Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (21 page)

60
BAWS 9, 202.

61
Keer 1954/1990, 167.

62
For an analysis of the radicalism inherent in the Ambedkar statue, in the context of Uttar Pradesh, see Nicolas Jaoul (2006). “To Dalit villagers, whose rights and dignity have been regularly violated, setting up the statue of a Dalit statesman wearing a red tie and carrying the Constitution involves dignity, pride in emancipated citizenship and a practical acknowledgement of the extent to which the enforcement of laws could positively change their lives” (204).

63
“The State represents violence in a concentrated and organised form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. Hence I prefer the doctrine of
trusteeship.”
Hindustan Times
, 17 October 1935; CWMG 65, 318.

64
Young India
, 16 April 1931; CWMG 51, 354.

65
Das 2010, 175.

66
Jefferson says this in his letter of 6 September 1789 to James
Madison. Available at
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch2s23.html
. Accessed 21 November 2013.

67
Ambedkar argues in “Castes in India”, his 1916 essay, that women are the gateways of the caste system and that control over them through child marriages, enforced widowhood and sati (being burnt on a dead husband’s pyre) are methods to keep a check on women’s sexuality. For an analysis of Ambedkar’s writings on this issue, see
Sharmila Rege (2013).

68
For a discussion of the Hindu
Code Bill, its ramifications and how it was sabotaged, see Sharmila Rege (2013, 191–244). Rege shows how from 11 April 1947, when it was introduced in the Constituent Assembly, till September 1951, the Bill was never taken seriously. Ambedkar finally resigned on 10 October 1951. The Hindu Marriage Act was finally enacted in 1955, granting divorce rights to Hindu women. The Special Marriage Act, passed in 1954 allows inter-caste and inter-religious marriage.

69
Rege 2013, 200.

70
Rege 2013, 241. Ambedkar’s disillusionment with the new legal regime in India went further. On 2 September 1953, Ambedkar declared in the Rajya Sabha, “Sir, my friends tell me that I made the Constitution. But I am quite prepared to say that I shall be the first person to burn it out. I do not want it. It does not suit anybody. But whatever that may be, if our people want to carry on, they must remember that there are majorities and there are
minorities; and they simply cannot ignore the minorities by saying: ‘Oh, no, to recognise you is to harm democracy’ ” (Keer 1990, 499).

71
AoC 20.12.

72
Omvedt 2008, 19.

73
Unpublished translation by Joel Lee, made available through personal communication.

74
Young India
, 17 March 1927; CWMG 38, 210.

75
Ambedkar said this during his speech delivered as Chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee in the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948. See Das 2010, 176.

76
For an analysis of Gandhi’s relationship with Indian capitalists, see
Leah Renold (1994). Gandhi’s approach to big dams is revealed in a letter dated 5 April 1924, in which he advised villagers who faced displacement by the Mulshi Dam, being built by the Tatas
to generate electricity for their
Bombay mills, to give up their protest (CWMG 27, 168):

1. I understand that the vast majority of the men affected have accepted compensation and that the few who have not cannot perhaps even be traced.

2. The dam is nearly half-finished and its progress cannot be permanently stopped. There seems to me to be no ideal behind the movement.

3. The leader of the movement is not a believer out and out in non-violence. This defect is fatal to success.

Seventy-five years later, in 2000, the
Supreme Court of India used very similar logic in its infamous judgement on the World Bank-funded
Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river, when it ruled against tens of thousands of local people protesting their displacement, and ordered the construction of the dam to continue.

77
Young India
, 20 December 1928; CWMG 43, 412. Also see Gandhi’s
Hind Swaraj
(1909) in Anthony Parel (1997).

78
Rege 2013, 100.

79
BAWS 5, 102.

80
In Das 2010, 51.

81
AoC, Preface to 1937 edition.

82
Cited in Zelliot 2013, 147.

83
Here, for example, is
Ismat Chugtai, a Muslim writer celebrated for her progressive, feminist views, describing an Untouchable sweeper in her short story, “A Pair of Hands”: “Gori was her name, the feckless one, and she was dark, dark like a glistening pan on which a roti had been fried but which a careless cook had forgotten to clean. She had a bulbous nose, a wide jaw, and it seemed she came from a family where brushing one’s teeth was a habit long forgotten. The squint in her left eye was noticeable despite the fact that her eyes were heavily kohled; it was difficult to imagine how, with a squinted eye, she was able to throw darts that never failed to hit their mark. Her waist was not slim; it had thickened, rapidly increasing in diameter from all those handouts she consumed. There was also nothing delicate about her feet which reminded one of a cow’s hoofs, and she left a coarse smell of mustard oil in her wake. Her voice however, was sweet” (2003, 164).

84
In 1981, all the Dalits of the village of
Meenakshipuram—renamed Rahmat Nagar—in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district converted to
Islam. Worried by this, Hindu supremacist groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh together with the Sankaracharya of Kanchipuram began to work proactively to ‘integrate’ Dalits into Hinduism. A new ‘Tamil Hindu’ chauvinist group called the Hindu Munnani was formed. Eighteen years later,
P. Sainath revisited Meenakshipuram and filed two reports (1999a, 1999b). For a similar case from Koothirambakkam, another village in Tamil Nadu, see S. Anand (2002).

85
Cited in Omvedt 2008, 177.

86
The figure Ambedkar cites is drawn from the
Simon Commission report of 1930. When the Lothian Committee came to India in 1932 Ambedkar said, “The Hindus adopted a challenging mood and refused to accept the figures given by the Simon Commission as a true figure for the Untouchables of India.” He then argues that, “this is due to the fact that the Hindus had by now realised the danger of admitting the existence of the Untouchables. For it meant that a part of the representation enjoyed by the Hindus will have to be given up by them to the Untouchables” (BAWS 5, 7–8).

87
See Note 69 at 9.4 of this AoC edition.

88
He says this in the April 1899 issue of the journal
Prabuddha Bharata
, in an interview to its editor. In the same interview, when asked specifically what would be the caste of those who “re-converted” to Hinduism,
Vivekananda says: “Returning converts … will gain their own castes, of course. And new people will make theirs. You will remember … that this has already been done in the case of Vaishnavism. Converts from different castes and aliens were all able to combine under that flag and form a caste by themselves—and a very respectable one too. From Ramanuja down to
Chaitanya of Bengal, all great Vaishnava Teachers have done the same.” Available at
http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_5/interviews/on_the_bounds_of_hinduism.htm
. Accessed 20 August 2013.

89
The names of these organisations translate as: Forum for Dalit
Uplift; the All-India Committee for the Uplift of Untouchables; the Punjab Society for Untouchable Uplift.

90
AoC 6.2.

91
Bayly 1998.

92
The term was coined by V.D. Savarkar (1883–1966), one of the principal proponents of modern, right-wing Hindu
nationalism, in his 1923 pamphlet
Essentials of
Hindutva
(later retitled
Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?
). The first edition (1923) of this work carried the pseudonymous “A Maratha” as author. For a critical introduction to Hindutva, see Jyotirmaya Sharma (2006).

93
Cited in Prashad 1996, 554–5.

94
BAWS 9, 195.

95
A few privileged-caste Hindu members of the
Ghadar Party later turned towards Hindu nationalism and became Vedic missionaries. On
Bhai Parmanand, a founder-member of the Ghadar Party who later became a Hindutva ideologue, see Note 11 in the Prologue to AoC.

96
For a monograph on the
Ad Dharm movement, see Juergensmeyer (1982/2009).

97
Rupa Viswanath (forthcoming 2014) details the history of the colonial state’s alliance with the landed castes against landless Dalits in the context of the Madras Presidency.

98
Davis 2002, 7.

99
BAWS 9, 1.

100
Ibid., 3.

101
See Devji 2012, chapter 3, “In Praise of Prejudice”, especially 47–8.

102
Cited from
Young India
, 23 March 1921, in Devji 2012, 81.

103
Golwalkar 1945, 55–6.

104
BAWS 17, Part 1, 369–75.

105
Godse 1998, 43.

106
BAWS 3, 360.

107
Cited in BAWS 9, 68.

108
Harijan
, 30 September 1939; CWMG 76, 356.

109
See Guha 2013b.

110
Tidrick 2006, 106.

111
For an archive of Gandhi’s writings about his years in South Africa (1893 to 1914), see G.B. Singh (2004).

112
Swan 1985, 52.

113
Kaffir is an Arabic term that originally meant ‘one who hides or covers’—a description of farmers burying seeds in the ground. After the advent of
Islam, it came to mean ‘non-believers’ or ‘heretics’, those ‘who covered the truth (Islam)’. It was first applied to non-Muslim Black people encountered by Arab traders along the Swahili coast. Portuguese explorers adopted the term and passed it on to the British, French and Dutch. In South Africa, it became a
racial slur the Whites and Afrikaners (and Indians like Gandhi) used to describe native Africans. Today, to call someone a Kaffir in South Africa is an actionable offence.

114
CWMG 1, 192–3.

115
CWMG 1, 200.

116
For a history of indentured labour in South Africa, see
Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed (2010).

117
Between the early 1890s and 1913, the Indian population in South Africa tripled, from 40,000 to 135,000 (Guha 2013b, 463).

118
Guha 2013b, 115.

119
CWMG 2, 6.

120
Hochschild 2011, 33–4.

121
During the
Second World War, he advised the
Jews to “summon to their aid the soul-power that comes only from non-violence” and assured them that Herr Hitler would “bow before their courage” (
Harijan
, 17 December 1938; CWMG 74, 298). He urged the British to “fight Nazism without arms” (
Harijan
, 6 July 1940; CWMG 78, 387).

122
CWMG 34, 18.

123
CWMG 2, 339–40.

124
The Natal Advertiser
, 16 October 1901; CWMG 2, 421.

125
CWMG 5, 11.

126
Ibid., 179.

127
Guy 2005, 212.

128
According to a note on the first page of volume 34 of CWMG, “Gandhiji started writing in Gujarati the history of Satyagraha in South Africa on November 26, 1923, when he was in the Yeravada Central Jail; vide Jail Diary, 1923. By the time he was released, on February 5, 1924, he had completed 30 chapters … The English translation by Valji G. Desai, which was seen and approved by
Gandhiji, was published by S. Ganesan, Madras, in 1928.”

129
CWMG 34, 82–3.

130
Ibid., 84.

131
Of a total population of 135,000 Indians, only 10,000, who were mostly traders, lived in the
Transvaal. The rest were based in Natal (Guha 2013b, 463).

132
CWMG 5, 337. This is from Clause 3 from Resolution 2 of the Five Resolutions passed by the British Indian Association in Johannesburg, following the ‘Mass Meeting’ of 11 September 1906.

133
Indian Opinion
, 7 March 1908; CWMG 8, 198–9.

134
CWMG 9, 256–7.

135
Indian Opinion
, 23 January 1909; CWMG 9, 274.

136
In a letter dated 18 May 1899 to the Colonial Secretary, Gandhi wrote: “An Indian may fancy that he has a wrong to be redressed in that he does not get ghee instead of oil” (CWMG 2, 266). On another occasion: “The regulations here do not provide for any ghee or fat to Indians. A complaint has therefore been made to the physician, and he has promised to look into it. So there is reason to hope that the inclusion of ghee will be ordered” (
Indian Opinion
, 17 October 1908; CWMG 9, 197).

137
Indian Opinion
, 23 January 1909; CWMG 9, 270.