1 Current scholarship affirms Ambedkar. Olivelle (1999, xxiv) says that a large number of works dealing with dharma— composed in an aphoristic style known as Sutra—were likely composed in the centuries immediately prior to the common era, and that they ‘belong to the same literary tradition that produced the works comprising the scriptural corpus of the Veda’ (xxv). Most Dharma Sutras are lost and only four—of Apastamba, Gautama, Vasishtha and Baudhayana—have survived. The Smritis—attributed to Manu, Yajnavalkya, Narada and so on—are regarded as Dharmasastra texts. Ancient Brahmanic texts are divided into two kinds—Smriti (passed through memory, tradition) and shruti (transmitted orally via hearing, revelation). C.J. Fuller (2003, 484) notes that the British administrators depended on Dharmasastras such as the Manusmriti to develop a legal system for India, thus subjecting the Hindu population as a whole to a Brahmanical legal code. For the most authoritative, exhaustively annotated edition (1,131 pages) of the Manusmriti, see Olivelle (2005).
2 For a definitive modern edition of the Dharma Sutras see Olivelle’s Dharmasutras: The Law Codes of Apastamba, Gautama, Baudhayana, and Vasistha (1999). Ambedkar often cited from Bühler’s various translations but in what ensues he refers primarily to Kane (1941a).
3 Ambedkar’s secondary source for the table reproduced here is Kane’s chapter on “Untouchability” in History of Dharmasastra (Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law) Vol. II, Part I that details references to ideas of Untouchables/Untouchability since the Rig Vedic period. Says Kane, ‘Among the earliest occurrences of the word asprsya (as meaning untouchables in general) is that in Visnu Dh. S. V.104; Kātyāyana also uses the word in that sense. [A footnote here in Kane’s text references Kātyāyana 433 and 783.] It will have been seen from the quotations above that candalas, mlecchas and Parasikas are placed on the same level as regards being asprsya’ (1941a, 172–3). Julius Jolly’s edition of the Vishnu Smriti, The Institutes of Vishnu (1880, x), says: ‘The Vishnu-smriti or Vaishnava Dharma-sastra or Vishnusutra is in the main a collection of ancient aphorisms on the sacred laws of India, and as such it ranks with the other ancient works of this class which have come down to our time.’ V.104 reads: ‘If one who (being a member of the Kandâlas or some other low caste) must not be touched, intentionally defiles by his touch one who (as a member of a twice-born caste) may be touched (by other twice-born persons only), he shall be put to death’ (1880, 33–4, emphases added).
4 Olivelle and Davis say: ‘A few lost Dharmasastras have been reconstituted by collecting medieval citations. The two most prominent ones are the texts of Brhaspati and Katyayana, both great jurists dealing with legal procedure’ (2018, 29) The Katyayana Smriti, said to be the first Smriti to use the term ‘Asprashya’—literally untouchable—is regarded as among ‘the four major legal texts produced during or shortly after the Gupta period, that is, between the fifth and seventh centuries CE’ (2018, 292) along with the Smritis of Yajnavalkya, Narada and Brihaspati. It was reconstructed by P.V. Kane and published in 1933 as Katyayanasmrti on Vyavahara (Law and Procedure) providing the full Sanskrit version along with an English translation and commentary. Kane cites internal and external evidence to date Katyayana later than Kautilya, Yajnvalkya, Narada and Brihaspati (1933, xv). He renders verse 433, which does use the word asprashya along with mleccha (55), as follows: ‘But in the case of the Untouchables, the lowest castes, slaves, mlecchas, and those who are the offspring of mixed unions in the reverse order of castes [Pratiloma], when guilty of sins, the determination (by the above named ordeals) should not be done by the king. He should indicate such ordeals as are well known among them in case of doubt (about their guilt)’ (1933, 201). As the previous verses state, punishments to other communities are directly meted out by the king but the outcastes and slaves do not merit an audience with him—even as they are punished, they must remain unseen and untouched. Verse 783 reads: ‘The punishment for untouchables, gamblers, slaves, for mlecchas, for persistent sinners, and for those who are born of unions in the reverse order of castes is beating (whipping) and not in money’ (281).Notwithstanding the gross injustices pronounced in the text, Kane in his preface says Katyayana on vyavahara (law and procedure) ‘represents the high water-mark of smriti literature’ (1933, i), a feeling contemporary Indological scholars share. Both Ambedkar and Aktor cite Kane (1941a), yet we find that Ambedkar’s 1948 work (or any of his other writings on Brahmanic Hinduism) is rarely referred to among both historians and Indological scholars working on ancient India, caste and such. When Vivekanand Jha and his mentor R.S. Sharma do engage with Ambedkar, they are dismissive of what they call his tall, untenable claims (see p. 308–9 note 33 and p. 321–2 note 66). Ambedkar admittedly does not approach Untouchability in a cold academic tone, but treats it as an aspect of history that irreparably affects him and condemns a wide swathe of population to an unequal life. The academic Untouchability Ambedkar is condemned to by the learned becomes all the more stark when modern scholars (D.N. Jha in The Myth of the Holy Cow or Mikael Aktor in his many essays on Untouchability), with the necessary institutional support and access, often citing the exact same verses through the same secondary sources, arrive often at the near-same deductions as Ambedkar. Except, the questions they ask and the conclusions they draw tend to be at odds. Significantly, the why, how and wherefore of untouchability cause Ambedkar to explore the connection between beef-eating and Untouchability, questions that do not concern either D.N. Jha, V. Jha, Sharma or Aktor; a clear material disjunction is palpable while ‘scholars of note’ assiduously trawl through Brahmanical paperwork, Ambedkar turns to a material point of memory—beef—which was consequential in his and his community’s life and infuses it with theoretical life.
5 Says Kane in an entry under Antya: ‘According to Vas. Dh. S. 16.30, Manu IV. 79, VIII. 68, Yaj. I. 148, 197, Atri 251, Likhita 92, verse Apastamba (III.1) this word is a generic appellation for all lowest castes like the candala…The word ‘Bahya’ has the same sense. Ap. Dh. S. I. 3. 9.18 says that there is a cessation of Vedic study on the day on which Bahyas enter a village; vide also Narada (155), Visnu Dh. S. 16.14’ (1941a, 69–70). Olivelle (1999, xxvi): ‘Gautama and Vasistha…are ancient seers. They could not have been the historical authors of the texts ascribed to them. These texts represent some of the earliest evidence for a phenomenon that became common in the versified Smritis, namely the emergence of eponymous literature, that is, the ascription of treatises to eminent persons of the mythical past.’ Olivelle renders 16.30, which is part of a discussion on who may serve as witnesses: ‘For women, he should get women to act as witnesses; for twice-born men, twice-born men of equal standing; for Sudras, Sudras; and for the lowest caste people, men of the lowest birth’ (1999, 291).
6 Chapter IV of the Manusmriti deals with how a Brahmana must live in this world. Bühler renders IV.79 as: ‘Let him not stay together with outcasts, nor with Kandalas, nor with Pukkasas, nor with fools, nor with overbearing men, nor with low-caste men, nor with Antyavasayins’ (1886, 141). Doniger and Smith (1991, 81): ‘He should not live with people who have fallen, nor with “Fierce” Untouchables, “Tribals”, fools, arrogant men, men of the lowest castes, and “Those Who End Up at the Bottom”.’ Historian R.S. Sharma offers evidence of how several Pali and Buddhist texts and Jataka stories held views that echoed the Brahmanic texts: ‘Several despised jatis of the Buddhist texts roughly correspond to the untouchable sections of Brahmanical society. According to the Buddhist and Jain texts the candalas and the pukkusas were not included in the Sudra varna’ (1990, 125). In the third revised edition of his 1958 study Sudras in Ancient India, he says (337): ‘Antyavasayins, though defined as a separate mixed caste in Vasistha and Manu, seems to have been an omnibus term applied to all the untouchables.’ In his classic work Buddhist India, T.W. Rhys Davids, a scholar Ambedkar consults often, concurs (1903, 55): ‘We hear in both Jain and Buddhist books of aboriginal tribes, Chandalas and Pukkusas, who were more despised even than these low tribes and trades.’ Rhys Davids says that while ‘the fact of frequent intermarriage is undoubted’, ‘the great chasm between the proudest Kshatriya on the one hand and the lowest Chandala on the other was bridged over by a number of almost imperceptible stages, and the boundaries between these stages were constantly being overstepped, still there were also real obstacles to unequal unions. Though the lines of demarcation were not yet drawn hard and fast, we still have to suppose, not a state of society where there were no lines of demarcation at all, but a constant struggle between attracting and repelling forces’ (1903, 60).
7 Bühler (1886, 266): ‘Women should give evidence for women, and for twice-born men twice-born men (of the) same (kind), virtuous sudras for sudras, and men of the lowest castes for the lowest.’ Doniger and Smith, who say Bühler’s translation is unreadable for its bad English and interpolation of commentaries into the text, render it, quite similarly, as: ‘Women should be witnesses for women, and twice-born men for twice-born men who are like them; good servants for servants, and men born of the lowest castes for men of the lowest castes’ (1991, 68).
8 The Apastamba Dharma Sutra has only two books. Kane lists III.1 as featuring the term Antya and following him Ambedkar lists the same, but Olivelle’s edition of the four major Dharma Sutras including Apastamba does not feature a Book 3.
9 Olivelle and Davis (2018, 26): ‘Yajñavalkya was the most influential writer after Manu in terms of his effect on the later tradition. The text was composed probably in the fourth or fifth century CE in Eastern India during the rule of the Guptas.’ I.148, which pertains to the duties of a Snataka Brahmin, reads: ‘[the study of Vedas should be stopped when interrupted by] the voice of a dog, a jackal, an ass, an owl, a Sâma (chanting), a bamboo, or one in distress (is heard). In the neighbourhood of impurities, a corpse, a Sudra, an Antyaja, a cemetery or an outcast’ (in Vidyarnava 1918, 253). According to the Monier-Williams dictionary, Snataka is a Brahmin who, after performing the ceremonial lustrations required on his finishing his studentship as a Brahmacharin under a religious teacher, returns home and begins the second period of his life, as a Grihastha. There are three kinds of Snataka—vidya, a vrata [who has completed the vows, such as fasting, continence etc., without the Vedas], and a vidya-vrata or ubhaya snataka [who has completed both Vedas and vows], the last being the highest. I.197, part of chapter 7 that lists methods of purification for a Brahmin, reads: ‘The mud and waters of the road if touched by out-castes (Antya) and dogs and crows become pure by the wind alone so also houses built of burnt brick’ (Vidyarnava 1918, 291). See also p. 235–6 note 35.
10 Ambedkar lists this vide Kane 1941a, 70 (see p. 291–2 note 3 above). There are no scholarly editions of Atri Smriti or Likhita Smriti that could be referred to. Atri is a Rig Vedic ancestor; Mandala V of the Rig Veda is attributed to him and known as the Atri Mandala, though Jamison and Brereton say he was not the author of all the verses in the Mandala but his gotra-clan, the Atris, sang most of them (2014, 659). The Atri Smriti takes his antiquated name merely as a legitimacy-seeking exercise, just like many shastraic texts claim mythic rishis as authors.
11 Both Ambedkar (1948, 132) and the BAWS edition list this erroneously as ‘1.2.39.18’ via his source Kane (1941a, 70) who lists it as ‘1.3.9.18’. Kane likely referred to George Bühler who, in 1868, during his term as professor of Oriental languages at Elphinstone College in Bombay (where Ambedkar would study), collated five different extant handwritten manuscript editions of the work (two each from Pune and Nashik and one from Madras) and published it in Sanskrit with the subtitle ‘Aphorisms of the Sacred Law of the Hindus’. In 1879, Bühler published an extensively annotated translation of the Apastamba Dharma Sutra along with Gautama Dharma Sutra as the second volume of the Sacred Books of the East edited by Max Müller and he went on to do the Sutras of Vasistha and Baudhayana (with Olivelle to follow in his footsteps in 1999) and did an edition of Manusmriti as well. The Apastamba Dharma Sutra is written in lines of aphoristic prose and not in the sloka/verse format. The line that corresponds (with the reference to Bahya) occurs in Bühler under 1.3.9.18 as part of a list of injunctions for a Brahmin about Vedic recitation and its suspension, where it appears that at the trigger of flimsy and whimsical excuses (regarded as ‘inauspicious’), a Brahmin must desist from reciting the Veda: ‘14. (He shall not study in a village) in which a corpse lies; 15. Nor in such a one where Kandalas live. 16. He shall not study whilst corpses are being carried to the boundary of the village, 17. Nor in a forest, if (a corpse of a Kandala) is within sight. 18. And if outcasts have entered the village, he shall not study on that day, 19. Nor if good men (have come). 20. If it thunders in the evening, (he shall not study) during the night…’ (Bühler 1898 I, 34–5; see also Olivelle 1999, 17). Crucially, Bühler, who renders Bahya as outcast, has this footnote: ‘Haradatta [a commentator] explains Bāhya, ‘outcasts’, by ‘robbers, such as Ugras and Nishadas’. But, I think, it means simply such outcasts as live in the forest or outside the village in the Vâdî, like the Dhers, Mahârs, Mângs of the present day. Most of these tribes, however, are or were given to thieving’ (1898, 34n18). That Bühler speculatively relates present-day Dhers, Mahars and Mangs (all Untouchables) to Bāhyas—in Hindi and Marathi, literally that which exists outside or is external/extrinsic, or that which has been externed, cast out—falls in line with Ambedkar’s own speculative exercise of regarding present-day Untouchable as Broken Men (Buddhists), except that for Sanskrit-leaning Indologists and historians (such as Bühler, Kane, Olivelle and Aktor) the Buddhism/Buddhist linkage is not a concern nor is it tenable (R.S. Sharma 1990; V. Jha 2018). See also R.C. Dhere’s reading of Marathi bhakti poetry (1984, trans. Feldhaus 2011) from the twelfth to seventeenth centuries around the cult of Vitthal of Pandharpur and its possible Buddhist origins (Dhere 2011, 186–8), a speculative conclusion Ambedkar too arrives at hoping (in 1954) to write at length about it (see Keer 1954/2001, 482).
12 This seems to be an error since the required details of Manu are not given; also Kane (1941a, 70) does not list Manu as one of the sources of Bahya; the references to Vishnu Dharma Sutra and Narada Smriti that follow via Kane do tally.
13 Says 16.14 (in Jolly 1880, 67): ‘Kandalas must live out of the town, and their clothes must be the mantles of the deceased. In this their condition is different (from, and lower than, that of the other mixed castes)’. However, the term Bāhya (as per Kane cited by Ambedkar) does not occur in the said instance (only Chandala does). Bāhya does occur in Vishnu Dharma Sutra later at 54.15: ‘An atheist, one who leads the life of a member of the Kandala or of other low castes that dwell outside the village (Bāhyas), an ungrateful man, one who buys or sells with false weights, and one who deprives Brahmanas of their livelihood (by robbing them of a grant made to them by the king or private persons, or by other bad practices), all those persons must subsist upon alms for a year.’
14 Kane gives this as 155, and in Ambedkar (1948, 132) and BAWS (1990a) it is I.155; however, nothing tallies with the first ever English translation of Narada Smriti by Julius Jolly (1876); the use of Bāhya could not be established in the entire text though the term ‘outcast’ occurs in five instances in Jolly’s English.
15 The reference given here for the Gautama Dharma Sutra doesn’t appear to make sense; it’s likely a typo or an oversight. The text of Gautama Dharma Sutra is divided into 28 chapters and each chapter is further subdivided into numbered verses. So references would have to be given as ‘28.4’, for example. In Patrick Olivelle’s translation, no reference to the term ‘Antyavasin’ can be found.
16 IV.79 in Bühler (1886, 141): ‘Let him not stay together with outcasts, nor with Kandalas, nor with Pukkasas, nor with fools, nor with overbearing men, nor with low-caste men, nor with Antyavasayins’; in Doniger and Smith (1991, 81): ‘He should not live with people who have fallen, nor with “Fierce” Untouchables, “Tribals”, fools, arrogant men, men of the lowest castes, and “Those Who End Up at the Bottom”.’ X.39 Bühler (1886, 141): ‘A Nishada woman bears to a Kandala a son (called) Antyavasayin, employed in burial-grounds, and despised even by those excluded (from the Aryan community). Doniger and Smith (1991, 240): ‘A “Hunter” woman bears to a “Fierce” Untouchable man a son “Who Ends Up at the Bottom”, who haunts the cremation-grounds and is despised even by the excluded castes.’ On the Antyavasayin, Kane draws our attention to a Sanskrit work of the post-Sultanate period written by a Brahmin scholar about the possible linkage between Antyavasis and the community we know as Doms of the present day (often cremation and burial ground workers): ‘Some modern works like the Jativiveka (D.0. Ms.No.347 of 1887–91) say that Dom in modern times is the antyavasayin of the smrtis’ (1941a, 71). There is little work on Gopīnātha’s Jātiviveka (‘Discernment of Jātis’) save for Rosalind O’Hanlon et al.’s commentary (2015) on this ‘modern’ Sanskrit manual which they say was written by a Saivite Brahmin from Ahmadnagar (of present-day Maharashtra) at a time of ‘the decline of Hindu royal power in western India’. This ‘defence of varnasramadharma against the degenerated social condition of varnasamkara, ‘confusion of varnas’, a state to be expected in the fallen age of the Kaliyuga, and portending great harm to dharma in the world’ was composed ‘sometime between the middle of the fourteenth century and the later fifteenth’ (103). Working within the caste categories of Manu and Yajñavalkya, demonstrating ‘a marked hostility to bhakti religion’ (111), Jātiviveka ‘listed the parentage, proper occupation and ritual entitlements of some 85 local jati communities’ (103–4). O’Hanlon et al. note that this successor to Brahmanic Smriti literature espoused ‘a social order consisting really only of two varnas. There were Brahman like himself, and a great mass of mixed people…Gopinatha’s was a world, therefore, in which there were few people of worth, apart from Brahman’ (104, 111). Unsurprisingly, the work holds the Muslim ‘Turuska’ rulers of the Deccan really low. ‘[Even] a Candala is better than him. He is merciless and cruel. In the west, there is Mleccha land. They kill cows. One should not speak the Mleccha language at any rate. He earns his living by cruelty’ (111). Gopinatha’s text, at the receiving end of which were also scribal (Kayastha) and various artisanal castes, may seem obscure but this work of restating Brahmanism for the times, we are told, ‘continued to exercise influence in the nineteenth century, shaping both social reform debates and the emerging politics of non-Brahmanism’, so much that when ‘the Sonar community of goldsmiths petitioned the Bombay government in defence of their rights, as high-born Rathakaras [literally chariot-makers but also craftspersons who worked on temple sculptures], to Vedic ritual, the Jativiveka was one of the works cited by H.H. Wilson, Secretary to the Committee of Public Instruction, and William Chaplin, Commissioner of the Deccan, against their case’ (116). Wilson was the author of the six-volume Rig-Veda Sanhita that Ambedkar often consulted; see p. 163 note 2.
17 Chapter XVIII of Vasistha Dharma Sutra deals with varnasamkara, the consequences of intermixture of varnas. In Bühler’s translation it reads, verse 3: ‘(That of a Sudra and) of a female of the Vaishya caste, an Antyavasayin’ (1882, 94).
18 Kane (1941a, 71): ‘Santi (141: 29–32) gives a graphic description of a hamlet of candalas and calls them ‘Antyavasaya’ (verse 41)’. Mahabharata’s longest section is the Shanti Parva, and 141 is part of what is called Apad Dharma Anushasana Parva, which speaks of what’s to be done when one’s dharma faces a crisis. The section sees a dialogue between Yudhistira and Bhishma, with Bhishma recounting the story of how the sage Viswamitra once finds himself without food or fire for days and sneaks into a Chandalas’ quarters, along a forest, and tries to steal a haunch of dog’s meat in desperation. Part of the description Kane has in mind, of a bewildering wilderness and desolation, here in K.M. Ganguli’s translation: ‘One day he [Viswamitra] came upon a hamlet, in the midst of a forest, inhabited by cruel hunters addicted to the slaughter of living creatures. The little hamlet abounded with broken jars and pots made of earth. Dog-skins were spread here and there. Bones and skulls, gathered in heaps, of boars and asses, lay in different places. Cloths [stripped] from the dead lay here and there, and the huts were adorned with garlands of used up flowers’ (Ganguli 1883–1896, Vol 8, 338). But Viswamitra is caught in the act by an elderly Chandala man, and a long dialogue ensues with Viswamitra arguing that he be allowed to sate his hunger. While the Chandala says, ‘The dog is certainly an unclean food to members of the regenerate classes’, Viswamitra insists: ‘Any other kind of meat is not to be easily had during a famine like this. Besides, O Chandala, I have no wealth (wherewith to buy food). I am exceedingly hungry. I cannot move any longer. I am utterly hopeless. I think that all the six kinds of taste are to be found in that piece of dog’s meat’ (Ganguli, 339). Despite the Chandala’s protestations and rather peculiar defence of varna-dharma, Viswamitra does take away the haunch of the dog’s meat, cooks it with his wife and eats it, but owing to ascetic powers and the practice of the required rituals, he does not lose caste. Most Brahmanic rules are framed such that the Brahmin, at least the exemplary Brahmin, remains one despite transgressions (even if Viswamitra in this case is an ironic example offered by Bhishma and the Mahabharata: born a Kshatriya he becomes a super-Brahmin after much self-denial and struggle). In this light, though the bone of contention seems to be the question of who gets to remain a Brahmin forever, the worse idea is that there forever must be a Brahmin. The persistence of the figure of the Brahmin generates the need of several people imagined to be untouchable—from the menstruating woman within the Brahmin household to the Sudra/ Chandala/ Antyaja/ Avarna, sometimes even the Brahmin male who trespasses tabooed boundaries—graded, shaded in ever-shifting degrees. Without this the justification of the position of the Brahmin, held as superior, becomes fraught. Once a fictive purity is imagined, a million ways of getting polluted become necessary. If the world were filled only with Brahmins, they would lose their mind and reason for existence, for they would have no one to defend their purity against. Anyone reading the Smritis and Shastras would come out feeling that the Brahmin is forever in a crisis, forever swearing by inherent inequality, guarding his turf and afraid of the radical equality that the very idea of Dalit-ness poses.
19 Madhyamangiras appears to be another ghost text cited by Ambedkar and is not listed in Kane’s History of Dhamasastra (1941a). Vivekanand Jha: ‘Vijnanesvara in his Mitaksara commentary on a verse of the Yajnavalkya Smriti, quotes Madhyamangiras to differentiate between antyavasayins represented by the Candala, Svapaca, Ksatr, Magadha, Suta, Vaidehaka and Ayogava and the seven Antyajas occuring in Atri and Yama and including the leather worker…’ (1979, 103).
20 36.7 is part of a set of injunctions which proscribe sexual intercourse with specific types of women: ‘And with a sister’s female friend (or with one’s own female friend), with a woman of one’s own race, with a woman belonging to the Brahmana caste, with a (Brahmana) maiden (who is not yet betrothed to a man), with a low-caste woman, with a woman in her courses, with a woman come for protection, with a female ascetic, and with a woman entrusted to one’s own care’ (in Jolly 1880, 134).
21 Manu IV.61: ‘Let him not dwell in a country where the rulers are Sudras, nor in one which is surrounded by unrighteous men, nor in one which has become subject to heretics, nor in one swarming with men of the lowest castes’ (in Bühler 1886, 138). Chapter VIII of Manu deals with punishments to be meted out to Sudras and outcastes for transgressions, imagined hence real, against the ‘twice-born’. VIII.279 reads: ‘With whatever limb a man of a low caste does hurt to (a man of the three) highest (castes), even that limb shall be cut off; that is the teaching of Manu’ (303). To give some context for this system of ‘caste justice’, here’s VIII.271: ‘If he [Sudra] mentions the names and castes (jati) of the (twice-born) with contumely, an iron nail, ten fingers long, shall be thrust red-hot into his mouth’ (301).
22 This is from Chapter 9 that speaks of the worship of the elephant-headed god Ganapati known also as Vinayaka, ‘the remover of obstacles’. In 1.273, Yajnavalkya says a good Brahmin must not even dream of an Antyaja: ‘Or dreams of persons wearing red garments, or dreams that he mounts on carnivorous animals or he dreams that he is in the company of low-caste [Antyaja] people or surrounded by asses and camels’ (Vidyarnava 1918, 367).
23 It has not been possible to establish this in Mitakshara’s commentary even via Kane (1941a).
24 See p. 296–7 note 10 above on the ghost text of Atri Smriti.
25 It has not (yet) been possible to access a reliable edition of the Vyasa Smriti attributed to Vyasa (see p. 152 note 3) though it is much cited via secondary sources by several scholars from Kane and Ambedkar to D.N. Jha. A right-wing online repository, Hindu Online (http://hinduonline.co), features a PDF in Sanskrit uploaded by ‘Maharishi University of Management: Vedic Literature Collection’ sans any authentication or provenance. In it, I.12–13 does have a reference to the term Antyaja. Earlier in this book, along notes 51–2, Ambedkar cites the Veda Vyasa Smriti and offers I.12–13 via Kane (1941a, 71) although this is I:11 in the online text of dubious provenance.
26 Surveying literary narratives, sastraic literature and Buddhist texts, Aktor (2018, 87–117) identifies three types of Chandalas depending on topography: those that live in the wilderness/ forest, further than even the outskirts of the village, whom he calls ‘tribe Chandala’; those that live at the edge of the village or sometimes even inside it (Chandalas connected with work such as cremation) and are referred to as ‘sons’ in Dharmasastraic literature: they are not seen as ethnically different, and are expected to wear certain visible marks of clothing to indicate their lowness; and lastly, the ‘adultery Chandala’, born of wrong sexual relations, varnasamkara (typically the Pratiloma progeny of Brahmin women and Sudra men). Aktor concludes, almost using Ambedkar’s language: ‘Since these early dharmasastras did not distinguish clearly between ‘caste Chandalas’ and ‘adultery Chandalas’, both being referred to as “sons”. This is a riddle inherent in the very notion of varnasamkara’ (2018, 92, emphasis added). Aktor’s use of ‘tribe Chandala’ harks back to D.D. Kosambi’s observation that in ancient India, ‘the Candala is of tribal origin, as are innumerable other castes actually found today in India—mostly sudras, but some risen by vocation in economic and therefore social status, to a place among the three higher caste-classes’ (1985, 193). The accompanying footnote explicates: ‘The Candalas had their own settlements and their own separate language according to Jatakas 497 (Matangapandita) and 498 (Citta-shmbhutta); however, they were even then so despised that brahmin girls washed out their eyes after having gazed by accident upon the untouchable. On the other hand, clever Candalas could manage to pass themselves off as brahmins, according to these tales’ (193).
27 Mikael Aktor says of this proliferation of terms and lack of consensus on what each meant: ‘It has often been argued that these classifications were speculative manoeuvres, which did not reflect actual practices of caste formation but were applied as a means of recognizing a relative and differentiated inclusion of indigenous and foreign people in the interaction with the people of the four varnas’ (2018, 93).
28 Citing the work of the Indological scholar Horst Brinkhaus from the German, Aktor says, ‘these classifications made it possible to integrate indigenous groups while at the same time establishing a clear demarcation between these and the varnas. The varnasamkara groups were linked to the varnas without forming a fifth varna beyond the scheme authorized in the Purushasukta. Thus, when it is denied in Manavadharmasastra [Manu] 10.4 that such a fifth varna exists, this is not an attempt to deny social facts, as it has been understood by [Louis] Dumont and [Vivekanand] Jha, but a matter of controlling these facts in a manner which respects the tradition’ (2008, 94). Echoing Ambedkar’s thesis in Castes in India (1989a) (but not citing him), historian Uma Chakravarti (1987) explains that the Brahmanic varnasamkara theories came in ‘to explain the proliferation of the number of occupational groups which resulted from the expansion of the economy’ and sees this as ‘probably one way in which many tribal groups were being assimilated into society.’ She adds: ‘Since the Brahmanical system of stratification was a hierarchical or linear order, every new group or occupation had to be fitted into the scheme of the social order in relation to the total system. This empirical reality of assimilation had to be given a conceptual formulation which was provided by the vamasamkara theory’ (29). Furthermore, R.S. Sharma in the revised edition of his Sudras in Ancient India (1990, 332–45), in an Appendix chapter, examines the proliferation of servile and peasant castes by citing epigraphic evidence to show both Brahmana priests and Buddhist monks from c. 200 BCE to 500 CE coming up with mechanisms to ‘absorb the tribals’. While Buddhist monks appointed by emperor Asoka played a key role in propagating Buddhist social ethics among tribals in central and western India, between the second and seventh centuries CE, Brahmins were granted large swathes of land in modern-day Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Bengal, Assam, Himachal and Nepal, in order to convert the people in these regions into the varna ideology, thus facilitating governance and administration. Sharma contends (1990, 341): ‘This is the reason why the lists of Manu and of the later Puranas disclose a large number of mixed castes, all Sudras, whose tribal origins can be detected without difficulty.’
29 The exposé mode here is similar to the one Ambedkar was to later use in Riddles in Hinduism, written in 1954–55 (Anand 2016, 11) which was posthumously published. The extensive tabular exposition of the many contradictions between Smritis and Shastras is especially used in Riddle No. 18, “Manu’s Madness or the Brahmanic Explanation of the Origin of the Mixed Castes”, where lamenting the ‘wholesale bastardisation of huge communities’, Ambedkar (2016, 152) asks (with an exasperation conventional scholars do not betray): ‘If these different Smritikaras are dealing with facts about the origin and genesis of mixed castes mentioned above, how can such a wide difference of opinion exist among them?’ (2016, 149). Trying to understand ‘this madness on their part’, he concludes: ‘It is possible that Manu had realized that chaturvarna had failed and that the existence of a large number of castes— which could neither be described as Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas or Shudras—was the best proof of the breakdown of the chaturvarna and that he was therefore called upon to explain how these castes who were outside the chaturvarna came into existence notwithstanding the rule of chaturvarna’ (153). Sharma’s explanation on this proliferation is outlined in the preceding note.
30 Following unwittingly in Ambedkar’s footsteps, Aktor writes in another paper (2002, 244): ‘Ancient and medieval texts frequently refer to what looks like proto-untouchable groups, such as Candalas, Pulkasas, and Svapacas. But these texts are literary sources in which direct evidence of the actual historical, economic, and social conditions of these groups is very limited. Even the law literature, the Dharmasastra, in which we find the most systematic account of the phenomenon, is not a source for the history of the untouchables but, at most, a source for Brahmanical attitudes that to some extent have been influential in forming the later observed social practices.’ Arguing that Brahmanical literature aimed at ‘both interaction and segregation at the same time’ (246, emphasis added), he says that segregation of untouchable groups was not absolute but negotiable. ‘The concern was with safeguarding and regulating a necessary interaction and not with prohibiting it altogether. In this sense, the untouchables were in an ambiguous position. They did not stand outside the community of the four varnas but at its margins’ (247).
31 [See Manu I.45]. Both Ambedkar (1948) and BAWS edition (1990a) cite Manu wrongly. It is Chapter X that discusses ‘mixed castes’ at length and the matching reference to Dasyus appears in X.45: ‘All those tribes in this world, which are excluded from (the community of) those born from the mouth, the arms, the thighs, and the feet (of Brahman), are called Dasyus, whether they speak the language of the Mlekkhas (barbarians) or that of the Aryans’ (Bühler 1886, 413).
32 [Ibid.] The use of Bahya, spelt Vâhya in Bühler’s text, occurs at X.28: ‘As a (Brahmana) begets on (females of) two out of the three (twice-born castes a son similar to) himself, (but inferior) on account of the lower degree (of the mother), and (one equal to himself) on a female of his own race, even so is the order in the case of the excluded (races, vâhya)’ (Bühler 1886, 408). X.31 refers to both Vâhya and Hina: ‘But men excluded (by the Aryans, vâhya), who approach females of higher rank, beget races (vâhya) still more worthy to be excluded, low men (hina) still lower races, even fifteen (in number)’ (409).
33 Hina as a generic reference to ‘low’ castes is found in contemporaneous and pre-Mauryan Buddhist texts as well. Many scholars, including Chakravarti (1987, 101) point to how in Buddhist texts, ‘[a] basic opposition between high and low appears in the context of jati, kula, kamma (work) and sippa (craft); thus there are high jatis and low jatis…Thus ukkatta [high] jati is defined as khattiya [Pali for kshatriya] and brahmana, while hina jati is defined as candala, vena, nesada, ratthakara, and pukkusa. The latter categories are conventionally translated as low caste-man, bamboo worker or basket maker, hunter, cartwright, and flower sweeper or scavenger, by Buddhist scholars. The same division is repeated exactly in the same form further on in the Vinaya Pitaka.’ Ambedkar, as such, can be faulted for bias and for bypassing Buddhist texts in his surveys and this has been pointed to by scholars such as R.S. Sharma (1990) and Vivekanand Jha (2018). With specific reference to Ambedkar’s case that untouchables were formerly Buddhists who continued to eat beef, Sharma says: ‘It has been suggested that in the majority of instances the origin of untouchables took place as a result of complete isolation and loss of tradition of the Buddhist communities. But such a view is untenable, for this social phenomenon appears in the pre-Mauryan period, which witnessed the rise and growth of Buddhism. It has been contended that those who continued beef-eating were condemned as untouchables. This may have swelled the ranks of the untouchables in later times, but cannot be taken as an explanation of their origin, for except for a late reference in the Gautama Dharma Sutra, there is nothing which may imply that beef-eating was prohibited in brahmanical society during this period’ (Sharma 1990, 131). However, Ambedkar’s main contention—how beef-eating and a ghetto existence define Untouchability in the modern sense— has not been addressed by scholars who are quick to cite the Buddhist embrace of caste distinctions to dismiss him.
34 IV.79: ‘Let him not stay together with outcasts, nor with Kandalas, nor with Pukkasas, nor with fools, nor with overbearing men, nor with low-caste men, nor with Antyavasayins’ (Bühler 1886, 141).
35 Medhatithi’s Manubhashya is one of the most cited commentaries on the Manusmriti. With no biographical facts available about its mysterious author—whether he was a Brahmin from the north or the south of the subcontinent—scholars have speculated that he lived in Kashmir or Nepal. Using textual evidence from the works that Medhatithi cites, Kane infers he must have lived between 820 CE and before 1050 CE and gives Manubhashya’s date as c.900 CE (Kane 1941a, xi).
36 Ambedkar is likely citing from Bühler’s notes where he summarizes the commentaries of all his predecessors and often offers his own take, quite like Kane and other Indologists up to Doniger and Olivelle do. Bühler (1886, 411): ‘Thus according to Medh. [Medhatithi] and Kull. [Kulluca]. But Gov. [Govindaraja] and Ragh. [Raghavananda] understand in the second line with “from a Vaidehaka”, the words “by women of the Vaideha caste.” Nar. [Narayana], who in the preceding verse takes the words ete trayah, “those three,” in the sense of “the following three other races,” assumes of course that the mothers of Karavaras, Medas, and Andhras are Ayogava females. The latter two “castes” are the well-known nations inhabiting Mevad/(Medapata) in south-eastern Rajputana, and the eastern Dekkan.’
37 On the contrary, Bühler is rather careful in making the distinction between Antya (its attendant suffixes) and low-caste, though often these two terms are used almost interchangeably by commentators. At IV.79 cited above in note 34, low-caste men and Antyavasayins are both listed. In fact, unlike Doniger and Smith (1991) or Olivelle (2005), Bühler, by translating less, allows space for a wide array of jati terms that Manu coins and uses (many of them obsolete and some that may never have existed) instead of resolving the confusion in a language (English) that does not have the vocabulary for so many ways of being unequal. Crucially, Bühler in his 1886 translation of Manu nowhere uses the term Untouchable, whereas Doniger and Smith choose to translate the word Chandala as ‘Fierce-Untouchable’ and do not always alert us to the different ways in which the idea of Untouchability figures in the text. For further problems on this, see p. 339–40 note 11.
38 [Kane,History of Dharmasastras II. Part I. p. 167]. Kane begins his chapter on Untouchability (1941a, 165–179) with a curious statement that while the contemporary world may make much of the existence of Untouchables in India, similar problems and conditions are obtained globally, and cites the various forms of ‘discrimination against Negroes’ prevalent in the southern states of the United States, and the experiences of Gandhi and other Indians in South Africa. Arguing, like Ambedkar, that the Vedic and Upanishadic periods did not recognize anyone as untouchable as such, he says there’s only evidence of how some ‘castes’ were held in contempt: the ‘Paulkasa lived in such a way as to cause disgust and the Candala lived in the wind (i.e. probably in the open or in a cemetery)’ (166).
39 In the same passage that Ambedkar cites, Kane enforces this view with further commentary: ‘Sankara explains that by “end of the quarters” are meant regions where people opposed to Vedic culture dwell. This description can only apply to people like the mlecchas and not to candalas who are not opposed to Vedic knowledge (but who have no adhikara to learn it). Besides candalas might stay outside the village, but they do not stay at the end of the quarters (or at the end of the Arya territory). Hence this passage does not help in establishing the theory of untouchability for Vedic times’ (1941a, 167). Why the Chandalas would not be opposed to Vedic knowledge merely because the Brahmin books say they have no adhikara to learn it, is not clear. That there was an antagonism between the Antyas and the Brahmins has variously been asserted by anti-caste radicals, including Ambedkar. As we have shown earlier, the Holeyas were opposed to the Brahmins entering their cheris and considered them inauspicious (see p. 132–3 note 18). Ambedkar’s key point is that those who became Untouchables were not simply barred from Vedic learning, but rather that they were opposed to it and actively militated against it from the beginning.
40 [Kane, History of Dharmasastras. Vol. II. part I. p. 70] In the ensuing paragraph, Ambedkar paraphrases Kane.
41 Kane, Ambedkar’s source, adds: ‘Nilakantha explains that they were the kaivartas and bhillas of the border regions.’ When Kane and Ambedkar wrote, the 1958 Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute’s critical edition of the Mahabharata had not been prepared. In K.M. Ganguli’s edition, a match for 109:19 in Shanti Parva could not be found. In the matching verse in the BORI Critical Edtion, the terms Antyaja does figure, but at 102.19: ‘tyaktaatmaanah sarva ete antyajaa hyanivartinah/ puraskaaryaah sadaa sainye hanyante ghnanti chaapi te’. This, according to Bibek Debroy, means: ‘All of them are ready to give up their lives. They dwell in the frontier regions and do not retreat. They place themselves ahead of the soldiers and kill or are killed.’ The context is Bhishma is describing (to Yudhishtira) warriors who dwell in the extremities of the kingdom.
42 The reference in Kane pertains to Saraswativilasa, a digest on ‘ancient Hindu Law’ written by Prataprudradeva (1497–1540 CE), a king of the Gajapati dynasty in Orissa. Saraswativilasa has come to be considered a part of Dharmasastra commentarial literature. It was published by the University of Mysore in a Sanskrit edition in 1927 by the scholar Rudrapatna Shama Sastry, who in 1905 also re-discovered and published the Arthashastra attributed to Kautilya (see Ellis 1833; Sastry 1927).
43 Bhillama II was a king of the dynasty known as Seuna or Sevuna Yadavas of Devagiri that ruled the Deccan after starting as feudatories of the Chalukyas. Bhillama II ruled from c. 985–1005 CE (Sen 1988, 403).
44 Viramitrodaya is a vyavahara text (a law digest) written in the early seventeenth century by Mitra Misra of the ‘Benares School’ on the Dharmasastra. The translated edition in circulation is Golapchandra Sarkar’s The Law of Inheritance as in the Viramitrodaya of Mitra Misra first published in 1879. Sarkar was a lawyer in the Calcutta high court, and the Viramitrodaya was often cited and consulted in legal judgements in British-ruled India.
45 Kane further adds: ‘This shows that these low castes had risen in social status in the medieval ages by their organization and wealth’ (1941a, 70).
46 [Amarkosh II Kanda Brahmabarga Verse II.] The reference is to Amarakosha, also known as Namalinganushasana, a Sanskrit lexicon written in metrical poetry in the fourth century CE by Amarasimha. A 1913 edition from Poona by Krishnaji Govind Oka opens with these lines: ‘Amarasimha’s lexicon, well-known to every Sanskrit student, is the oldest work of the kind now extant. It is of great interest to note that, though the production of a Buddhist, it has been universally accepted as an authority by the Brahmans and the Jainas alike’ (1913, 3). It is not clear which edition Ambedkar used or if he is citing this from a secondary source. But Amarakosha does list Antyevasin (not Antyavasin as is rendered in romanized versions by most scholars) in the sloka numbered 2|7|11|1|2: Chatrantavesinau sishye shaikshah praathamakalpikah ekabrahmarvataachara mithah sabrahmacharinah. However, since words have multiple meanings, Amarakosha also has the following sloka (2|10|20|1|3), nishaada-shvapachav-antevasi-chandala-pukkasaah/ bhedah kiraata-shabara-pulindaa-mlechha-jaatayah, which lists that castes that may be called Mlechha jaati: to wit, Nishada, Svapacha, Antevasi, Chandala, Pukkasa, Bheda, Kirata, Shabara, Pulinda are the mleccha jati. The scholar Bibek Debroy, who led us to this, glosses the two terms: etymologically, in the word antevasin, the verb root is to reside, to reside outside inner quarters. So it means ‘those who dwell outside inner habitations’. Antyaja means ‘those cast aside from inner habitations’. Ambedkar was absolutely right—neither has anything to do with untouchability.
47 Chapter 16 of Vasistha Dharma Sutra lists the jati names of those born of mixed marriages. Verses 1 to 3 with the third mentioning the Antyavasayin read: ‘1. They declare that the offspring of a Sudra and of a female of the Brahmana caste becomes a Kandala, 2. (That of a Sudra and) of a female of the Kshatriya caste, a Vaina, 3. (That of a Sudra and) of a female of the Vaishya caste, an Antyavasayin’ (Bühler 1882, 94).
48 It is erroneously printed as V.39 in Ambedkar (1948, 137) and BAWS (1990a); the right reference is the already discussed X.39 on p. 299–301 note 16.
49 In his History of Dharmasastra Kane devotes over a page (1941a, 81–2) to the many valencies and occurrences of the term Chandala from the Vedic period to Fa-Hian’s descriptions up to the use of the term in the 1931 census. Ambedkar derives his ensuing list from Kane. See p. 345–6 notes 20–1 where Fa-Hian’s description of Chandalas is cited by Ambedkar, who says the Chinese traveller’s description of the Chandala does not fully indicate Untouchability: ‘The Chandala is not a good case to determine the existence or non-existence of Untouchability. The Brahmins have regarded the Chandalas as their hereditary enemies and are prone to attribute to them abominable conduct; hurl at them low epithets and manufacture towards them a mode of behaviour which is utterly artificial to suit their venom against them. Whatever, therefore, is said against the Chandalas must be taken with considerable reservations.’
50 [According to all Dharma Sutras and Smritis including Manusmriti.]
51 [According to Veda Vyas Smriti (1.910)] It has not been possible to establish the provenance of this reference, but the same is cited in Kane. Even the dubious online source cited earlier on p. 304 note 25 does not feature 1.910; and often with different editions, the romanization and chapterization modes also vary.
52 [According to Veda Vyas Smriti (1.910)]
53 [According to Yama quoted in Parasura Madhavya] Parasara Madhaviya (spelt as Parasura Madhavya in Ambedkar 1948, 138, and 1990a, 366) was authored in the thirteenth century by Madhavacarya who cites from the Yama Smriti, a text often cited in other commentaries but a reliable edition of which has not been found.
54 [Anusasan Parva (29.17). He is also called Matanga.] See p. 347–8 note 25 for a discussion of the term ‘Matanga’.
55 Ambedkar is citing from Bühler (1898, 253).
58 Manu V.85: Bülher (1886, 183), V.131 (192), V.143 (194).
59 In making this seemingly fraught and persistent point, and in arguing a little earlier that those classed as ‘Antyavasin, Antya, Antyaja’ (or even slapped with the generic ‘Chandala’) in ancient literature need not have been ‘Untouchables in the modern sense of the term’, Ambedkar is asking us to turn and return to the radical meaning of such terms that have their root in Vedic Brahmanic ritual: how a word in itself, say antevasya, contained a range of meanings: a celibate Brahmachari Brahmin at one end and the ones who live at the end of the village, the outcaste, at the other end. Contempt and inequality surely undergirded the very premise of caste even within the varna fold, and Ambedkar himself in “Castes in India” (1916) says that caste never exists in singular, is always plural and works as a system. But here Ambedkar wagers much in saying that this cannot be taken to mean the wholesale rejection of an Antyaja or Chandala from all forms of sociality (despite the evidence of Fa-Hian or Kadambari or Brahmanic texts), the way it has come to be in the ‘modern’ sense where Untouchability is hereditary, where an Untouchable is an object of permanent derision and exclusion, not just for the ritual-minded Brahmin but to most non-Brahmin non-Dalits as well as sometimes to Adivasis. To state it more politically, like the modern Dalit movement puts it, the presence of the Untouchable-Dalit is resisted in our times both by Brahmanic temples as well as faculties of such universities as Jawaharlal Nehru University.A university founded in Ambedkar’s name, Ambedkar University, Delhi, can institute an annual Ambedkar Memorial Lecture and not invite a single Dalit to deliver a talk over nine years (see Dalit Bahujan Adivasi Collective’s “An Open Letter to the Vice Chancellor, Ambedkar University, Delhi” 2016). Any ‘progressive, leftist’ Brahmin and the Sankaracharya or any anti-reservationist will gleefully point out how there’s Untouchability observed amongst ‘SCs’ themselves (say the Chamar who looks down on a Musahar who looks down on a Dom and so on, with each resisting connubiality and commensality)—the endless mathematical reproduction of both caste and its consequence, Untouchability, such that there is always someone more Untouchable than one Untouchable—owes of course to the sheer Brahmanic cunning invested in sustaining the thought of inequality as attested to by the range of Brahmanic literature Ambedkar surveys here. This is the perverse unreflective comfort derived in saying, ‘But it is not just I who practises Untouchability, everybody does.’
60 In our concern for producing an annotated edition of manageable length, Chapter 2 (called “Untouchability among Hindus” in Ambedkar 1990a, 256–67) was one of the portions that we had to forego. Here, Ambedkar discusses at length Brahmanic notions of ritual pollution, purity and defilement as defined in Manusmriti and such texts, and compares them to the taboos that exist among ‘primitive and ancient peoples’. Examining how birth, death and menstruation were seen as sources of defilement by Manu and others, he says even the Brahmin was not ‘ever pure’. But Ambedkar’s concern here is what he called ‘hereditary Untouchability’ (1990a, 259) and he adduces a list prepared by the British Government of India in 1935 and ‘attached to the Orders-in-Council issued under the Government of India Act of 1935’. Ambedkar offers the list of nine sections across six pages that, he says, ‘may be taken to be both exhaustive and authentic’ so as ‘to give an idea of the vast number of communities which are regarded as hereditary Untouchables by the Hindus’ (259). At the end of the list he makes in 1948, he writes: ‘This is a very terrifying list. It includes 429 communities. Reduced to numbers it means that today there exist in India 50–60 millions of people whose mere touch causes pollution to the Hindus. Surely, the phenomenon of Untouchability among primitive and ancient society pales into insignificance before this phenomenon of hereditary Untouchability for so many millions of people which we find in India. This type of Untouchability among Hindus stands in a class by itself. It has no parallel in the history of the world’ (265). He then concludes that ‘defilement as observed by the Primitive Society was of a temporary duration’, for ‘after the period of defilement was over and after the purificatory ceremonies were performed the defilement vanished and the individual became pure and associable. But the impurity of the 50–60 millions of the Untouchables of India, quite unlike the impurity arising from birth, death, etc., is permanent’ (266). Unlike pollution-related taboos of tribal and primitive societies, Ambedkar says ‘Hindu society insists on segregation of the Untouchables. The Hindu will not live in the quarters of the Untouchables and will not allow the Untouchables to live inside Hindu quarters. This is a fundamental feature of Untouchability as it is practised by the Hindus. It is not a case of social separation, a mere stoppage of social intercourse for a temporary period. It is a case of territorial segregation and of a cordon sanitaire putting the impure people inside a barbed wire into a sort of a cage. Every Hindu village has a ghetto. The Hindus live in the village and the Untouchables in the ghetto’ (266). To explain this ‘unique phenomenon, unknown to humanity in other parts of the world’, Ambedkar comes up with the Broken Men theory.
61 See the list of twelve in the table by Ambedkar on p. 280–1 under Antyaja and Antyavasin.
62 Ambedkar places much premium on this colonial census-driven ‘Scheduled Castes’ list, calling it ‘exhaustive and authentic’. For a critique of how colonialism and Census freeze-dried communities into castes and how colonialism and Orientalism shaped the caste system in the modern sense, see p. 121–2 note 1 where Ambedkar calls the Census a ‘wealth of information’.
63 Here Ambedkar makes an exaggerated claim in bemoaning the difference in the communities or jatis listed in the Dharmasastra texts and a colonial-era post-Census list. It is likely that much has changed over time. After all, the status of any caste, even those listed as Brahmin, is often contested and open to negotiation with shifting power centres over time, as is clear from how a Brahmanic text like Jativiveka in the sixteenth century sets down afresh who is Sudra and who is Savarna, and their relative positions in the hierarchy (see p. 299–301 note 16 above on Jativiveka). If varnasamkara (intermixture of caste) is inevitable, and if the nature of caste is that of proliferation under all circumstances—historical, social, geographic and economic—then new names and mechanisms of inequality have to constantly be invented, and Untouchability necessarily follows. During the colonial moment, caste and Untouchability were permanently defined and any change to the ‘Schedule’—getting into or out of it—involved (and continue to do so) protracted legal battles that were often untenable. The Pallars of present-day Tamil Nadu (see p. 132 note 17) are embroiled in a struggle to get out of the Schedule while the Mauryas (also known variously as Sakhya, Saini and Binds) of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana (currently listed as an Other Backward Class) are involved in a struggle to get on to the Schedule as an Untouchable caste. Whether it is the Rathakaras or Sonars in the nineteenth century contesting the validity of Jativiveka or Pallars and Mauryas today, these definitions of who does and who does not belong are always contested. In Bihar, Nitish Kumar as chief minister in 2007 established the State Mahadalit Commission enlisting eighteen jatis (subsequently expanded to twenty-one) under the Mahadalit category, arguing that only a few jatis had cornered the benefits of reservation as SCs (see Teltumbde 2018, 70–1). Getting in or out of the Schedule list— originally notified in 1950—needs a bill in parliament to be passed followed by a presidential notification. As on date, only six such Presidential Orders have been issued between 1950 and 1978.
64 History provides several instances of those who face Untouchability moving out of this pale but over centuries. While the category Untouchable remains, those classed as so can change. See p. 283–4 above where Ambedkar via Kane draws our attention to Rajakas whom the Shastras define as Antyaja but who, by the tenth century, had no stigma of Untouchability. According to historian Irfan Habib, the Jats (or Jatts) who are today demanding Other Backward Class (OBC) status were, until the eighth century, regarded as Chandala, an Untouchable jati in the Sindh and Punjab regions. By the eleventh century they had attained Sudra status; after the Jat rebellion of the seventeenth century, a segment of the Jats aspiring to be zamindars sought Rajput (Kshatriya) status (see Habib 1976).
65 Ambedkar takes an important argumentative risk here. This dissonance between the two lists (in the Smritis and the colonial censuses) is explained through their common term: the Chamar caste. The consumption of beef by this community becomes the crucial fact on which the origin of untouchability is pegged. For ‘objective’ academia, which isn’t moved by the urgency of Ambedkarite politics, this might seem absurd and untenable. But Ambedkar’s gesture is worth exploring: beef-eating takes on two roles. It is the remnant of the practices of the Buddhist faithful before the onslaught of the Brahminic counter-revolution. Beef-eating also functions as a symptom: a revolutionary violation even as the counter-revolution keeps growing stronger. And this is what Ambedkar reminds us: beef itself is largely unimportant. It is its position in the schema of caste society that is consequential. Such symptomal objects can differ depending on the contingencies of politics. In the present, we latch on to what these incisional objects, like beef, reveal about the truth of the conditions of certain subjects caught in a system that appears ‘normal’. With beef, Ambedkar captures the body of the Untouchable subject, in a time when they weren’t untouchable, and infuses their position with revolutionary potential by locating them in an anonymous scene of historical battle—a battle whose memory has been erased, but we continue to remember it anyway because of our faith in equality.
66 Vivekanand Jha takes further his mentor R.S. Sharma’s accusation that Ambedkar got it wrong in connecting beef-eating with Untouchability and defeated Buddhists. There is cold comfort in Jha and Sharma at least reckoning with Ambedkar and arguing their differences unlike others who tactically do not even acknowledge his work. In the collection of his various essays on Untouchability, revised and published in 2018, Jha chides Ambedkar for ‘lacking the discipline of a historian’ and ‘prizing his imagination’ to arrive at ‘wild generalisations’ and concludes that ‘his survey of the origin, development and expansion of untouchability is full of subjective impressions’ especially given that he ‘idealized and lionized the role of Buddhism’ (2018, 66–7). In his essay “Stages in the History of Untouchables”, he concludes: ‘It is amusing to see Ambedkar deny the very being of the Candala in his bid to push ahead the date of the beginning of untouchability in this country’ (67). As we have seen, Ambedkar treats the Chandala or the Antyavasin as a generic category and not exactly an Untouchable, and in this he is merely following the scholar P.V. Kane (and the Indologist Mikael Aktor follows in their path). But Kane, a Brahmin scholar who knows his Sanskrit, never comes in for such rebuffs. While Jha accuses Ambedkar—who tried learning Sanskrit in India, was denied, and then tried picking it up at Bonn University in three months (see Bellwinkel-Schempp 2003)—of not having ‘thorough first-hand knowledge of wide-ranging original sources dispersed over a long period,’ often Jha himself depends on secondary and tertiary sources (like several contemporary scholars) that he cherry-picks, a tactic used by any writer who is a subjective subject. Jha prizes ‘objectivity’ and ‘hard evidence’ only to often succumb to subjective conclusions. Meanwhile, as we have shown, Ambedkar contends with the presence of caste in Buddhism and the contempt for proto-Untouchable groups in Buddhist texts, and attempts to extract the Buddha’s ‘original teachings’ from their historical appropriations and distortions. Jha, on the other hand, over-reaches in expressing his love for the Bhagvad Gita (“Social Content of the Bhagvadgīta: Idealized Notion of Caste sans Untouchability” 119–70), a text he deliberately misreads ‘as one that [is] meant for all classes of people in equal measure’ (120). This is pointed out, with dissent, by fellow-historian Suvira Jaiswal in her preface to his book (xiii). The late Jha also displays unabashed and subjective love for Gandhi, another defender of varnashrama and the Gita, and says that Ambedkar ‘took an uncharitable view of Mahatma Gandhi’s vigorous championship of their [untouchables’] cause and even dubbed him a “humbug”’ (45). How Ambedkar anticipates such attacks as Jha’s is explained in the first endnote (p. 92–3 note 1) of this edition.