S. Anand and Alex George
‘Gaay ki poonch tum rakho, hume hamari zameen do’ ‘You hold the tail of the cow/ just give us our land now’ —Slogan coined by Jignesh Mewani at Azadi Kooch (Freedom March), in July 2017, a year after the Una violence against Dalits over a dead cow in Gujarat
It may well turn out that this attempt of mine is only an illustration of the proverbial fool rushing in where the angels dare not tread. But I take refuge in the belief that even the fool has a duty to perform, namely, to do his bit if the angel has gone to sleep or is unwilling to proclaim the truth.
—B.R. Ambedkar in The Shudras (1946)
B.R. Ambedkar’s The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables?—the sequel to his 1946 work, The Shudras: Who they were and How they came to be the Fourth Varna of the Indo-Aryan Society—was first published in October 1948 by Amrit Book Co., Delhi. It is an investigation into the origins of Untouchability, self-declared as ‘a pioneer attempt in the exploration of a field so completely neglected by everybody’. The long history of Brahmanism, and the persistence of its colonizing efforts and effect, is predicated on the naturalisation of caste and Untouchability. Harking back to the Buddhist tradition of anti-metaphysical thinking—that asserted the this-worldliness and materiality of all perceivable phenomena— Ambedkar refutes these pretensions. Not content with the mere naming of Untouchability as immoral, Ambedkar begins from the premise that its very existence is ‘most unnatural’. At the outset, he acknowledges that:
If any non-Brahmin were to make such an attempt the Brahmin scholars would engage in a conspiracy of silence, take no notice of him, condemn him outright on some flimsy grounds or dub his work useless. As a writer engaged in the exposition of the Brahmanic literature I have been a victim of such mean tricks (90).
Given the general apathy of historians and other learned men and women towards Ambedkar, it is as if he was foretelling the fate of his work. As you will see in this heavily annotated selection, the handful of university historians and scholars who have deigned to engage with The Untouchables (or The Shudras or Riddles in Hinduism) tend to be dismissive of Ambedkar. The book’s principal arguments—constructed using available textual evidence from within Brahmanic sources and by invoking comparable parallels from other parts of the world— are that those labelled Untouchables in the subcontinent were originally Buddhists defeated by a resurgent Brahmanism, hence called Broken Men, and their practice of beef-eating, especially when they were excommunicated and forced into the disposal of and consumption of the meat of the dead cow, resulted in their being stigmatized and cast out of the main village. The Mahar caste, to which Ambedkar belonged, was expected to perform duties for the village as part of the baluta system, free work for which they received ‘payment’ such as the right to the dead cow’s carcass, and hence its flesh and skin. While some educated Mahar leaders initiated a reform movement just ahead of Ambedkar’s time and sought to give up beef-eating to seek inclusion into an antipathetic Hinduism, Ambedkar historicizes the issue of Untouchability (Rao 2009) and is vehement in his disavowal of Hinduism. In the very first paragraph of The Untouchables, he declares:
The Hindu Civilization…could hardly be called civilization. It is a diabolical contrivance to suppress and enslave humanity. Its proper name would be infamy.
This raises the hackles of scholars who in the guise of being bipartisan and objective will not brook such a partisan declaration of intent. In a nation whose intellectual class has been predominantly Brahmin, as Ambedkar notes of his time—and most universities in India still have less than three per cent of Dalits or Adivasis on their faculty against the constitutionally stipulated 22.5 per cent reflective of the demographic reality—the chances of Ambedkar getting a fair hearing outside of ‘unlearned’ Dalit circles have been remote. Caste and Untouchability ‘studies’ (quite like the studies of multifarious aspects of Hinduism) have also seen a preponderance of Western interest, often tinged with a seemingly benign yet typically noble premise such as: ‘As social scientists, it is our aim to try to understand the phenomenon, and the present book is precisely an attempt to tackle some of the general features of untouchability’ (Deliège 1999, ix). Our endeavour, which decidedly resists university discourse, is a recoil against the untouchability Ambedkar has been habitually subjected to.
The Untouchables was published when Ambedkar was in the thick of things as the first Law Minister of independent India as well as Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution. Within a month of its publication, he submitted the draft constitution to the Constituent Assembly in November 1948. Overseeing a Constitution that outlawed Untouchability if not caste, Ambedkar did not think his task was over. He was well aware that the Constitution, however enlightened a document, could not effect a change in the thinking of most Hindus if they continued to control the state apparatus. Besides, there was much unhappiness over this covenant in which he tried to safeguard the interests of the minorities in a Hindu-majority–driven society. Writes Keer in his biography:
It was not that all the members were pleased with the form of the Constitution. There were a few dissenting voices. A member said that the Constitution was worthless as the Provinces were reduced to the status of Municipalities. Another bewailed that the Constitution-maker had discarded the idea of decentralization favoured by Gandhi. Yet a third one felt sorry that the Constitution did not provide for a ban on cow-slaughter (Keer 1954, 409–10, emphasis added).
In an otherwise Ambedkarite constitution, the Gandhians did manage to sneak in the cow. Article 48 of the Directive Principles of State Policy states that the government shall ‘in particular, take steps for…prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle’. It is this caveat that has come to haunt anyone associated with beef-eating and the slaughtering and disposal of a dead cow in contemporary India. Gandhi called the cow ‘a poem of pity’ and held that ‘the central fact of Hinduism is cow protection. Cow protection to me is one of the most wonderful phenomena in human evolution’ (Young India, 6 October 1921, quoted in Gandhi 1987, 33–4). While he condemned violence against Muslims in the name of cow-protection, he wanted to convince Muslims to give up sacrificing or eating the cow, for he, like other irrational Hindus, saw the divine in the bovine. History and facts are summarily cast out; an ahistoric ‘cultural truth’ is proffered as sacral. About the existential relationship of Untouchables with the cow, Gandhi had nothing to say, though he opined, in 1936, that ‘some of the untouchables are worse than cows in understanding. I mean they can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow.’ Despite scores of such bizarre intuitive ‘truths’ delivered from a self-mounted perch, Gandhi has enjoyed the attention and respect, love and adulation of a range of scholars who otherwise have displayed little patience with or interest in Ambedkar beyond the token respects they are forced to pay in recent times because of politics.
Not driven by mere feelings but reason, Ambedkar conducted several parallel exercises in passionate scholarship to dispel and expose such ingrained prejudices and myths even as he worked on the Constitution. His long-time secretary and typist, Nanak Chand Rattu, in his memoir says that since 1950 Ambedkar was under tremendous financial stress and in a hurry to publish as many of his books as he could, given the political setbacks he faced (he lost the 1951 Lok Sabha election from North Bombay and also a by-election he contested in 1952 from Bhandara constituency) and his failing health (he suffered from acute diabetes since 1947). Rattu (1997, 59) lists the following manuscripts Ambedkar was working on: (i) Buddha and His Dhamma, (ii) Buddha and Karl Marx, (iii) Revolution and Counter-revolution in Ancient India, (iv) Riddles in Hinduism, (v) Riddle of Rama and Krishna (vi) Riddle of Trimurti and (vii) Riddle of Woman. All, including his opus The Buddha and His Dhamma, came to be published posthumously.
While this annotated critical selection from The Untouchables comes in the wake of similar work at Navayana on Annihilation of Caste (2014) and Riddles in Hinduism (2016), the increasing violence against Muslims and Dalits in the name of cow-protection that India has witnessed since the coming to power of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014 gave our project an urgency that has governed the selections we have made here. We have chosen only those portions of The Untouchables that dwell upon the connection between beef-eating and Untouchability—that is from Chapter IX to the last Chapter XVI, comprising two-thirds of the book. Ambedkar divides the book into six sections spread across sixteen chapters. The first three sections (chapters I to VIII) provide an overview of Untouchability among Hindus and non-Hindus, outline the comparable cases of outcasteness among the near-forgotten Fuidhirs in Ireland and the Alltudes in Wales in pre-historic Britain (for all of whom he applies the term Broken Men), seek to understand the logic behind separate settlements for such outcastes and crucially argue against the racial theories that sought to explain the origin and proliferation of caste and Untouchability:
If anthropometry is a science which can be depended upon to determine the race of a people, then the result obtained by the application of anthropometry to the various strata of Hindu society disprove that the Untouchables belong to a race different from the Aryans and the Dravidians. The measurements establish that the Brahmin and the Untouchables belong to the same race. From this it follows that if the Brahmins are Aryans the Untouchables are also Aryans. If the Brahmins are Dravidians the Untouchables are also Dravidians. If the Brahmins are Nagas, the Untouchables are also Nagas…The racial theory of the origin of Untouchability must, therefore, be abandoned (Ambedkar 1990a, 302–4).
Here, Ambedkar was challenging the view that caste was a result of a series of invasions—first by the Dravidians over the Nagas, and then by the Aryans over the Dravidians. Ambedkar, amongst others, argued that this was a Western construction which Indian scholars and ideologues—under the aegis of a colonial hegemon—were only happy to adopt. The narrative was one of a master race (the Aryans) and their inferior subjects, and it was propagated in order to emphasise Western supremacy by virtue of descent. Indeed, in doing so, there came to be an ‘Aryan brotherhood’ at the highest levels of the state machinery, wherein the British coloniser would invoke common Aryan descent to ennoble the Brahmin, albeit while keeping him colonized, and claim superiority and dominance over the rest of the subcontinental population (the lower castes and classes). Dorothy Figueira (2015) provides ample evidence of how this identity called ‘Aryan’ was developed and mobilized in the West in order to spur colonial ambitions and claim cultural superiority. Gandhi adopted a similar tack in South Africa to argue how whites and high-caste Indians share an Aryan ancestry (Desai and Vahed 2015). In tandem with the colonial machinery that reaffirmed one’s caste identity, a static society of socially degraded people confined to their position, incapable of breaking their bonds, came to be. In breaking with this elitism, Ambedkar presented a nuanced picture. In Who Were the Shudras (1946), he rejected racial difference as the origin of caste by rigorously invalidating various theories of invasions in the subcontinent. Further, he cites sociologist G.S. Ghurye’s study of nasal indices across castes and regions, which reveal no racial difference underlying the stratifications of caste difference that have come to exist. Following this, in The Untouchables, through interpretive and linguistic analyses, he presents evidence supporting the fact that the existence of the three races—Aryans, Dravidians and Nagas—is a myth. He also argued along the same lines in 1936, in Annihilation of Caste:
…the caste system came into being long after the different races of India had commingled in blood and culture. To hold that distinctions of castes are really distinctions of race, and to treat different castes as though they were so many different races, is a gross perversion of facts. What racial affinity is there between the Brahmin of the Punjab and the Brahmin of Madras? What racial affinity is there between the untouchable of Bengal and the untouchable of Madras? What racial difference is there between the Brahmin of the Punjab and the Chamar of the Punjab? What racial difference is there between the Brahmin of Madras and the Pariah of Madras? The Brahmin of the Punjab is racially of the same stock as the Chamar of the Punjab, and the Brahmin of Madras is of the same race as the Pariah of Madras. The caste system does not demarcate racial division. The caste system is a social division of people of the same race (Ambedkar 2014, 237–8).
Ambedkar’s intellectual forebear, the radical thinker Jotiba Phule (1827–90) and his contemporary ‘Periyar’ E.V. Ramasamy Naicker (1879–1973) however turned the racial theory inside out. They, and several indigenist first-of-the-soil ‘Adi’ movements of the marginalized communities (see Juergensmeyer 2009 on the Ad Dharm challenge to caste in Punjab), postulated a pre-Aryan golden age and regarded the Brahmins as Aryans, and hence foreigners, who imposed the caste system upon the non-Brahmins, who were seen as an indigenous race. For Phule’s writings, especially Gulamgiri (Slavery, 1873), see G.P. Deshpande (2002, 23–101). While communities placed low in the caste hierarchy sought to rally around the memory of equality (even when it was not backed by the rigours of research and science), the Brahmanic belief in the Aryan story, such as by B.G. Tilak who authored The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903), is staked primarily on claiming racial superiority. (Related to this memory of a time of equality see p.132–3 note 18 as well as the essay on Broken Men theory that concludes this book.) Having dismissed the racial theories, Ambedkar turns to the theory of occupational origins in Chapter VIII only to conclude: ‘The filthy and unclean occupations which the Untouchables perform are common to all human societies. In every human Society there are people who perform these occupations. Why were such people not treated as Untouchables in other parts of the world?’ (Ambedkar 1990a, 205). He also does not place much premium on the purity–impurity binary that has often predominated in treatises on caste and Untouchability (such as with works that have come to enjoy the status of classics like Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus (1966) or Michael Moffat’s An Untouchable Community in South India: Structure and Consensus (1979) that are dictated by a functionalist understanding of hierarchy where caste is seen as a ‘cultural resource’ of the people, works that make no mention of Ambedkar’s Broken Men theory). It is then that Ambedkar asks us to consider his very own ‘New Theories of the Origin of Untouchability’, starting with Chapter XI entitled ‘Contempt for Buddhists as the Root of Untouchability’. Our selection begins here.
A crucial reason to not annotate the entire book is that such an exercise would have made for a rather unwieldy edition of close to six hundred pages. Our task has been primarily threefold. One, to illuminate to ourselves what we, as readers in a fractious present, cannot easily decipher of the argument when Ambedkar writes thus, for instance:
Nilakantha in his Prayaschit Mayukha quotes a verse from Manu which says: ‘If a person touches a Buddhist or a flower of Pachupat, Lokayata, Nastika and Mahapataki, he shall purify himself by a bath.’ The same doctrine is preached by Apararka in his Smriti. Vrddha Harita goes further and declares entry into the Buddhist temple as sin requiring a purificatory bath for removing the impurity.
Most readers would find it next to impossible to understand the range of references. All that Ambedkar offers here is a cryptic footnote to the Prayaschit Mayukha indicating his source as an unreferenced volume edited by ‘Gharpure, p. 95’. In the process of explaining to ourselves who Nilakantha and Gharpure were, or what Prayaschit Mayukha and the Smriti attributed to Apararka are, and so on, we not only return to the sources Ambedkar cites but also consider all the available commentary on such texts and the contexts, both contemporaneous with Ambedkar’s time and the latest scholarship.
Our second concern has been to determine and sometimes project and build on the intellectual and philosophical coordinates of some of his ideas, such as his views on what makes a ‘civilization’ when he says what has come to be called ‘Hinduism’ is not one. Such annotations are both serendipitous and intentional. The task has not been restricted to bringing Ambedkar up to speed with contemporary academic findings; we try and bring contemporary academic discourse up to speed with Ambedkar, while also setting up the possibility of having Ambedkarite thought encounter disparate and seemingly unassociated investigations. We have maintained a sense of plasticity in our search for connections; Catherine Malabou’s translation of the French expression voir venir embodies the effort: ‘‘To see (what is) coming’ is to anticipate, to foresee, to presage, to project; it is to expect what is coming; but it is also to let what is coming come or to let oneself be surprised by the unexpected, by the sudden appearance of what is un-awaited’ (Malabou 2005, ix). The third is our efforts to come to terms with the several tables that Ambedkar indefatigably offers when he seeks to hunt down the ways in which terms like Antyavasin, Antya, Antyaja, Asprashya, Svapaca, Pukkusa, Mleccha, Chandala and so forth have been used—each indicating, according to Ambedkar, the Untouchable-to-come, not yet having become ‘Untouchable’ as we understand it today (the 429 communities, including his own Mahar caste, designated Untouchable in the 1931 Census). In corroborating Ambedkar’s investigations, especially in Chapters XV and XVI, our notes overwhelm Ambedkar’s precise and clear arguments. This merely owes to the fact that we have set out to establish the truth value of each claim, and this we felt was necessary because historians of ancient India have blithely disregarded his efforts for being dictated more by politics, contingency and convenience than by ‘objectivity’.
For these reasons, our notes run longer than the core text of Ambedkar. To be exact, for the thirty thousand words from The Untouchables featured here, our annotations come to just over fifty thousand words—an excess that we hope will seem as necessary to most readers as it did to us. We the annotators and editors become critical yet partisan readers who hope to bring the whole width of Ambedkar’s scholarly enterprise to you. Any reader could of course choose to walk past us and read only Ambedkar’s work, available freely online and in previous editions. For ease of reading, and for those who wish to only follow the supple thread of Ambedkar’s argumentation, we have proposed a design wherein Ambedkar’s text shall appear first, chapter-wise, and the notes, in a more compact yet readable typeface, shall run at the end of each chapter. We hope the reader will pause to consider the dialogue we seek to establish between Ambedkar and the present. Ambedkar’s own notes and references are given in square parenthesis to distinguish them from our annotative notes. While spellings and capitalization have been standardized, we have stuck by Ambedkar’s style of using capitals for caste and identity markers. Some of the extended informative notes, which we hope add to the force of Ambedkar’s arguments, have been split across various entries to make them manageable.
As with other comparable texts like Who Were the Shudras, Riddles in Hinduism and “Revolution and Counter-revolution in Ancient India”, Ambedkar often presumes a minimal familiarity with textual debates and knowledge of Brahmanic theology and mythology among his readers. It is, as if, he is writing both for a posterity, which is us and those who will come after us, as well as for the Brahmanic readers of his time who he fears will ignore his often-laborious efforts. It is indeed true that Ambedkar depends primarily on translations of Sanskrit texts by Orientalists, Indologists and colonialists, and Brahmanic Sanskritists for his readings—just as we as annotators do. However, this is perforce the case with most scholars even today. Anyone who reads this annotated edition will realise how Ambedkar reads these sources against the grain. None of them asks the kind of questions Ambedkar feels existentially driven to ask. To give but one instance, the renowned historian of the late nineteenth century, Rajendralal Mitra, has a long essay on beef-eating in ancient India in his 1881 work Indo-Aryans. However, not once in this thirty-five-page essay does he pause to consider the connection between beef-eating, caste and Untouchability. In more recent times, we have the historian D.N. Jha’s The Myth of the Holy Cow, which upon first publication in 2001 ran into rough weather with the right-wing BJP, causing its publisher in India to withdraw the book. Jha—like most historians, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists and philosophers engaging with caste and Hinduism—never once cites Ambedkar nor does he explore the connection between beef-eating and caste. Yet, often they both use the same sources, raising questions of both method and perceptions. When Navayana re-issued Jha’s work in 2009, we appended to it a small selection from Ambedkar’s The Untouchables, both to underscore Jha’s own negligence and for politics—the imagined protection such a gesture might offer us from potential right-wing attacks. (The desire to annotate The Untouchables was seeded then, and we have since kept the Jha title in print.)
What struck us in this annotative effort is the relation Ambedkar forges between truth and method. Our effort partakes of this logic even when we feel free to call out Ambedkar where he gets carried away and errs in his readings, such as with his flawed interpretation of Sudraka’s fourth-century play Mricchakatika, where he sees an anti-Buddhist bias where none exists, or with his condescending and dismissive views on the subcontinent’s ‘aboriginal’ and ‘primitive’ tribes, quite in line with the views of the colonial authorities (Duncan 2005).
The final section of the book is an addendum which discusses Ambedkar’s ‘Broken Men Theory’. Its inception lies in the fundamental tension that is at the heart of The Untouchables. The arguments of the majority of the book have a deductive character; this is true about most of Ambedkar’s investigative writing. However, the foundation which undergirds the meticulously crafted edifice of proofs, premises and conclusions is a speculation. The speculation is admitted and its possibility is defended with examples which aren’t strictly related to the argument at hand.
This can be—and has been—quickly construed as an error by some scholars. At the very least, the contradiction between this basal argument and the logic that follows had led some scholars, who deal with a similar subject matter, to reject the systematic ‘pretensions’ of The Untouchables. At a fundamental level, any academic investigation is grounded in a method (or a set of methods) which comes with allied axiomatic rules. Ambedkar’s method of logical deduction is not merely weakened by his opening speculation, rather he actively negates it by breaking its rules. The question we are posed with is: is this a mistake? Does this then relegate his text to mere cultural and literary significance? Must we just take specific arguments as valid, and deny the validity of the overall thesis?
We reject all these recourses. The addendum ‘Broken Men Theory: Beginnings of a Reading’ is a defence of Ambedkar’s method specific to The Untouchables. The examination occurs at a formal level: indeed, we argue that the most fundamental level of truth is the method itself. With his specific formal treatment of the problem of the origin of Untouchability, Ambedkar invents for us the conceptual tools to connect the past and the future with an insurrectionary logic of the present. History is preserved not merely by discourses but also as a relation—and caste, in Ambedkar’s words, is a regime of ‘wrong relations’. Specifically, caste, as a historical development, privileges not merely specific castes, but rather it works in service of preserving the unnatural idea of caste itself. We find ourselves within this notion today as much as the past is steeped in it. Any study of caste runs the risk of being influenced not merely by the present configuration of caste, but also the material continuity of the past and the present. The problem is that the caste-organisation of the past is materially different from that of the present, not better or worse (that is a separate question) but different. The present interpellation, the relation we hold with caste as its unwilling and willing subjects, necessarily interacts with and infects the study of caste at least at the level of university discourse in ways that are multiple, differential and new.
But the Ambedkarite task is to annihilate this relation— this wrong relation—with the casteist past and bring forth the new. And Ambedkar’s founding speculation, stripped of all its particularities, is of different relations. One would assume that to investigate Untouchability one would have to trawl the particular spatio-temporal plane within which it evolved, that is logical. Resisting this interpellation, Ambedkar forms new historical relations with British civilizational past, with general theories of world ancient history. In doing this, Ambedkar, like many anti-caste radicals of his time and those who came after him, exits the Brahmanical-mythical past (see for instance how Iyothee Thass anticipates Ambedkar but whose work in Tamil the latter is not familiar with, in Ayyathurai 2011). This is not a mere happenstance but is a wager that produces profound philosophical insights.
The methodology becomes militant. Ambedkar’s fundamental fidelity to the truth of equality comes at play in the formal structure of his study. The now infamous declaration in the collective Laboria Cuboniks’ The Xenofeminist Manifesto (2018) comes to mind: ‘If nature is unjust, change nature!’ Speculation replaces deduction, because deduction would mean maintaining a relation with caste and being restricted to the world this ideology would allow him to conceive. At the moment of impasse, where the study would halt, Ambedkar turns the dead end itself into a site where he can perform an equalizing gesture and speculate the possibility of a world where no subject is interpellated by Untouchability. He constructs (im)possible relations. And yet, in manufacturing new historical relations, he insists on the speculative nature of his thesis. This insistence is crucial. If he was simply declaring his work as the truth, he would be creating new superstition. But by placing a fundamental doubt at the centre of his argument—‘I am not so vain as to claim any finality for my thesis. I do not ask them to accept it as the last word’—Ambedkar performs a radical epistemological exercise in service of the present. The task of annihilating caste is accompanied also by the envisaging of a world with new relations, this new relation is unknown because it hasn’t come yet. Just like the past is unknown, for Dalits, because it has been violently erased by Brahmanism. In the present, which is a political present no less, the past as a relational continuity is what we must end. Historical material and ‘data’ are resources that allow us to construe the possibilities of new relations. These possibilities are thought in the universal domain of human experience, a domain defined (in Ambedkar’s case, as the principle of equality, and even through his particular mode of deductive reasoning) at particular sites against the grain of a restrictive present. Ambedkar’s method enables the exit from merely studying culture in our superstitious corners and offers an ontology of objects, a material possibility of the new. When he uses historical material to construct new relations, Ambedkar sets a precedent. Of thinking the possibilities in the past and the future.
And yet what remains true for Ambedkar, as also for other anti-caste thinkers, is the materialism that is inherent in their speculations and their general political position. The materialism we see in Ambedkar is one that does not restrict itself to mere critical analysis of Brahmanism and instead posits a real, positive statement about Untouchable subjects and their existence in history. This position comes with an underlying principle which is a judgement on what the nature of reality itself is. Having reached this highly abstract and philosophical point in analyzing Ambedkar’s theory, we have explored its ontological stakes in light of the contemporary developments in the ‘speculative realist’ school of thought. Ours is an attempt to study Ambedkar in tandem with the latest understanding of what the term ‘materialism’ itself means, where materialism has become increasingly twinned with the term ‘speculation’; we believe that we have uncovered a strange proximity in this unlikely juxtaposition. In 1951, the communist leader and writer S.A. Dange while criticizing Ambedkar referred to him as ‘unprincipled and opportunist’. This has continued to be the usual Hindu attitude, albeit in different registers. Against this, we assert the force of Ambedkar’s logic and systematicity.
Even in the preface to his 1946 work Who Were the Shudras— such as in the epigraph that frames this preface—Ambedkar anticipates criticisms that could, and have been, raised against him for breaching the disciplinary and caste lines, and for studying Sanskrit texts in translation, in order to reach his partisan conclusions, where he explains why he needs to enter ‘the prohibited field’:
[S]ome may question my competence to handle the theme [of such a study]. I have already been warned that while I may have a right to speak on Indian politics, religion and religious history are not my field and that I must not enter it…I am ready to admit that I am not competent to speak even on Indian politics. If the warning is for the reason that I cannot claim mastery over the Sanskrit language, I admit this deficiency. But I do not see why this should disqualify me altogether (1990b, 11).
However, Ambedkar’s approach to the question of history of Untouchability is not to be celebrated merely because he transgresses and breaches bastions of privilege, but because the questions he asks and the answers he offers have a renewed relevance in our times—not just for Untouchability but for the end of caste as such.
Hence this annotative exercise—Beef, Brahmins and Broken Men—is a fool’s errand since the wise angels are still to wake from their sleep.
Ambedkar, B.R. [1948] 1990a. The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables? In BAWS 7. Edited by Vasant Moon. Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra.229–382.
——. [1946] 1990b. Who Were the Shudras? How they came to be the Fourth Varna in the Indo-Aryan Society. In BAWS 7. Edited by Vasant Moon. Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra.1–227.
——. [1936] 2014. Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition. Edited by S. Anand. New Delhi: Navayana.
Ayyathurai, Gajendran. 2011. “Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness: Pandit Iyothee Thass, Tamil Buddhism, and the Marginalized in South India”. PhD thesis. New York: Columbia University.
Deliège, Robert. 1999. The Untouchables of India. Trans. from the French by Nora Scott. Oxford: Berg.
Desai, Ashwin, and Goolam Vahed. 2015. The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire. New Delhi: Navayana.
Deshpande, G.P. (ed.) 2002. Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule. New Delhi: LeftWord Books.
Dumont, Louis. 1966/1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications. Complete revised English edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Duncan, Ian. 2005. “Ambedkar, Ambedkarites and the Adivasi: The Dog that Didn’t Bark in the Night”. Paper presented at the International Conference on Reinterpreting Adivasi Movements in South Asia, University of Sussex. Accessed from Academia. edu 20 January 2019.
Figueira, Dorothy M. 2015. Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority Through Myths of Identity. New Delhi: Navayana.
Gandhi, M.K. 1987. The Essence of Hinduism. Compiled and edited by V.B. Kher. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publication House.
Jha, D. N. 2001/2009. The Myth of the Holy Cow. New Delhi: Navayana.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2009. Religious Rebels in the Punjab: The Ad Dharm Challenge to Caste. New Delhi: Navayana.
Keer, Dhananjay. 1954/2001. Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan.
Laboria Cuboniks. 2018. The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation. London: Verso.
Malabou, Catherine. 2005. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. from the French by Lisabeth During. London: Routledge.
Mitra, Rajendralal. 1881. Indo-Aryans: Contributions towards the Elucidation of their Ancient and Mediaeval History (2 vols). Calcutta: W. Newman & Co.
Moffatt, Michael. 1979. An Untouchable Community in South India: Structure and Consensus. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rattu, Nanak Chand. 1997. Last Few Years of Dr Ambedkar. New Delhi: Amrit Publishing House.
Rao, Anupama. 2009. Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tilak, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar. 1903. The Arctic Home in the Vedas: Being Also a New Key to the Interpretation of Many Vedic Texts and Legends. Poona: Tilak Bros.