Alex George and S. Anand
In the following pages we will present a reading of one of the more difficult aspects of Ambedkarite thought—the Broken Men theory. This reading is indebted to developments in contemporary philosophy, specifically the speculative realist movement which is ascendant in our time, and even more specifically, the speculative materialist philosopher, Quentin Meillassoux. We have refrained from discussing the specifics of Meillassoux’s theories (2009, 2012) or how we have used them for our particular purpose. In their lieu, we begin with the acknowledgement of this influence. Without citing the specifics of speculative materialism, we have tried to concentrate on Ambedkar’s own theory to uncover what appears to us to be a singular philosophical pronouncement on our historical subjectivity. In this spirit, our hope is that this essay is a modest addition to both the Ambedkarite and the speculative materialist movements. Whether it is right to bring together these divergent disciplines is a fair question that has been asked by readers of an earlier draft of this essay which is forever contingent. And yet, it seems our justifications can only be made retrospectively. If the ideas developed here hold true and raise further fruitful encounters, then alone would we have been justified. Else this would have indeed been a fool’s errand. With this uncertainty, which is perhaps the uncertainty intrinsic to any philosophical work, we begin.
Readings
First, we must confront the difficulty embedded at the very inception of this project, the difficulty of reading. In reading intensely political thinkers like Ambedkar, who write with resolute conviction, one cannot help but feel a sense of suspicion. Not so much a suspicion with the words which these thinkers present to us, but rather with oneself, and with one’s capacity to grasp the ‘fullness’, the entire truth of what one reads. Now, of course, none of us can be perfect readers, just as no text can in itself be perfect. Often, we lack knowledge, we lack the idiom, we lack the motivation—however it is we would like to name it, it is something we lack that mars our approach towards a text. The text appears an inaccessible alien, which we then must pretend to understand. This becomes more pronounced when we read from within systems. The various social, political, economic categories within which we are held, act as formidable barriers, always distracting us from the thing that is to be read. Always making us feel small, inadequate. In militating against such barriers, one cannot help but feel dwarfed, impotent; that nothing one does will ever be enough to be ‘accepted’ by those who seem to be on the other side, by those who seem to ‘understand’, who are in on the joke. Living in caste society, one feels compelled to be suspicious of everything, even oneself. How much has my caste-reality affected my ability to read? Will I ever be able to escape this? Will I ever be able to read ‘normally’? What distortions may a Brahmin translator bring to a Dalit text, what further distortions a Brahmin reader? What ruptures does the very word Dalit unleash in those not Dalit? Is all that we are left with just a reading?
What all these questions both shroud and reveal is the necessity of lack. What if the problem isn’t that some of us lack a certain unnameable something, which must be (re)gained, but that lack is embedded into ontology itself? What if the problem with the systems which interpellate us is that they pretend as if they aren’t cut through with this sense of lack, that they pretend to have a total, incontrovertible view of the universe? Perhaps, the point of emancipatory politics is to unleash this sense of lack. To make the universe confront its own incompleteness. Whenever Brahmanical ideology operates to totalize the world, anti-caste icons emerge and disrupt this completeness, militate against ‘assimilation’. Perhaps the world which any radical thought envisions is one with the freedom to work with and mobilize this essentially displaced relation, and the world’s own uneasy relation with itself. To mould, innovate and restructure beyond the tyranny of norms.
As we work (perhaps tragically) towards this possibility, we are caught in the stranglehold of a present that seems endless. The ruling ideology seeps through everything, infects every thought, infiltrates every reading. Against this we must be ever vigilant. The most important tenet to be upheld, beyond every nicety of good grace, is to constantly ask, how does the ruling ideology want me to see reality? The task is to constantly read against the grain. To embrace the suspicion that is engendered by our position. We must always ask, how does caste society want me to read Ambedkar? In what manner does it want me to defang him, render him banal and powerless, make him lose the urgency of his politics? This is the primary responsibility of any reader who is a subject of politics. In this wariness, in this need for constant innovation when faced with a seemingly undefeatable enemy, a thousand readings must bloom.
The Thing-in-Itself
The Broken Men theory in The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables? (1948) is Ambedkar’s unique solution to the problem of the origin of Untouchability. No historian or scholar has been able to produce a valid thesis for how this system of oppression was established. One sees much analysis of historical material and text, but never a definitive explanation of its singular conception. While the latest cross-disciplinary efforts that combine genome and DNA studies with archaeology and linguistics (Reich 2018, Joseph 2018) proffer near-accurate dates for the Harappan era, for ‘Aryan’ migration and for the likely onset of the caste system, they do not have an answer yet for the when and how of Untouchability.
Ambedkar proceeds by locating disparate object-occurrences in history and speculates their concatenation in the context of caste society. He begins with the fact that Untouchable communities are relegated to living outside the village. Here he identifies two possibilities: either Untouchability came first and then the ousting of Untouchables from inside the village, or vice versa. He affirms the latter. To institute Untouchability first and then undertake the massive operation of ousting people from villages across the subcontinent is an absurd and improbable task. Therefore, one can assume that certain communities were already living outside the village. Why this happened, he demonstrates by looking at the organization of primitive societies. The evolution of society from primitive to modern began with the transformation of nomadic communities into settled ones. As evidence for this he provides the example of English pre-history. During the transformation, settled communities had no way of defending themselves against nomadic ones who attacked them for their cattle and, more importantly, their agricultural produce which the nomads couldn’t produce themselves. This left several settled communities ravaged, and because early tribal societies were based on blood relations, such settled tribes couldn’t simply assimilate into other tribes. Survivors of tribal warfare were therefore Broken Men, who floated around looking for subsistence in constant danger.
They were to find employment in established settled communities in need of guards to protect themselves from unexpected attacks. But because the Broken Men couldn’t be a part of tribal blood-associations they were relegated to live outside the village. For their services, they were provided with the surplus food (in the caste context, mostly leftovers) that the village produced, including animal carcasses. Here, Ambedkar directly references the experiences and position of his own caste, the Mahars of western India, whose traditional role (among other duties thrust upon them) was the policing of the village periphery. The existence of such communities of Broken Men is evidenced by citing the examples of Fuidhirs (strangers, refugees or migrants, placing themselves under the protection of a chief and becoming his tenant) in primitive Ireland and the Alltudes (those banished and exiled) in Wales. How the subcontinental Broken Men became Untouchables is explained by the emergence of Buddhism and its popularity among the Broken Men and the subsequent Brahmanical backlash against the Sramanic religion. Once the shape-shifting Brahmanism moved away from the consumption of beef and condemned the act as sacrilegious, its continued consumption by the Broken Men rendered them impure, Untouchable, even as they were expected to dispose of the carcasses provided by the settled communities by law.
Terrains
What we must extract from Ambedkar’s theory is its defiant materialism. Here Ambedkar is not taking on a critical posture or reducing existence to discursivity. He posits a cold hard materiality via speculation. This has been the case for several radical anti-caste thinkers from Phule to Iyothee Thass to Kancha Ilaiah, all construct an alternate reality which is defiantly material—‘this is how it is’, they proclaim, much to the discomfort of those accustomed to governing mores.
At this point we will need to develop, or define, two philosophical concepts: materialism and speculation. Materialism, to put it simply, is to think of reality as independent of thought and subjectivity (human or divine). By speculation we mean the thinking of possibilities or hypotheticals in a specific philosophical sense—it is the ability to think of an ‘absolute’ (a function or essential feature of reality) without acceding to dogmatic metaphysics; it is concerned with the non-factual existence of facticity as such (Meillassoux 2012).
[Speculation] by contrast with the repetitive continental focus on texts, discourse, social practices, and human finitude, [thinks of] the nature of reality independently of thought and of humanity more generally. This activity of ‘speculation’ may be cause for concern amongst some readers, for it might suggest a return to pre-critical philosophy, with its dogmatic belief in the powers of pure reason. The speculative turn, however, is not an outright rejection of these critical advances; instead, it comes from a recognition of their inherent limitations. Speculation in this sense aims at something ‘beyond’ the critical and linguistic turns. As such, it recuperates the pre-critical sense of ‘speculation’ as a concern with the Absolute, while also taking into account the undeniable progress that is due to the labour of critique’ (Bryant et al. 2011, 3)
Speculation and materialism are inseparably connected, if one is to render a consistent theory of reality. What quantum physics has taught us is the universe’s own contradictory and incomplete nature. Materialism must therefore contend with the chaotic, unstable and divided nature of the universe itself—of its being and nothingness both as positive ‘materials’. Speculation therefore is the philosophical position which asserts the necessity of contingency—that is, the Absolute ‘component’ of the universe is contingency itself. Natural laws and material reality have no necessity, but are only contingent appearances. And this contingency—a contingency that lends itself as proximate to empirical scrutiny and demands reappraisals of all theories of reality asserted as necessary—itself is the necessary principle of reality. When we are unable to grasp the totality of the universe, it is not merely because we lack this knowledge or that it is inaccessible to us, but because reality itself is an incomplete field, riven by a void (Žižek 2011). With the various figures of anti-caste thought, chief among them Ambedkar, indulging in both speculation and materialism, we must now develop their singularity, especially in the context of their uncanny proximity to contemporary philosophers of speculative materialism.
Remembrance/History
Let us return to history, that sanctified concept against which Ambedkar militates with his Broken Men theory. What is the function of history? It gathers data from the past and reconstructs a temporality of which we become subjects. Historians scrupulously work to verify evidence, to study archaeological material, that give us glimpses into a lost time. In its register as a myth-creating discipline, history generates causalities. There are of course those historians who challenge these causalities, pose alternatives, and offer corrections, but there is a problematic at the heart of the discipline itself.
No history can be complete. And yet history offers us a certain kind of completion. Of an unbroken line, no matter how much it zigs and zags, which converges onto our present. But we do not live in history. We live in the present. To be able to read history necessarily requires that we be outside of it. There are things in history which have a material continuity with the present, the caste system or Untouchability, for example. But the assertion of this continuity discounts the necessary difference between the past and the present—Untouchability was different (not better or worse, but different) in the past from what it is now.
The simple question is: what does history tell us about reality? We wager that it doesn’t tell us why things are the way they are, but offers us a myth of its journey. To ask why are things the way they are is a properly philosophical question, and its answer cannot be found in history. It must be thought and deduced in the here and now. If we look for answers in the past all we get are the repetition of habits, and any radical assertion, any breakthrough in understanding, is also a break with past habits.
What is constructed as history is necessarily retroactively posited. Why did caste arise? Why are Brahmins considered superior? Such naïve and simple questions are explained away via discursive fabulation that do not go to the contingency that is at their heart. That is to say, Brahmins are considered superior for no reason, caste arose for no reason. More precisely, whatever the contingent events that led to these results, they aren’t necessary truths. That is to say there is nothing essential in the nature of reality that led to the emergence of caste or Brahmins or Untouchability. Materialism shows us that reality emerges without underlying laws or reason. Therefore, the way in which society was shaped in history also has no reason— various contingent factors led to its being a certain way, and it could very well have not been this way. History could have gone one way or another.
This contingency of the past is of course true for the present too. That the past could have been different, and was the way it was for no necessary reason, means that our present also has no underlying necessity for being maintained in the way it is.
There is a register of the past which does help us in this regard—memory. Memory is fickle, it remembers what it requires and discards the rest, it carries forward pain and the dream of emancipation. Memory is aware of its own fallibility. Often history is overpowered, overshadowed by the power of collective memory, no matter how false it may be.
Ambedkar’s speculation
To speculate of a history, where none can be found, while admitting the speculative nature of this history, is an Ambedkarite affirmation of the truth. The truth is none other than that of equality. Indeed, many Western scholars, anthropologists, historians, of his time were given to speculation. But the singularity of the Broken Men theory is to be found in the truth of the memory of this equality that is wagered onto the past.
Ambedkar through this particular case then mobilized history itself to be in service of the future-oriented goal: the annihilation of caste. He does this because he ‘remembers’ an egalitarian past, its memory haunts him. Of course, Ambedkar’s memory might be false, as many university historians gloat in claiming. But it is permeated by the truth of equality—Ambedkar’s body and the physico-political body of Untouchables, hitherto made invisible and reduced to automatons by ‘official history’, in its existence as a subject of equality, is proof that this memory is real.
In Ambedkar’s speculation of the Broken Men theory two registers of contingency can be sensed: one, is that history is a mere emergence of contingencies (annotations, even) which must be read and scrupulously deployed to establish the norm of equality. Second, the future is also contingent; no matter how improbable it may seem, things have no inherent necessity to remain the way they are, and it is just as possible to change it as it is difficult.
Wagers
This speculative position Ambedkar occupies is of course not produced in a vacuum. There are reasons to consider the historical development of his theories. Especially in the light of our own speculative work in this essay, in which we have attributed later philosophical developments of ‘speculation’, ‘materialism’ and ‘contingency’ back to Ambedkar. He certainly did not hold these words in the same valency as we explicate here. Can the correspondence developed here then be valid?
Before answering this we must first examine the milieu in which Ambedkar’s work developed, how it was received, what position it occupied, and the current of anti-caste thought it conversed with. First, let us take the case of how Ambedkar’s Broken Men theory was received by subsequent scholarship. For decades, the few establishment scholars who read him dismissed Ambedkar’s thesis; the dismissal was offered often in footnotes, as an aside. Vivekanand Jha in his essay “Candala and the Origin of Untouchability”—first published in the Indian Historical Review in 1986—conducts his own independent inquiry into the questions that concerned Ambedkar. In the revised edition of this essay, Jha (2018) makes several less than charitable remarks about Ambedkar’s threading together of Buddhism, beef and Broken Men (see p. 321–2 note 66). Jha does offer important counter-evidence when it comes to the attitude of Buddhists towards the ‘hinajatis’ which weakens Ambedkar’s claim that Buddhism was a succour for the oppressed masses. But what doesn’t bother Jha, and he prides himself on this ‘objectivity’, is the sheer virulence with which some sections of the society were treated, and the singularity of this oppression. It becomes too easy for him to conclude that it was class difference which led to such ousting as was meted out to various groups across the subcontinent.
For Ambedkar such an answer is not satisfactory; it does not hold. The system of class difference included the Shudras too; in fact, to the Brahmin no one is or was equal. Yet, what made some sections so deplorable that their existence itself became despised? The problem with such inquiries as Jha’s, an embodiment of University Discourse, is that they can only refer to texts that survive to look for clues, and the texts that survive— even Buddhist ones—belong necessarily to the ruling classes of different times. The task in the present is to try and suture the gaps in history which such texts produce. Unfortunately, University Discourse cannot withstand the melancholy of loss intrinsic to such gaps, of forever being out of touch with a time and a system of being, of having to contend with loss and embrace this loss. The University tries to cover this up by hypothesizing from within the evidence that is up to standard. So the suturing that occurs is one that necessarily inhabits the dominant worldview, for one is already accepting the terms of existence, thought and sociality that the ideology provides in its texts.
The rejection of this blackmail is primary for Ambedkar. Sure, he refers to several scholarly texts, like any university scholar would, but his readings always function against the grain of the texts themselves. He reads knowing full well that his political endeavour is diametrically opposed to the ideology of what he reads. And so, he reads the Manusmriti, the Dharma Sutras, all that is available to read, in order to extract the specific things needed for the political purposes that come from his ideological standpoint. He carefully reads and cites ‘Mahamahopadhyay’ Pandurang Vaman Kane (1880–1972), the archetypal Brahmin scholar figure, but in the Constitution Assembly he argues against the state bestowing such titles. He reads from the standpoint of the present, not as a subject of history. Ambedkar exits the reality of the ruling ideology, and in doing so he returns agency to the enforced silence of broken historical subjects. The people who were made outcasts were not silent witnesses to their own degradation. Ambedkar makes them active bodies in conflict with their colonizers. This agency itself comes from the present. The people who suffer now at the hands of an unjust system are not silent either. Their struggles and memory of egalitarianism, is transposed back to their anonymous ancestors. The ideology of equality is made transhistorical. In this sense, even Buddhism which was for a time an official state religion, is returned to the silenced parts of history.
In The Untouchables, while Ambedkar does not elaborate on the how and why of outcastes embracing Buddhism, he does say elsewhere that Buddhism, even if it had no love lost for Untouchables, provided an egalitarian thrust that was, in principle, attractive. Vedism and Brahmanism offer no such scope. The Buddhist sangha was the first organized religion in the subcontinent that both theoretically and institutionally opened itself up to Shudras, Untouchables and women even if the rest of society remained watchful of such moves, even if the Brahmin converts and the mercantile classes appear to have had a greater say in the annals as historians tell us. It appears the non-elite sections negotiated their way with Buddhism on their own terms (as Decaroli 2004 argues by looking beyond what he calls the ‘seeming disjuncture between textual Buddhism and early Buddhist art’). Ambedkar had reason to believe that people written out of history would still have had reasons to be part of it. Reflecting on how the Marathi ‘bhakti’ poets from the twelfth to seventeenth centuries emerged in the vacuum created by the eviction of Buddhism from the subcontinent, Ambedkar in a speech in 1954 in Poona alludes to this. His biographer Dhananjay Keer says, Ambedkar
told the gathering of 20,000 men and women that he was writing a book on Buddhism explaining its tenets in simple language to the common man. A year might be needed to complete the book: on its completion he would embrace Buddhism. Ambedkar also told his audience that the image of the god Vithoba at Pandharpur was in reality the image of the Buddha. He intended writing a thesis on the subject, and after completing it, he would read it before the Bharatiya Itihas Sanshodhan Mandal at Poona. The name of the god Pandurang, he observed, was derived from Pundalik. Pundalik meant lotus, and a lotus was called Pandurang in Pali. So Pandurang was none other than the Buddha. (Keer 1954/2001, 482)
Vitthal or Vithoba of Pandharpur in Maharashtra’s Solapur district, who likely began as a pastoral pre-Vedic cult of nomadic shepherds, is eventually Buddhisized and then Vishnuized as Pandurang. By the fifteenth century, the Vitthal temple in Pandharpur that starts its journey as a wood and brick ‘primitive’ statue, comes to be a major site of pilgrimage for not just caste Hindus but many Untouchables as well, even if the Untouchables were not allowed into the temple and had to sing their prayers at the gates along the outcast shrine for the Untouchable poet-saint Chokhamela to whom Ambedkar dedicates his book. The scholar Ramchandra Chintaman Dhere’s Sri Vitthal: Ek Mahasamnvay (Lord Vitthal: A Great Confluence or Syncretization, 1984 in Marathi), says till the twelfth century what’s today Maharashtra was largely Buddhist (like much of the subcontinent had once been) and the Varkari cult grew around the time when Namdev, Jnandev, Chokhamela, Janabai and their cohort of saint-poets would have seen the Buddhist caves being emptied out of monks who were persecuted by a resurgent Brahmanism. Dhere’s work, translated in 2011 by Anne Feldhaus, has this passage that fills the gap that seems to appear in Ambedkar’s The Untouchables:
We must not forget that in Indian traditions nothing ever gets destroyed: it only gets transformed, taking on different names and forms. Followers of the Buddha were spread throughout Maharashtra continuously for a thousand or fifteen hundred years, until just before the time of Jnandev and Namdev. There is not a single mountain range in Maharashtra where Buddhists did not carve out caves. From within these hundreds of caves in the sides of the Sahyadri Mountains, the cries of Buddhist monks continually resounded: Buddham saranam gacchami, “I take refuge in the Buddha.” The great mantra of non-violence and compassion echoed from each granule of Marathi soil. Still today, inscriptions show that the whole society, from kings to agricultural laborers, was prepared to renounce the world in order to serve these dispassionate monks. Monks (bhikshus) had become objects of respect, as indicated by the common use of the name Bhikoba for men and Bhikubai for women in village after village. It is historically inconsistent to think that a philosopher who took pride in the Vedic religion [by this Dhere means Sankara of Kalady, the arch Brahmin revivalist] would have had the power to completely erase ten or fifteen centuries of this profound influence on the folk mind. Indeed, that influence was strong enough that such a philosopher was cursed as a “Buddhist in disguise” (187).
Ambedkar considers this vacuum, these emptied-out Buddhist caves, and the effusive songs and poetry that make Vitthal sacred, and tells us what may have possibly happened before a people were made untouchable in and by history. Buddhism, through the Ambedkarite gesture, is shown to not merely belong to the royal courts where annals are produced, but in the invisible life-worlds of labouring classes as a consciousness towards freedom, both physical and metaphysical. Buddhism therefore becomes the name of this consciousness of freedom in an unknown time that Ambedkar speculates.
Now how do we mean that Ambedkar speculates an egalitarian Buddhist past? How does Ambedkar ‘choose’ Buddhism, so to speak? Is it a blind devotional decision made in transcendental ecstasy? No. He undertakes a close reading of the defining principles of Buddhism, and in studying it, ‘learns’ of its equalizing core, even if as a potentiality. We must remember how careful he was in making his own decision to convert. It was a decision made after thorough examination of the principles of the religion and its suitability for the future sociality of the members of his community and indeed the rest of the subcontinent. Having thus isolated its principles, and becoming convinced of its truth, he is able to map this core principle back into history. This is the act of speculation. In history, Buddhism emerged as the contingent name for the egalitarian uprising against the excesses of Vedic Brahmanism. Having emerged along this axis of opposing inequality, Buddhism then can be speculated about as historical object that turns around its egalitarian core. Had the religion emerged under different conditions, under a different name, and yet with the same core of egalitarianism, Ambedkar would have been equally satisfied with adopting it in this different form. This gesture of making us subjects capable of thinking of the principles of various objects and making decisions on the basis of its truth and validity, especially in the realm of politics where all thought is foreclosed by ruling ideology, is what grants Ambedkar a proximity to a certain kind of speculative materialism.
Broken, and made whole
The most impressive of Ambedkar’s speculative breaks is of course that of the invisible subjectivity he christens as ‘Broken Men’. What does Ambedkar tell us about the Broken Men? That they were part of different nomadic tribes that were defeated in battle. That is all. In this minimal description of the origin of Untouchability, we are also provided an essential lesson of what we are as subjects. In the primordial scene of battle, we are equal subjects. In this sense this originary battle is an egalitarian one, in the sense that in it humans fought as equals and not as a part of the caste system. The Broken Men all came from different tribes in different places, who in the contingencies of history, found themselves on the losing side. That is all we are: victims of a contingent unfolding of history, with no particular reason for being in the current state of subjugation we are held in.
In the egalitarian battle which produces Broken Men, there is no hierarchy of merit, nor divine cycle of karma and gunas, only two warring factions fighting for survival. It is the caste-society, which followed this battle, that wants us to believe in our essential separation and difference from each other as subjects. It is caste-society that segregates and makes some people axiomatically higher than the others. This society tries to maintain that its system of values is timeless and primordial, when in fact society has always been tumultuous, always going through shifts and imbalances. Often, history tends to ascertain a purity in the past, even when it studies oppression and communities that are oppressed, it tends to essentialize a sense of an original idyll—be it in the form of Matanga, Buddha or even Ambedkar—which was then disturbed. But this notion of purity must absolutely be rejected.
The various Brahmanic manuals that Ambedkar carefully examines that describe and classify the proliferation of jatis with the will-to-govern—where someone is always placed lower than the lowest, ad infinitum, to wit Manu X.39, ‘A ‘Hunter’ woman [Nishada] bears to a ‘Fierce’ Untouchable man [Chandala] a son ‘Who Ends Up at the Bottom’ [Antyavasayin], who haunts the cremation-grounds and is despised even by the excluded castes’—unwittingly reveal that there was never (and never will be) the ‘pure’ of Time when the intermixture of varnas and jatis would not have happened. Scholars say even the early ‘Aryans’ who produced the Rig Veda were migrants who did not bring along enough women and they cohabited with the indigenous population and invented new lineages. Smritis and sastras hold forth against the unnaturalness of Pratiloma (hypogamy) relations (which occur but naturally), and force upon us the imagined naturalness of caste, while asking us to think of equality as abnormal, as if we are cursed to live inside a self-perpetuating nightmare with no wake in sight.
To illustrate, as we prepared this note, an ordinary piece of feature writing in a newspaper’s ‘culture’ pages (“Friday Review”, The Hindu) paraded Brahmanic purity imagined in a man bearing a Muslim name, opening with these lines:
On a concert stage, with his Brahminical looks accentuated by his tall, slim, fair frame, broad forehead, back-brushed and pony-tailed long hair and thoughtful eyes, Rudraveena maestro Mohi Bahauddin Dagar seems to belong to the era of sages (Banerjee 2018).
This strain of thought, this base desire for the pure of the imagined essence of caste—always the Übermensch– Brahman, never the Chandala—causes few eyebrows to arch, let alone triggers outrage. But this essence of caste does not exist, it is an ideological construction which can be and must be annihilated. When the historicity of particular habits becomes the only reason for their repetition, which is the case for so many oppressive practices, history is upheld as pure. When the contingency of history is asserted, on the other hand, we grant the past the playfulness of impurity. Decisions and structures of the past were constructed on the back of an interplay of so many permutations of human imagination, and we are allowed to speculate the possibilities and impossibilities that are entailed by the boundlessness of this imagination in the past, the present and the future.
For the purposes of politics in the present, no precedence in history is consequential. No particular subject position is essential, no decision is eternal, no sequences of arrangement are permanent. We are faced with a future that holds no promises, but towards which we work from the present through our fidelity to principles we hold as universal. The past persists only out of habit, a habit whose rules are self-defined. The hard work of the present is to lay bare the non-essentiality of the rules of old. And to wilfully propose the new rules (the new constitution, a new dhamma even). The bringing forth of such a ‘new’ requires the acceptance of absolute (terrifying) freedom even as all of history conspires to lull you into the security of given narratives and unfree thoughtlessness. In 1936, in Annihilation of Caste, defiantly published as the “Speech Prepared…but Not Delivered”, Ambedkar declares to the Hindus who invited him but refused to let him speak: ‘I am sorry, I will not be with you. I have decided to change.’ He goes on to say:
It means conversion; but if you do not like the word, I will say it means new life. But a new life cannot enter a body that is dead. New life can enter only into a new body. The old body must die before a new body can come into existence and a new life can enter into it. To put it simply: the old must cease to be operative before the new can begin to enliven and to pulsate. This is what I meant when I said you must discard the authority of the shastras, and destroy the religion of the shastras (2014, 311).
Mathematics
Another consequential aspect of Ambedkar’s speculation is how he employs a mathematical method to solve a problem in history—mathematical in the sense of that which is infinitely repeatable. The square-root of minus one will remain the square-root of minus one throughout time and space; it is endlessly repeatable. Ambedkar identifies specific yet geographically and culturally far-removed occurrences from the past that, unlike what Untouchability entails till date, do not preoccupy anyone any longer—in English primitive society, the existence of the Fuidhirs in Ireland and the Alltudes in Wales—and universalizes them. He then repeats them within the particularity of caste-society. The implication of this universalization and repetition is interesting. Universality always pertains to principles; it subsumes within itself all particular relations of specificities in all their modes. More importantly universality is imposed, and it is so imposed from a particular position within a specific relation. From his singular (factional) position which enunciates the axiom of equality, Ambedkar thus gives a universal principle of history. Insofar as equality is a relation every subject holds with another, time is the axis on which this relationship must necessarily exist. That is to say, it is not that suddenly equality appeared on the scene and from this point forward we will act as if it is real, and that before this point all were unequal (Choudhury 2018a). Rather, people were always equal but contingent structures forbade the realisation of this principle. So a Greek philosopher, an African slave being smuggled into the New World, the Untouchable who was persecuted under the Peshwas, all, we can now recognize, were equals—in capacities, in thought, as subjects. This opens up the space of comparability, of ideas and existence in different points in history. The principle of equality commissions a near-quantitative relation between subjects on the axis of time.
That is not to say one can replace subjects like one does numbers when one mechanically repeats them. However, the quantization is the work of thought: thought can permeate history. One can think history equally. One participates in the same temporal field, albeit in severally articulated modes of being. And yet comprehensibility is never forbidden. The enunciation of such a comprehension of course must not be exaggerated, for no comprehension is total. At the same time, it must be recognized that the world that one tries to comprehend is not a totality itself: it is ridden with holes which it tries to cover up. This incompleteness of any given ‘world’ is not an ununderstandable core, but rather an opening which allows us to think, to touch that which is forbidden. In this sense, Ambedkar’s is a project of invitation. He invites us to touch all that was deemed true and ancient and primordial and holy, to not fearfully hide it away from thought as if it was ununderstandable, but to play with it, mould it and think it as if it was any other object. To carve together the bits of matter we find in history into the weapon that will free us from our con-temporary chains.
The Banishment of Untouchability
Now comes the question of truth, especially in the context of right-wing politics distorting facts of history for their own purposes. One would say, isn’t this exactly the thing Ambedkar would prescribe? Aren’t they also constructing a narrative that ‘does not exist’ in order to maintain and build power? The obvious answer to this is that there is no deified position ‘we’ hold where we are neutral observers of history reporting what are merely facts. Such a position is always-already ideologically charged. Any position of neutrality is already beholden to a certain worldview. The point isn’t that the right-wingers are distorting history, but why they are doing it and what principles underlie such a distortion—the project of equality is surely not one they are invested in. Thus, defeating the enemy is not a question of protecting (our) history (as if it exists) but an ideological struggle played out in the present. What must be universalized is the conviction that drives us to look at the past, the present and the future in a certain way. This is the banishment of Untouchability, the abolishment of inequality from all of time for all people. It is not the sequestering of hallowed spaces from the rampages of some unthinking horde. Uncovering of archaeological evidence, discovery of documents, engaging with these documents, mapping ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating…all must and will go on. But the position historians occupy in the present is determined by a decision of subjectivity. And any construal of a narrative or breaking down of narratives is performed from this necessarily decisional agency of the historian-subject. It cannot be escaped. Such a subjective decision orients future politics. It contributes to the construction of the new or to the persistence of the old. The right-wingers and ‘apolitical’ subjects of an old history, in a sense, perform the same task: affirming an old continuity. But a historian like Ambedkar, who is a subject of equality, must speculate the new in the future and in the past.
Historical being, for Ambedkar, is therefore the realm of universal participation. It is completely comprehensible, analyzable, open to participation. That is to say, the particularities within history are not separate or wholly other, but linked by a subjectivity of equality. This is his revolutionary hypothesis. We no longer participate in disparate worlds of becoming which are forever other to the outside. On the contrary, there is no outside. History as mathematized in its notional repeatability, makes our particularities touchable; there is no ‘untouchable’ if we are subjects of Ambedkarite history.
If the all-but-forgotten Fuidhirs and Alltudes existed in history, and we can think of their existence, why can we not also think of a repetition of their mode of existence in a situation elsewhere? The Fuidhirs and Alltudes aren’t wholly unto themselves, but are also ours in thought. Their touchability allows us to transpose them into a new situation, the situation of caste.
The mathematical imposition of the case of the Fuidhirs and the Alltudes on to the Untouchables in India, then begs the question of what subjectivity itself is. Does the fact that disparate cases can be superimposed onto another subject also point to the contingent becoming of the subject itself? As subjects that participate in a contingent reality, we must confront our own contingency, we too have no necessary identity or essence that makes us who we are. We too are the void that is superimposed by the various narratives of power. This knowledge then gives us one thing: choice, freedom.
The Difficulty of Freedom
To be free is to not be caught in discourses that give us the comfort of necessity. To be free is to embrace the contingency of reality and to reject all easy answers. To be free is the rejection of the old: syntax and time. Radical politics is hard work, and becoming free is a painful process. In the state of freedom, a subject knows that they cannot rely on any given narratives and dogmas of hope, and makes a choice without knowing where it would lead. True moments of freedom are difficult to come by, caught as we are in our struggles to survive, to fulfil our desires. It is difficult to accept one’s own incompleteness and contingency. But when we look at Ambedkar, when he writes his fearless historical-political treatises, when he drinks water from Chavadar Tank, when he calls for the annihilation of caste, we know true moments of freedom are possible.