Sudipta Kaviraj, “Dark Genealogies: Ambedkar’s Struggle with Historical Past”, Distinguished Lecture Series, Delivered at the Sir C. V. Raman Auditorium, University of Hyderabad (5 April 2019).
Disclaimer
The section divisions and the notes in monotype are all mine. The transcript has not been vetted by the speaker. Readers must consult the lecture itself whenever in doubt.
Sections
1. Ambedkar as a Modern Thinker
2. Ambedkar and “Castes in India”
4. The Tone of Ambedkar’s Thought
1. Ambedkar as a Modern Thinker
I shall speak about a question that I find fascinating in the study of Indian thought: the question of history. Ambedkar has a distinctive place in this tradition precisely because, although the lack of historical records is a general problem for Indian history, the Dalit perspective that Ambedkar brings to it enters into very different kinds of questions about our relation to our past. What I shall talk about this evening is a bit unusual for my subject, political theory. In reading political theory we enter into a world primarily of augmentation, of clear statements, clarifications, counter-arguments, and conclusions. Today’s subject is more akin to the study of literature themes, of aesthetic judgment, and historical melancholia. Yet it is also about a major political theorist from modern India and about a major concern he carried throughout his life, a question that has a peculiar eruptive presence in his writings because it is a question that he cannot resolve and yet cannot abandon.
Looking at the paintings of artist, like let us say Caravaggio, we cannot avoid an overwhelming and looming sense of the darkness of his palette. The metaphysical darkness at the core of his world seems always trying to burst onto the canvas. We often have that sense in reading the work of poets that human existence is tinged with an indelible layer of melancholy, a predominant rasa that permeates not a single work but the totality of their production. Reading Ambedkar, one can feel the presence of a similar ineradicable tone of grief, a tone in both senses of the world: like an aural tone of music or a tone of color in painting. But because of some reason strongly related to the internal features of political theory as a genre of reflection, there is a strange obstruction in the path of expression of this grief. My paper seeks to understand the nature of this obstruction and its transcendence in Ambedkar’s long reflections, always interrupted and always resumed, on the elusive history of untouchability.
We cannot read political theory entirely divested of the techniques of reading literature. Though we always feel this is less important, all works of political theory are written in the philosopher Frege’s sense, in a particular tone. By preliminary distinction between sense and tone, Frege separated all questions not related to sense and quarantined them into a residual concept so that they did not intrude into his subsequent analysis of how language carried different meanings.[1] This distinction immediately opens up an interesting prospect for readings of political theory.
Frege speaks of the “colorings and shadings [Färbungen und Beleuchtungen] which poetic eloquence seeks to give to the sense”. See Gottlob Frege, “Sense and Reference” (originally published in 1892), The Philosophical Review 57, no. 3 (1948): 209–230, at 213. This is what Frege’s great interpreter, Michael Dummett describes as “tone” in Frege: Philosophy of Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 83–89. On Frege’s rather sparse discussion of the notion of “tone”, Dummett remarks: “The carelessness of Frege’s treatment of tone was due to his lack of interest in it: for him it is a very secondary feature of meaning” (p. 88).
Clearly, in addition to the readings we subject them to, texts of political theory could be read in terms of tone as well. When we read Hobbes and Locke, for instance, we encountered a clear tone distinction between Hobbes is defiantly provocative mocking tone against the dominant Christian ideas about the nature of man, the presence of God, the impact of religion on human life and Locke’s utterly different tone of acceptance of the deep reasonableness of Christian doctrines, like the world as a gift of God to all men in common, only to be entirely transcended by the powerful renunciation of a theory of unlimited accumulation of property in the next few pages of that chapter [Chapter 5 of Locke’s Second Treatise]. Tone is a perfectly possible subject of analysis in reading political theory and if we decide to supplement the reading of theoretical sense with the reading of linguistic tone, we can supplement our conventional reading by the techniques of the literary theory. In the case of Ambedkar and the kind of critical theory that he represents, an analysis of tone leads to more fundamental theoretical insights.
Among modern Indians, Ambedkar was undoubtedly a most skilful user of the liberal language of political thinking. What I mean by language here should be explicated more clearly. Language is not something that we use voluntarily and optionally when we are taking steps in a particular process of actual reasoning. Language in this sense refers to something more underlying and profound, something that both enables and limits our thought. It’s a fundamental way of conceiving of what the political world is really like what can be done to it and in what ways. Politics in Ambedkar’s world are dominated by at least three different languages.
First there is a fundamental distinction between a pre-modern and the modern language which are entirely asymmetric. A pre-modern language drawn from the concepts and arguments developed through which texts like the Arthaśāstra, the Manusmṛiti, the Śukranīti, the Kāmandakīya Nītisāra, etc., develop their thinking and their judgments is evidently inadequate, lacking in conceptual resources for thinking through the modern world. From Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, we are irrevocably in a world of modern thinking in which it’s perfectly possible for authors to adopt an anti-modernist stance but their intellectual tools are drawn all from modernist languages, not from the depleting vocabulary of pre-modern reflection because the nature of modern power is so profoundly different from the ontology of the political world about which they thought and offered judgments. That leaves us with the important linguistic universe which was the universe that Ambedkar made his own.
Specialists consider the Śukranīti to be quite a late production, composed as late as the 19th century. Lallanji Gopal concludes (consult his references as well) that: The present Śukranīti was the work of a man of the nineteenth century who had a thorough knowledge of the regulations, administrative measures, and policies of the East India Company, especially those of the Bombay coast, and who was well-informed on Maratha history. “The ‘Śukranīti’ — A Nineteenth Century Text”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 25, no. 1/3 (1962): 524–556, at 551.
To characterize an author like Ambedkar strictly, we have to discern the defining features of his thinking. First, it is entirely modern. Ambedkar was had a total irreverence towards the antiquity of his society, except Buddhism. He believed that there was little valuable, serviceable, or morally defensible in the heritage of Hindu thought. Inside the universe of modern politics, Ambedkar is clearly in favor of the language of liberalism. That is the language of his unmistakable choice. That is the heritage that he draws upon and exalts in his polemics against nationalist doctrines that give priority to the political over social reform. That is the language that he wields to denounce the practices of caste in Hindu society. The language he uses masterfully in the detailed and constantly shifting context of constitutional deliberations. And the language he deploys with precision and foresight in the great opportunity he gets in shaping the Indian Constitution. His relation with Western liberalism however — I would be happy to have a discussion about this — is not quite straightforward. It required constant refinement and modification. But I am concerned with something that appears to me to be both more elusive and more profound in his thinking.
Ambedkar’s writing shows two types of affiliation to liberal thought. Like many of his contemporaries he was clearly attracted by the high rationalistic tradition of the Enlightenment emphasizing particularly two strands of thinking: of uncompromising rationalistic critique of religion and the high liberal fervor for the expansion of liberty. Ambedkar’s affiliation to the liberal language of political thought comes very early and is entirely decisive and irreversible. Ambedkar saw Indian Marxism as a form of thought entirely trapped in a Eurocentric obsession with economically defined class unable to recognize the obvious and profound form of inequality in their own society present in caste. Eventually Ambedkar became a real master of the theoretical language of liberalism. Dewey’s influence at Columbia seems to have been profound and methodologically critical because Dewey was an innovative thinker of liberal doctrine and applied it to new questions and fields of inquiry. For instance, Dewey was very interesting thinker about the connection between the liberal society and education. This seems to have shown Ambedkar that the meaning of being a good liberal was not an obstinate repetition of its catechisms but elaboration of his central moral principles towards new analytical domains. So he did for India what he thought Dewey was doing in the American context. He did more than anyone else to construct a radical form of liberal politics in the context of Indian political life.
For a valuable history and analysis of the intellectual connection between Dewey and Ambedkar, see Scott R. Stroud, The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: An Intellectual Biography of B. R. Ambedkar (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023).
The question of Ambedkar’s relation not to the doctrine but to the language of socialism is however an interesting one. Liberalism is less outraged by inequality than socialism is and I believe that though doctrinally Ambedkar rejects Marxism there is a subterranean presence of language of outrage that draws from a socialist vocabulary and the socialist tone. That’s why, to my mind, the tone is very important. On one question, however, the two languages of liberalism and socialist thinking were fundamentally similar. Both languages of modern political thought emerge from a shared secular tradition but secularity works here in a peculiarly fundamental sense. In the great early modern thinkers like Hobbes, the business of politics in increasingly conceived as mundane in an intensified sense. Generally these thinkers did not question the existence of God or his perceptible presence in the world but it seemed clear to them that divine presence is not regarded as a reliable protection from the possible predations of the modern state. In a sense, the whole business of political theory and constitutionalism which was at the center of a Ambedkar’s thinking emerged from this gap, absence, or flaw, in the world’s mundane arrangements to secure political justice. To find protection against a state turned hostile, the presence of a hidden God was not reliable remedy.
As a modernist, Ambedkar assumes that rules of morality must be marked by a form of what can be called Kantian universalism: a tenet that is good for one person must be good for all. Otherwise, it did not qualify as a moral rule. Drawing on this line of thought, he could argue that the detailed instructions of differential punishments, for instance, in the Manusmṛiti was a travesty of the very conception of a moral rule. The Manusmṛiti, in particular, was outrageous not because its rules were degrading and discretely indefensible but because it was premised on a monstrous misconception about the nature of morality itself. He could have gone forward and claimed, alongside his startling claim that Hinduism did not constitute a society, that Hindu texts of this kind also did not have a conception of morality.
It is often noted that philosophical materialism leads to a kind of experimental-experiential presentism. Since what is happening to us in the present moment has an immediate effect on us in all senses materially and intellectually, it gets a natural preponderance in our attention. Abstractly, the past and the future might be an equally significant part of time conceived in the abstract sense. But in this sense they’re less materially present than the time of the present. If we can notice this uneven emphasis on different segments of time — past, present, and future — we could say that we can detect an underlying latent structure of temporality in every kind of political theory about how the treat past present and future differentially. I am using temporality in a special narrow meaning. Temporality in my use in not just a fancier name for time but the way time, which is necessarily abstract, is given a structure something akin to a shape by stressing some of its parts at the expense of others. It will be seen in that modern political theory and both its dominant forms of liberalism and Marxism are futuristic in a rather narrow sense. In the sense that because the present is still happening and the future is yet to happen, the political activity of seeking justice and social equality must be oriented towards these two segments of time, particularly the present.
At times, this bias in favor of present experience and materiality, this prejudice in favor of the simple existence itself, seem to have troubling consequences in liberal judicial rules. I’ll give you a notorious English example. Two young boys of 10 and 12 bludgeoned a toddler to death. In their trial and afterwards, the entire orientation of the judicial process seems to be to ensure that the perpetrators, these two boys who killed the toddler, were treated with the care we owe to children, hastening their rehabilitation as moral persons so that they can enjoy a successful human life when they come out of prison. The mother of the toddler agitated against the entire procedure because she thought that the justice for her child, who was also a moral person, is sacrificed. But the argument goes down to a brutal rock-bottom where the basic point of persuasion is that the lives of the two perpetrators are still existent in the present and possibly in the future while the life of the toddler unfortunately is impossible to continue. Therefore, there cannot be a reasonable extension of moral considerations of care towards him as he is now incapable of being cared for.
An argument that is at bottom very similar would be advanced by both liberals and socialists here implicitly regarding questions like instances of atrocities in the long irrevocable past. Both theories would, according to their lights and to their respective principles, demand the politics of justice for groups who are wronged. Liberal theory would recommend social initiatives and state action to counteract practices of social injustice like caste and socialists would invoke them to counteract poverty but both types of social theories are secular and materialistic in this common sense. That they would strain every nerve to eradicate such practices. Think of slavery in the modern West and the continuing degradation and denial of equal rights to people of color and women in the West. Liberal and socialist theory carried on the real moral crusades against these social wrongs, eventually to some success.
Yet these theories are indifferent towards the past. At most, they might regard the evidence of the past subjection of groups to inegalitarian atrocity as a deplorable aspect of the societies history but eventually they have a deep active orientation towards society. Their central question, after after the necessary work of moral judgment is concluded is, what can be done now, what can we do to right these wrongs. The trouble with history is the irreversible inaccessibility of the past to present action and the fact that, because of that pastness, somehow the crucial phrase “what can we do about it” becomes another inoperative and ineffectual. Action is rendered impossible simply by the obstructing tense of the case. Action is barred, deflected. The demand for action rebounds in a sense from the temporal surface of the historical past. The eventual attitude of futuristic future-oriented and action-oriented theories is to accept silence. This was true of social theory in Ambedkar’s time, though, in recent times, new speculation has begun on some of these questions.
2. Ambedkar and “Castes in India”
A reading of Ambedkar immediately reveals two things. Ambedkar’s fluent and mastery of the language of liberalism as I said but also his deep melancholy at the idea which that language seems to force upon us, that which will necessarily accept the silence that I considered just now. Consider three of his texts which circle backing explicitly to this question of origin and the injustice of this silence. The first is probably the most academic piece “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis, and Development” — I would want you to look at it literally because every word has a weight: their Mechanism, Genesis, and Development — presented for the ethnology seminar at Columbia with Alexander Goldenweiser in 1916, later published in Indian Antiquity in 1917.
Twenty years later, he wrote the Annihilation of Caste as a lecture to be delivered at the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal reform organization which demanded in treating and dropping some passages they found unacceptably radical making him refuse their invitation. But precisely for it is uncompromisingness that issue remains a major statement of Ambedkar thinking. In 1946, he published Who Were the Shudras? which was linked to the extension of this historical inquiry into the further question about origins of untouchability published after independence in 1948 [The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables?]. So what I shall do is I have a very long paper in which I go into all these different texts in great detail. I don’t have time to go into all that so I’ll simply give you the example of the first text and then go on to make the other more theoretical remarks.
In the introduction to his to this essay there is a subtle insertion of a move that marks a departure from the accepted methods of the discipline he was studying at Columbia. I quote Ambedkar:
In my opinion a student of Ethnology, in one sense at least, is much like the guide [to a historical site like Pompeii]. Like his prototype, he holds up (perhaps with more seriousness and desire of self-instruction) the social institutions to view, with all the objectiveness humanly possible, and inquires into their origin and function.
[B. R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development”, Indian Antiquary 46 (1917): 81–95, at 81 (hereafter cited in text).]
The sentence seems some unremarkable yet it contains a surplus or supplementary question that was entirely outside the normal science methods of anthropology of his time. To understand how a social institution works, of course, scholars must grasp how its constituent elements actually function and explore, if possible, how its way of functioning came into existence. So there are two questions: one is the question of functioning and the other one is the origin of that functioning at some point in history. We must remind ourselves that when he was writing this paper, Ambedkar had been studying anthropology in Columbia, one of the premier institutions in this field at the time, for three years presumably absorbing the methodology that demarcates this field off from two neighboring disciplines which also studies human societies and their institutions, the conventional discipline of history and the more recent one of sociology.
At their origin disciplines tend to be particularly sensitive and insistent about their methods because because these precisely separate them off from other competing ones. Why did academic knowledge need a discipline called ethnography or anthropology when it already had these two others? The answer has to be methodological. Ambedkar himself notes without expressing any discomfort that the seminar was concerned with the fundamental distinction between “primitive” and “modern” societies and it was now his turn to “entertain” his coparticipants with the paper which showed the mechanism, genesis and development of castes in India. Yet, the primitiveness of societies which ethnography dealt with was of a special kind, precisely the kind of society which had continued for long spans of time yet which did not have reliable records of how this time was spent: societies that were record less, “without history”, and consequently, in these societies, the primitiveness had to be read off from a kind of timeless, that is time-suppressing, present. “Primitive” is a technical term of methodological art. “Primitive” is not equivalent to “ancient”. The use of the term “ancient” implies that it’s a state that they left behind followed by something else which acts as a foil to give the term “ancient” its precise semantic content. History deals with ancient societies; ethnology has to resolve the puzzle of primitiveness.
Anthropologists did not produce history; they produce an alternate for historical knowledge by showing how these societies had a structure, how exactly its parts were linked to each other, and how these were functionally connected — a method which would be called structural functionalism later on. This was, of course, the privileged method for studying the working of societies which were presumably primitive but whose lack of history deflected the historical question. They lived in an unhistorical time, lapse of time without evidence of change. The self knowledge of these societies had a surface or character from which historical questions such as “when”, “why” and “how” bounced off without bite. Techniques of history did not have materials they could grasp. Therefore these had to be subjected to the methodologies of a freshly-minted discipline. History and anthropology did not compete or intersect in their epistemic fields or their cognitive methods. They did quite different things. For a student who had studied under under the discipline of Franz Boas — because Goldenweiser was a student of Boas in one of the first departments of anthropology — this move was not part of normal science.
On the connection between Ambedkar and Boas, see Jesús Francisco Cháirez-Garza, “B.R. Ambedkar, Franz Boas and the Rejection of Racial Theories of Untouchability”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41, no. 2 (3 April 2018): 281–96.
The paper’s actual analysis first addresses the question of mechanism: how the institution functions in the strong and peculiar sense that the discipline of anthropology was conferring on this verb. After critically assessing several authors who sought to define caste by some special defining characteristic, Ambedkar follows the work of Dr. Ketkar who is, in his words, “both a native and has an open mind” to make two arguments (Ambedkar 1917, p. 81). The first, which is remarkable at this very early stage of anthropology, is his conviction that trying to define caste by some special feature or a single principle is inadequate. Caste is a structural fact. What creates caste, to deploy much later terminology, is the dominance of a structure. As you know, this is a term I take from Louis Althusser. He also makes a second argument which partly chimes with the insight of the structural character of the caste order. Caste depends on endogamy and endogamy is the only characteristic that is peculiar to caste. But this is followed by an odd methodological claim and I quote him, “if we succeed in showing how endogamy is maintained, we shall practically have proved the genesis and also the mechanism of caste” (Ambedkar 1917, p. 84).
Ambedkar recognises that there are great many pitfalls in the paths of those who try to unfold the past and caste in India to be sure is a very ancient institution. This is especially true where there exists no authentic or written records or where the people like the Hindus are so constituted that, to them, writing history is a folly for the world for the world is an illusion. But the methodological technique to use in case of such obdurately ahistorical cultures to is to import the scientific techniques of paleontology. I quote him:
As often as not, customs and morals are like fossils that tell their own stories. (Ambedkar 1917, p. 97)
Although Ambedkar doesn’t use the word “paleontology” in this early essay, he explicitly uses the term in The Untouchables (1948, p. vii). The task is one of gathering survivals of the past, placing them together and making them tell the story of their birth. The task is analogous to that of the archaeologist who constructs a city from broken stones or of the palaeontologist who conceives an extinct animal from scattered bones and teeth or of a painter who reads the lines of the horizon and the smallest vestiges on the slopes of the hill to make up a scene. In this sense the book is a work of art even more than of history. The origin of Untouchability lies buried in a dead past which nobody knows. To make it alive is like an attempt is to reclaim to history a city which has been dead since ages past and present it as it was in its original condition.
He notes that that the question of origin is always an annoying question and in case of caste, this question had been sadly neglected. Later, Ambedkar clear sightedly acknowledges the limits of the historical explanation. He wants to elucidate the mystery of the growth and development of caste.
Unfortunately, a direct answer to this question is not within my power I can only answer it indirectly. (Ambedkar 1917, p. 89)
The indirect answer he gives to this question again comes in two parts. Discounting the great man theory of history which would attribute an act of a Solonian inscription to the edicts of Manu, he concludes that the spread and growth of the caste system is too gigantic a task to be achieved by the power or cunning of an individual or a class. Rather, the task of anthropology is to show the falsity of the attitude that has exalted religious sanction to the position of scientific explanation. Simply describing the śāstric injunctions of the modality does not constitute an explanation of the caste system, simply a demonstration of the availability of recondite justifications from the brahmins. Brahmins in order to ensure purity of blood at some point institute endogamy within themselves sealing the boundary between themselves in the rest of society.
Subsequently following the Tardian an example principle of hierarchy — I think he was familiar with Gabriel Tarde because he was a major French sociologist of his time — that is the emulation of the customs of superior groups by their inferiors in a social scale, other castes imitatively adopt endogamy generating the familiar system of a completely impermeable system of social differences. [Ambedkar (1917, p. 92) actually quotes Tarde’s Laws of Imitation (originally Les lois de l’imitation, 1890).] Interestingly, despite its intellectual sophistication, the paper used the methodological techniques of early stage structuralist anthropology which can and does address only the question of mechanism. Ambedkar’s search for history in a sense fails. The question of genesis is turned from a historical question of origins to a structural elaboration of functions. Fails not in the sense that Ambedkar fails, it actually shows that it is a question to which it’s very difficult to find an answer in principle. The question of how caste originated remains unanswered in the early academic writing.
When we go through Ambedkar’s repetitive forays into the past, we detect an iterative structure: iterative in the sense that he comes back again and again. For any historical event or institution which is the fact of a different kind, the question of origin when and how did it come about is an entirely legitimate one. The discipline of history has the specialized task of answering questions of this kind reliably with the evidence from its archives. Of course there is no guarantee that all historical questions can be satisfactorily answered according to the standards of epistemic validation. When intellectuals begin to think about the past, there are many significant occasions when though the question is paramount for some historiographic need, an answer does not seem to appear to be possible. That is the reason for the iterative constantly repeated attempts by the same author to try something different from the arguments deployed earlier. These are questions that the author cannot answer but also cannot let go.
3. Ambedkar and Genealogy
I want to turn now to some consideration of this question. As positivist history advanced and its methodological structures and rules were explored and elaborated, it became clear that the cognition or exploration of the past was an internally heterogeneous activity. Many different methodologically distinct cognitive projects were subsumed under general appellation of history. Positivist historical science of 19th century sought to deduce the cluster of these diverse approaches to the past and reserve the title history only to the modern enterprise of knowing the past with clarity and accuracy with the help of specific types of evidentiary rigor. Alongside the demand for accuracy and chronological precision, additional methodological requirements were announced. The use of any method implied the separation between subjectivity of the enquirer and the abstract truth of the cognitive process. Following a specified method ensured that different knowing subjects could fit into the cognitive subject positions and carry on the enterprise uncontaminated by the conditions of individuality and space-time variability.
Nietzsche’s philosophical speculations disturbed the symmetries of this early methodological orthodoxy of positivist history. And not surprisingly much of the recent questioning of history and methods has been carried on under Nietzsche’s banner. To carry the argument forward, I want to use an argument related to Nietzsche — it doesn’t come from Nietzsche himself. This is about genealogy.
In his well-known late work Truth and Truthfulness [2002, Princeton University Press], the analytic philosopher Bernard Williams made a bold suggestion about the meaning of genealogy. Williams’ discussion of the concept is linked to a reading of Nietzsche that I do not find in entirelly textually persuasive. So my point is not that Williams’ reading of Nietzsche is right but what I am saying is that what Williams then says about the content of the term genealogy I find very evocative and helpful for understanding a whole lot of context. He evidently thought that this is what Nietzsche meant by the use of the term. By genealogy, Williams thought, Nietzsche meant a question that bears a logically historical form which is highly significant for some people for understanding something crucial about themselves but which could not be answered by accepted techniques of historical inquiry. This description should be seen to be fairly similar to what I have described as Ambedkar’s puzzle about the past.
Interestingly Williams does not treat this mode of thinking as a failed historical enterprise, as history that has gone wrong or wavered and inquiries that began as a historical understanding but lost its way and ended up elsewhere at an unexpected and inappropriate cognitive destination. To Williams, it’s a separate kind of cognitive enterprise. He treats this as a form of thinking used by thinkers who have an insistent past related question for resolving which cognitive resources of conventional positivist history are not sufficient. That he takes this kind of thinking seriously is attested by the illustration he offers for this mode of thought. As an example of such genealogical thinking, Williams offers one of the most influential figures of thought in the tradition of western political theory, the idea of the state of nature and social contract.
At the time of the rise of the modern state, Western political theories face two related questions. The first was a generalized historical puzzle: how did we get here in the Western modern societies to this particular condition. The second was related but narrower question: how did the state come to be or how did it emerge in history. To none of these questions did Western political theory as a philosophical discipline offer a credible historical answer. The great answer provided to this question, which we have all read in the endless in a reading of political theory, which were both historically significant and intellectually fascinating was through a fable of a social contract. The question was how did something like the modern state so vital to social functioning and political experience of human beings come into existence.
A historical answer in the positivist sense would have patiently tracked the prior stages of time through the feudal state towards Roman and Greek antiquity and if possible beyond. In fact, the “answer” supplied by contract theory followed an entirely different methodological procedure. Clearly, this was not an historical answer by any definition. However, this answer remains plausible because of the ambiguity of the original question: how did this come to be, how is it possible. Because ambiguous, this question could be first interpreted in two ways and then answered. The first reading of the question is historical: what are the concrete events and stages to which the state of affairs came to exist in the world. But a second interpretation of the question admits of another kind of construction. The group that asks this question must find a way of giving it an answer that makes sense and so produces an interpretation of its own present condition.
The fable of the state of nature from which humanity emerged through a contract was a para history which showed how this state emerged with the additional advantage that it showed its development process in a way that made a constitutional agreement with state or royal power possible and necessary. This was a substitute for history or para history that the liberal constitutionalist line of thinking gave to itself to justify its future condition as the liberal state. I think Ambedkar’s reflections on the origins and history of untouchability are in some ways similar. It is easy to see that at every stage Ambedkar asks a question that is historical: how did untouchability as a social institution come into existence. But it becomes clear as well that the historical path to answering this question is obstructed. Ambedkar himself constantly laments the lack of record and archive that makes it possible to give it a truly reliable answer, the only kind of answer that history admits.
But from acknowledging this impulse, we as readers of social history can follow to interpretive options. The first would view some of Ambedkar’s surmises as unsuccessful history, as historical hypotheses, that lacked the evidence to bear them out. The second, which is often suggested in a postmodern embrace of uncertainty, is to suggest that history is given by different groups to themselves, that all history is similar irrespective of evidentiary support, and that this is their history because this is the history that values Dalits give to themselves. I want to avoid this second line. First, because it undermines one of the basic defining features of the historical enterprise in spite of all its admitted imperfections and limitations. Secondly, this is also subtly patronizing: it is a condescending idea that although this would not qualify as the history of other groups, this will do for lower castes or untouchable. Treating these as genealogy in this sense helps avoid these two positions. Possibly because Ambedkar was a student of political theory, above all, this kind of reasoning was familiar to him. When the path to direct evidentiary history was obstructed, he took recourse to this alternative route.
Ambedkar discusses Nietzsche in a number of places, but especially in essays like “Philosophy of Hinduism” and “The Hindu Social Order: Its Unique Features” in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 3 (Bombay: Govt. of Maharashtra, 1987).
4. The Tone of Ambedkar’s Thought
I wish to end by raising another theme in this study of Ambedkar thought. Returning to the theme of historical melancholia, I’ll try to show how as the leading interpreter of Dalit experience in his time Ambedkar wanted to transcend the futuristic limitation of liberal and Marxist thinking. Despite a temporal positioning or orientation that instructed him to look at the present closely and keep his face turned firmly toward the future, he turned often disconsolate with an ineffable sadness towards the past. That is what these genealogical fragments in his writing inserted in the middle of structural sociology or constitutional theorizing are doing. He cannot help but turn back and face the past although it is clear, he knows, that this is not his task at hand at that moment.
One could argue that this is strange out of step moves for someone like Ambedkar. An obsessive fascination with the past is more understandable when it is nostalgia. I want to make this point precisely because you know this is not nostalgic in the technical sense. It is nostalgia when the writer believes, like Gandhi, that there is something of unsurpassable value in that past that was lost or is threatened with the loss forever. But Ambedkar’s relation to the past is in a precise sense totally antinostalgic. He is attracted to the past not because it contains something is something of a fading paradise. On the contrary, he is drawn to the past because it shrouds an unchronicled historical atrocity, hides a dark stain of suffering on a massive scale. This feeling of shock and wonder gives rise to what Indian aesthetic theory would call a camatkāra, a perception that produces dark and perverse wonder around the entirely legitimate question: how was this possible? Camatkāra can be propelled by sense of the rasa of bībhatsa. In a sense, this could be an appropriate and profound illustration of how the sentiment of jugupsā — repugnant, abhorrent or hateful — can create a deep and a binding wonderment in the reflecting human mind.
For a discussion of camatkāra, see David Shulman, “Notes on Camatkāra”, in Language, Ritual and Poetics in Ancient India and Iran: Studies in Honor of Shaul Migron, edited by David Shulman (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2010). For a general introduction to rasa, see Sheldon Pollock “Introduction: An Intellectual History of Rasa”, in A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics, translated and edited by Sheldon Pollock, Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). For a brief discussion of bībhatsa and jugupsā, see the entries in Maria Heim, Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).
But again, I think we should subject this gesture despite his fragmentariness, to a serious theoretical analysis. That would reveal a line of reasoning that is hardly sentimental or vague or ambiguous. Rather it carries an intense emotion that pursues precisely and clearly defined cognitive object. Justice is the central value of all Ambedkar’s social thought. and justice in the wider sense involves a global accounting of all human experience. So, I emphasize global, global meaning not merely spatially but temporally global including all that belongs to the same category in past time. It is the search for justice that drives the powerful argumentation for inclusive nationalism, for constitutional representation, the purpose of deployment of the power of the state apparatus to end untouchability and discrimination.
But this global accounting of suffering frustratingly can apply only to the present and the future. Modern theory advises us not to feel sentimental about the past because there is simply nothing that can be done to redeem those lives. But in Ambedkar’s view, there is something deeply defeating and monstrous about this resolution to forget. History represents, in its ideal form, a global narrative of human experience. This will mean that there will be there will be forever a huge hole in the middle of the historical record of India. The suffering of human beings in the present might be eradicated which would mean that probably that would not exist in the future but there would remain the past in which the human suffering of untouchability was not only not eradicated but, in deeper travesty, not even remembered. The people of the present, Ambedkar fears, would wipe away the collective guilt of the society by a colossal act of forgetting in the name of the unavailability of historical record. Ambedkar treats this as a kind of false accounting. If that happens, history would precisely betray its promise. That is why, despite all the difficulties in the path of history, this record of suffering ought to be memorialised so that people whom he called the “broken men” are not treated to the ultimate insult or forgotten.
Political democracy bears the responsibility and a connection to history. The present must make a new accounting of the past from which silences and forgetting can be removed. So that at least, this forgetting is removed. Ambedkar’s writings in these passages are not failed history or history in a lower register, but a discourse that is not history but the lost genealogy of untouchability. It is history’s permanent neighbor and scourge which follows history like a shadow and reminds it constantly of the moral responsibility lying at the heart of its cognitive failures. Sometimes Ambedkar’s writing reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s. One connection is easy to grasp. Both Benjamin and Ambedkar, writing around the same time in two corners of the world were fascinated by the constitutive presence of structural violence in their social order, a violence so pervasive and unalterable that it did not have to be manifested in violent acts.
I want to draw your attention to a different aspect which I think is simpler and has not been very pronounced in Ambedkar writing, again I think because of his theoretical modernism. Benjamin and Ambedkar wrote about the experience of two human groups with the longest and in some ways the history of exclusion known to humanity yet Benjamin had a resource that Ambedkar did not. Once I taught a course on Benjamin with a very distinguished colleague at Columbia, Prof. Dan Miron, a great scholar of German and Jewish literature. Teaching a class on the Theses on the Philosophy of History [Über den Begriff der Geschichte or, literally, On the Concept of History] I wondered at the strange linguistic coloratura at play in the famous passage that describes the angel of history in Benjamin. Benjamin semantics imagination was playing around a rather small a typically enigmatic Paul Klee sketch which he had in his possession. I’ll read the passage from Benjamin. It’s a very famous passage which I’m sure most of you would have read it. I quote:
A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
[Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 259–60.]
Benjamin discovered in the small and spare interior of that sketch an amazing meaningfulness. The angel had its wings spread out; it could not close its wings because the storm was long from paradise; it was looking in dismay at the debris of civilization collecting at his feet. I had for long loved that passage offering it an uncomprehending admiration; uncomprehending because I did not understand where the camatkāra of that passage was coming from. No ordinary Marxist could write that passage which evoked a storm from paradise, an angel with wings, its eyes gaping in wonder at the destruction of the world, and also his back turned towards history. Think of a Marxist who can write that without embarrassment! This is certainly not something many men got from the mandatory optimism of the Marxist tradition. Prof. Miron, who was teaching with me, solved the puzzle very easily. It was the language Benjamin received through the Jewish prophetic tradition.
For thousands of years, European Jews faced a long unceasing historical disaster. As the people of learning and subtle intelligence, they had stocked and refined their experience of suffering in a vocabulary of a prophetic language for which the world was always at the edge of an apocalyptic end. More than other Marxist, Benjamin became the witness to the end of the Western civilization in the 1930s and 40s precisely because of this precious unusual heritage, the legacy of a pre-modern deeply religious language which was familiar with the secrets of human suffering and saw suffering as the great thread running through human history. Modern languages with their compulsory optimism and futuristic orientation lack the capacity to express this melancholy; only a religious and aesthetic language code can do so. Although despised, marginalized, and forced to exist outside the village as outcasts — recognise the similarity between the Jews and the Dalits here — still the Jews had a treasure that was denied to the Indian untouchable. Jews may not have had an exact monopoly of the history of the persecution, but they had a literature, above all, a literature which captured the essence of the experience of history.
Denial of education was like a withdrawal of all but the most rudimentary speech. Ambedkar comes back to this again and again. The Dalits lost history from two sides. They had no place in the history that was ever written because they were not central to that history. But they did not have the resources to write their own in which there would have been at the center. That does not mean that there is no way of reconstructing the Dalit past. There is the work of Narayana Rao and David Shulman that points out that literature is a great resource but I am talking here narrowly in this about history.There is no oblivion greater than being written out of history so that after a thousand years there is no record that you had ever existed. This was at the heart of Ambedkar’s struggles with history. The Dalit Panthers, a few years after his death, opened up a new horizon of expression of the Dalit experience by harnessing the power of the poetic language. I think these concerns played a role in Ambedkar’s embrace of Buddhism at the end of his life, an unexpected turn from the limited prosaic languages of modern politics into a language that was vaster, more manysided and much more colorful and a language that declared dukkha to be at the heart of the human world.
Ambedkar thought a revitalised Buddhism would require a Buddhist “Bible” which would not present its teachings in the form of “abstract dogmas” or “as narrative or ethical exposition” but in the form of “an incantation” whose style must be “lucid, moving and must produce an hypnotic effect”. See B. R. Ambedkar, “Buddha and the Future of His Religion”, The Maha-Bodhi 58 (1950): 117–18, 199–206, at 204. Ambedkar’s attempt at writing such a book would culminate in The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957).
Clueless Political Scientist 