will not be allowed to enter the Cheri-natham. Should a Brahmin venture into a cheri, water with which cow dung has been mixed, is thrown on his head and he is driven out. Some Brahmins consider a forsaken cheri, an auspicious site for an agraharam’ (Rajah 1925/2005). Rajah, like Ambedkar, cites the case of Holeyas vide Mackenzie from the Indian Antiquary. This observation portends the central objective of Ambedkar’s thesis. Through this text Ambedkar sets up a scene of a historical battle, where the opponents were equals-in-war. The memory of this adversarial relation and of the existence of a time of equality sets up an ‘open history’ which is ripe with lessons for contemporary politics: the possibility of recapturing this originary egalitarianism in the contemporary body which kindles its memory.
19 Holeyas, belonging to the present-day state of Karnataka and its adjoining regions, are primarily agricultural labourers.
20 Little is known of James Stuart Francis Fraser Mackenzie except that as a colonial official he worked largely in Mysore and Southern India. His interests ranged far and wide and he authored scores of scholarly essays (including the much-cited “The Village Feast,” in the Indian Antiquary in 1874 which describes a fire-walking ritual in Akka Timanhully in Bangalore as largely benign and harmless) and nine books from the 1870s to 1910s including Description of the Halebid Temple (1873) and the much-reprinted Wild Flowers and How to Name them at a Glance Without Botany (1917).
21 [Indian Antiquary 1873 11.65.] Some errors in spelling and punctuation in the BAWS edition have been edited after comparing with Mackenzie’s essay in the Indian Antiquary. The quote also appears in the second volume of Edgar Thurston and K. Rangachari’s Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909). Whether Ambedkar obtained the particular extract from this volume is hard to ascertain. He does refer, in an earlier chapter of The Untouchables, to Thurston and Risley’s list of social precedence of castes in different regions in India. Thurston had worked alongside Risley during his survey work for the 1901 Census. In Castes and Tribes of Southern India, he presents contradictory accounts of the origin of the Holeyas, all of which reveal an undercurrent of conflict with the Tulu Brahmins. Holeyas are said to have been the inhabitants of the land which stretched from the Western Ghats all the way to the Eastern Coast, until the arrival of the Tulu Brahmins. One particularly self-serving narrative is as follows: ‘…the Brahmins […] from Ahi-Kshetra were again driven out by Nanda, a Holeya chief, whose son Chandra Sayana had, however, learned respect for Brahmins from his mother, who had been a dancing-girl in a temple. His admiration for them became so great that he not only brought back the Brahmins, but actually made over all his authority to them, and reduced his people to the position of slaves’ (Thurston and Rangachari 1909, 374–5). The first volume of Castes and Tribes in Southern India also offers mythical justification for the subdued reverence Brahmins had for the Holeyas as evidenced in the above quote. It goes back to the time of the twelfth century Vaishnavaite reformer Ramanuja and how he came to allow the Holeyas and Madigas temple entry. On learning that the Turk king of Delhi had stolen an image of Lord Krishna, Ramanuja tried to enlist the Brahmins to help retrieve it. When they refused, it was the Holeyas who offered assistance. In return they were allowed to enter the sanctum sanctorum of any temple and were also granted the title of ‘Tiru-kulam’ (sacred race). Importantly, Risley and Thurston were proponents of the racist pseudoscience of colonial anthropometry. They were together responsible for much of the systematization of colonial ethnography and contributed to the essentialization of caste characteristics (Dirks 1996). Thurston was particularly thoroughgoing in his categorizing fervour, personally measuring the skulls and noses of subjects across South India. His study of racial types seemed to extend from his hobby of labelling and pinning butterflies and collecting plants (Bates 1995). His methodology was heavily shaped by his ‘personal touch’, where subjective knowledge as anecdotal evidence was used to determine essential features of several castes (Philip 2004). For a detailed study of Thurston’s work in India and his role in accentuating caste, see Dirks (1996; 2015).
22 The Broken Men theory is Ambedkar’s novel explanation of the origin of Untouchability in India. It can be summarized in three points:
1. Primitive tribal society could be divided into two categories: Settled (which practised agriculture) and Nomadic.
2. The Nomadic Tribes found it favourable to attack Settled Tribes for food, who, because of their agrarian turn, had no defensive recourse. This system of warfare resulted in ‘Broken Men’: people who had their villages destroyed and were left tribe-less.
3. Tribal communities were built on blood relations, which meant that the Broken Men couldn’t assimilate into a different tribe. However, Settled Communities would allow them to establish themselves outside their village, and would provide them with food in lieu of defensive services.
Ambedkar postulates that it is these groups of Broken Men who end up becoming Untouchables The present volume is a compendium of the justifications Ambedkar provides, including the rise of Buddhism and the Brahmins’ decision to make beef consumption sacrilegious in its wake. See the extended note on the Broken Men theory addended to this annotated edition which explains the significance and strength of Ambedkar’s speculative thesis.
23 Robert DeCaroli, in Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of Buddhism (2004), demonstrates how Buddhism became a mass religion through interpretations of textual and archaeological sources. DeCaroli argues that contrary to the usual understanding that extant local religious practices were at odds with the tenets of Buddhism, it was Buddhism’s commensuration with the worship of spirit-deities that made it into a popular religion. Patanjali’s differentiation of two types of gods is a useful tool in this regard: there were the vaidika (Vedic or prescribed) gods and the laukika (worldly, customary, or generally prevalent) ones (DeCaroli 2004, 13). The laukika deities would include yaksas, raksasas, pisacas, bhutas, kinnaras, kimpurusas, mahoragas, gandharvas, asuras, nagas, vidyuts, suvarnas and tree-spirits (bhutanis). Despite a drop in state patronage for Buddhism during the Sunga period (second century BCE) it grew into a popular religion by directly engaging with the laukika beliefs of a majority of the population. Through this, the monks solidified the position of Buddhism as the supreme moral doctrine. Several fantastic texts reveal how the monks dealt with the menace of haunting spirits and brutish deities by non-violently (usually) winning them over into the Buddhist ethic. This indicates the willingness of monks to adopt local religious beliefs to push their own values. DeCaroli also says that tales of Buddha’s life were modified after the fact (gleaned by dating particular texts) to show him engaging with local spirit-deities. Architectural study reveals that Buddhist monasteries were often built near or directly on top of megalithic burial sites. ‘[I]t would seem that the Buddhist monks and nuns quickly established themselves as experts in dealing with the dead. […] All of this evidence, taken collectively, reveals a monastic world that frequently interacted with both spirit-deities and the dead’ (2004, 102). DeCaroli concludes that, rather than sticking to dogma, Buddhism was able to flourish and gain ascendance as a popular religion because the monks had to incorporate it within already existing laukika traditions.
24 Nilakantha Bhatta was a seventeenth-century philosopher who wrote several texts which continue to have ritualistic influence in caste Hindu lives. He was the grandson of the influential Brahmin priest Narayana Bhatta who was close to Akbar’s minister, Todar Mal, and with whose help he was able to reconstruct the Visvesvara temple in Kashi (O’Hanlon 2007). Nilakantha, best known for his encyclopaedic interpretation of Brahmanic laws collected together in the Mayukhas (‘rays of light’), drew from various canonical sources, including the Manusmriti, to give a consistent rulebook for the dwijas.
25 [Edited by Gharpure, p. 95] J.R. Gharpure was a pleader in the Bombay High Court and a Sanskritist who offered scholarly Sanskrit editions of Yajnavalkya Smriti and Manusmriti among other texts. Ambedkar is citing from his Santi Mayukha: A Treatise on Propitiatory Rituals by Bhatta Nilakantha, self-published by Gharpure in Sanskrit in 1924 from Girgaon, Bombay, as part of his series, ‘Collections of Hindu Law Texts’. Of Nilakantha’s twelve Mayukhas, Prayaschit Mayukha is the tenth. It details the various ways in which sin (see p. 239 note 49 and p. 245–6 note 57) or crime and pollution can occur, the punishments that await sinners in hell and the means of repentance. Sin, for a dwija, can be induced by such actions as ‘murder, drinking, theft, adultery, eating of forbidden things [flesh, onion, garlic, among other things], giving up vedic study, contact with certain persons…[and] taking food from men of other castes or Sudras’ [emphasis added] (Kane 1926, xxxii–xxxiii). Killing of the cow or the Brahmin were also considered grave sins. Nilakantha also lists the different births a person may be condemned to for living in sin. He gives extensive lists of means of repentance, which include shaving and applying cow-dung and mud to the body. Acts of penitence differ depending on the caste of the sinner. On Untouchability and avoidance of contact with lower castes, Nilakantha was, well, more liberal than his forebears: ‘contact at tirthas, in marriage processions, fairs, battles, national calamities, burning of village’ were all permissible (Kane 1926, xxxii–xxxiii). The Mayukhas were popular books of Hindu ethics in the regions of Gujarat, Konkan and Maharashtra, and are said to have been brought into prominence by the Marathas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Macnaghten 1860; Mitra 1881).
26 Apararka, or Aparaditya, was a monarch of the Shilahara dynasty who ruled over the Konkan region in the late twelfth century. He is best known for Apararka-Yajnavalkya-Dharmasastra nibandha, his commentary on the Yajnavalkya Smriti. Estimated to have been written anywhere between 100 BCE to 600 CE, the Yajnavalkya Smriti is regarded as second in importance only to the Manusmriti (Ghose 1917). The Smriti was likely written during the Gupta reign and can be seen as commissioned to grant legitimacy to the Brahmanical empire (Olivelle and Davis 2018, 26). Set in the anustup metre (see p. 232 note 27), the work sets out the ethical, social, political and religious imperatives of the lives of dwija men. Apararka, in his commentary, pulls from 108 other primary sources including the srutis, Grihya and Dharma Sutras, metrical Smritis and from twenty-one puranas. He tries to reconcile the various contradictions found in these texts and situates and discards codicils as he sees fit for contemporary society. Apararka’s text still remains authoritative in Brahmanical society and is the principal book of the Kashmiri pandits (Ramdas 1986). The original text of the Yajnavalkya Smriti (Vidyarnava 1918) also contains references to Buddhism: in a list which describes in odious detail the qualities of a good wife, one of them is ‘She never makes friendship with Buddhistic nuns (Sramana)’ (149). In one section, among the obstacles mentioned in the non-fulfilment of wishes made during a sacrifice is if the sacrificer dreams of a head-shaven person, which the translator, Srisa Chandra Vidyarnava, notes could be a reference to Buddhist monks (367–8). Vidyarnava, in his introduction to the text, also notes the influence of the Buddhist period in the writing of several Smritis. He identifies the usage of the word ‘vinaya’ meant as ‘discipline’ among the Buddhist and not as ‘modest’ (an alternative translation of the term) to make this claim (xvi). He also notes that though there is no mention of Buddhists by name, they are references to them as ‘munda’, ‘shaven-heads’, and ‘kashaya-vasas’, ‘yellow garments’ (xvii).
27 [Smriti Sammuchaya I. p. 118]
28 Harita was an ancient composer of Dharma Sutras who is said to have lived anywhere between 600 and 300 BCE. The two main texts attributed to him are Vrddha Harita and Laghu Harita. That he is widely quoted in several ancient Dharma Sutras establishes him as a prolific composer with encyclopaedic ambitions (Kane 1930). The Vrddha Harita, which comprises eight chapters and about 2,600 verses, is said to have been recited by him to the mythological king, Ambarisa. It details the various obligatory duties that ought to be performed by individuals depending on their varna. It is also a theoretical study of the nature of the self, both individual and supreme, and it lists the various means by which one can attain moksha. Purification from different kinds of pollution, penances to be performed, rules of impurity in birth and death and of inheritance are also listed (Kane 1930).
29 There are not many Buddhist plays in Sanskrit, but Buddhist characters appear in Sanskrit plays from the time of Bhasa (third–fourth centuries CE). The treatment of Buddhist characters in Sanskrit dramas is not uniform. Bharata in his Natyashastra states that Buddhist monks should be addressed as ‘bhadanta’ or Blessed Sir, contravening the conclusion that Ambedkar chooses to draw from Mricchakatika. In the bhana play (a one-act monologue) Padmaprabhrutakam by Shudraka, the protagonist Sharvilaka makes love to a shakyabhikshaki, a Buddhist nun. In Bhavabhuti’s romantic play Malati-Madhava, a Buddhist nun, Kamandaki, helps to unite the hero and the heroine. M.L. Varadpande in History of Indian Theatre (2005) says, ‘Since seventh century A.D. onwards dramatic literature, particularly farces made fun of Shakya Shramanakas. Buddhism had started declining and it branched off into various tantric cults like Vajrayana and Sahajayana whose ritualistic practices included the five Ms or panchamakaras. But one must also note that the ascetics and monks of other cults too were not spared by the playwrights. Collapse of morality was not confined to any one cult’ (152).
30 Ambedkar appears to misread the play to make it work for his thesis. Mricchakatika (The Little Clay Cart), composed in the second century BCE by Sudraka, is classified as a prakarna (realistic) play reflecting society and its ordinary characters (as opposed to the nataka type where the temporal order subserves a celestial order, such as Kalidasa’s Sakuntala). In the play, the hero Charudatta, a Brahmin merchant fallen upon hard times, loves a wealthy, beautiful courtesan, Vasantsena, who in turn is pursued by the king’s ill-bred brother-in-law, Sakara, also the local governor. The historian D.D. Kosambi (2008) says the play ‘flouts convention by ignoring court life and epic incidents in its choice of theme […] The boorish villain, foiled several times, finally strangles the heroine and leaves her for dead, but accuses the hero of her murder […] The heroine is revived and the hero rescued from the execution block. The Prakrit spoken by various characters has provincial variations that seem to be modelled upon life’ (180). Such usage of language in Mrichhakatika was unique to the text. Kosambi points out the caste nature of this aspect of Mrichhakatika: ‘The Prakrit spoken by different characters in the Mrcchakatika has been separated into varieties labelled with local names. But even the Mrcchakatika Candalas use a Prakit easily understood by the rest, while the Candalas of the Jatakas spoke a language among themselves incomprehensible to “Aryans”’ (Kosambi 1985, 14). In the scene that Ambedkar chooses to discuss, subtle satire and the role of social distinctions are reflected in the depiction of the Buddhist monk. There is evidence in the play that the attitude towards Buddhists was not universally hostile. The scene that riles Ambedkar serves to further the comic element and Sakara’s villainous character rather than establish the inferiority of Buddhists, for Samvahaka is not enclosed within a Hindu/Buddhist dichotomy but is a rounded character who evolves through the play. A shampooer at the beginning, who works at the Brahmin merchant Charudutta’s home, he’s given to gambling. With financial help from Vasantasena, he gives up gambling and turns to Buddhism and becomes a monk. In a line of the play he says, ‘Treasure these words in your memory: “He was a shampooer, a gambler, a Buddhist monk”’ (Ryder 1905, 40). In Act VIII, when the villainous Sakara assaults Vasantasena and leaves her for dead, it is Samvahaka who rescues and nurses her. In Act X, he averts the execution of Charudutta and reunites Vasantasena and Charudatta. Contrary to the conclusion Ambedkar draws, being a Brahmin does not exempt Charudatta from being awarded capital punishment at the hands of Chandala executioners. Nevertheless, the question of why, within the text, Sakara as governor maintains such a hostility towards Samvahaka remains. Ambedkar is right in making much of this thread he extracts from within the play. Though the play may not be itself contemptuous towards Buddhism, that the element of contempt does exist, in the mind of a character, is of use for Ambedkar’s purpose.
31 In the 1905 translation of the play by Arthur William Ryder (for Harvard University), and in all other translations, we see that the courtier Vita brazenly mocking Sakara, referred to as Sansthanaka (the governor). Three times in the course of the scene by the pool and garden, Vita addresses the loutish governor not as ‘Friend’ but as ‘You jackass’ (as he does in almost every other scene he shares with him). Vita admonishes Sakara for going after a harmless monk. In fact, in almost all the scenes involving the courtier and the governor, the latter is shown to be a comic villain who exercises brute authority. It has not been possible to establish which translation Ambedkar is referring to, but crucial elements in the dialogue between Vita and Sakara that figure in Ryder’s and A.L. Basham’s translations—both dateable to Ambedkar’s time—are missing here.
32 While the Brahmin is exempted from capital punishment irrespective of his crime in texts such as the Manusmriti, it is not a rule that was necessarily followed. At variance with the conclusion Ambedkar draws from within the play, the Brahmin Charudatta is indeed sentenced to capital punishment. He is of course saved in the last act thanks to the Buddhist monk Samvahaka’s crucial role.
33 Gail Omvedt (2003) points out the considerable lack of evidence to substantiate the decline of Buddhism. She rejects the accepted theories, one of the main claims being that persecution of Buddhists only played a minor role in the process. Rather, it is generally held that the system of monasteries that increasingly became involved in commercial activities and banking, drained surplus labour into itself leading to increased irrelevance to people’s everyday lives. The monasteries have also been termed as decadent and as having moved away from the central tenets of austerity. They are described as exploitative centers which flourished on tax incentives and offered nothing in return. On the other hand, the adoption (at least nominally) of the Buddhist tenet Ahimsa by the Brahmins is said to have transformed Hinduism into devotional worship of Shiva and Vishnu (whose various avatars could easily subsume local deities). This came to fill the religious gap left by Buddhist (anti-) theism in popular consciousness. Moreover, the Brahmanical expertise in sacrificial rites and knowledge of seasons is said to have been crucial in rallying the agricultural populace into the Hindu fold. The eighth century Adi Sankara is said to have been crucial in this transformative process with his revivalist institution-building project. The deathblow to Buddhism is said to have been dealt by the Turkish invaders who put the final nail in the coffin of a religion already in decline. Drawing upon colonialist readings of Islam, Ambedkar, too, believes this. In the unfinished unpublished manuscript, “The Decline and Fall of Buddhism”, (1987a, 229–38), he writes: ‘There can be no doubt that the fall of Buddhism in India was due to the invasions of the Musalmans. Islam came out as the enemy of the ‘But’. The word ‘But’ as everybody knows is an Arabic word and means an idol. Not many people however know what the derivation of the word ‘But’ is ‘But’ is the Arabic corruption of Buddha. Thus the origin of the word indicates that in the Moslem mind idol worship had come to be identified with the Religion of the Buddha’ (229–30). Regretting that the ‘sword of Islam’ thesis was accepted even by Ambedkar, Omvedt labels all the above theories as ‘facile generalisations’ and laments the absence of any evidentiary Buddhist texts from this period, which is part of the larger problem of lack of historiographical evidence from ancient times in Indian history in general. She says there is a glaring lack of sociological texts which serve as direct chronicles of the lived experiences of subcontinental peoples. The lack of descriptive texts is matched by an abundance of Brahmanic prescriptive ones. Relying on Hsuan Tsang’s descriptions of violence against Buddhists and noting that it was much more beneficial for the ruling classes to maintain Brahmanism rather than a more egalitarian Buddhism, Omvedt concludes that large-scale violent reprisal remains the most probable explanation for the disappearance of the religion. Omvedt: ‘To view “Muslims” uniquely as destroyers and looters of monasteries and temples in contrast to people of other religions (e.g. ‘Hindus’) is an erroneous concept, a product of the Hindutva ideology that began to take shape in 19th century India’ (2004, 174). Omvedt points out several contradictions that plague the above-mentioned theories. For instance, how could the mere agricultural orientation of Brahmins supplant the commercial strength of the Buddhist, especially in an age where foreign trade was becoming widespread? Moreover, if indeed the Buddhists were closely tied to the commercial realm of things, how then would their existence be seen as parasitic and unproductive? If they were instrumental in moving the people away from the ‘productive’ lives of ritualistic-agrarianism, could this not be construed as more of a threat to the ruling classes by creating a new configuration of power? It is also known that Buddhism very easily accommodated itself with local ritual cultures and that its questioning of the previous Vedic hegemony didn’t merely result in a belief-void, but instead offered simple tenets of a moral life. The main problem, Omvedt reckons, is that historians have relied on Brahmanic texts to map out the situation of the past. Buddhist texts on the other hand have mostly been destroyed and the only ones available are from outside the subcontinent. Also, Brahmanic texts quite openly sanction the use of violence to get rid of ‘heretics’ (Pashandas). Although, DeCaroli (2004) notes that Buddhism was extremely flexible in incorporating itself into existing local traditions (see p. 135–6 note 23), Kosambi (2008, 166–76) identifies the decline in importance of yajna rituals after the proliferation of Sramanic traditions, like Buddhism and Jainism, as central to the branching out of Brahmin priests into more accommodative of laukika traditions that included tribes who previously weren’t a part of caste society. The adoption of tribal gods like Shiva, Nandi, the various avatars of Vishnu are good examples. Further Kosambi points out that even during the reign of Buddhist kings, Brahmins held important positions and were important in securing ‘illustrious’ lineages in order to legitimize and grant prestige to the kings.