There is nothing new in the phrase “Hindu nationalism,” even if it has come to be associated with the recent emergence of political movements expressing Hindu rather than secular ideology. Nationalism in India emerged under colonial conditions, conditions that put Indian civilization itself on trial as the principal impediment to modernity and self-rule. We have traced parts of the process whereby India was consigned to an otherworldly and decidedly premodern position, and have pointed out moments when reactions to colonial and Orientalist characterizations led to other versions of Hinduism as the indigenous cultural repository of identity and value. This process led, as well, to a variety of attributions related to Islam, as a foreign presence and a colonizing power that had subdued a Hindu nation and prepared the way for British colonial rule. As much as Muslims were targeted both as scapegoats and as outsiders, they were not the only ones to worry about the formation of dominant nationalist ideological formations in which new and quintessentially Hindu self-representations became increasingly taken for granted, even in avowedly secularist formulations. And as Muslims became figuratively reincorporated in the nationalist consensus as minorities that needed protection as well as representation as an effect of difference, other cracks in the nationalist body politic became visible, as well.
One of the major consequences of the census was the denomination of “Hindus” as the majority group in India, with “Muslims” as the dominant minority, atop groups of other, progressively smaller, discrete religious communities. It was not just the idea of a majority community that was new but also the use of a single term, “Hindu,” to designate a population that ranged so widely in belief, practice, identity, and recognition. “Hindu” began as a general designation for the people of a place, but little by little it was affiliated to normative conditions that were oppositional (to Muslims, or Christians), exclusive (of tribals, or untouchables), and confessional (in the sense of a single world religion). If one of the most dramatic effects of colonial history has been the denomination of Hindus as a majority community made up of the adherents of a uniform religious system, this history has been neither straightforward nor uncontested. Even as upper-caste Hindus only came to relax the exclusionary concerns of ritual propriety in the face of demographic pressures and the onset of democratic institutions, the troubling character of the homogeneous monolith was apparent both for designated “minorities” and for a host of other groups. The phantasmatic nature of the Hindu whole worked ironically to constitute its reality even as it made contestation and critique more urgent than ever. New voices emerged as representatives of sociopolitical constituencies that saw the Hindu whole as hierarchical, oppressive, and graded, the precipitate of a politics of exclusion that endangered groups “within” as much as outside. And in this respect, the majority was an effect of the idea of the minority, even as the exemplary minority of Muslims created the terms of and models for other minority groups. Minority languages of dissent emerged as a consequence of the general discourse of the minority, even as they were necessarily tied to and dependent on the majority languages of national, religious, regional, and ethnic unity.
The constitution of minorities in colonial India served both to justify the colonial state, which legitimated itself in part through its claim to offer protection to minority groups that were seen as endangered, and to fashion the majority as a homogeneous group. The majority not only was represented through colonial lenses; it also congealed as a single community in nationalist reaction to colonial rule. Even the most secular elites fashioned rhetorics of Hindu majoritarianism when engaged in social reform; they called simultaneously for the reform of caste and gender relations within the Hindu fold and urged social and legal autonomy for different communal—read religious—groups. These same elites accepted colonial policy and practice concerning civil and personal law, maintaining faith in the secular mission of the colonial state even as they gave administrative support to the fashioning of a distinctive set of compromises motivated by the general understanding of Hinduism as an unusually all-encompassing way of life as well as a religion.1 Although social reform agendas in the nineteenth century often focused on Brahmanic practices, with only a few exceptions (such as with Phule’s movement in Maharashtra) they worked to assert the primary importance of Brahman customs for the definition of the Hindu community. And although the salience of social reform activities waned considerably in the twentieth century, there was in fact a growing consensus in favor of the regulation of civil domains and public spaces. The management of temple trusts, the abolition of devadasis (temple dancers), and the legislative efforts to promote temple entry for untouchable groups were all pitched in terms of principles having to do with fundamental human rights, but not only singled out Hindu institutions for state reform but also enshrined enlightened Brahmanic opinion as the basic arbiter of Hindu practice. Even when legislation such as that which established the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment Board in Tamil Nadu in 1927 was mobilized ostensibly in order to control Brahman power, the net effect was to broaden Brahman control and further establish the hegemonic authority of certain textual traditions and interpretations that could only be described as Brahmanic. In fact, the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment Board had the effect of “sanskritizing” ritual practices and procedures and “Brahmanizing” managing boards in many temples that had earlier been controlled by non-Brahman caste groups such as Chettiars, Maravars, and Valaiyars.2
This chapter concerns the emergence of minority and majority languages, and movements, around caste (a marker in any case of Hindu identity) in relation to two extraordinary individuals, E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker and B. R. Ambedkar. Eloquent spokesmen for and organizers of social and political movements through much of the twentieth century, these two individuals fought for minority rights while they also contested the ideological charter of the majority. Both, in their own ways, fought as much against “Hinduism” as they did for political rights, revealing in their particular ways the extraordinary tyranny of nationalist ideology as it became tied to late colonial Hindu self-representations. Both, as well, became obsessed with the role of Gandhi in the formulation of Indian nationalism, and their lives, and struggles, inevitably shed a great deal of light, and some darkness, on the saintly father of the Indian nation himself (as well as on recent appropriations of Gandhi). Both, in the end, help us to anticipate the current crisis around Hindu nationalism, and call into question the ideological uses that have been made of the idea of a tolerant majoritarian religion in India today.
Periyar, a title meaning “Great Man” that was conferred on him by many Tamilians during the political struggles, was born E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker in 1879. Also known as E.V.R., he entered nationalist politics as an enthusiastic supporter of Gandhi and the Congress movement shortly after the satyagraha of 1919, and rose quickly to be elected president of the Tamil Nadu Congress in 1920. He became a critical figure in the mobilization of political agitation in Madras around Gandhi’s noncooperation campaign, and was imprisoned by the British in November 1921. After his release several months later, he took up various Gandhian causes, from prohibition to the popularization of khadi. In the spring of 1924, he entered the campaign at Vaikkam, a temple town in the princely state of Travancore. The campaign concerned the issue of temple entry for the “untouchable” caste of Ezhavas. Temple entry had become an important concern of Gandhi and of Congress, as an extension of reform activities around the plight of untouchable groups, and perhaps also as a reaction to the difficulty of relations with Muslims after the troubled Khilafat alliance. Gandhi had long decried the sin of untouchability, but only after 1920 did untouchability become defined formally by Congress as a “reproach to Hinduism.” T. K. Madhavan introduced a resolution to the 1923 Kakinada session of the All-India Congress which stated that temple entry was the birthright of all Hindus. The next year, Madhavan and other local leaders inaugurated untouchable marches to and around the Vaikkam temple, provoking multiple arrests. Gandhi followed the movement closely, intervening when a Syrian Christian assumed charge of the satyagraha. Gandhi wrote to say that the Vaikkam satyagraha was not a Christian concern and that “Hindus [should] do the work.”3
In saying this, Gandhi gave implicit voice to one of the central concerns that motivated Congress support for Gandhi’s position on untouchability, namely, the inclusion of untouchables within the Hindu fold for reasons of number. Rather than constituting another minority, untouchables were to help Hindus constitute the majority. Untouchability was a reproach to Hinduism rather than to the nationalist movement. The campaign to force temples to allow entry for untouchables thus occupied a contradictory position for both Gandhi and Congress. Although he advocated Congress involvement in temple entry, Gandhi wished that Hindus alone be involved in what he felt was a cause for Hindu shame in the context of an exclusively Hindu quarrel. And Congress took up a Hindu cause as a national issue (which, unlike most other social reform issues, specifically concerned questions of religious worship). Perhaps it is no surprise that temple entry had an ambivalent career in the nationalist movement, both in the early twenties when it was first undertaken, and later in the thirties when it became an important plank in Congress’s constructive program. Although the Vaikkam satyagraha managed to bolster “the spirits of a demoralised [Kerala] Congress . . . after the shock of the Mappila Rebellion of 1921,” it did so at the cost of further communalizing local nationalist politics.4 It also had an unintended effect: E.V.R.—one of the heros of the Vaikkam agitation—left the satyagraha assuming that systematic reform of Hindu institutions had become Congress’s main ambition, only to discover soon thereafter that social reform had very limited scope for both Congress and Gandhi.
E.V.R. quarreled with Congress and Gandhi very soon after the Vaikkam affair over the question of separate dining for Brahman and non-Brahman students in a Congress-sponsored school (Gurukkulam) near Madras. The school was set up by the nationalist leader V.V.S. Iyer with the aim of imparting traditional religious education in the larger context of a commitment to patriotism and social service. After several complaints, it became clear that Iyer had arranged for separate dining facilities for several Brahman students at the request of their parents. Although Gandhi attempted to intervene through a compromise resolution, the controversy split a number of Brahman and non-Brahman Congress leaders and led to a great deal of bitterness on the part of E.V.R. and several of his principal associates. While this controversy raged, E.V.R. further attempted to interest the Tamil Nadu Congress to support a resolution for communal representation. At the same time that E.V.R. met failure in this attempt, he found that his efforts to expand non-Brahman representation on the Tamil Nadu branch of the All India Spinner’s Association (of which he was then president) were frustrated, as well. Once again, E.V.R. found himself locked in bitter dispute with some of the same Brahman leaders who had opposed him over both the Gurukkulam school issue and the communal resolution. In late 1925 E.V.R. decided to leave the Congress. After this break, he declared his political agenda to be: “no god; no religion; no Gandhi; no Congress; and no brahmins.”5
The year 1925 was a time of turmoil in south Indian politics. Coming in the midst of the period when Gandhi had consigned Congress to a preoccupation with social reform activity rather than direct or constitutional political action, at this time the moderate “Swarajists” came to dominate the national political agenda. In the south, the Congress had to usurp the reformist momentum from the Justice Party, which from its position in the Legislative Council had successfully mobilized non-Brahman opinion and pushed through the first communal legislation mandating non-Brahman participation in government service. Meanwhile, Congress efforts were compromised both by some of the conciliatory social gestures of Gandhi and its initial difficulty—given the prominence of Brahmans in the local organization—in pressing home its own charge that the non-Brahman movement was narrowly self-interested. The Justice Party had originally been formed in 1916, in part in reaction to Annie Besant’s alliance with Brahmans in her Home Rule League, around the concern to advance non-Brahman interests in public and government domains. The Justice Party achieved its greatest success through its role in the two “Communal G.O.s” of 1921 and 1922. The Communal G.O.s (Government Orders) established new guidelines to increase the proportion of government offices held by non-Brahman communities in Madras Presidency; the population was classified into the following groups: Brahmans, Non-Brahman Hindus, Indian Christians, Muhammadans, Europeans and Anglo Indians, and Others. These classifications were used to measure and press for greater proportional representation in new government appointments, as well as in promotions and other personnel decisions.6 Although the Justice Party could take major credit for the implementation of these new policies, its constitutional collaboration with the British during the period of the noncooperation campaign set the limits of its political success. By 1925, the Swaraj Party, licensed to engage in electoral politics during the period of Gandhi’s political retirement and commitment to constructive activity, was showing signs of eclipsing Justice, which received little support from E.V.R. despite his break with Congress.
For a man with the political ambitions of E.V.R., constitutional collaboration was an inadequate political goal, to say the least. E.V.R. was regularly critical of the way Brahmans continued to conflate ritual scruple and national principle, and at the same time he genuinely felt the slights Brahmans routinely offered to non-Brahmans in the newly emerging public spheres of Madras. But he never seemed content with the normal procedures of minoritarian politics, and he recognized many of the compromises and problems such a politics necessarily implied. Indeed, one of his stated reasons for leaving Congress in 1925 had been his concern that Gandhi had given too much credence to the Swarajists, who were allowed to engage in Council elections and politics. Ironically, E.V.R. felt that Gandhi had not sufficiently emphasized the importance of the constructive (social uplift) program. Despite E.V.R.’s ostensible agreement with Gandhi in not supporting direct political activity, he seemed particularly bitter when Gandhi undertook political retirement during the late 1920s. At one point he wrote, “The reason why Gandhian Constructive principles have lost all value is because, in the name of a fraudulent unity, they were abandoned and in their place a Gandhi Mutt established. Since madness is characteristic of all mahatmas, our own is no exception to the general rule.”7 E.V.R. was preoccupied with Gandhi’s personal authority, while at the same time he seemed especially concerned to challenge the way Gandhi formulated national political goals, and dissented with manifest bitterness over the definition of political communities, social reform issues, and religious questions and identities. Indeed, E.V.R. was most enraged by Gandhi himself, whose involvement in Tamil Nadu Congress matters seemed invariably conservative. For E.V.R., Gandhi represented a Brahmanic position on the question of reform. To be sure, Gandhi’s statements about caste in response to the non-Brahman movement in Madras were defensive on the subject of Brahmans and hardly designed to suggest sympathy with a full-scale critique of caste.
In April 1921, addressing a public meeting in Madras, Gandhi had said that Hinduism “owes its all” to the great traditions established by Brahmans. He noted further that Brahmans “could pride themselves on taking the first place in self-sacrifice and self-effacement and that they should remain the custodians of the purity of our life.” In obvious reference to the non-Brahman struggle in Madras, Gandhi admonished non-Brahmans not to attempt to “rise upon the ashes of Brahmanism.”8 In a later speech in Madras in 1927, Gandhi upheld the fourfold classification of caste and the duties appropriate to each stage of life (varnashramadharma), though he firmly rejected the notion that caste had anything to do with high or low status. Further, he maintained that a ban on intermarriage or interdining was essential to the ideal system.9 E.V.R. responded to Gandhi by arguing that support for the principle of varnashramadharma in effect relegated all caste Hindus to the position of Sudras, which implied for him that they were “sons of prostitutes.”10 If Sudras were to follow Gandhi’s advice, E.V.R. said at a public meeting in Tinnevelly, they would end up only serving Brahmans.
E.V.R. met with Gandhi in September 1927 in an encounter that resolved none of their differences. E.V.R. reportedly told Gandhi that he believed true freedom for India would only be achieved “with the destruction of the Indian National Congress, Hinduism, and Brahminism.”11 These exchanges were widely covered in the Tamil press, and were critical in the legitimation of E.V.R.’s break with Congress. For most non-Brahman political activists—including those for whom the Justice Party had been tainted from the start by its antinationalist position—support for varnashramadharma was support for Brahman hegemony. For E.V.R., this was to be his last meeting with Gandhi: “Though the public believes that Mahatma Gandhi wishes to abolish untouchability and reform religion and society, the Mahatma’s utterances and thought reveal him to hold exactly the opposite views on this matter. . . . We have been patient, very patient and tight-lipped but today in the interests of abolition and self-respect we are, sadly enough, forced to confront and oppose the Mahatma.”12
In 1926, E.V.R. established the “Self-Respect Movement,” an organization that set for itself a very different task from that of the Justice Party, even though its rhetoric built on that of the early non-Brahman movement. Whereas the Justice Party had been principally concerned about proportional representation, the Self-Respect Movement advocated the overthrow of caste and instituted new forms of marriage and other ritual practices designed to encourage intercaste associations. The movement further engaged in a radical critique of religious belief and practice. At various points and in different ways, the movement attacked the Brahman priest and the whole Brahmanic ideology of privilege, scriptural authority in general, and religion either as general ethos or as theological doctrine. Periyar himself advocated outright atheism as the only rational worldview. Periodically, the movement organized dramatic assaults on religious symbols; its members burned sacred texts such as the Manusmriti, proclaimed that the Ramayana was an Aryan myth designed to denigrate Dravidians, beat priests and idols with shoes, and marched on temples and seminaries in mass demonstrations. During this time, E.V.R. used his newspaper, Kudi Arasu, as the mouthpiece for a series of radical critiques of Congress and Brahmanism; he reached new audiences well beyond the more elite-based Justice constituencies, at the same time as he countered the dominant role he felt Brahmans had accumulated in mainstream newspapers such as The Hindu. Especially in the period following Gandhi’s 1927 visit to Tamil Nadu, E.V.R. engaged in a number of provocative activities that became the hallmark of the Self-Respecters’ style of social activism, distinctive acts of social protest that fashioned E.V.R. as a counterforce to Gandhi in symbolic as well as political domains. E.V.R. was particularly critical of the Brahman priesthood, and used the racial and linguistic theories of Caldwell and others to proclaim a new form of Dravidian national pride.13 By the early 1930s, when E.V.R. had to escalate his rhetoric to capture attention in the period of national civil disobedience, the Self-Respect Movement officially took up a “rationalist” position, debunking all religious belief as superstition and upper-caste propaganda. As E.V.R.’s political rhetoric evolved over the years, constantly engaging the issues of the day, he enunciated an essential relationship between Hinduism and Brahmanism, and vowed to work steadfastly against them both.
E.V.R. continued to press for the right of temple entry for Adi Dravidas through the decade of the 1920s and well into the thirties. As Gandhi and Congress took up this cause once again after the Poona fast of 1932, however, he seemed to lose interest in the goal, despite his argument that the temple was a civil space as well as a religious one. He also became skeptical about the possible role of the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Board in either controlling Brahmanic power in temples or seriously reforming the ways in which developing distinctions made between religious and secular activities might work to redress Brahmanic authority over symbolic capital.14 Indeed, although S. Satyamurty, a leading political figure in the Madras Congress, lamented that the state was grabbing the sacred wealth of temples in the manner that Henry VIII confiscated the wealth of monasteries, the history of state control over temples and other charitable endowments makes it clear how the domain of religion itself was reconstituted through developing agreements between upper-caste Hindus and British Christian administrators. Under such a general regime, temple entry meant simply buying in to a Brahmanic dream, which for E.V.R. always had a hallucinatory power.
During these years E.V.R. began to up the ante increasingly in his criticisms of Brahmans. He blamed them for duping non-Brahmans into believing that Hinduism was a reasonable religious system and attacked them for the ritual privileges they encoded as fundamental precepts of the Hindu fold. E.V.R. suggested that Brahmans would do anything to maintain their ritual status, by dominating secular as well as sacred activities through their preponderance in the British civil service, as well as by their control over educational institutions and their dominance in public media. “When it comes to seeking alms and practising their priestcraft, brahmins feign ignorance of politics, but when it comes to securing high positions for themselves in government, they tell the white man that brahmins alone are eminently suited to man these posts and that they alone qualify as good political leaders and reformers.”15 E.V.R. argued that Brahman interest in Tamil studies (as in the example of U. V. Swaminatha Aiyer’s scholarly rediscovery of the Sangam classics) as well as their controlling interest in the Indian nationalist movement were further illustrations of Brahman treachery. There were times when his rhetoric became particularly offensive, as when he accused Brahman women of immorality, and on more than one occasion he implied that Brahmans should be murdered. He also accused Hindu gods in coarse language of acts of sexual perversity in a variety of writings. His vulgarity and excess were calculated to shock, and often landed him in trouble with antisedition laws, both during the colonial period and afterward. There was also a time in the thirties when he embraced Russian communism and preached against Brahmans and Britons as agents of world capitalism, in language that was sure to attract colonial concern. But through many changes of emphasis and influence, he maintained throughout his life a sustained critique of Brahmanism, Hinduism, and nationalism.
Nationalism was for E.V.R. “an atavistic desire to endow the Hindu past on a more durable and contemporary basis.”16 He was as contemptuous of the religious fervor used to animate nationalist goals as he was convinced that the underlying interest for both religion and nationalism was Brahmanic privilege. Thus he never worried about being branded antinationalist and, despite his disinterest in the quasi-religious cult around the Tamil language, saw the Congress imposition of Hindi in government schools shortly after it came to power in 1937 as a further illustration of the oppressive character of nationalist ambition in India. Imprisoned for a time because of his vociferous critique of Congress on the subject of Hindi and what he saw as an Aryan conspiracy, he increasingly advocated the creation of a separate Tamil Nadu. His call developed in time into a demand for an autonomous Dravida Nadu. By the early 1940s, he supported the claim for a separate Pakistan, and argued for a separate Dravidistan as well.17 In 1944, E.V.R. established the Dravidian Party (Dravida Kazhagam), which had as its central aim the establishment of a separate non-Brahman or Dravidian nation. Significantly, when Ambedkar met Periyar in 1944 to discuss joint initiatives, Ambedkar noted that the idea of Dravidisthan was in reality applicable to all of India, since Brahmanism was a problem for the entire subcontinent.18 E.V.R. wrote a unique obituary for Gandhi in 1948, condemning his murder but also noting that Godse was not an isolated bigot or madman but rather an expression of the very forms of Hindu nationalism that Gandhi himself had done so much to cultivate, and that had become pervasive in India at large. Gandhi, he writes, was struck down by a cancer within, a scourge that E.V.R. saw as fundamentally about the cloying connection of Brahman privilege to Hindu ideology.
But although he was a secular rationalist, E.V.R. was obsessed with religion and ritual (read Hindu religion and ritual). And he was a figure as contradictory as he was flamboyant. He was a social radical who genuinely championed egalitarian social relations across caste and gender lines, but he was so consumed by Brahamanic ritual privilege and its role in the local nationalist movement that he often appeared to be a reactionary in both national contexts and more local ones. Refusing the role of minority activist, he sought to critique the ideological and social constitution of the majority, even as he attempted to expel it from his own national project. Although he was an iconoclast in many things, his major concern was always caste; for E.V.R. the minority was figured in relation to caste rather than religion. Except for a brief moment in his early career, his interest was far less in the representation of non-Brahmans in numerical terms than in the representation of non-Brahmans in symbolic terms; non-Brahmans were to be seen both as the majority and as the principal modality of social value. His use of the transformed idea of varnashramadharma as a way to forge a new egalitararian majority rankled non-Brahmans for obvious reasons, but it was also the case that E.V.R. shared with Gandhi the conviction that caste was deeply anchored in the social conventions of the subcontinent. Indeed, E.V.R. shared a great deal with Gandhi—in his reliance, for example, on the symbolic character of politics, on the necessity of social reform, and in his overriding interest in ideology rather than political process. He even set himself up as a kind of Rabelasian alter ego to Gandhi, wearing black rather than white, indulging his appetites rather than curtailing them, and establishing a personal cult that was nevertheless based on social service, among other things. But for a variety of reasons E.V.R. was always positioned on the margin—of the nationalist movement, of social reform, and of symbolic access to the national pool of ideological possibilities that were cultivated within colonial nationalism. The margin became a space where all action was reaction—spectacular at times, utopian as well, but driven by forces that were always elsewhere. When E.V.R.’s own movement began to enter the mainstream of Tamil political life in independent India, E.V.R. seems to have had no choice but to stay in the opposition. He agitated against the compromises of normal politics, provoked Hindu and Brahman sensibilities, and echoed Gandhi’s own profound unease about the inexorable tyranny of social hierarchy. He occupied a space of radical critique that is as impressive today as it was always a sign of the contradictions of the position of minority in a caste hierarchy. And yet E.V.R. was ultimately trapped by his own critical language, in a syntax that could never transcend its oppositional character.
Ironically, E.V.R.’s last political battle, in alliance with the ruling DMK party of Tamil Nadu, makes clear once again what he had been up against all of his life, and how little some things had changed under the secular postcolonial regime. In 1970, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu signed into law a new amendment that did away with the practice of appointing hereditary priests, thus opening the way for persons for all castes to be eligible for the priesthood. But the constitutionality of the amendment was challenged, and the Supreme Court of India reversed it. Although the bench upheld the DMK’s argument about the appointment of non-hereditary priests, it refused to accept the idea that priests could come from any caste. Such a policy would interfere with the Hindu worshiper’s practice of faith, stipulated by Agamic textual precepts and injunctions. According to the Supreme Court, “any State action which permits the defilement or pollution of the image by the touch of an Archaka not authorised by Agamas would violently interfere with the religious faith and practices of the Hindu worshipper in a vital respect and would therefore be prima facie invalid under the Constitution.”19 For the Supreme Court, the ultimate authority was P. V. Kane’s interpretation of the Brahma Puranas. For the court, the protection of religious freedom “had to be decided . . . with reference to the doctrines of particular religion.” Thus Hindu tradition was to be upheld and preserved in textual terms, exactly as had been established by colonial practice. That the old texts were themselves to be interpreted by Brahmanic standards of Orientalist knowledge only sealed the equation of Brahmanism and Hinduism. Under the circumstances, E.V.R. chose a form of iconoclasm that was neither religious nor “secular” but strategically oppositional. An extraordinary figure who resisted Brahmanism and nationalism through his entire life, his life’s struggle puts in bold relief the problematic history, and bequests, of Hindu majoritarian nationalism.
Although E.V.R. was preoccupied throughout his life with matters of caste, his position was always that of the “Sudra.” He seems rarely to have addressed the question of untouchable rights or concerns. After 1930, E.V.R. was little interested in politics beyond the borders of the south, so perhaps it is no surprise that he paid no attention to B. R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra. But even if he had been interested in building alliances across the subcontinent, it is unlikely that he would have reached out to Ambedkar. Ambedkar, who went on to become the “father” of the Indian constitution, had a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and was deeply Western in outlook. Rather than modeling himself in some oppositional way on Gandhi, he was a figure much more like Nehru, except that he could never get beyond his caste origins and the political sensibility that the daily insults of untouchability engendered in him. And yet, despite the many differences between these two figures, they were startlingly similar in some respects. Both E.V.R. and Ambedkar were keenly aware that caste was the principal impediment to social justice, equality, and reform; and they were in agreement that caste could not be separated from the beliefs and institutions of Hinduism more generally. Where they differed most was in their relationship to politics. Ambedkar not only relied on constitutional issues, he made one of his most important marks through the constitution, and he was convinced that untouchables could only thrive through constitutional negotiation around their status as an oppressed and disenfranchised minority. And yet, in the end, Ambedkar was not content with politics as usual. In the most dramatic political statement of his career, he announced his intention to leave Hinduism through conversion to Buddhism. Despite his deep and abiding secularism, he could only counter religious prejudice with religious conversion. And he did this despite the threat that reservations for scheduled castes had been established as an incidence of unequal treatment within the Hindu fold. This meant that it was by no means a foregone conclusion that Buddhists would benefit from the very constitutional provisions Ambedkar had so strenuously fought for throughout his life.
Born in 1891 into a Maharastrian Mahar untouchable family, Ambedkar studied in army cantonments and then in Bombay, graduating from Elphinstone College in 1912. His educational attainment and social background gained the recognition of the Maharaja Gaekwad of Baroda, who gave him a scholarship for travel to Columbia University in New York, where he earned his Ph.D. as well as to do further advanced work in law and economics at the London School of Economics and the London bar. After an unsuccessful attempt to practice as a lawyer in Baroda—his caste status earned him steady insults and made it impossible for him to rent rooms in town—he went to Bombay to become a college lecturer and practitioner before the Bombay High Court. As early as 1927, Ambedkar was officially nominated to the Legislative Council as one of two representatives of the depressed classes. During the next two decades Ambedkar maintained a role as a prominent figure in official circles as well as in government, at the same time that he took up a series of political and social struggles on behalf of untouchables.
Ambedkar first took up the cause of educational access for untouchables, turning as well to three major issues: the abolition of the traditional duties of Mahars in village society, the campaign to gain access to common water, and the movement for temple entry for untouchables. His public notoriety began with the issue of temple entry. He greeted the untouchable victory in Vaikkam, which had been spearheaded by E.V.R. (Periyar), with great enthusiasm, and subsequently he led a campaign to open up the Thakurdwar temple in Bombay in 1927. This was followed by struggles around the Parvati temple in Poona in 1929, and around the Kalaram temple in Nasik beginning in 1930. Ambedkar was conspicuously unable to gain the support of more than a few caste Hindu reformers, in large part because of his confrontational style and rhetoric. He led the Mahad satyagraha of 1927, in which speeches were delivered about such things as the need for Mahar women to wear their saris in the manner of the upper castes. He concluded the rally by marching to the high-caste tank and drawing water to drink. Orthodoxy claimed to be outraged, the tank underwent ritual purification, and the municipal council withdrew its support for Ambedkar’s efforts. He performed his most dramatic act in December 1927, when in a public gathering he set fire to a copy of the Manusmriti, a gesture that outraged many a sympathetic social reformer.
Ambedkar’s symbolic assault on Hindu scriptures illustrated his general sense that caste had become an integral component of the Hindu religion. His first systematic critique of caste had been made in a paper he presented while a graduate student at Columbia, in an anthropology seminar in May 1916. He argued that caste was first and foremost the imposition of the principle of endogamy, a social system of exclusion that began with Brahmans and was imitated by other groups both because of the prestige accorded by Hinduism to Brahmans and because of the social logic of exclusion (“Some closed the door: Others found it closed against them”).20 Even if Brahmans did not impose caste as a system by strict force, they nevertheless invented caste to suit their own concerns and predilections: “These customs in all their strictness are obtainable only in one caste, namely the Brahmins, who occupy the highest place in the social hierarchy of the hindu society. . . . [T]he strict observance of these customs and the social superiority arrogated by the priestly class in all ancient civilizations are sufficient to prove that they were the originators of this ‘unnatural institution’ founded and maintained through these unnatural means.” But neither Brahmans as a class nor the great lawgiver Manu could have manipulated social forms to produce caste as a social system; rather, Ambedkar suggested that Brahmans set the ball rolling, and that Manu worked to provide spiritual and philosophical justification for the conversion of a class structure into a system of endogamy. Ambedkar dispensed with prevailing European theories of caste, noting that Nesfield’s suggestion that caste was really about occupational differentiation was as obvious as it was unsuited for providing any kind of social explanation. Ambedkar implicitly critiqued Risley and all those who provided racial explanations for caste by noting that “European students of caste have unduly emphasised the role of colour in the Caste system. Themselves impregnated by colour prejudices, they very readily imagined it to be the chief factor in the Caste problem. But nothing could be further from the truth.” He quoted Ketkar to say: “Whether a tribe or a family was racially Aryan or Dravidian was a question which never troubled the people of India, until foreign scholars came in and began to draw the line.”21
Ambedkar expanded his critique of caste and transformed an academic argument into an explosive political intervention in an undelivered address for the 1936 annual conference of the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal of Lahore. Invited to the conference by a group of social reformers who wished to honor Ambedkar’s lifelong struggle against caste, he wrote an address that led some of his most avid supporters to back away from him. Ambedkar apparently went over a line when he wrote that the annihilation of caste required an assault on Hinduism itself. “People are not wrong in observing Caste. In my view, what is wrong is their religion, which has inculcated the notion of Caste. If this is correct, then obviously the enemy, you must grapple with, is not the people who observe Caste, but the Shastras which teach them this religion of Caste. . . . The real remedy is to destroy the belief in the sanctity of the Shastras.” Ambedkar noted further that “Brahminism is the poison which has spoiled Hinduism. You will succeed in saving Hinduism if you will kill Brahminism.”22 Ambedkar was told that he could not deliver his address without modulating the language of his attack on Hinduism, in particular exempting the shastras from any criticism. Refusing to do so, he printed the address at his own expense and entered into a public debate with Gandhi.
Gandhi responded to his address by insisting that “Caste has nothing to do with religion.” Noting that caste was harmful both to spiritual and national growth, he also argued that “Varna and Ashrama are institutions which have nothing to do with castes.”23 He went on to say that “The law of Varna teaches us that we have each one of us to earn our bread by following the ancestral calling. It defines not our rights but our duties. It necessarily has reference to callings that are conducive to the welfare of humanity and to no other. It also follows that there is no calling too low and none too high. All are good, lawful and absolutely equal in status. The callings of a Brahmin—spiritual teacher—and a scavenger are equal, and their due performance carries equal merit before God and at one time seems to have carried identical reward before man.”24 Gandhi continued to hold to the views that had so exercised E.V.R. in Madras the decade before, when Gandhi had responded to the rise of non-Brahman politics. He felt that caste as a ranked structure of groups was bad but that the principles of varna and asrama (stage of life) on which caste was based, and of which caste could be seen as a degraded form, were noble and well worth reviving as ideals. Ambedkar took Gandhi as his most significant rhetorical adversary. Whereas he seems to have written his address in part as criticism of Gandhi’s views on social reform, he jumped at the opportunity to debate Gandhi directly about these views when Gandhi reviewed Ambedkar’s address in his newspaper Harijan. Ambedkar wrote that “what the Mahatma seems to me to suggest in its broadest and simplest form is that Hindu society can be made tolerable and even happy without any fundamental change in its structure if all the high caste Hindus can be persuaded to follow a high standard of morality in their dealings with the low caste Hindus.” In perhaps the most scathing of a series of rebuttals to Gandhi, he wrote that the Mahatma “has almost in everything the simplicity of the child with the child’s capacity for self-deception. Like a child he can believe in anything he wants to believe. We must therefore wait till such time as it pleases the Mahatma to abandon his faith in Varna as it has pleased him to abandon his faith in Caste.” For Ambedkar, the disagreement with Gandhi was fundamental. He was not, as he said, quarrelling with Hindus, and Hinduism, because of “imperfections of their social conduct.” No indeed; his quarrel was “much more fundamental. It is over their ideals.”25
Ambedkar’s fundamental quarrel with Gandhi had, in fact, begun in earnest in relation to the question of separate representation for untouchables in the wake of negotiations with Britain after the civil disobedience campaign of 1930–1931. Indeed, the quarrel took on epic proportion in 1932, when Gandhi announced a fast unto death over the establishment by Ramsey MacDonald of a separate electorate for untouchables, in large part as a consequence of Ambedkar’s advocacy of untouchable interests at the Round Table Conference. Like E.V.R., Ambedkar grew increasingly suspicious of Gandhi’s defense of the caste system as an organic, unifying, and inclusive system that could divest itself of all hierarchical traces. Ambedkar saw caste as part of the problem, not part of the solution, and rejected Gandhi’s call for untouchables to be included within the compass either of the caste system or of Hindu society. In the actual negotiations, the most heated issue concerned the classification of the electorate. Gandhi, who was opposed to separate electorates for any group, grudgingly accepted them for Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and Anglo-Indians but, in what was clearly his commitment to the unity of the Hindu community, drew the line when it came to untouchables, whose interests he claimed to represent. The Communal Award of August 17, 1932, granted untouchables Ambedkar’s demand for separate electorates in areas of their largest concentration. Gandhi responded to the award by announcing that he would fast unto death, a decision that Nehru, among others, thought was disastrous, since it elevated what for him was a side issue in the nationalist struggle to center stage and threatened the Mahatma’s health and life once again. Nevertheless, many in Congress supported Gandhi, some because of their concern to protect the great Hindu base of Congress in the face of other communal interests. Ambedkar was unable to withstand public pressure to defer to the force of Gandhi’s fast, and in the resulting compromise, known as the Poona Pact, the electorate was maintained as joint while the numbers of seats specifically reserved for untouchables was doubled.
A conference of Hindu leaders was convened in Bombay in September 1932 to ratify the Poona Pact, and they unanimously adopted a resolution in effect outlawing untouchability. The resolution not only stipulated an end to discrimination in the use of public wells, schools, and roads, it also advocated temple entry for untouchables. Gandhi covered the ensuing temple-entry movement in his weekly paper, The Harijan, with regular reports of new temple openings, as well as of protests performed to press for other temples to open their doors. Congress supporters proposed a series of temple-entry bills in various legislative councils. Ambedkar was bitter about Gandhi’s sudden advocacy of temple entry and his effort to make it into a central plank of the constructive program at this point. He believed that Gandhi’s object in joining the temple-entry movement (which he claimed Gandhi had earlier opposed) was “to destroy the basis of the claim of the Untouchables for political rights by destroying the barrier between them and the Hindus which makes them separate from the Hindus.” He also believed that Gandhi was manipulating the issue for his own fame and glory. In February 1933, Ambedkar came out against the Temple Entry Bill, arguing that by this time, although he had supported it in the past, temple entry was a side issue. Not only was it less important than higher education, higher employment, and economic advancement, it appeared to be the only public issue related to untouchable social status that had attained support by Congress (and that too only after local referendums called for temple openings). Ambedkar further believed that temple entry conferred additional symbolic capital on high-caste Hindus, thus suggesting a level of disgust with Hinduism that anticipates his later interest in conversion. Finally, Ambedkar wrote that he had no interest in joining Congress on the issue of temple entry if they did not join him in his effort to destroy the caste system itself.26
For both Ambedkar and E.V.R., temple entry was a goal that lost its appeal once it was generally shared, not least because of the shame that the religious politics of exclusion had produced during invariably disheartening struggles for recognition and respect. From 1933 on, Ambedkar took a relentlessly oppositional stance to Gandhi and Congress, as he became suspicious of all majoritarian politics. Although he had been forced to back away from the idea of separate electorates—confronted as he was with apparent responsibility for the Mahatma’s life—he nevertheless pursued constitutional measures designed to protect depressed classes from either limited representation or misrepresentation. At the same time, he continued to defend separate electorates on the grounds that he did not trust the majority to elect minority representatives who would genuinely represent minority interests. Indeed, Ambedkar’s aim was for untouchables to be treated as minorities in the same terms as other groups, especially Muslims. And yet, Ambedkar cultivated an ambivalent sensibility about the politics of the minority, distrustful of any effort on the part of the majority to incorporate the minority, and all the while harboring a growing sense of bitterness at the social and religious system that conferred on untouchables such a pathetic fate. Even to accept minority status on the basis of caste position was to accept some residual taint of the hegemonic system of caste prejudice.
Indeed, both E.V.R. and Ambedkar seem to have become even more embittered with Brahmans, and Brahmanism, as a result of their experience working within the framework of Hindu social reform, whether in the advocacy of temple entry or the common pursuit of social aims that were ultimately designed to give greater credibility to the Hindu fold. When Ambedkar wrote The Untouchables in 1948, he noted that the cause of Hindu civilization was itself at fault. As he wrote, “The Hindu does not regard the existence of these classes [untouchables, etc.] as a matter of apology or shame and feels no responsibility either to atone for it or to inquire into its origin and growth.” The primary reason for this, he claimed, was the undisputed position of the Brahmans as the learned class. “The power and position which the Brahmins possess is entirely due to the Hindu Civilization which treats them as supermen and subjects the lower classes to all sorts of disabilities so that they may never rise and challenge or threaten the superiority of the Brahmins over them. As is natural, every Brahmin is interested in the maintenance of Brahminic supremacy be he orthodox or unorthodox, be he a priest or a grahasta [householder], be he a scholar or not.”27 Although in 1916 Ambedkar had been calmly analytic about the relation of Brahmans to the caste system, thirty years later he saw them as a scourge, and as the basis of a religious system that he had announced he must abandon.
If Ambedkar felt disillusioned by his experience of working with Hindu social reformers, his defeat by Gandhi over the issue of separate electorates left him permanently disillusioned, as well, with the possibility that democratic institutions would allow adequate self-representation on the part of untouchable constituencies in India. But as several commentators have noted, Ambedkar’s career reflects an extraordinary ambivalence about politics. On the one hand, Ambedkar went on to become the architect of the Indian constitution, and it was he who set the legal guidelines for reservations and positive discrimination for postindependent India. It was clear from this extraordinary investment and legacy that Ambedkar never gave up entirely on the state as the ultimate seat of justice. On the other hand, he announced his intention in 1935 to leave the Hindu fold, doing so finally twenty years later, shortly before his death.28 And in his studies of and searches for a new religion, as well as in his final conversion to Buddhism, he gave voice to his conviction that even as untouchability was not simply a political (or social, or economic) problem, the stigma of untouchability could not be erased simply by political means. If caste was so fundamental to Hindu society, it could only be annihilated by abandoning Hindu society altogether. A nationalist to the end, he chose a religion that was as Indian as Hinduism.29 As a secularist, he chose a religion that could be conceived as rational, ethical, and unburdened by sacerdotal hierarchy. But the conversion of this secular constitutional lawyer into a neophyte Buddhist was more than either a strategic political move or the outcome of basic philosophical frustration. Rather, Ambedkar’s conversion was a poignant illustration of the contradictory position of caste in colonial and postcolonial India. Müller and Gandhi both could argue that caste and Hinduism were distinct, but for an untouchable, such distinctions seemed irrelevant, wrong, and ultimately impossible. For Ambedkar, the use of a religious idiom to make his final critique of caste—a critique far more powerful than all his extraordinary essays, speeches, and political interventions over his long career—was forced on him by his recognition, as an untouchable, that he could neither undo nor escape the horrible embrace of Hinduism and caste society. Conversion, for Ambedkar, seemed the only way out. When, in the last year of his life, he converted to Buddhism and advocated the mass conversion to Buddhism of all untouchables, he performed what he considered to be the final and most decisive rejection of the claims and hegemonic character of caste Hinduism.
E.V.R. and Ambedkar began their political careers advocating communal representation. They both claimed the need for non-Brahmans and Depressed Classes to attain rights and redress through proportional (and thus necessarily affirmative) representation in the emerging electoral bodies of late colonial India. In this process they were required to fashion their political constituencies as minorities, accordingly deploying critiques of the majority while at the same time issuing a range of appeals to the majority for recognition. Significantly, these claims for recognition betrayed the peculiarity of the language of the minority for the communities in question. Non-Brahmans were numerically minor only in the context of public bodies and institutions that were dominated by the numerically minor but socially, culturally, and politically major Brahmans. Any significant extension of the franchise entailed the promise of growing power and influence for non-Brahmans, who claimed to represent all non-Brahman classes (including by default the depressed classes, who were largely neglected by the non-Brahman movement). The non-Brahman movement was based in part on the claim for proportional representation and in part on anti-Brahman sentiment. Although these two trajectories were synergistic in the early years of the Justice Party, they began to split off from each other by the middle of the 1920s, as non-Brahmans began to play an increasingly important role in the Congress and the nationalist movement more generally. The depressed classes were a classic example of the minority, dominated by the upper castes in every sense, even as they were always doomed to numerical minority with no natural social or political allies. Even the depressed classes, however, were not a minority in the same sense as Muslims were, despite the efforts of Ambedkar to model untouchable politics on the strategies of the Muslim League.
In the initial stages of political mobilization, the depressed classes sought both protection and inclusion, the latter through the extension of rights to political representation, economic benefits, and religious participation. However, protection and inclusion turned out to be contradictory aims, since the development of minoritarian politics in India around the Muslim question led to an expectation that protection was necessary only when communities were committed to the maintenance of difference and separation. Certainly Gandhi’s desire for untouchables was that protection be predicated on the paternalism (he used the phrase trusteeship) of the upper castes. At the same time, untouchables were to be incorporated into the Hindu fold in such a way as to render the protection of difference, rather than simply the protection of weakness, unnecessary. In this way untouchables and Muslims were themselves fundamentally different (and the possible conversion of untouchables into Muslims was protected against at all costs). Indeed, Muslims were never offered the option of (re)conversion; protection was the flip side of a coin that was minted in the service of the ineradicable nature of religious difference. In part as a logical extension of the Muslim position, Ambedkar realized that in his rejection of the hegemonic condescension of caste Hinduism he also needed to refuse the incorporative strategy of the majority. Ambedkar’s ultimate conviction that he needed to convert to another religion was a tacit acceptance of the minority model of the Muslim, a tragic sign of the limited conditions for recognition in a nation that had been constituted around a peculiar form of secular majoritarianism. It is not unimportant, of course, that he seems never to have taken seriously the idea that he might convert to Islam. And I can only mention here the lack of interest among most backward-caste leaders in making strategic alliances with Muslims, who in most rural situations shared structural (often castelike) conditions with backward and depressed classes.
Both E.V.R. and Ambedkar rejected the hegemonic claim of the majority community, even as both of these figures developed radically different political ideologies and strategies. And yet even in rejection, the power of the majority asserted (indeed constituted) itself. In particular, E.V.R. and Ambedkar were ultimately unable to think themselves out of what they themselves diagnosed as the conspiratorial and quintessentially Hindu embrace of religion and politics. E.V.R.’s secular rationalism could never transcend its strategic iconoclasm, one that in the end produced both mythologies and rituals of its own. And Ambedkar’s constitutional secularism never made it possible for him to accept either that caste was only an index of material relations or that Hinduism could be transcended (or simply defeated) without conversion. Ambedkar shared with Gandhi a fundamentally ritualistic view of caste, even as he shared with E.V.R. an incapacity ever to get beyond the insults of Brahmanic Hinduism. Both of these figures, and the movements they spawned, simultaneously tell the stories of minority impossibility and of majority intolerance. They serve, additionally, to caution against some of the current uses of Gandhi to help us think beyond the contemporary crisis of secularism. And even as they highlight the modal story of Muslim exceptionalism in modern Indian history, they remind us too that the minor is the necessary other of the major, whether the major dominates through logics of exclusion or inclusion. They reflect the peculiar contradictions that are still very much a part of the colonial inheritance for the nation, and that still work against most progressive postcolonial politics in India today, however they might be positioned in the contest with Hindu majoritarianism. And they demonstrate that caste is still very much a part of the communal problem in the political struggles over recognition, identity, and rights.
E.V.R and Ambedkar were both seen as antinationalist figures, though Ambedkar was more easily folded into the nationalist apparatus and became a key figure in the drafting of the Indian constitution. Both figures split with the canonic nationalist cause centered on Gandhi’s role in defining Indian nationalism. It is ironic in retrospect to see Gandhi in this light, given the extent to which we are now being told that Gandhi was the nationalist figure who managed most successfully to negotiate the pitfalls of colonial mimesis. Gandhi was opposed both to the efforts of various non-Brahman groups to challenge the role of a broadly Hindu ideological structure for national unity and to the concerns of other non-Brahman and untouchable groups to challenge the representational character of national politics. E.V.R. and Ambedkar represented different groups as well as different oppositional strategies, but they both bring into relief the incorrigible relationship between certain caste constituencies and assumptions, on the one hand, and the ideological charter of the anticolonial form of nationalism that emerged in the Indian case, on the other. Clearly they tell a different story from the one that would be conveyed had this book focused on religious communities rather than caste. But the stories converge in important ways, as well. And in this convergence, they also remind us of the extent to which the most pernicious inheritance of colonialism may be the colonial role—persisting long after direct colonial rule—in fashioning the oppositional terms for the construction of the idea of a national community. If it is the case that the postcolonial state has been relentlessly seen as threatened by communitarian forces, it is also the case that these forces have been fundamental to the formation of this state—and the presumed nation it represents and governs—in ways that have worked both to mask and to justify oppression. And as the lives of E.V.R. and Ambedkar have both made manifest, oppression has been enclosed within the Brahmanic fold of Hindu civilization.