Ambedkar , livre ebook

GAIL OMVEDT
Ambedkar
Towards an Enlightened India
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Introduction
One: Without education Shudras are ruined
The Education of an Untouchable
Two: We are against Brahmanism but not Brahmans
Beginning the Fight for Dalit Human Rights
Three: Gandhiji, I have no homeland
The Round Table Conferences, the Poona Pact and Nationalist Dilemmas
Four: I will not die a Hindu!
The Conversion Shock
Five: Against capitalism and Brahmanism
Years of Class Radicalism
Six: We can be a nation, provided
War, Peace and Pakistan
Seven: The law of Manu replaced by the law of Mahar
Shaping Independent India
Eight: Building a palace on a dung heap
The Post-Independence Years
Nine: Buddham sharanam gacchami
The Final Years
Conclusion: Dr Ambedkar and the Freedom Struggle of Dalits
Footnotes
Two: We are against Brahmanism but not Brahmans : Beginning the Fight for Dalit Human Rights
Three: Gandhiji, I have no homeland : The Round Table Conferences, the Poona Pact and Nationalist Dilemmas
Five: Against capitalism and Brahmanism : Years of Class Radicalism
Eight: Building a palace on a dung heap : The Post-Independence Years
References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
AMBEDKAR
Born in Minneapolis, USA, Gail Omvedt is an Indian citizen. She has an MA and Ph.D in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. She has been living in India since 1978, settled in Kasegaon Village in southern Maharashtra, with her husband, Bharat Patankar, and other members of an Indian joint family. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
Among her numerous books focusing on social and economic issues are Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste (2003), Dalit Visions (1995), Dalits and the Democratic Revolution (1994), Reinventing Revolution : New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India (1993) and Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Maharashtra (1966). She has also collaborated with Bharat Patnakar in translations from the Marathi into English.
To Prachi, and all the young generations of Indians, Indian- Americans and other Americans who are learning to see Ambedkar as one of the greatest leaders of modern India and to struggle for the overcoming of caste and Brahmanism
Introduction
There are undoubtedly more statues of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar in India than of any other historical person of the last millennium. They have been raised in every village, on crossroads, in every Dalit urban residential area and in front of educational and governmental institutions throughout the country. They show a stocky man, usually dressed in a western suit and tie, holding a book under his arm. The book represents the Constitution of India. Following the overthrow of the socialist regime in Russia, which brought with it the upsetting of statues of Lenin, and the downgrading of Mao in China, the number of these statues throughout India and elsewhere represents the major monumental memorial today to a leader of the downtrodden.
Such statues have played a major role in political assertion in recent India. Their raising has represented a claim to pride and public space. Their opponents also take them as such and express their hostility to Dalit assertion by putting garlands of chappals around such statues-actions which have often led to severe rioting and police firing. With all of this, it is clear that in the politics of flags and statues , Dalits have placed Ambedkar at the top of the world.
At the same time, the depiction of the Indian Constitution symbolizes the fact that Ambedkar was not simply a Dalit leader, not even a leader only of all caste-oppressed. He was a national leader-in a different sense from the well-known elite nationalists who led the struggle for freedom from British colonial rule. Ambedkar s nationalism was expressed in all his life s work, in the programmes of his various political parties, in his political decisions, in the many books and essays he wrote on problems of caste, of Muslims and minorities, of Pakistan and of women and in his role in the construction of a democratic independent India. He played a major role in the construction of Indian planning, in the formation of irrigation and energy policies, and his work in setting up colleges and educational institutions represented the efforts of all anti-caste leaders to win education as a tool of liberation. Following his work in chairing the committee to draft the Indian Constitution, he became law minister in the first cabinet after independence whose most famous activity was guiding the Hindu Code Bill as a charter of women s rights in free India. All this represented a nationalism that was not simply the winning of political independence but of nation-building , the creation of social equality and cultural integration in a society held enslaved for so long by the unique tyrannies of caste and varna ideology.
Today the name of Gandhi still resounds through the world as a force of peace and non-violence. Yet what Ambedkar represents, the rising of India s oppressed and exploited and the herald of a new age of equality and rationalism, is beginning to catch the imagination of African-Americans and other racially oppressed groups, Japanese ex-untouchable Burakumin, Buddhists in Asian societies building a liberation theology within the framework of their traditional religion and seekers everywhere looking for a new model of liberation.
Within India, Ambedkar is often contrasted to Gandhi, an opposition that is symbolized in their sculptural depiction. Gandhi, in loincloth and often with a spinning wheel, represented an identification with India s poor that romanticized the traditional Indian village and its spiritual stagnation. Ambedkar s western image symbolizes a claim by Dalits to the heritage of the ages, a rejection of Brahmanic and other forms of narrow cultural nationalism and a modernism that even today represents the height of India s Enlightenment tradition. If Gandhi was Bapu, the father of a society in which he tried to inject equality while maintaining the Hindu framework, Ambedkar was Baba to his people and the great liberator from that framework. But Dalits rightfully protest against a comparison that links Ambedkar only to Gandhi; they see him as a world figure, one best compared to Marx. While Gandhi fought for freedom from colonial rule, Ambedkar fought for a broader liberation from exploitation and oppression. In his own words, like Marx he was not simply a philosopher reinterpreting the world but a leader of those who wanted to reconstruct the world by abolishing exploitative social structures. This orientation to social transformation is expressed in a famous song by Annabhau Sathe, a Dalit writer who was a lifelong member of the Communist Party of India: Strike a blow to change the world, so Ambedkar told as he left Where Ambedkar differed from Marx was in his emphasis on the role of non- class , non-economic structures in the process of exploitation, in posing the importance of spirituality, ideology and consciousness both in maintaining slavery and winning freedom. For him the answer was found in Buddhism, but whether or not one agrees with this, the issues remain central to all liberation movements.
The story of how this man rose from the poorest of India s untouchable , downtrodden masses to become an acknowledged shaper of independent India and a symbol of rationalist liberation in a new millennium is one that we will try to tell in the following pages.
One
Without education Shudras are ruined
The Education of an Untouchable
Without education knowledge is lost; without knowledge development is lost; without development wealth is lost; without wealth Shudras are ruined.
-Jotirao Phule (1890)
Master of arts and doctorate in economics, Columbia University; master of science and doctor of science in economics, London School of Economics and Political Science; barrister-at-law, Grey s Inn, London. For anyone to attain so many degrees is impressive, but for an untouchable, born in a small rural town in a colonial country at the end of the nineteenth century, it is even more so. This superior education helped propel Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar to the leadership of a growing movement of India s downtrodden. The coincidence of several factors contributed to his success: the openings for mobility provided by British colonial rule, the help of a few progressive and far-sighted, wealthy and upper-caste social reformers, sacrificial support from his family and his own sheer grit and determination.
Much of these personal strengths came from his family. Ambedkar was born in Mhow, a small town in central India, on 14 April 1891 to an untouchable family in military service. He was a member of the Mahars, one of the largest untouchable castes of India, its ubiquitousness in Maharashtra marked by the saying Where there s a village, there s a Maharwada . Mahars were village servants who performed hereditary duties for the headman, higher political overlords and the dominant groups of the village. They held small allotments of land in exchange for these services, and they were also agricultural labourers. In parts of the state, especially in eastern Maharashtra, they sometimes had larger holdings, and a few became wealthy farmers and even landlords. In both Bombay and Nagpur Mahars provided a good proportion (about 20 per cent in Bombay, 40 per cent in Nagpur) of labourers in the burgeoning textile mills of the colonial period.
Dalits in Maharashtra also had a military tradition dating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mahars and Mangs (the other large untouchable caste of the region) were among the martial races of India, serving as common paiks or soldiers and occasionally as squadron leaders. Sometimes they were made heads o