1 [This definition of religion is by Prof Emile Durkheim. See his The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 47. For the discussion that follows I have drawn upon the same authority.] Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) was one of the founders of sociology, who was concerned with establishing the discipline as a provider of an objective account of society, much like how the natural sciences studied the physical world objectively. He attempted to move away from generalizing social theories influenced by psychology that appeared more as philosophical meditations than science. In his last work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), he gives a functionalist definition of religion, according to which religious belief and practices are in effect the bond which hold society together. Durkheim’s definition has since provided grounds for innumerable debates particularly for its totalizing and a priori view of society, in which all social practices, beliefs and rituals, are employed for its creation and maintenance. Besides failing to imagine society as embedded in history and constantly changing, this formulation also implies religious practitioners were deluded as to the true nature of their creed and only Western researchers have access to its true meaning. Yet, in the context of his contemporaries, he could be said to have taken religious life more seriously than they did. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim studies the totemic religion of a single aboriginal tribe in Australia, in order to draw out a general definition of religion and make claims about its origin. Much like Ambedkar had relied heavily on the historical experience of the Mahars to draw far-reaching conclusions about the origin and workings of Untouchability.
2 Criticisms against Ambedkar have been raised in the past for relying too heavily on Western sources, or for being Eurocentric. An important inversion of this dynamic is made by Soumyabrata Choudhury in Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme (2018a) that hails Ambedkar as a Europeanist who was not simply displaying Europhilia by using a Western framework in his critique. Rather his was an engagement in the universal realm: that the articulation of the values of, say, ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ found expression in the French Revolution was only a contingent occurrence. It was the truth of the articulation which was important. The essence of what Ambedkar says in the chapter “A Plea to the Foreigner”, in What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1948), according to Choudhury is: ‘Thought is nobody’s monopoly.’
3 With reference to Durkheim’s influence in the field of sociology, Bourdieu and Passeron (1967) argue that even the scholars who were opposed to him were caught within the coordinates set by his work: that being an assumption of a structural entity called ‘society’ and all analysis of this entity flowing from a pre-given notion of how humans operate and co-operate with each other within this structure. The thrust of their arguments situates Durkheim as an oppositional figure, who saw his self-given task as one of opening up a field of radical ‘newness’, of looking at the world from a new theoretical perspective. This was inevitably co-opted and tamed by University Discourse, resulting in wide streams of study which sat quite well within the material confines of the ruling ideology. On the other hand, it has also been argued that Durkheim was very much a part of the ruling French republican establishment. While he was opposed to the ancien régime represented by the Catholic Church, his was very much a pedagogical project of reining in the radical elements of society and standardizing a set of values and principles that would ‘unite’ the people of the nation through ‘scientific’ means (Allen and O’Boyle 2017). Durkheim’s study of religion is markedly different from the contemporary academic discipline known as ‘world religions’, which is more of a comparative field. Tomoko Masuzawa in The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (2005) problematizes the entire Western framework within which the so-called ‘world religions’ are studied and underlines the simplistic outlook which defines the subject: a dichotomy between the ‘venerable East on the one hand, and the progressive West on the other’ (4). In her 1988 paper “The Sacred Difference in the Elementary Forms: On Durkheim’s Last Quest”, Masuzawa closely reads Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred and the profane and brings to light how much more accommodative of difference these concepts are. Durkheim, she claims, was aware of the contingent nature of the emergence of these categories, and he also maintained that there was no fixed criterion that marked the difference between the sacred and the profane.
4 Ambedkar uses the term secular to mean that which does not have anything to do with the religious or the spiritual. In the West, the word is employed to assert the separation of church from state. In India, however, the word has come to imply something else altogether: i.e. the equidistance of state from all religions, a purported neutrality. This was a decision on the part of the postcolonial government to take a strong stance against communal polarization, especially in the wake of the bloodshed caused during the Partition. Shabnum Tejani (2013a) however explores the pre-independence history of Indian secularism and illustrates the importance of caste politics for its present mode of articulation. She contends that the notion of secularism as we know it arose in the context of the communal awards which were instituted through the constitutional reforms of 1919. These awards allowed for separate electorates for minority communities which included Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Anglo-Indians and the Depressed Classes. While the political elite, a majority of whom were Western-educated, privileged caste Hindus, accepted separation on communal lines for religious minorities, the representation of Depressed Classes as a separate element was vehemently opposed. It was seen as a colonial plot to weaken the ‘Hindu’ majority, and leaders like Ambedkar who demanded the separation were openly vilified. This conflict came to a head in the Poona Pact which forced Ambedkar to back down on his demands for separate representation. Before independence, Muslim representation was not as contested as Untouchable representation was. It was the Depressed Classes who were accused of trying to break up the integral whole that was presumed to be ‘Hindu’ (Tejani 2007b). This rhetoric of unity was transplanted wholesale in the post-Independence era under the moniker of secularism which sought to counterpose India against a decidedly communal Pakistan. The much-touted vision of a ‘united’ India was very much a repetition of the old tradition of glorifying a ‘united Hinduism’ which denied Dalits separate representation. Indian secularism from the beginning was a project which tried to wish away the contradictions of caste and of the experiences of minority communities in order to construct a united nationalist narrative.
5 [Prof Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 38] Another important scholar in this regard is the anthropologist Talal Asad, who has closely studied the notion of ‘secularism’ and how the West operates within its guise. Writes Asad: ‘A secular state is not one characterized by religious indifference, irrational ethics or political toleration. It is a complex arrangement of legal reasoning, moral practice, and political authority. This arrangement is not the simple outcome of the struggle of secular reason against the despotism of religious authority. We do not understand the[se] arrangements [...] if we begin with the common assumption that the essence of secularism is the protection of civil freedoms from the tyranny of religious discourse, that religious discourse seeks always to end discussion and secularism to create the conditions for its flourishing’ (2003, 255).
6 In his introduction to the edited volume The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion (1985), Philip E. Hammond draws out the difference between the religious and the sacred. Drawing from Georg Simmel’s conceptual framework, he suggests that the sacred need not always be tied with the religious, especially in the (purportedly) secular age in which we now find ourselves. ‘Encounter with the sacred, or what Simmel calls “piety”, is thus not necessarily religion, but “religion in a quasi-fluid state…” (1954:24), that is, not yet “objectified”’ (1985, 3). This state of piety, or the distinction between the sacred and the profane, Hammond writes, are seen by Durkheim and Simmel not as intrinsic to humanity, but a necessary outcome of social organization. Hammond provides a helpful analogy to illustrate the difference between religion and the sacred: it is similar to the difference between marriage and love. While marriage is the institutional embodiment of love (or so goes the claim), it can be easily demonstrated that the two do not have a necessary relationship. Such an understanding of religion and the sacred is particularly reminiscent of the situation of caste in ‘liberal– secular’ discourse. Just because one disavows the formal structures which proscribe caste society (Hindu scriptures, Manusmriti, etc.) it does not imply that the ‘sacredness’ of that injunction and its material manifestations also vanish.
7 [The curious may refer to page 317 of the above book.] In a 1915 edition of the work that Ambedkar likely referred to, Durkheim writes on page 317: ‘In one sense, it is logically implied in the very notion of sacredness. All that is sacred is the object of respect, and every sentiment of respect is translated, in him who feels it, by movements of inhibition. In fact, a respected being is always expressed in the consciousness by a representation which, owing to the emotion it inspires, is charged with a high mental energy; consequently, it is armed in such a way as to reject to a distance every other representation which denies it in whole or in part.’ This quote points towards Durkheim’s position on the origin of religion in “the collective effervescence” that people living in the simplest societies experienced when they got together for collective acts such as harvests. When engaged together in collective action people became aware of something larger than themselves, which they interpreted as belonging to the spiritual realm. This way religion became a representation of society, which implies misrecognition. The Western scholars who drew from such a categorization of the sacred and the profane were interested in the social implications of religion—the social organization and dynamics of power that the existence of religion signals. Such perspectives have been critiqued for their faith in their own ability to successfully deduce what religion was about and their implication that practitioners of religion were somehow deluded.
8 [The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p 41. Interdictions which come from religion must be distinguished from those which proceed from magic. For a discussion of this subject see ibid., 300.] According to Durkheim, religious interdictions follow the structure of categorical imperatives, i.e. commandments that lie beyond the pale of reason (see p. 270– 1 note 11). These interdictions are concerned with categorizing sacrilegious activities. Magical interdictions, however, have a secular structure and follow a certain reasoned discourse. Breaking such taboos do not offend opinion but rather have consequences that naturally follow from the actions. Durkheim refers to them as ‘utilitarian maxims’ (1915, 300–301). They have a logic of hygiene behind them. There is nothing morally wrong with drinking contaminated water, but it follows that you may contract disease. Similarly, when one disregards magical interdictions, one does not undermine any sacred prescription but rather does oneself (or another) a kind of ‘logical’ harm.
9 Durkheim goes to quite some length about the interdictions made by religion (1915, 300–308 passim). On the subject of food, he draws out two categories: food forbidden to the profane on account of its sacredness and food forbidden to the sacred on account of its profanity. As Mary Douglas, a prominent scholar on the notion of the sacred and the profane, wrote in her book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1984): ‘A total opposition between sacred and profane seems to have been a necessary step in Durkheim’s theory of social integration. It expressed the opposition between the individual and society. The social conscience was projected beyond and above the individual member of society onto something quite other, external and compellingly powerful. So we find Durkheim insisting that rules of separation are the distinguishing marks of the sacred, the polar opposite of the profane’ (21–2). In the Brahmanical context, the cow is not consumed by the sacred (Brahmins) on account of its sacredness, whereas it is the profane (Untouchables) who consume the sacred animal’s carcass. In the pre-Buddhist times, however, it was the Brahmins who had special access to sacrificial cow meat on account of its sacredness. In trying to understand these shifting dynamics, we can look to Mary Douglas’ structuralist reading of pollution and dirt, substances and acts, the relationship of people to which will cause them to be cast out of society—a process that maintains social order. Since pollution and dirt are cause people to be cast out and made separate from the social structure, they are in a very similar place to the sacred which is also separate. In this reading, the sacred is as dangerous as dirt; the sacredness of the cow is maintained through casting out those that dare to touch it.
10 Durkheim dedicates several pages to discuss the various ways in which the profane is excommunicated from the sacred. He does this from a seemingly neutral perspective, from a position that is outside of the system. These discussions for him build towards the conclusion that such interdictions are necessary for the maintenance of religious sanctity: ‘[R]eligious life and profane life cannot coexist in the same place. If the former is to develop, a special [place] must be placed at its disposition, from which the second is excluded’ (1915, 308). He uses this conclusion to underline the necessity of the division between the sacred and the profane. It is Ambedkar who radicalizes this finding by situating himself within the ideology of religion. For Ambedkar these were deeply political concepts that were existentially charged. His very being was marked as ‘profane’ by Brahmanical society. One can thus see how Ambedkar builds on Durkheim’s conclusions to develop his thesis of the rejection of Hinduism altogether in order to annihilate caste, in order to render meaningless this dichotomy of the sacred and the profane.
11 The concept of categorical imperatives lies at the centre of Kantian ethics. It was developed by Immanuel Kant in Groundwork in The Metaphysics of Morals (1785). For Kant, moral duties were categorical imperatives, i.e. that which we have to follow unconditionally even though we have the freedom to not do so. There are three categorical imperatives that govern all moral duties according to Kant: 1) all our moral actions must be such that they are universalizable, i.e. they must be followed whatever the situation, e.g. if we take the universal law to be ‘never tell a lie’, then we must follow it unconditionally even if it means telling a lie might save someone’s life; 2) we must always treat humanity, in ourselves or in others, as an end in itself and not as a means; 3) our ethical acts and decisions must be such that they derive and rest solely on principles and must not arise from external influences, further we must act such that these principles may be accepted by society at large where the society must always be presumed to be composed of agents who are free and possess rational capacity (Johnson and Cuerton 2018). In his undelivered speech Annihilation of Caste (1936), Ambedkar develops an ethic which has Kantian echoes: ‘[The] difference between rules and principles makes the acts done in pursuit of them different in quality and in content. Doing what is said to be good by virtue of a rule, and doing good in the light of a principle, are two different things. The principle may be wrong, but the act is conscious and responsible. The rule may be right, but the act is mechanical. A religious act may not be a correct act, but must at least be a responsible act. To permit of this responsibility, Religion must mainly be a matter of principles only. It cannot be a matter of rules. The moment it degenerates into rules, it ceases to be Religion, as it kills the responsibility which is the essence of a truly religious act’ (Ambedkar 2014, 304–5).
12 The terms ‘association’ and ‘associated life’ have a special significance for Ambedkar. He borrows it from Deweyan philosophy, wherein democracy is seen not merely as a political tool, but an essential aspect of social life in all its quarters: education, personal relationships and so on. Soumyabrata Choudhury (2018a) develops an Ambedkarite reading of a ‘collective life of association’. It is a life of ‘common feelings’ and fraternity which grants the ‘freedom to encounter others in their strangeness’ (28).
13 Mahar is an Untouchable caste in western India that was forced to offer baluta or compulsory unfree service to the caste Hindus of the village. For this, Mahars received no wage but a share in the village produce—the prerogative of disposing of dead cattle (finding a use for everything ‘from the tip of the horn to the end of the tail’, as Daya Pawar notes in Baluta), the privilege of skinning cows, guarding the village perimeter, announcing the births and deaths in Savarna households that held them vassal— 52 such impositions that passed for rights. Under the colonial government, several Mahars found employment as soldiers in British regiments. Ambedkar himself was the son of a subedar in the British Indian Army. (For an account of the ‘Mahar army tradition’ to which Ambedkar belonged, see Zelliot [2013, 45–52].) Many key arguments in this text are drawn from the particular experience of the Mahar caste; so much so that his essay “The Mahars: Who Were They and How They Became Untouchables” (Ambedkar 2003, 137–50) is identical in its arguments and conclusions to the present volume. In the essay, he also argues that the Mahars in particular, in addition to being Broken Men, were also Kshatriyas who were later cast out of the in-group. Which begs the question, can the experience of a single caste in a particular region be used to conceive a generalized theory of how Untouchability arose? Ambedkar was often dubbed as a ‘Mahar leader’ and most organizations he floated had an overwhelmingly Mahar base. Jaffrelot (2005) notes, ‘Indeed Ambedkar met with many difficulties attracting the support of Chambhars or Mangs who considered him to be a Mahar leader’ (76–7).
14 The Untouchables were traditionally not allowed to join martial ranks. However, under the Muslim rulers of the second millennium several ‘outcastes’ were recruited as soldiers and they grew to be quite influential. One such soldier was Amritnak, in the employ of the king of Bedar. He managed to convince the king to pass a ‘Charter of 52 Rights’ for the Mahars. These included the right to collect baluta, a small sum in lieu of the services that the Mahars provided in the villages. This, R.K. Kshirsagar notes, proved to be detrimental to the Mahars: even though they now had a few petty rights, it was expected of them to carry out all the ‘dirty’ and hazardous tasks. Their conditions further worsened under the rule of the Brahmin peshwas who imposed severe restrictions on them and intensified their degradation (Kshirsagar 1994). When exactly the 52 rights were granted is unclear. Kshirsagar states the year to be 1129 CE. However, Bedar was under Chalukya and Kakatiya rule in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Yazdani 1995). It was only in 1322 that Muslim rule was established, when prince Ulugh Khan (Muhammad bin Tughluq) captured it. The following list can be found in a document which dates back to the year 1738, unearthed by Paswan and Jaideva (2004), in which the upper-caste members of Lalgun village in Satara deliberated about the compulsory duties of the Mahar caste:
1. Mahars should be engaged in miscellaneous labour for Patil.
2. Mahars should be engaged in miscellaneous labour for the Government (Divan), etc.
3. Mahar should offer a bundle of firewood (to village headman) on each festival day (Sana).
4. Mahar should remove the skin of dead cattle of the headman’s, accountant’s and assistant headman’s families, and submit it to its respective owner’ (Paswan and Jaideva 2004, 34).
Another document from the 1700s reveals the different kinds of bonded labour which was extracted in Maharashtra. This practice was called ‘Vethbegar’, derived from the Sanskrit word, ‘visti’ meaning compulsory work, and the Urdu word ‘begar’ which also meant the same thing. Seven kinds of vethbegars are said to have been common in the era: construction and repair (of forts, police stations, houses of bureaucrats and dams), porterage of goods including crops and timber, cutting fodder from government land, miscellaneous labour in government offices, handling extraneous work in stables, keeping guard of chowkis and marketplaces, and construction and porterage services in an inamdar’s (those who have been given special grants by the government) house (37).
15 Muslim rule began in Bedar after its conquest by Muhammad bin Tughlaq in 1322. As the dynasty of the Tughlaqs began to decline, several regents in the Deccan rebelled against the king and established independent states. One of these was Amir Hasan Gangu who went on to found the Bahmani dynasty. The Bahmanids were in constant animus with the Warangal and Vijayanagar empires to their south. In 1425 Warangal was annexed by Ahmad Shah I. Towards the end of the fifteenth century as the Bahmani dynasty began to crumble, several regional officials declared independence. Of these, the Barid Shahis of Bedar established the Bedar dynasty in 1489. Their rule too came to an end when in 1619 Bedar was annexed by Bijapur, which was soon felled by the Mughal armies of Aurangzeb (Bosworth 1996).
16 The zeal for cow-protection was only one of the several ways in which Brahmanism gained in strength under the Guptas. Rejecting the homegrown art which flourished under Buddhist influence and was mostly created by those who were lower in the social order, they embraced the Hellenist-inspired Gandhara style. Several attempts to rewrite old religious texts to make them more palatable to the ruling ideology were also undertaken. These would include Kalidasa’s expansive rendering of Shakuntala’s story from the Mahabharata and also the rewriting of the Bhagavad Gita. Reinterpretations of the multifarious puranas and the writing of Dharmasastras were taken up. With the reach of the empire being so wide, several non-Brahmin mendicants tried to become chroniclers and bards to sneak in their own ideas into the Brahmanical fold. This was allowed for, but attempts were also made to ‘Puranicize’ the plural ideas and make them palatable to the conservative tastes of the ruling ideology. The cult of Vaishnavism also became the phenomenon that it is, thanks to the patronage of the Gupta kings (Doniger 2010). See also p. 253–4 note 76 on the Guptas.
17 Imitation was an important concept which Ambedkar deployed in his 1916 paper delivered in New York City, “Castes in India: Their Genesis, Mechanism and Development”, in which he tried to map the conceptual logic of the emergence of caste. He begins the paper by first fixing the definition of caste: it is an enclosed class in which exogamy is superposed on endogamy, that is to say though marriages appear to occur only outside one’s gotra, it is still limited to marriage within caste. These, he claimed, were practices which emerged from one caste: the one at the top of the hierarchy which existed in a theocratic society like India: the Brahmins. In order to explain how this dynamic of caste proliferates, Ambedkar borrows the concept of ‘imitation’ from Walter Bagehot and Gabriel Tarde. Bagehot was an English businessman who was closely allied with state historians; his 1872 work, Physics and Politics, dedicates an entire chapter to explain how imitation works between groups. He makes it clear that such imitation need not be voluntary or even conscious. Rather, it stems from that part of human nature which causes belief and therefore creates hierarchies. Tarde, a French sociologist, develops these ideas further in order to explain the formation and flow of culture between different classes in a society (also see p. 197–8 note 16). Essentially, the practices of those higher up the hierarchy were imitated by those lower down the ladder. As one moves lower in a hierarchy, imitation gets diluted and becomes an imperfect copy of the original. Ambedkar explains that caste is such that it necessarily proliferates once its logic enters a society. Once the Brahmins have declared themselves to be separate and refuse to inter-marry with the outgroup, the non-Brahmins are automatically made into a caste, without any say in the matter. And this leads to a necessary imitation: non-Brahmins now can only intermarry among themselves, which leads to further compartmentalization of society because of the now implanted imitative urge. Ambedkar’s theory is often seen as closely related to M.N. Srinivas’s theory of Sanskritization, according to which those that occupy lower rungs in the caste hierarchy feel the need to imitate and change their practices to suit those of the ones higher up. However, a crucial difference between Ambedkar and Srinivas is the position of their critiques: Srinivas already takes for granted the existence of caste and theorizes about the imitation after the fact, whereas Ambedkar is examining the origins of caste and how it came to be. Further, Ambedkar’s theory of excommunication is an important counter-point to the Sanskritization thesis: he claims that some groups find themselves excommunicated from the in-group in the first place precisely because of their non-imitative urges. Ambedkar terms it ‘innovation’: Whenever a segment of the population (in caste society) ‘innovates’, they find themselves thrown out of the caste order, precisely because the innovation acts as a threat to the existence of the social reality as construed by caste-logic (see Ambedkar 2013, 77–108). Mary Douglas (1984) also puts forward a similar account of excommunication.
18 [Owing to the reform movement among the Mahars the position has become just the reverse. The Mahars refuse to take the dead animal while the Hindu villagers force them to take it.]