Untouchable - New Rambler Review

10/8/21, 12:07 PM Untouchable - New Rambler Review
AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS
Categories / Religion / Untouchable
Untouchable
By MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
Review of ANNIHILATION OF CASTE: The

Annotated Critical Edition, by B. R. Ambedkar,
edited and annotated by S. Anand
Introduced with the essay The Doctor and the Saint,

by Arundhati Roy
Navayana Publishing / Verso, 2014
View UNTOUCHABLE
When Europeans and North Americans think about

the founding of the Indian nation, what thoughts do
they have about its distinguished founders? Not very
many. More or less everyone could name Mohandas
Gandhi. Many could identify a photo of him, and
some could even describe in a general way his views
of non-violent protest. Thanks in part to the
excellent Attenborough film, but thanks as well to
the appropriation of his ideas by Martin Luther King,
https://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/religion/untouchable 1/20

Jr. -- and thanks above all to his own genius for
attention-catching moral-political theater -- he is a
world-historical figure, revered more than critically
assessed, but at least not ignored. He makes every
top ten list of the world’s most influential human
beings – usually right after Jesus, Mohammad, and
the Buddha. Meanwhile, the first -- and so far
indubitably the greatest – political leader of the
independent nation, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964,
Prime Minister from 1947 to 1964), is known to most
non-Indians as a name, and perhaps as a style of
jacket; but few know anything much about his
political ideas and almost nobody reads his
marvelous and profoundly moving books
(Autobiography and The Discovery of India). Indeed,
ignorance of Nehru is so complete that many people
believe that the subsequent Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi (1917-84, P. M. from 1966 to 1977 and 1980
to 1984) was Gandhi’s daughter rather than Nehru’s,
despite the close association of father and daughter
throughout the father’s adult life. (Indira Nehru
married a Parsi from Mumbai named Feroze Gandhi,
who could not possibly be any relative of Mohandas,
a Vaishya Hindu from Gujarat.)
The palm of unjustified obscurity, however, goes to a

man who was very likely the greatest intellect of all

the Founders, and one of the most impressive legal
minds of the twentieth or any other century, B. R.
(Bhimrao Ramji) Ambedkar (1891-1956), who, as
Nehru’s Law Minister, became the primary architect
of the Indian Constitution. His name is little-known,
his struggles attract no interest, and his voluminous
writings – many unpublished in his own lifetime
because he was unable to pay the cost of publication
– have been available only in dusty tomes until very
recently -- when Columbia University, his alma
mater, put many of them online, and publishers have
begun to produce high-quality critical editions of the
most important. The present volume is therefore
occasion for warm celebration. It contains a superb
critical edition of one of Ambedkar’s most important
writings, Annihilation of Caste, with notes by S.
Anand that are all that one might wish from a high-
grade edition. It also reprints the subsequent sharp
published exchanges between Gandhi and
Ambedkar, again extensively annotated, a boon to
the student of either. Finally, it includes an essay of
180 pages by Arundhati Roy, Booker-prize-winning
novelist turned political polemicist, which contains a
somewhat higher ratio of historical and social fact to
shrill rhetoric than many of her other writings.
While marred by a venomous hatred of Gandhi that

few will share, or even come to share after reading
her indictment, Roy’s essay still performs a useful
function for the uninitiated, showing that uncritical
reverence is not the only possible attitude toward
this singular leader.
Before turning to Ambedkar’s writing, however, it is

necessary to introduce the man. B. R. Ambedkar was
born in 1891 into the untouchable Mahar caste,
traditionally sweepers. Mahars, however, also had a
long-established military role, and his father, like
other ancestors, was employed in the army of the
British East India Company. He thus attained a
decent living standard if not affluence. The British,
who with all their flaws and their racism did not
favor untouchability, supported the right of
untouchable children to be educated at touchable
schools. (The people who used to be called
Untouchables are now called and call themselves
dalits -- meaning “broken people” -- but that term
was popularized by Ambedkar himself much later, so
I use the earlier term, which he also used earlier, as I
narrate his younger years.)
So the young Ambedkar went off to school – where,

as he wrote much later, he endured appalling
discrimination. He was forced to sit on a piece of

gunny sack that no other child would touch, and he
was forbidden to drink from the common tap. (This
is Madhya Pradesh, where temperatures can easily
rise above 110 in the midday. On May 31, 2015, the
high reported in this region was 114.) If the school
servant was present, that servant could pour the
water down to him from a height. If the servant was
absent, as he often was, then no water.
Still, Ambedkar excelled in his studies. Supported by

a Brahmin teacher, he won admission at Elphinstone
College of Bombay University, the first untouchable
child to be admitted. He received his B. A. in
economics and political science from that university
in 1912. His supporters believed that a change of
venue would help him advance without the
continual exhausting struggle against the stigma of
untouchability. (For just one example: as with the
Jim Crow South, he was unable to stay at touchable
hotels, and he reports one appalling trip with his
sisters, well-off well-behaved children wearing
immaculate starched clothes and carrying lots of
cash, and yet they almost had to sleep in the open,
after a series of rejections all along the way.) So,
with the help of a scholarship, he went off to New
York.

Ambedkar flourished at Columbia University (which
in 2011 finally erected a statue to him on its
campus). He got two M.A.s (1915 and 1916) and one
Ph.D. (1927) in Economics, writing on the Indian
finance system, and he became a protégé of John
Dewey, whose work and ideas remained dear to him
throughout his life. America was always his favorite
place. He said he experienced social equality there
for the first time; and he retained throughout his life
a somewhat starry-eyed love of our flawed country,
even arguing in an unpublished essay that slavery
was not as bad as untouchability. Intellectually, his
rejection of Marxism and socialism and his embrace
of a progressive New-Dealish type of parliamentary
democracy owe much to Dewey’s influence. (In a
late work comparing the Buddha and Karl Marx, he
indicts Marx for his idea that human progress must
take place through “dictatorship” and the
suppression of liberty.) In between his M.A. and
Ph.D. degrees at Columbia, he spent time at the
London School of Economics, getting an additional
Economics Ph.D. degree there (1923) and becoming
a barrister in Grey’s Inn. (Thus he never had a U. S.
law degree, but he gathered an encyclopedic
knowledge of U. S. as well as British law. The U. S.
Constitution, with its combination of a written text,

including a list of fundamental rights, and common
law interpretive traditions, became, later, his model
for India.)
Back in India, however, he always had to be not only

a top legal and political mind, but also an
Untouchable, and the political struggle against caste
consumed a great part of his energy during the
1930’s. Ambedkar was never a very effective
politician. Every time he ran for office he lost. He
simply was an intellectual first and foremost, lacking
the common touch and lacking Gandhi’s instinct for
symbol and strategy. His epochal role in politics
came much later, and in an appointive post: in 1948-
1950, as Nehru’s law minister. His work on the
Constitution and his remarkable speeches about it,
preserved in the Constituent Assembly proceedings,
are a topic for another occasion[1]. Suffice it to say
that he deftly rejects the solidaristic vision of the left
parties in favor of a liberal insistence on
parliamentary democracy and on a type of formalism
that puts procedure ahead of outcomes.
But Annihilation of Caste preceded all of this; it

belongs to a strain of Ambedkar’s thought that is
really not political at all, so much as social and
religious. In 1936, the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (“Forum

for the Breakup of Caste), a group of Hindu
reformers, invited Ambedkar to deliver the plenary
lecture at its annual meeting. He showed them the
text of his lecture ahead of time, and they found it
objectionable, so they canceled the entire meeting.
The group was dedicated to moderate incremental
reform: they focused on mixed-caste dining, and
probably hoped that social mingling would
ultimately lead to intermarriage. But they were not
prepared for denunciation of the entire idea of a
religion based on the authority of text and priests;
they hoped, rather like Gandhi, that judicious
reinterpretation of text could solve the major
problems. Above all, Ambedkar’s declaration in the
lecture that he had already left Hinduism behind
was anathema to them. For, again like Gandhi, they
were hoping to keep Untouchables in the Hindu fold
through reform; they were attached to their religion
and wanted it to be the best it could possibly be.
(Gandhi’s motives were more complex and political:
he did not want a potentially powerful
independence movement to be fractured by
sectarian religious splits.) Ambedkar published the
speech at his own expense, charging 8 annas for it
(half a rupee, not high considering costs). It was
therefore snarky and insulting when Gandhi

suggested in his first published reply that this fee was
too high, and that the appropriate fee would be 2
annas or at most 4. The work quickly became
famous and was translated into many languages.
(Like all Ambedkar’s major writings it was written in
English.)
Annihilation of Caste does not dwell on the horrifying

discrimination involved in the caste system and the
practice of untouchability. For data on this the
reader should consult the first part of Roy’s essay,
which does a real service by assembling facts about
the persistence of caste practices, including denials of
common water and food, denials of lodging,
education, employment, and social association, and,
often, horrific violence, including rapes and
lynchings. (The Jim Crow South is an apt parallel,
except that caste practices are so much older and
more firmly entrenched.) The implied reader of the
essay, the reform-minded Hindu, is expected to know
what untouchability has meant for human dignity;
the essay operates against that background.
Ambedkar’s objections to the entire institution of

caste are fourfold. First, the institution includes the
horrendous practice of untouchability, with all its
violence and insult. Second, in the process of

enforcing the caste hierarchy, the upper castes have
deprived the lower (mainly Untouchables, but other
manual laborers as well) of the two most efficient
means of changing their lot: for the hereditary
division of labor denies them the right to education
and the right to bear arms. (He always assumed that
without the potential use of arms, at least in self-
defense, a revolutionary movement would be
crippled. But he never developed this argument.)
This second problem would not be removed by
simply dropping the stigma attached to
untouchability and reconceiving of caste in the way
proposed by Gandhi, as simply a hereditary
allocation of occupations. Third, in the process of
enforcing the hereditary division of occupations,
caste rides roughshod over the profound human
value of the free choice of occupation in keeping
with talent and inclination. (Here Ambedkar joins
hands with Adam Smith, who made the same point
about the odious system of apprenticeship and
parish registration.) Fourth, caste is just an irrational
notion, part and parcel of a religion of blind
subservience to tradition. It cannot be defended by
reason, and it can have no place in any religion based
upon reason. These last two objections, once again,
cannot be met by moderate reform, although

Ambedkar believes that the annihilation of caste
leave lots of room for religion, rightly understood.
In his later legal/political writings, Ambedkar adds a

fifth, political objection to caste: it is anti-national,
leading to an identity politics that breaks up people
along traditional lines and asks them to have their
primary affective ties to their caste group. It thus
impedes the creation of a united nation and a
politics based upon ideas rather than irrational
traditions. He was so right about this, and the
politics of India today shows how well-founded his
objection was: dozens of caste-based parties, most of
them regional, since castes are regional, have
balkanized the party politics of the nation,
preventing to a considerable extent any rational
sorting of parties along lines of policy.
What is left, if caste should be annihilated for the

four reasons given? Ambedkar plainly thinks that
Hinduism would not be left. He thinks Hinduism
cannot survive the end of idolatry and
submissiveness. But he insists that religion is not
doomed by the demand to give moral reasoning
priority over tradition. For there can be a religion of
principle that does not ask us to pervert our
judgment. The moment religion “degenerates into

rules it ceases to be religion…[R]eligion must mainly
be a matter of principle only.” Very like Immanuel
Kant, in Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone
(1793), he demands a reconceptualization of religion
that accepts the supremacy of (moral) principle and
reasoned critique. He does not mention in this essay
his belief that Buddhism is such a religion, but the
reader would be expected to be aware of Ambedkar’s
longstanding interest in that option and its history.
Gandhi responded sharply to Ambedkar’s pamphlet

in his own journal Harijan, and Ambedkar included
the critique in the 1936 reissue of Annihilation, along
with his own reply to Gandhi. Gandhi’s response to
Annihilation does not show him at his finest. He
keeps insisting dogmatically, and without any show
of respect for Ambedkar, that Hinduism can be
reformed from within and that all-out annihilation
of caste means the annihilation of religion. In
saying this he simply fails to respond to Ambedkar’s
powerful arguments. As Ambedkar works his way
through Gandhi’s essay, with each refusal to engage,
his rejoinders become more blunt, more sardonic,
until we find him saying flat out, “The Mahatma
appears not to believe in thinking…Like a
conservative with his reverence for consecrated
notions, he is afraid that if he once starts thinking,

many ideals and institutions to which he clings will
be doomed. One must sympathize with him. For
every act of independent thinking puts some portion
of an apparently stable world in peril.”
The best face to put on Gandhi’s stance is that he

was thinking above all of the independence
movement and what would strengthen it, and that
he thought, plausibly enough, that if he adopted the
Enlightenment stance of Ambedkar this would cause
the mass defection of most Hindus from the
movement. Gandhi was always an inscrutable
mixture of saintliness and strategy, and what
Arundhati Roy stridently denounces as hypocrisy and
compromise is very likely best seen as correct human
insight about how to build a mass movement. But
there is also little doubt that Gandhi really did think
that there was no harm in the hereditary division of
labor, if untouchability were once removed from it.
There is also little doubt that his critique of tradition
stopped well short of Ambedkar’s, retaining a
profound role for text and authority. As for whether
(as Roy repeatedly asserts) he refused the full human
equality of the Untouchables, that seems far less
clear, and here her essay veers into snide polemic.
He surely did not trust them to lead themselves at
crucial junctures, and he did make some patronizing

remarks – but the larger conclusion Roy draws,
namely that he was a proud upper-caste Hindu
defending his turf by dishonest pretenses of
egalitarianism, is not borne out by any evidence she
presents. All I can do at this point is urge the reader
to delve for herself into the extensive controversy
about Gandhi’s ideas concerning caste. As for Roy’s
snide disparagement of Gandhi for accepting funds
for his movement from the industrialist Birla,
another member of his own Vaishya (merchant)
caste, as if it were some grave moral sin to accept
money from rich people -- this seems to me very
odd. Should he have tried to break the stranglehold
of the Raj without funds? Or should he have insisted
on taking funds only from the most destitute? Roy’s
shrill hatred of capitalism renders her critique here
crude and incoherent.
For our purposes, it is enough to know that

Ambedkar’s Enlightenment idea of religion is quite
far from any reform that Gandhi would accept, and
that Gandhi gives no arguments at all in response to
Ambedkar’s cogent arguments. But we must also
keep in mind the fact that Gandhi formed and led an
enormously successful and noble mass movement
that eventually led to India’s independence, and that
Ambedkar had no ability at all in this line of human

endeavor. When the time came for constitution-
making, that was his shining hour.
Ambedkar and Gandhi were both deeply religious.

Their rivalry was that of utterly opposed types of
religious reformers. Gandhi assailed untouchability
in the name of human dignity, but retained, by some
textual gymnastics or perhaps some fuzziness of
thought, the authority of text and priestly tradition.
His understanding of religion retained an essential
role for tradition, myth, symbol, and authority, and
after a point it really is true that he had no room for
thinking. Ambedkar brooks no half-way measures.
Reform means using critical reason all the way down,
jettisoning the authority of text and tradition, and
fashioning a religion of moral principle in place of
the religion of rules and laws. Already fascinated by
the Buddhism to which he would officially convert
shortly before his death in 1956, in a mass ceremony
joined by his Brahmin wife and his entire Mahar
caste, he can conceive of no possible reform of
Hinduism that would meet his moral demands.
But he does not jettison religion. He understands

the need for moral ideals that have a community and
a history, even a poetry, attached to them. Here too
he joins hands with Kant, though there is no sign

that he ever read him: for Kant held that imperfect
people need religion, meaning communal ritual
practices of some type, to reinforce their dedication
to the moral law. Ambedkar would have added too, I
think, that people need religion to express human
love fully and adequately, overcoming parochialism
and self-interest. His take on the need for religion
seems less about avoiding evil than about the whole-
hearted embrace of good. His posthumously
published book The Buddha and his Dhamma (not
published in his lifetime only because he had no
money to pay for its publication) is a lyrical and
deeply moving work, an attempt to convey to a
broad audience the greatness of the Buddha and his
moral leadership – all the while emphasizing that,
unlike other founders of religions, the Buddha did
not make a place of honor for himself in his religion
of moral law -- dhamma is defined by Ambedkar as
“right relations between man and man in all spheres
of life” -- or claim any divinity or infallibility for
himself or even for his law. “He said that it was open
to anyone to question it, test it, and find what truth
it contained. No founder has so fully thrown open
his religion to such a challenge.”
All the things the reader of Annihilation could have

guessed at are in this late text: the insistence on

universal moral legislation, the broad compassion,
the refusal of asceticism, the egalitarian ethics. But
what such a reader could not have guessed at in
advance is the sheer beauty of the story-telling,
illuminated throughout by Ambedkar’s love of the
charm of the Buddha’s personality and his gracious
and life-affirming presence. “On seeing him, he who
was going elsewhere stood still, and whoever was
standing followed him; he who was walking gently
and gravely ran quickly; and he who was sitting at
once sprang up…He was loved and respected by all.”
Can this be the fiery denouncer of social evil? Can
this be the sober legal scholar? To begin to penetrate
Ambedkar’s mind and heart, one has to figure out
how the answer to both of these questions is,
“Indubitably yes.”
Asking Ambedkar’s questions, Kant turned to a

reconstruction of Christianity based on the recovery
of the authentic teaching of Jesus, as he saw it. Some
Christians today agree with Kant that Jesus favored a
religion of moral principle, although many do not.
The Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn tried to
convince Kant that Judaism was the alternative Kant
wanted – meaning a rational Judaism stripped of
mere legalism. And indeed, when I read
Annihilation, I can’t help thinking of my own

religion, Reform Judaism, which took Mendelssohn’s
radical vision and ran with it. Ambedkar’s vision
really is that of the radical Jewish reformers of the
nineteenth century, who remained Jews but rejected
the authority of text and religious law, including the
dietary laws, putting the moral law in first (and really
the only) place and reconceiving of religion as
focused on universal human love and the striving for
human justice. The difficulty these reformers
encountered, however, was that they tended to omit
poetry and ceremony as well, so the movement
eventually either collapsed from within (the decline
of the Ethical Culture Society) or turned back to
recapture some of what was lost, hopefully the right
things and not the wrong things. My Reform
congregation is not alone in trying to recapture
poetry, ceremony, and beauty within the confines of
reason – with much debate about which practices
involve “totemism” and “fetishism” and which ones
can have a symbolic moral meaning. It’s a tough act,
but it’s what appeals to me, and it’s what evidently
appealed to Ambedkar.
Above all, the present volume – along with late

works including The Buddha and his Dhamma and
The Buddha and Karl Marx -- shows that Ambedkar
was a very considerable thinker about religion,

human beings, and society. If we combine these
works with his legal and constitutional thought,
including his work creating one of the world’s most
compelling visions of liberal social democracy, the
Indian Constitution, we will begin to take the
measure of this remarkable human being.
MARTHA NUSSBAUM is an American philosopher

and the current Ernst Freund Distinguished Service
Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of
Chicago, a chair that includes appointments in the
philosophy department and the law school.
[1] I discuss his ideas in “Ambedkar’s Constitution:

Promoting Inclusion, Opposing Majority Tyranny,”
forthcoming in a volume on assessing constitutions
edited by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq, Cambridge
University Press.
The Editors REVIEWS RELIGION

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10/8/21, 12:07 PM Untouchable - New Rambler Review

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

Categories / Religion / Untouchable

Review of ANNIHILATION OF CASTE: The

Introduced with the essay The Doctor and the Saint,

Navayana Publishing / Verso, 2014

When Europeans and North Americans think about

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

The palm of unjustified obscurity, however, goes to a

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

Before turning to Ambedkar’s writing, however, it is

So the young Ambedkar went off to school – where,

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

Still, Ambedkar excelled in his studies. Supported by

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

Back in India, however, he always had to be not only

But Annihilation of Caste preceded all of this; it

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

Annihilation of Caste does not dwell on the horrifying

Ambedkar’s objections to the entire institution of

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

In his later legal/political writings, Ambedkar adds a

What is left, if caste should be annihilated for the

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

Gandhi responded sharply to Ambedkar’s pamphlet

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

The best face to put on Gandhi’s stance is that he

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

For our purposes, it is enough to know that

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

Ambedkar and Gandhi were both deeply religious.

But he does not jettison religion. He understands

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

All the things the reader of Annihilation could have

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

Asking Ambedkar’s questions, Kant turned to a

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

Above all, the present volume – along with late

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

MARTHA NUSSBAUM is an American philosopher

[1] I discuss his ideas in “Ambedkar’s Constitution:

The Editors REVIEWS RELIGION

AN ONLINE REVIEW OF BOOKS

The New Rambler Review

Law School and Gifford Combs | Subscribe | Website: Judy O Studio

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