Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (48 page)

The last paragraph of the letter surely cancels the first. If the Mandal rejects the help of the shastras, they do exactly what Dr Ambedkar does, i.e., cease to be Hindus. How then can they object to Dr Ambedkar’s address merely because he said that that was his last speech as a Hindu? The position appears to be wholly untenable, especially when the Mandal, for which Shri Sant Ram claims to speak, applauds the whole argument of Dr Ambedkar’s address.

But it is pertinent to ask what the Mandal believes in, if it rejects the shastras. How can a Muslim remain one if he rejects the Quran, or a Christian remain Christian if he rejects the Bible? If caste and varna are convertible terms, and if varna is an integral part of the shastras which define Hinduism, I do not know how a person who rejects caste, i.e., varna, can call himself a Hindu.

Shri Sant Ram likens the shastras to mud. Dr Ambedkar
has not, so far as I remember, given any such picturesque name to the shastras. I have certainly meant when I have said: that if shastras support the existing
untouchability I should cease to call myself a Hindu. Similarly, if the shastras support caste, as we know it today in all its hideousness, I may not call myself or remain a Hindu, since I have no scruples about inter-dining or intermarriage. I need not repeat my position regarding shastras and their interpretation. I venture to suggest to Shri Sant Ram that it is the only rational and correct and morally defensible position, and it has ample warrant in Hindu tradition.

Harijan
, 15 August 1936

1
The title given by Gandhi to his two-part response to AoC, published first in
Harijan
, was “Dr Ambedkar’s Indictment”. Ambedkar includes Gandhi’s response in the revised 1937 edition of AoC and gives it his own title “A Vindication of Caste by Mahatma Gandhi”. While Sant Ram’s rejoinder to Gandhi was published in
Harijan
, Ambedkar chose to publish his own exhaustive reply to Gandhi in the 1937 edition. All these are sequentially arranged here as they appear in AoC 1937.

2
Primary membership to the Congress party cost four annas.

3
Gandhi ‘moved from truth to truth’ on Ambedkar’s identity and the motives for his commitment to the anticaste struggle. Shortly before the Round Table Conference, when they first met in Bombay, Gandhi took Ambedkar to be a radical Brahmin fighting untouchability. As his grandson Rajmohan Gandhi notes in his biography of Gandhi (2007, 334), Gandhi did not, however, say this to Ambedkar, and quickly realised his mistake.

4
The reference is to the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad (1863–1939), who pioneered social reform by opening eighteen special schools for Untouchables in his state, and supported Ambedkar’s education—both in India (with a stipend of twenty-five rupees for Ambedkar’s B.A. at Elphinstone College, Bombay) and abroad (his M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia University, on a scholarship of 11.5 British pounds per month for three years, in 1913–16). See Fatehsinhrao Gaekwad’s (1989) biography of Maharaja Sayajirao III.

5
Rao Bahadur M.C. Rajah (1883–1943) and Rettamalai Srinivasan (1860–1945, conferred the title Dewan Bahadur) were Untouchable leaders from Madras Presidency. Rajah—author of
The Oppressed Hindus
(1925), the first ever book in English by an Untouchable in India—was the chief political rival of Ambedkar to the position of the representative of the Depressed Classes on the national scene. Like Ambedkar, his grandfather served the British army. In 1922, Rajah was conferred the British honorary title, Rao Bahadur, after his entrance to the Madras Legislative Council as the first Adi Dravida (as Untouchables were known in Tamil-speaking areas) member. In 1927, he became the first Depressed Classes member to be nominated to the Central Legislative Council. Rajah was piqued that Ambedkar chose Srinivasan, also a member of the Madras Legislative Council, over him as a delegate to the Round Table Conference. Srinivasan accompanied Ambedkar to the two Round Table Conferences, in 1930 and 1931. He testified alongside Ambedkar to the Simon Commission, and followed him in the demand for separate electorates. In 1932, during the negotiations after the 1931 Round Table Conference, Rajah aligned himself with B.S. Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha and came up with the Rajah–Moonje Pact guaranteeing reserved seats for Depressed Classes in a joint electorate with Hindus; this was vehemently rejected by the All-India Depressed Classes Conference held at Nagpur. Depressed Class groups across India threw in their lot with Ambedkar. Rajah came to regret his position much later. When Ambedkar was browbeaten into signing the Poona Pact in September 1932, the arrangement was in fact not so different from the Rajah–Moonje Pact. As Jaffrelot (2005, 67) notes: “This scheme was in fact close to that advocated by the Rajah–Moonje pact. For Gandhi, the Poona Pact was much more than an exercise in political engineering: it had wider implications for society as a whole, as evident from his comment to Ambedkar in 1933: ‘In accepting the Poona Pact you accept the position that you are Hindus.’ ” Three years later, goaded by Gandhians and the Mahasabha, Rajah even denounced Ambedkar’s announcement that he would not die a Hindu. For an account of how Rajah was manipulated by Gandhi in this, see Keer (1954/1990, 266–84). See also Zelliot (2013, 124–39). However, as Jaffrelot notes: “Rajah was to join Ambedkar six years later, in 1938, after having been dismayed by the conservatism of the government formed by Congress in his province of Madras. He complained about it to Gandhi, who advised him to be patient and reaffirmed his confidence in the leader of the Madras government, a Brahmin, Rajagopalachari. Rajah, demoralised, thus came to regret the Poona Pact, and opposed, like Ambedkar, the Quit India Movement of 1942” (2005, 181–2 n48). Further, the proposals made by the Cripps Mission in 1942 caused “M.C. Rajah to become still closer to Ambedkar. Like him, he regretted the absence, in this set of proposals, of a provision granting a separate electorate to Untouchables … During his tour in the south, in 1944, Ambedkar was invited by M.C. Rajah to Madras” (184 n31).

6
Just like human beings are divided into four varnas, a ‘twice-born’ savarna Hindu male’s life has four stages (ashramas), ascending from the status of
brahmacharya
(unmarried, where man devotes his time to education),
grihastha
(householder), and
vanaprastha
(he dwells in the forest as a hermit but without severing ties with his family) to
sannyasa
(total renunciation of the world). The
Manusmriti
, among other Hindu scriptures, discusses the ashramas at length.

7
Gandhi here is restating his views on the benefits of varnashrama explicated by him in one of his earlier writings (
Young India
, 13 August 1925; CWMG 32, 286), in which he says: “Varnashrama, in my opinion, was not conceived in any narrow spirit. On the contrary, it gave the labourer, the Shudra, the same status as the thinker, the Brahmin.” Even earlier, he wrote (
Young India
, 25 February 1920; CWMG 19, 417): “I am one of those who do not consider caste to be a harmful institution. In its origin, caste was a wholesome custom and promoted national well-being. In my opinion, the idea that inter-dining or intermarrying is necessary for national growth, is a superstition borrowed from the West.” While later coming around to criticising caste/jati as a corruption, throughout his life Gandhi steadfastly defended an ‘idealised’
varnavyavastha
(varna system). Nauriya (2006) believes that Gandhi came to recant his views on varnashrama.

8
Segaon: later called Sevagram, the ashram established by Gandhi, near Wardha (in today’s Maharashtra).

9
Chaitanya was a Vaishnava saint from sixteenth-century Bengal, a proponent of Bhakti yoga. Jnyandeo, or Gyandev (also Dnyandev), was a thirteenth-century Bhakti poet-saint from western India; he wrote a commentary on the
Bhagvad Gita
. Tukaram was a seventeenth-century sant of the Varkari tradition; Cokhamela was a fourteenth0century Mahar sant of the same tradition (not mentioned by Gandhi). Tiruvalluvar was a Tamil poet and philosopher, the author of the
Thirukkural
, from sometime between the second and eighth centuries CE. Ramakrishna Paramahansa was a nineteenth-century Kali worshipping mystic from Bengal. Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Maharshi Devendranath Tagore together founded the Brahmo Samaj, a social and religious reform movement in nineteenth-century Bengal (Kopf 1979). Vivekananda was a self-styled Hindu monk. A disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahansa, he founded the Ramakrishna Mission (see Sharma 2012).

10
Gandhi published Sant Ram’s letter in
Harijan
and appended his own response to it.

11
While Ambedkar did write a paper called “Castes in India” in 1916 during his years in Columbia University, the subject of his doctoral dissertation was
not
the caste system. His doctoral work was on
The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India: A Study in the Provincial Decentralisation of Imperial Finance
, and it was later published by P.S. King and Co., London, in 1925, with a foreword by Edwin Seligman who taught Ambedkar at Columbia.

12
This seems to be a deliberate misreading of what Ambedkar actually says in his speech, made not only by Sant Ram but also Har Bhagwan (see his letter to Ambedkar in the Prologue to AoC). While Ambedkar did denounce Hinduism and declared he would walk out of the Hindu fold in 1935 (see Note 15 to Prologue of AoC), the exact words of Ambedkar in AoC 25.1 are “this would probably be my last
address to
a Hindu audience, on a subject vitally concerning the Hindus” (emphasis added).

I appreciate greatly the honour done me by the Mahatma in taking notice in his
Harijan
of the speech on caste which I had prepared for the
Jat-Pat Todak Mandal. From a perusal of his review of my speech, it is clear that the Mahatma completely dissents from the views I have expressed on the subject of caste. I am not in the habit of entering into controversy with my opponents unless there are special reasons which compel me to act otherwise. Had my opponent been some mean and obscure person I would not have pursued him. But my opponent being the Mahatma himself, I feel I must attempt to meet the case to the contrary which he has sought to put forth.

While I appreciate the honour he has done me, I must confess to a sense of surprise on finding that of all people the Mahatma should accuse me of a desire to seek publicity, as he seems to do when he suggests that in publishing the undelivered speech my object was to see that I was not ‘forgotten’. Whatever the Mahatma may choose to say, my object in publishing the speech was to provoke the Hindus to think, and to take stock
of their position. I have never hankered for publicity, and if I may say so, I have more of it than I wish or need. But supposing it was out of the motive of gaining publicity that I printed the speech, who could cast a stone at me? Surely not those who, like the Mahatma, live in glass houses.

Motive apart, what has the Mahatma to say on the question raised by me in the speech? First of all, anyone who reads my speech will realise that the Mahatma has entirely missed the issues raised by me, and that the issues he has raised are not the issues that arise out of what he is pleased to call my indictment of the Hindus. The principal points which I have tried to make out in my speech may be catalogued as follows:

(1) That caste has ruined the Hindus; (2) that the reorganisation of Hindu society on the basis of chaturvarnya is impossible because the varnavyavastha is like a leaky pot or like a man running at the nose.
¹
It is incapable of sustaining itself by its own virtue and has an inherent tendency to degenerate into a caste system unless there is a legal sanction behind it which can be enforced against everyone transgressing his varna; (3) that the reorganisation of Hindu society on the basis of chaturvarnya would be harmful, because the effect of the varnavyavastha would be to degrade the masses by denying them opportunity to acquire knowledge and to emasculate them by denying them the right to be armed; (4) that Hindu society must be reorganised on a religious basis which would recognise the principles of liberty, equality and
fraternity; (5) that in order to achieve this object the sense of religious sanctity behind caste and varna must be destroyed; (6) that the sanctity of caste and varna can be destroyed only by discarding the divine authority of the shastras.