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B R Ambedkar John Dewey and The Meaning of Democracy PDF
B R Ambedkar John Dewey and The Meaning of Democracy PDF
I
ndia’s encounter with the West happened in a discursive frame-
work that has come to be known as orientalism, thanks to Edward
Said’s vastly influential book. To give a thumbnail sketch of a sub-
stantial body of research, British and German scholars, such as William
Jones and Max Müller, were greatly fascinated by the ancient texts of
Sanskrit and propagated the glories of an ancient civilization which,
unfortunately, had lost its vitality through old age and such misfortunes
as the invasions of the Islamic armies and one thousand years of Muslim
rule. They claimed that India needed to be revitalized by the vigour of
the newer and more masculine civilization of the Anglo-Saxons.
High caste Indians eagerly absorbed this discourse, whose most famous
example perhaps is Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s 1882 novel, Anandmath,
which provides a blueprint of a reinvigorated Hindu nation that will
arrive after the Hindus have learned modern sciences from the Brit-
ish.1 Few Indians besides B. R. Ambedkar challenged this discourse that
glorifies a Brahminic corpus of ancient texts while totally ignoring its
hierarchization of human beings into touchables and untouchables. He
saw the world through a different lens, the one provided by his famous
teacher, the American pragmatic philosopher John Dewey. This paper
looks at the influence of Dewey on Ambedkar and Ambedkar’s refashion-
ing of Deweyan thought into a tool for his own investigations of Indian
history and culture. I suggest that studying this unique relationship can
help us abandon the old racist and hierarchist ideologies, an absolute
necessity in this era of globalization. As the tourism advertisements of
the Government of India that use slogans such as “Incredible India!”
and “five thousand years of unbroken civilization” demonstrate, the
orientalist discourse of the glorious India is alive and well, just like the
“manifest destiny” discourse of the United States of America. If living
together in the global village has to be harmonious and peaceful, then
such discourses of national uniqueness will have to be abandoned as so
much dead wood. This was the project that both Dewey and Ambedkar
embarked on, and studying their work together can help us learn about
how to live as equals in this global village.
New Literary History, 2009, 40: 345–370
346 new literary history
the British.7 On the other hand, he has been hailed as the father of the
Indian Constitution, the new “Manu”8 an analogy he would have found
repugnant. Some have criticized him for narrowly focusing on collective
rights and ignoring the individual.9 And the nativists have found him
“too Western.”10 Ambedkar thus refuses to be encapsulated in a single
story line, demanding that we pay attention to India’s heterogeneity and
hierarchies of power.
A cosmopolitan spirit who had imbibed deeply of the Western scholar-
ship of his time, Ambedkar is a global citizen in the realm of knowledge
who saw the various societies around the world as exemplars of the
different stages of humanity’s progress from barbarism to civilization.
While the same categories were often tinged with the notions of racial
superiority in the early twentieth century, Ambedkar’s sociological and
anthropological analyses, beginning with his very first piece of scholarly
writing, the paper entitled “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis
and Development,” delivered at the anthropology seminar of Dr. A. A.
Goldenweizer at Columbia University in 1916, categorically rejected race
in favor of explanatory constructs such as status and kinship. In making
this choice, Ambedkar withstood, and in fact criticized, a trend that was
widely popular among many academic, political, and religious quarters
in the United States as well as Britain, Canada, and India. Instead, as I
propose to argue in this paper, he opted for a theory of the human that
is suffused with democratic ideals, namely, the pragmatic philosophy of
John Dewey, his teacher at Columbia University where Ambedkar studied
from 1913 to 1916.
In an essay entitled, “Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s Philosophy of Emancipation
and the Impact of John Dewey,” which is the only sustained treatment of
the topic thus far, K. N. Kadam claims that Ambedkar was planning to
write a book on Dewey and believes that his preliminary work on it has
been lost.11 According to a frequently cited newspaper article by Clarke
Blake, Ambedkar “took down every word that the great teacher uttered
in his teaching. Ambedkar used to tell his friends that ‘[i]f Dewey died,
I could reproduce every lecture verbatim.’”12 Kadam feels that “unless
we understand something of John Dewey, . . . it would be impossible to
understand Dr. Ambedkar.”13 I have tried to examine the intimate threads
of influence and confluence that bind Ambedkar’s conceptualization of
democracy to Dewey’s, particularly as detailed in the latter’s Democracy
and Education.
Ambedkar’s writings mark his affiliation with Dewey through extensive
quotations from Dewey’s work. So deeply embedded is Dewey’s thought in
Ambedkar’s consciousness that quite often his words flow through Ambed-
kar’s discourse without quotation marks. Ambedkar not only borrowed
concepts and ideas from Dewey, his methodological approach and ways
348 new literary history
of their heritage before they can suitably govern themselves: “the Hindus
must consider whether they should conserve the whole of their social
heritage or select what is helpful and transmit to future generations only
that much and no more. Prof. John Dewey, who was my teacher and to
whom I owe so much, has said: ‘Every society gets encumbered with
what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively
perverse. . . As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is
responsible not to conserve and transmit the whole of its existing achieve-
ments, but only such as make for a better future society.’”16
Dewey’s quotation in the above passage is from his Democracy and Educa-
tion.17 This work had a lasting impact on Ambedkar and he quoted from
it repeatedly, although not always with quotation marks. Dewey here is
speaking about the education of the young and the type of education
needed to build a democratic society. The issues that Ambedkar and
Dewey raise in this passage have still not been settled: Will our society
be governed by creationist or evolutionist principles? Shall we teach our
young to question everything in the light of accumulated knowledge
gained through what Dewey called “cooperative intelligence,” or tell
them, for instance, that “Vedic science” and “Vedic mathematics” are
the epitome of eternal truth? However, for Dewey as well as for Ambed-
kar, these are not questions to be discussed in the abstract, as language
games of philosophers. For Dewey, it is about schooling and what shall
be taught to the children. Ambedkar applies Dewey to a concrete situa-
tion to ask whether the high caste Hindu society can discriminate against
some of its members and treat them as untouchables simply because the
scriptures sanction such practice? In 1937, Ambedkar burned a copy of
the Manusmriti at a rally in Mahad, Maharashtra, where over five thou-
sand people had gathered under his leadership to protest against the
denial by high caste Hindus of their basic right to take water from Lake
Chavdar. Ambedkar, I would suggest, drags Dewey to the edge. Dewey
only played with the matches when he reflected in subjunctives about
the pernicious effect of idealizing the past. Ambedkar actually set the
“dead wood” afire.
A few sentences later, Ambedkar goes on to quote another, somewhat
lengthy passage from Dewey while exhorting Hindus to ask themselves
“whether they must not cease to worship the past as supplying its [sic]
ideals”:
The baneful effect of this worship of the past are [sic] best summed up by Prof.
Dewey when he says: “An individual can live only in the present. The present is
not just something which comes after the past; much less something produced
by it. It is what life is in leaving the past behind it. The study of past products will
not help us to understand the present. A knowledge of the past and its heritage
350 new literary history
is of great significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise. And
the mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main material of
education is that it tends to make the past a rival of the present and the present
a more or less futile imitation of the past.” The principle, which makes little of
the present act of living and growing, naturally looks upon the present as empty
and upon the future as remote. Such a principle is inimical to progress and is
an hindrance to a strong and a steady current of life. (AC 79)
ment of free India,18 that is, Ram Rajya, Ambedkar drew on Dewey to
describe his ideal society:
If you ask me, my ideal would be a society based on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
And why not? What objection can there be to Fraternity? I cannot imagine any.
An ideal society should be mobile, should be full of channels for conveying a
change taking place in one part to other parts. In an ideal society there should
be many interests consciously communicated and shared. There should be var-
ied and free points of contact with other modes of association. In other words
there must be social endosmosis. This is fraternity, which is only another name
for democracy. Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a
mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially
an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellowmen. (AC 57)
In short, there are many interests consciously communicated and shared; and
there are varied and free points of contact with other modes of association.
(DE 97)
to describe the exclusiveness of India’s high caste groups and how that
prevents social endosmosis.
My investigation into Dewey’s extensive writings suggests that the term
“social endosmosis” was used by him only once, in the excerpt quoted
above. It has not been remarked on either by any of his numerous com-
mentators. For Ambedkar, however, it becomes a major heuristic tool
that he used repeatedly in his writings. When a society has groups that
are separated into “a privileged and a subject class,” social endosmosis—
free circulation of individuals, with various points of contact—cannot
take place. A sort of atherosclerosis of the social body sets in. Ambed-
kar’s frequent use of metaphors of disease and pathology to describe
Indian society is thus an extension of the metaphorical possibilities of
endosmosis.
While Annihilation of Caste was written in 1936, Ambedkar first used
this metaphor, along with several unidentified quotations from Democracy
and Education, in his presentation to the Southborough Committee on
Franchise in 1919,21 soon after his return from the United States. In his
presentation, Ambedkar uses a set of ideas from Dewey that he would
continue to use again and again. However, Ambedkar inserts them in a
political and historical context that needs to be understood first in order
that the full import of his use of Dewey can be appreciated. “English-
men,” he says, “have all along insisted that India is unfit for representa-
tive Government because of the division of her population into castes
and creeds. This does not carry conviction with the advanced wing of
Indian politicians. When they say that there are also social divisions in
Europe as there are in India they are amply supported by facts. The
social divisions of India are equalled, if not outdone, in a country like
the United States of America.” Ambedkar uses Dewey’s description of
society in this argument between the British colonial power and the high
caste Indian elite to insert himself and his community in the political
debate that had entirely excluded them. He concedes the Indian politi-
cians’ contention that there are social divisions in Europe. Indeed, he
adds that they exist in the United States as well. Then, he proceeds to
answer his Indian opponents’ question: “if with all the social division, the
United States of America is fit for representative Government why not
India?” Ambedkar gives the following reasons, weaving Dewey’s words
into a new pattern:
How they [social divisions] matter can be best shown by understanding when
they don’t matter. Men live in a community by virtue of the things they have in
common. What they must have in common in order to form a community are
aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge, a common understanding; or to use the
language of the Sociologists, they must be like-minded. But how do they come
to have these things in common or how do they become like-minded? Certainly
354 new literary history
not by sharing with another as one would do in the case of a piece of cake. To
cultivate an attitude similar to others or to be like-minded with others is to be
in communication with them or to participate in their activity. Persons do not
become like-minded by merely living in physical proximity, any more than they
cease to be like-minded by being distant from each other. Participation in a group
is the only way of being like-minded with the group. Each group tends to create
its own distinctive type of like-mindedness, but where there are more groups
than one to be brought into political union, there would be conflict among the
differently like-minded. And so long as the groups remain isolated the conflict is
bound to continue and prevent the harmony of action. It is the isolation of the
groups that is the chief evil. Where the groups allow of endosmosis, they cease
to be evil. For endosmosis among the groups makes possible a resocialization of
once socialized attitudes. In place of the old, it creates a new like-mindedness, . .
. essential for an harmonious life, social or political and, as has just been shown,
it depends upon the extent of communication, participation or endosmosis.22
The unidentified Dewey quotations in this passage are from page five of
Democracy and Education, modified to fit into Ambedkar’s own argument.
As Ambedkar used them in Annihilation of Caste, as well (AC 51), it is clear
that Dewey’s formulation of democracy was very important for Ambedkar.
It would, therefore, be useful to quote the passage from Dewey:
Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and
communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What
they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims,
beliefs, aspirations, knowledge—a common understanding—like-mindedness as
the sociologists say. Such things cannot be passed physically from one to another,
like bricks; they cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it
into physical pieces. The communication which insures participation in a com-
mon understanding is one which secures similar emotional and intellectual
dispositions—like ways of responding to expectations and requirements.
Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any more than
a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles removed
from others. (DE 5)
Sir, I think that that is a very narrow view of the University. One of the fundamental
functions of the University, as I understand it, is to provide facilities for bringing
the highest education to the doors of the needy and the poor. I do not think
that any University in any civilised country can justify its existence if it merely
deals with the problems of examinations and the granting of degrees. Now, if it
is the duty of a modern university to provide facilities for the highest education
to the backward communities, I think it will be accepted as a corollary that the
backward communities should have some control in the University affairs. Sir, I
look upon the University primarily as a machinery, whereby educational facilities
are provided to all those who are intellectually capable of using those facilities to
the best advantage, but who cannot avail themselves of those facilities for want
of funds or for other handicaps in life. Now, Sir, it is said that the University is
primarily a concern of the intelligentsia and of the educated classes, and that as
the University is to function properly it is necessary that it should be controlled
by what are called the educated classes. I would accept that principle, if the edu-
cated classes who are going to control the University possessed what we called
social virtues. If they, for instance, sympathised with the aspirations of the lower
classes, if they recognised that the lower classes had rights, if they recognised that
those rights must be respected, then probably we, coming from the backward
communities, might well entrust our destinies to what are called the advance
communities. But, Sir, for centuries we have had the bitterest experience of the
rule of what are called the higher and the educated classes.25
There are other floating arguments against the claim of the Untouchables for
political safeguards which must also be examined. One such argument is that
there are social divisions everywhere, not merely in India but also in Europe;
but they are not taken into account by the people of Europe in forming their
constitutions. Why should they be taken into account in India? . . . In so far as
it alleges that every society consists of groups it cannot be challenged. For even
in European or American society there are groups associated together in various
ways and for various purposes. . . . But when the statement goes beyond and says
that the castes in India are not different from groups and classes in Europe and
America it is nothing but an arrant nonsense. . . . In Europe the possibility of
counteracting mischief arising from a group seeking to maintain “its own interest”
does exist. It exists because of the absence of isolation and exclusiveness among
the various groups which allows free scope for interaction with the result that the
dominant purpose of a group to stand out for its own interests and always seek
to protect them as something violate [sic] and sacred gives way to a broadening
and socialization of its aims and purposes. This endosmosis between groups
in Europe affects dispositions and produces a society which can be depended
upon for community of thought, harmony of purposes and unity of action. But
the case of India is totally different. The caste in India is exclusive and isolated.
There is no interaction and no modification of aims and objects. What a caste
or a combination of castes regard “as their own interest” as against other castes
remains as sacred and inviolate as ever. (WCG 191–93)
In chapter nine, “A Plea to the Foreigner: Let Not Tyranny Have Free-
dom to Enslave,” he tries to explain to left-wing foreigners, convinced by
the Congress party’s claim to represent all sections of the Indian popula-
tion, why they should not support the Congress’s claim to power unless
it agreed to honor the claims of the untouchables. Here, too, the twin
concepts of social groups and endosmosis are deployed:
In other countries, there is, at the most, a hyphen between the governing class
and the rest. In India, there is a bar between the two. A hyphen is only separa-
tion; but a bar is a severance with interests and sympathies completely divided.
In other countries, there is a continuous replenishment of the governing class
by the incorporation of others who do not belong to it but who have reached
the same elevation as the governing class. In India, the governing class is a close
corporation in which nobody, not born in it, is admitted. This distinction is very
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 359
important. In the case where the governing class is a close corporation, tradi-
tion, social philosophy and social outlook remain unbroken and the distinction
between masters and slaves, between privileged and unprivileged continues hard
in substance and fast in colour. On the other hand, where the governing class is
not a close preserve, where there is social endosmosis between it and the rest,
there is a mental assimilation which makes the governing class more flexible,
its philosophy less anti-social. (WCG 232–33)
Inside the community there is no discrimination among those who are recognized
as kindred bound by kinship. The community recognizes that every one within
it is entitled to all the rights equally with others. As Professors Dewey and Tufts
have pointed out: “A State may allow a citizen of another country to own land,
to sue in its courts, and will usually give him a certain amount of protection,
but the first-named rights are apt to be limited, and it is only a few years since
Chief Justice Taney’s dictum stated the existing legal theory of the United States
to be that the Negro ‘had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’
Even where legal theory does not recognize race or other distinctions, it is often
hard in practice for an alien to get justice. In primitive clan or family groups this
principle is in full force. Justice is a privilege which falls to a man as belonging
to some group—not otherwise. The member of the clan or the household or
the village community has a claim, but the Stranger has nothing [sic] standing.
It may be treated kindly, as a guest, but he cannot demand ‘justice’ at the hands
of any group but his own. In this conception of rights within the group we have
360 new literary history
the prototype of modern civil law. The dealing of clan with clan is a matter of
war or negotiation, not of law; and the clanless man is an ‘outlaw’ in fact as well
as in name.” (AH 414; quoting a passage from ISP 32)
Ambedkar expresses his lack of confidence in the efficacy of the law for
excluded groups many times in his writings. In a statement presented to
the Indian Statutory Commission of the British colonial government on
May 29, 1928, he complained about how the administration, the police,
and the justice system treated the untouchables. They were refused em-
ployment in the police and the army, denied admission to schools, and
their civil rights were violated with impunity: “They cannot live a cleaner
and higher life, because to live above their prescribed station is opposed
to the religious notions of the majority (item Nos. 1 and 6). So rigor-
ous is the enforcement of the Social Code against the Depressed classes
that any attempt on the part of the Depressed classes to exercise their
elementary rights of citizenship only ends in provoking the majority to
practice the worst form of social tyranny known to history. . . . Protection
against such tyranny is usually to be found in the Police power of the
state. But unfortunately in any struggle in which the Depressed classes are
on the one side and the upper class of Hindus on the other, the Police
power is always in league with the tyrant majority (item No. 11), for the
simple reason that the Depressed classes have no footing whatsoever in
the Police or in the Magistracy of the country.”30 At the Round Table
Conference, convened by British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in
1930 to discuss the future of India, he again registered his frustration
with “paper rights”: “What I am saying is this, that the constitution may
give me certain rights, but I know that 99 percent of the people in India
are not going to allow me to exercise those rights. What is the use of
those paper rights to me unless the constitution provides that if anyone
infringes my rights he is liable to certain penalties?”31
It is clear that for Ambedkar and Dewey, justice will be denied to those
who are excluded from full participation in society. In a manuscript
entitled “India and the Pre-Requisites of Communism,” of which only
two chapters have been found, Ambedkar returns to the problem of the
lack of social endosmosis in Hindu society:
Not so much the existence of classes as the spirit of isolation and exclusiveness
which is inimical with a free social order. What a free social order endeavours
to do is to maintain all channels of social endosmosis. This is possible only
when the classes are free to share in an extensive number of common interests,
undertakings and expenses, have a large number of values in common, when
there is a free play back and forth, when they have an equable opportunity to
receive and to take from others. Such social contacts [sic] must and does dissolve
custom, makes for an alert and expanding mental life and not only occasion but
demand reconstruction of mental attitudes. What is striking about the Hindu
social order is its ban on free inter-change and inter-course between different
classes of Hindu society. There is a bar against inter-dining and inter-marriage.
But Manu goes to the length of interdicting ordinary social intercourse.32
362 new literary history
Dewey, too, spoke of the need for citizens “to take a determining part
in making as well as obeying laws” (DE 140). However, Dewey felt that
democracy in its current form in the United States, where powerful groups
with “interests of their own” blocked others from participating, was far
from ideal. John Patrick Diggins suggests that “Dewey’s going back and
forth between the inadequacies of actual democracy and the promises
of ideal community leaves unsolved the problem of how to move from
democracy to community by an act of intelligent choice alone.” Diggins
also feels that “Dewey rarely dealt with the question of human motiva-
tion.”33 It seems to me that what Dewey does not offer is how to change
the exclusionary and isolationist group so that it will either see the folly
of its ways or, conversely, be defeated so that the power it controlled
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 363
industrial system is not so much poverty and the suffering that it involves as the
fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to those who are
engaged in them. Such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill-will and
the desire to evade. (AC 47–48)
Sentimentally, it may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the present régime
is not found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the fact that
so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them, which are pursued
simply for the money reward that accrues. For such callings constantly provoke
one to aversion, ill will, and a desire to slight and evade. (DE 370)
brought it into the discourse of civil liberties and the individual’s right
to choose. It just so happens that it is also the most efficient method to
make things better.
For both Ambedkar and Dewey, the right to choose one’s occupation
is a major aspect of democracy. Coerced into a job, either because of the
caste system or because of the capitalist system, “neither men’s hearts
nor their minds are in their work[.] As an economic organization Caste
is therefore a harmful institution, inasmuch as, it involves the subordina-
tion of man’s natural powers and inclinations to the exigencies of social
rules” (AC 48). Dewey goes one step further when he claims that right
livelihood is the key to happiness: “An occupation is the only thing which
balances the distinctive capacity of an individual with his social service.
To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do
it is the key to happiness” (DE 360).
Ambedkar’s attempt to persuade the Indian elite that the ancient Varna
system, the four tiered caste system whose apex consisted of Brahmins
and bottom of untouchables, was inconsistent with democracy as well
as socially inefficient fell on deaf ears. Gandhi, in his review of Annihila-
tion of Caste, in Harijan, July 18, 1936, insisted that the individual must
follow his ancestral calling: “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. . . . Indeed one traces even now in
the villages the faint lines of this healthy operation of the law.”35 So what
was dead and diseased for Ambedkar was a symbol of health for Gandhi.
Elsewhere Gandhi defended the system of ancestral callings as superior
to the European idea of choice as it prevented class conflict.
While the Gandhian idea of social cohesion was based on an externally
given divine law, Ambedkar and Dewey insisted that the individual only
consented to obey the law because he had a hand in making it. Duty
could not be imposed from without. It had to be felt from within. Indi-
viduals do consent to authority if it is established democratically and if
it is established to promote their welfare.
In Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar warned the high caste Hindus that
it was the last time he was going to speak to them because he had made
up his mind to convert to another religion that would treat him with
the dignity that he deserved as a human being. By 1935, based on his
interactions with Gandhi at the Round Table Conference of 1931 and
Gandhi’s subsequent fast unto death in 1932 to prevent the granting
of separate electorates to the untouchables, Ambedkar seems to have
made up his mind that the high caste Hindu leadership of the Congress
party was not interested in championing the rights of the untouchables.
However, there is evidence that right up to 1932 Ambedkar tried the
way of persuasion and dialogue. Besides fighting for the rights of the
366 new literary history
[The Sangh] should attempt to dissolve that nausea, which the touchables feel
towards the Untouchables and which is the reason why the two sections have
remained so much apart as to constitute separate and distinct entities. In my
opinion the best way of achieving it is to establish closer contact between the two.
Only a common cycle of participation can help people to overcome the strange-
ness of feeling which one has, when brought into contact with the other. Nothing
can do this more effectively in my opinion than the admission of the Depressed
Classes to the houses of the caste Hindus as guests or servants. The live contact
thus established will familiarize both to a common and associated life and will
pave the way for that unity which we are all striving after. (WCG 138)
The passage quoted above comes from What Congress and Gandhi have
Done to the Untouchables, a text Ambedkar wrote in 1945 in the hope of
reaching out to people both in India and abroad to explain what he saw
as the betrayal of untouchables’ interests by the Congress and Gandhi.
Quoting profusely from Gandhi’s writings to demonstrate that he sup-
ported the Varna system, the capitalist mill owners, and the big landlords,
Ambedkar declared that Gandhi did not believe in democracy. He ac-
cused the Congress of being run by “capitalists, landlords, money-lenders
and reactionaries,” and fighting only for “national liberty” and not for
“political democracy” (WCG 236). He told his foreign readers that an
“ideology which has vitiated parliamentary democracy is the failure to
realize that political democracy cannot succeed where there is no social
and economic democracy. . . . Social and economic democracy are [sic]
the tissues and the fibre of a political democracy. The tougher the tissue
and the fibre, the greater the strength of the body. Democracy is another
name for equality.” He said that because parliamentary democracy had
forgotten the principle of equality, “liberty swallowed equality and has
made democracy a name and a farce” (WCG 447).
In 1947, after India’s independence, Ambedkar accepted India’s first
Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru’s invitation to join independent India’s
first government as Law Minister and headed the “Drafting Committee”
that prepared the Constitution. Though Ambedkar ended up doing
the majority of the work on the Committee, the draft Constitution was
a result of compromises and, by 1949, he had become so disillusioned
with India’s parliamentary democracy that he raged: “I myself will burn
the Constitution!”36 His misgivings were recorded in the speech he gave
in the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949. Here, too, we can
recognize Dewey’s presence: “We must make our political democracy a
social democracy as well. Political democracy cannot last unless there lies
at the base of it, social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It
means a way of life, which recognize [sic] liberty, equality and fraternity
as the principles of life. . . . On the 26th January, 1950,37 we are going to
enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in
social and economic life we will have inequality. . . . We must remove this
contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer
from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy, which
this Assembly has so laboriously built up.”38
Disappointed with the Congress party’s conservative agenda, Ambedkar
resigned from the cabinet on September 27, 1951. He devoted himself
to writing and speaking to various audiences on democracy. These pub-
lished and unpublished writings reverberate with Ambedkar’s dialogue
with Dewey. Indeed, I would suggest that “social endosmosis” became a
key concept for Ambedkar, which he also deployed to speculate about
368 new literary history
Notes
1 See, for example, Alok K. Mukherjee, This Gift of English: English Education and the
Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2009), 85–105.
2 The term is derived from the Sanskrit root dal, which means to crack open, split, crush,
grind, and so forth. Appropriated by untouchable activists and intellectuals, including
Ambedkar, it has been used as a noun and an adjective since the early decades of twentieth
century to metaphorically describe the extreme oppression of untouchables.
3 Upendra Baxi, “Emancipation as Justice: Legacy and Vision of Dr Ambedkar,” in From
Periphery to Centre Stage: Ambedkar, Ambedkarism and Dalit Future, ed. K. C. Yadav (New Delhi:
Manohar, 2000), 49.
4 Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005), 31.
5 Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar, 144.
6 Suresh Mane, “Constitution and Dr. Ambedkar’s Vision for Social Change,” in Ambedkar
on Law, Constitution, and Social Justice, ed. Mohammad Shabbir (Jaipur: Rawat Publications,
2005), 248.
7 Arun Shourie, Worshipping False Gods: Ambedkar, and the Facts Which Have Been Erased
(New Delhi: ASA Pub., 1997).
8 The ancient Hindu sage widely regarded by high caste Hindus as India’s preeminent
law giver, best known for his work, Manusmriti, or the Code of Manu, which his critics
consider to be antiwoman and anti-low caste.
9 M. A. Kishore, “Dr. B. R. Ambedkar: His Approach Towards Human Rights,” in Ambedkar
on Law, Constitution and Social Justice, ed. Mohammad Shabbir, 234–35.
10 Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar, 144.
11 K. N. Kadam, “Dr. Ambedkar’s Philosophy of Emancipation and the Impact of John
Dewey,” in The Meaning of Ambedkarite Conversion to Buddhism and Other Essays (Mumbai:
Popular Prakashan, 1997), 1–33.
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 369
12 Quoted in Dinkar Khabde, Dr. Ambedkar and Western Thinkers (Pune: Sugava Prakashan,
1989), 42.
13 Kadam, “Dr. Ambedkar’s Philosophy,” v.
14 See, for example, John Patrick Diggins, “Pragmatism and Its Limits,” in The Revival of
Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham,
NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1998), 209.
15 Stanley Fish, “Truth and Toilets: Pragmatism and the Practices of Life,” in The Revival
of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, 419.
16 B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste with a Reply to Mahatma Gandhi (1936), in Dr.
Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, vol. 1, compiled by Vasant Moon (Bombay:
Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1979), 79, original ellipsis (hereafter
cited as AC).
17 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1916;
New York: Macmillan, 1958), 24 (hereafter cited as DE).
18 Hindus regard Ram as the ideal king, whose reign, called Ram Rajya, or the rule of
Ram, is deemed to have been just, fair, and harmonious.
19 Quoted in Diggins, “Pragmatism and its Limits,” in The Revival of Pragmatism, 212.
20 Robert B Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1993), 93.
21 This committee, headed by Lord Southborough, was sent by the British government
to inquire into electoral arrangements for India’s multireligious population.
22 Ambedkar, “Evidence Before the Southborough Committee on Franchise” (1919), in
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, vol. 1, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education
Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1979), 248–49 (hereafter cited as “SCF”).
23 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in In
Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 198.
24 Ambedkar, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution” (undated manuscript), in Dr. Babasaheb
Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, vol. 3, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department,
Government of Maharashtra, 1987), 305–6.
25 Ambedkar, “On the Bombay University Act Amendment Bill: 4” (1927), in Dr. Babasaheb
Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, vol. 2, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department,
Government of Maharashtra, 1982), 61–62.
26 Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945), in Dr. Babasaheb
Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, vol. 9, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department,
Government of Maharashtra, 1991), 187 (hereafter cited as WCG).
27 Ambedkar, “Away from the Hindus” (undated manuscript), in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s
Writings and Speeches, vol. 5, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department, Govern-
ment of Maharashtra, 1989), 413 (hereafter cited as “AH”).
28 Dewey and J. H. Tufts, Introduction to Social Psychology (1908), reprinted as John Dewey:
The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 5, 1908, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois Univ. Press, 1978), 6 (hereafter cited as ISP).
29 Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” in The Philosopher of the Common
Man: Essays in Honor of John Dewey to Celebrate His Eightieth Birthday (New York: Putnam’s
Sons, 1940), 225.
30 Ambedkar, “Submission to the Indian Statutory Commission” [1928], in Dr. Babasaheb
Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, compiled by Vasant Moon, 2:445–46.
31 Ambedkar, “Dr. Ambedkar at the Round Table Conference,” in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s
Writings and Speeches, vol. 2, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department, Govern-
ment of Maharashtra, 1982), 538 (hereafter cited as “ART”).
32 Ambedkar, “India and the Pre-Prequisites of Communism” [undated manuscript], in
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, 3:113; see also Dewey, DE 97.
33 Diggins, “Pragmatism and its Limits,” 213.
370 new literary history
34 Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Univ. Press, 2005), 86.
35 Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Dr. Ambedkar’s Indictment” [1936], in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s
Writings and Speeches, 1:83.
36 Quoted in Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit
Movement in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1994), 325.
37 On this date, independent India adopted a new constitution, and became a democratic
republic, with an elected Parliament replacing the Constituent Assembly.
38 Quoted in James Massey, “Dr. Ambedkar’s Vision of a Just Society,” in Ambedkar on
Law, Constitution and Social Justice, 168–69.
39 Ambedkar, “Buddha or Karl Marx” [undated manuscript], in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s
Writings and Speeches, 3:451.