Centre for Indian Studies in Africa

Invites you to a talk

Ambedkarite Jurisprudence?

Arvind Narrain
Advocate, Legal Researcher and co-Founder of Alternative Law
Forum, Bangalore, South India
Human Rights Activist and Researcher
Author of Queer: Despised sexualities, law and social change (2004);
with G. Bhan, Because I have a voice (2005); with A. Gupta, Law like
love: Queer perspectives on law (2011); and with V. Chandran,
Medicalization of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (2014)

This paper analyses Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s contribution to thinking about law. One of the most
important preoccupations of Dr. Ambedkar’s work was to find a way in which the Dalit
community could find access to a life of dignity or a way by which the ‘confiscated title
deeds of their humanity’ would be returned to them. The law was an important mode through
which this struggle for dignity could be waged. First, in his terms, the law becomes a mode
through which the rights of the minority are protected against a deep majoritarian bias. In Dr
Ambedkar’s words, “the tyranny of the majority must be put down with a firm hand.”
However Dr. Ambedkar was very aware of the limitations of the power of coercive law
especially if the majority was dead set against the minority. As he puts it, “there is no
method found for punishing the multitude.” Keeping in mind this limitation, Dr. Ambedkar
deployed another imagination of law in this struggle for dignity of the Dalit community,
namely the idea that law was a transformative ideal, which finds its finest expression in Dr
Ambedkar’s repeated invocations of the notion of ‘constitutional morality’ as well his
invocations of the ideals of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. These ideals were imagined as
ways in which at the level of norm, the “graded and hierarchical system of Hindu society”
were to be combated with the radical idea of the equality of all citizens. However, it do would
do injustice to Dr Ambedkar’s thinking on jurisprudence, if one failed to acknowledge that at
the very heart of the Ambedkarite project of securing justice through law was a scepticism of
law. This scepticism did not find expression as a radical disavowal of the law but rather as a
turning towards other ways of bringing about this feeling of brotherhood or fraternity on
which rested the promise of equal treatment. Perhaps emblematic is the argument on inter
caste marriage, with love being seen as a solvent of the ties of caste. Love, in Dr.
Ambedkar’s imagination, opens out the possibility of justice.

Date: Thursday 13 November, 2014

Time: 15.00-17.00
Venue: CISA Committee Room