1 Ambedkar’s Who were the Shudras?: How they came to be the Fourth Varna in the Indo-Aryan Society, first published in 1946, two years before the publication of The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables?, charts a history of the emergence of the Shudra caste. Ambedkar hyposthesizes: to begin with there was no such varna as ‘Shudra’; those that became Shudras were originally Kshatriyas; a section of these Kshatriya kings subjected Brahmins to tyrannies and persecution as a result of a feud; this led the Brahmins to refuse to perform Upanayana ceremonies on their enemies; not having access to the Upanayana meant that the antagonized Kshatriyas lost their status and position in the caste hierarchy and fell below other Kshatriyas and the Vaishyas (who had access to the Upanayana) leading to the the creation of a new jati: the Shudras. The justification for these hypostheses is given by providing minute readings of several Brahmanical texts. In the preface to this edition Ambedkar anticipates criticisms that could, and have been, raised against him for breaching the disciplinary and caste lines, and studying the original Sanskrit texts in order to reach his partisan conclusions. ‘[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 […] There is very little literature in the Sanskrit language which is not available in English […] I venture to say that a study of the relevant literature, albeit in English translations, ought to be enough to invest even a person endowed with such moderate intelligence like myself with sufficient degree of competence for the task […] 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. This is my justification for entering the prohibited field’ (1990b, 11).
2 The classification of entire communities as ‘Criminal Tribes’ was in large part a colonial construction. This occurred in the wake of the 1857 mutiny when India came under the direct dominion of the British crown. Extensive Census activities were undertaken to take stock of the newly acquired subjects. The colonial encounter with bands of roaming dacoits resulted in their becoming an ethnic category with two hundred communities brought under the fold of ‘Criminal Tribes’ through the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871. These communities were declared as addicted to committing criminal offence, and authorities were asked to ‘notify’ those ‘fitting such description’ to register themselves with the government. This was a means of keeping these communities under surveillance. The government assumed that crime, like other Indian practices, could be explained by the hereditary caste principle. Other than the stigma of being named criminal, people belonging to the notified tribes were systematically persecuted, their nomadic lifestyle made unacceptable to state and society, and their activities curbed at every step by constant scrutiny, making them unable to perform their traditional occupations. Once stigmatized and disenfranchized, the colonial government came to use the now unemployed population as cheap labour and strikebreakers. After independence, the so-called criminal tribes were ‘de-notified’ and are now known as Denotified Tribes (DNTs); the stigma of ‘thugee’ in Indian popular imagination remains. The discrimination faced in contemporary times by such communities often becomes difficult to counter because of the specific nature of institutional brutality meted out, stemming from the behaviour-based identity assigned to them. ‘The category of the criminal tribe […] is not well described by [the flexible ethnic] framework, since it involved the uneven superimposition of both modern (and early-modern) concepts of “criminality” on a broad array of highly differentiated preexisting ethnicities. In many cases, these identities were already associated with law breaking. But […] the cultures of illegality that such definitions implied hardly lent themselves to a straightforward strategy of community based rights claims. Unlike Scheduled Castes or Dalits and more recently Backward Castes, groups described as Criminal Tribes were structurally hindered in negotiating strategies of ethnic mobilisation. Any concept of disadvantage they might publicize in this milieu would always imply a heritage of law breaking, and therefore voluntary social marginality’ (Bajrange et al 2018). The Criminal Tribes Act was christened Habitual Offenders’ Act after Independence. In the fight against continued repression, the moniker of Vimukta jatis has been adopted by several members of the community as they struggle against the presumed moral superiority of the state machinery which continues to view their existence as opposed to the ethical sensibilities of Indian citizenry (Bajrange et al. 2018; Schwarz 2010).
3 While Ambedkar attests to the tribal origins of society as a whole, here we see a separation of a community which is referred to as ‘aboriginal’. Several communities across the world have been termed as ‘aborigine’, a word in Latin used to denote ‘original inhabitants’. First used in mythology to refer to the original inhabitants of Rome (Kimball et al. 1845, 275, 288), the word was later used by European colonizers as a catch-all term in order to establish superiority and to unify the multiplicity of cultures across the world into a position of lowliness when compared to the Western world. In India, ‘aboriginal tribes’, now termed as ‘Scheduled Tribes’, is again used to denote a wide multiplicity of cultures: from the tribes in Nagaland to those in Kerala. This denotation only arises when one sees Hinduism as the superior order against which all the various tribal practices are juxtaposed as inferior. But Hinduism itself has tribal origins. The Rig Veda was essentially a tribal text (Jamison and Brereton 2014, 54–5). It is the rise of caste and Brahmanism with its need to expand and assimilate differences into a singular order that gave rise to a subjectivity such as ‘Adivasi’ and ‘aboriginal’, relegating them to outside the fold. Indeed, many Hindu deities including Shiva, Krishna, Murugan, the many versions of Durga/Bhavani/Kali were all tribal gods absorbed into the caste-fold of Brahmanism. In Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (2017), historian Sumit Guha problematizes the notion that ‘tribe’ as a concept is some sort of an originary stage in the evolution of human society. Citing several examples he asserts that organization of society in the Iron Age cannot be determined due to lack of evidence, and that their continuity with later ‘tribes’, which are described as ‘large, stratified, socio-political organizations characterized by diffused authority and collective leadership’ (71), cannot be established. Guha claims that tribes existed in conversation with, and under varying degrees of reciprocity with, larger kingdoms and imperial powers. Their institutions weren’t maintained out of ignorance, as is implied by most scholarship, but as a means of preservation in particular natural and social environments. Tribes often got transformed into dominant castes and their coexistence with monarchies has been noted across South Asia. Ambedkar’s own understanding of tribal communities in his time was influenced largely by colonial interpretations and seems woefully incorrect as has been asserted by scholars who came after him. In his paper “Ambedkar, Ambedkarites and the Adivasi: The Dog that Didn’t Bark in the Night” (2005), Ian Duncan charts Ambedkar’s view of Adivasis and attempts to find in history the answers to the question which plagues contemporary Dalit-Bahujan activists: why did Ambedkar not attempt to form a political union with oppressed Adivasi communities, a solidary conjunction which seems natural and imperative now? For Duncan, the answer lies in how political movements engaged with the colonial government and how in the struggle for representation, those who didn’t fit into the parliamentary paradigm were excluded as unimportant and ‘undeveloped’ for the exegencies of politics. Duncan says this attitude was a result of how colonial politics of representation was grounded in the search for the ‘right man’ who could effectively manoeuvre within existent legislative bodies: within this framework, Adivasis were deemed, as Ambedkar says, to ‘have not as yet developed any political sense to make the best use of their political opportunities and they may easily become mere instruments in the hands either of a majority or a minority and thereby disturb the balance without doing any good to themselves’ (Ambedkar 1989a, 375). Unsurprisingly, colonial officials held similar views about Untouchables who tried to enter politics. Duncan cites the example of Governor Wylie of the United Provinces who wrote to the Viceroy the following in a letter in 1947: ‘The danger in their [the Untouchables’] case is that they lack both education and integrity; their presence in local bodies in appreciable numbers may only aggravate the intrigues and corruption which at present mar the working of almost all local bodies in the Province’ (Duncan 2005).
4 In Ambedkar’s time, one of the more influential thinkers of the term ‘civilization’ was the Australian Marxist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957). Childe formalized ten characteristics that determined a civilization with urbanization as key to this determination: 1) densely populated urban settlements; 2) presence of full-time specialist craftsmen, merchants, transport-people, officials and priests; 3) some kind of taxation levied by a divine king from the surplus produced by his subjects; 4) distinguishing architecture and monuments; 5) presence of a ruling class, which included priests, and civil and military officials who absorbed a large share of the surplus wealth produced; 6) writing; 7) the emergence and expansion of exact, predictive sciences; 8) conceptualization of sophisticated artistic styles; 9) trade over long distances with foreign societies; 10) citizenship determined by place of residence rather than kinship (Childe 1950). Childe also used the term ‘revolution’ in a manner which is similar to Ambedkar’s employment of the term with regard to Buddhism. In fact, Childe’s main contribution to archaeology, and it is a contribution which has been heavily criticized since his rise in influence, was the understanding of development of societies on the basis of revolutions. He also formulated a Marxist and scientific understanding of the triad ‘savage–barbarian–civilized’ to explain the progress of history. It is unlikely that Ambedkar read Childe, however one can perhaps read similarities into their separate works owing to their involvement in the progressive movements of their time. Childe’s specific claims and even understanding of history have been been debunked by several archaeologists with access to more accurate data; however, in recent years there has been a growing interest in some aspects of his work, such as his claim that archaeology was influenced by the subjective interpretation and biases of the researcher, the stress he lay on the importance of difference in various cultures which led to a differential progress in history and his disbelief in any progressive nature of our journey into the future from the present (Smith 2009; Trigger 1994).
5 Voltaire was the pen-name of François-Marie d’Arouet (1694–1778), a leading figure of the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Though primarily a writer and activist, his philosophical tracts had a profound impact on Western thought. Born into an elite family of noblemen, he gained infamy for his critical stances and his defiant writing in a society which was heavily censored and controlled. Although his rebellious spirit is often exaggerated, as throughout his life he did try to fit into the ruling establishment, he was also a prolific attractor of scandals. Several of his books were publicly burnt, and he had to flee into exile many times. The last period of his life was characterized with radical opposition to the fanaticism and superstition of the ecclesiastical and the monarchical orders. The foundational elements of his philosophical programme were individual human liberty, hedonistic ethics of voluptuousness, scepticism and a belief in Newtonian empirical science (Shank 2015). Yet, Voltaire was also a virulent racist and an anti-semite. Strangely enough, his racism stemmed from his anti-religious views. He reckoned that racial difference indicated that god didn’t create man as was claimed in the Book of Genesis. He cited the inherent racial superiority of the white man as the reason behind the enslavement of Africans and the conquest of the ‘New World’ in the Americas. The races that dwelled in the tropics were seen by him as savages who had never written a philosophical treatise and never would either (Harvey 2012). His attitude towards Jewish people was similarly appaling, referring to them as animals and an inferior species of man (Poliakov 2003, 88–9).
6 Critics of Ambedkar were scattered across all quarters of Hindu society. For instance, on 11 January 1950, the RSS mouthpiece Organiser published a long letter by K.D.P. Shastri that ridiculed Ambedkar for piloting the Hindu Code Bill: ‘[Calling Ambedkar the Modern Manu] is an instance of depicting a Lilliput as a Brobdingnag. It borders on ridicule to put Dr Ambedkar on par with the learned and god-like Manu’ (Guha 2016). A more dangerous opposition to Ambedkar could be sensed in the ‘sensible’ writings of Congressist leaders such as C. Rajagopalachari, a Tamil Brahmin, also known as Rajaji. In a book entitled Ambedkar Refuted, which came out in the year 1946, just two years prior to the publication of Ambedkar’s The Untouchables, Rajaji took a more condescending route to belittle Ambedkar. The book was a response to Ambedkar’s What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945), a precise theoretical attack on the pretensions of Gandhism and centrist Congressism. Rajagopalachari, true to his ideological character, says: ‘We have to look for a materialist explanation for [why] Dr Ambedkar and other educated leaders of the Scheduled Castes [ignore and understate the achievements of Congress under Gandhi]. These castes are scheduled for special favours intended for their uplift. Though these concessions are made for the benefit of the scheduled communities as a whole, the advantages accrue most to the educated leaders. Thriving on the scheduled status it is no wonder that many of them want that undesirable status to continue intact. They become detractors and enemies of any efforts that seek to remove the bar, for it may tend to the termination of the special favours based in the depressed condition of their community. It is a paradox but it is true that it is natural for educated and favoured leaders of Scheduleld Classes to do their utmost for the continuation of the isolation of their community and to oppose and belittle all efforts at the removal of untouchability. This is the material explanation for the violent dislike of Gandhiji exhibited by Dr Ambedkar who looks upon this great and inspired reformer as the worst enemy of the “untouchables”, meaning thereby of the educated and ambitious among them who find that the depressed status furnishes a short cut to positions’ (Rajagopalachari 1946, 33–4).
7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a poet, dramatist and novelist who came to symbolize the Germany of his times more than any other figure. Philosopher Robert Solomon writes about Goethe, ‘[His] rich and varied life, as a conservative and libertine, as a young lawyer and as author-autocrat of Weimar, as an artist, a scientist, and above all, a poet, has often been compared to the rich and varied experience of Germany from the first waves of chauvinism and sentiment with the poet Klopstock to the beginnings of militaristic nationalism’ (Solomon 1983, 37n2). In the early years of his life, Germany was a confederation of 234 principalities without a concrete unified identity, still weighed down by medieval rulers and memories of the Thirty Years War. It was with the arrival of the ‘world-soul’, Napoleon, who evoked great regard in the minds of young Germans, that the hope for a new revolutionary and modernized era was kindled in Rhineland. Napoleon’s annexation, though not a benevolent gesture, spurred German thought with a new vitality, with Goethe as its leading cultural figure (Solomon 1983, 35–9).
8 [Maxims and Reflections of Goethe, Nos. 453, 543.] Maxims and Reflections of Goethe is a collection of aphorisms that Goethe collected in the later period of his life on a varied field of subjects. Some reflections he developed himself, some he borrowed from other thinkers and still some he gathered from conversations with acquanintances. The subjects included: life and character, literature and art, science and nature. Ambedkar here is quoting from pages 164 and 190 in Bailey Saunders’s 1906 translation of the book. The maxim numbered 452 also seems to have particular resonance with Ambedkar’s enterprise: ‘The historian’s duty is twofold: first towards himself, then towards his readers. As regards himself, he must carefully examine into the things that could have happened; and, for the reader’s sake, he must determine what actually did happen. His action towards himself is a matter between himself and his colleagues; but the public must not see into the secret that there is little in history which can be said to be positively determined’ (163–4). Ambedkar inverts Goethe; he first publicizes the indeterminacy of history and then proceeds to establish the truth despite this indeterminacy.
9 Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859) was a Scottish diplomat and statesman who served the East India Company as envoy to Kabul and in the court of the Peshwas, before the Anglo–Maratha Wars. Once the Bombay province came under British dominion, Elphinstone was appointed as its Lieutenant-Governor. Here, he took on the white man’s burden of educating the natives and set up several education programmes. Bombay’s Elphinstone College, where Ambedkar himself did his undergraduate studies, was constructed in his honour (Cotton 1911).
10 The quote is taken from Elphinstone’s magnum opus The History of India (1843, 19). The work was written in order to further the understanding of subcontinental history and the work of James Mill who had, before Elphinstone, written his own The History of British India (1817), unencumbered by the fact that he had never once visited India nor knew any Indian languages. Elphinstone proclaims that though Mill’s ‘ingenious, original and elaborate work [left little] room for doubt and discussion […] the excellence of histories derived from European researches alone does not entirely set aside the utility of similar inquiries conducted under the guidance of impressions received in India’ (xvii).
11 The nature of scientific inquiry and its claims of objectivity has been problematized by several thinkers in the humanities. Two figures who represent this critical approach are Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour. Foucault subjected the apparent givenness of scientificity to his thesis that such historical concepts and cultural forms have to do with the exercise of power, thus showing us how they become tools developed by institutions that hold us in check. Latour held as suspect the objectiveness of scientific truths and their capability to describe the world independent of the actor who/which creates these truths and the networks of relationships she/it is embroiled in with other human and non-human actors. He inverted the lens to focus on non-human actors, and raised the possibility of thinking about non-human agency. Thus he was able to develop a method to subject scientific truths/things to an analysis that traces the way the networks are formed, how they operate, to arrive at the conclusion that scientific truths are ‘matters of concern’, things that gather, and are constituted in the human and non-human relationships that are formed around them—in a (reductive, admittedly) word, relational. Such critical approaches to objectivity, though of tremendous value, leave us with a problem. Can we, if we consider ourselves practitioners of the humanities, make objective claims about the universe and about being in general, or is our job restricted to the critique of what is given as truth? In the particular case of this study, Ambedkar makes truth claims of his own (the existence of Broken Men and the Buddhist origins of Untouchables, as we will see later), and doesn’t stay restricted to critiquing the position of what he opposes. French speculative materialist Quentin Meillassoux addresses this very question: ‘Doubtless, where science is concerned, philosophers have become modest—and even prudent. Thus, a philosopher will generally begin with an assurance to the effect that his theories in no way interfere with the work of the scientist, and that the manner in which the latter understands her own research is perfectly legitimate. But he will immediately add (or say to himself): legitimate, as far as it goes. What he means is that although it is normal, and even natural, for the scientist to adopt a spontaneously realist attitude, which she shares with the ‘ordinary man’, the philosopher possesses a specific type of knowledge which imposes a correction upon science’s ancestral statements—a correction which seems to be minimal, but which suffices to introduce us to another dimension of thought in its relation to being’ (2009, 13). It is in response to this woe that Meillassoux develops his theory that asks: What can be said to exist when we are not there to sense things? We delve into the possible relevance of Meillassoux in the Ambedkarite context in our note on the Broken Men theory at the end of this volume (p. 351). The stake of Ambedkar’s argument in this book is this: Untouchability did not always exist; at some point in time some people were made Untouchable; all the historical evidence we have is suspect because they are all Brahmanical sources or influenced by Brahmanical ideology, but this doesn’t take away from the objective fact that at some point in time some people were forcibly subjugated. It is in this problem that we find a parallel between Meillassoux’s theory that allows us to think of the material world without its being mediated by human agency, and Amedkar’s attempt to grasp the materially inaccessible past of Untouchability and its beginning. We assert the importance of the conjoined methods of speculation and science (see p. 356), and the necessity of claiming positive truths (as students of humanities) while also producing negative critiques. This is particularly important in the present where the critical energies of academia are still in the hands of Brahmanical forces, whose shape-shifting and even seemingly progressive stances keep enforcing caste ideology, rather than spurring on the annihilation of caste. Against such an institutional edifice, where the rules of engagement of appropriate academic language and ways of thinking, under the guise of professionalism and academic etiquette, serve the continuation of caste, the truth of anti-caste possibilities and realities must continue to be proclaimed and hypothesized in their full material force.
12 Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) was a leading figure of social-realist literature in pre-revolutionary Russia. He was praised for the simplicity of his writing and his concern for the indignity of the life of the working class. His work remained prototypical of the kind of literature expected from revolutionary writers. Needless to say, he was closely associated with the Bolsheviks and was an open critic of the Tsarist regime. After the revolution, he became critical of Lenin’s authoritarian ways and spent several years in exile. However, he was first personally invited by Stalin to return to the Soviet Union in 1932 and later placed under house arrest once Stalin began to consolidate his power (Tikhonov 1946).
13 [Literature and Life. A selection from the writings of Maxim Gorky.] The volume Ambedkar is referring to is the 1946 edition of Literature and Life. As we are unable to track the edition down, we have referred to the 1982 collection of Maxim Gorky’s non-fictional writings entitled On Literature. The quote can be found in an essay entitled “How I Learnt to Write”. In it, Gorky responds to his readers’ requests to teach them how to write stories. He first tells them to learn the history of literature, to study what drove men to be rebellious writers and how their writings pushed against class society in different periods of time. The rest of the essay maps out the importance of creativity in shaping the world and in helping us think the new. Speculation, something Ambedkar prizes, is revealed by Gorky as something that is imperative in all fields of thought in order to push possibilities and understanding forward. The quote Ambedkar refers to, which may have been translated differently in the edition we could access, is rendered thus: ‘Science and letters have much in common: in both a leading part is played by observation, comparison, and study; both the writer and the scientist must possess imagination and intuition. Imagination and intuition help fill in the gaps in a chain of facts, thus enabling the scientist to evolve hypotheses and theories, which more or less effectively guide the mind’s inquiries into Nature’s forces and phenomena. By gradually subordinating the latter, man’s mind and will create human culture, which in effect is our “second nature”’ (Gorky 1982, 31).
14 On the notion of ‘hypothesis’, Quentin Meillassoux offers this: ‘[T]he fundamental dimension presented by modern science from the moment of its inception was the fact that its assertions could become part of a cognitive process. They were no longer of the order of myths, theogonies, or fabulations, and instead became hypotheses susceptible to corroboration or refutation by actual experiments. The term ‘hypothesis’ here is not intended to suggest a kind of unverifiability that would be peculiar to such statements. We do not mean to imply the idea that no ‘direct’ verification of dia-chronic statements is possible by definition, since the occurrences to which they refer are posited as anterior or ulterior to the existence of human experience. For as a matter of fact, this absence of ‘direct verification’ holds for a great many scientific statements, if not for all of them, given that very few truths can be attained through immediate experience and that generally speaking, science is not based upon simple observations, but rather upon data that have already been processed and quantified by ever more elaborate measuring instruments. Thus, in qualifying the statements of empirical science as ‘hypotheses’, we do not seek to undermine their cognitive value but rather to confer upon them their full value as instances of knowledge. It is the discourse of empirical science which, for the first time, gives meaning to the idea of a rational debate about what did or did not exist prior to the emergence of humankind, as well as about what might eventually succeed humanity. Theories can always be improved and amended, but the very fact that there can be such dia-chronic theories is the remarkable feature made possible by modern knowledge. It was science that made it meaningful to disagree about what there might have been when we did not exist, and what there might be when we no longer exist—just as it is science that provides us with the means to rationally favour one hypothesis over another concerning the nature of a world without us’ (2009, 113–4).