Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme 9788189059859

Table of contents :
Contents:
Foreword - Aishwary Kumar 11
Preface 17
Introduction 21
Dalit: Elements of a Sentence-to-Come 58
On Conversion: Beyond Protective Discolouration 87
Anathema and Anachronism: Utilizing Ambedkar’s Critique of Gandhism for Our Times 114
Caste and Debt: The Case of Ancient Greek Liturgy 140
Ambedkar and Other Immortals: A Note on Comparative Politics and Incomparable Events 162
Ambedkar Contra Aristotle: On a Possible Contention about who is Capable of Politics 199
Ambedkar and Pericles: A Concluding Exercise in the Immortalist Method of Comparative Politics 232
References 251
Acknowledgments 260
Index 262

Citation preview

Soumyabrata Choudhury  1

I cannot praise this project enough. Not only is it, as far as I can see, a crucial intervention into Indian ideologico-political debates—what fascinated me is how it breaks out of the confines of the ‘East–West’ dichotomy by placing Ambedkar in series with Pericles, Aristotle, Abbé Sieyès and others, as an exemplar of radical egalitarian logic. What we get is a reading of Ambedkar through Badiou, and I love the Maoist formulation of ‘Ambedkar–thought’, a universal thought actualized through an individual, a universal thought with a singular name of a person. The egalitarianism also holds for the relationship between East and West (and other parts of the world): they are a priori posited as equal. The struggle is not between East and West, it is internal to each culture—in India, it is between Ambedkar’s universalism and brahminic tradition, in the same way that in France, the struggle was between ancien regime and the new revolutionary order. The way in which Soumyabrata Choudhury defines Ambedkar as ‘Europeanist’ is for me the most radical rejection of Eurocentrism: Ambedkar is (what we usually associate with) ‘Europe’ (European emancipatory legacy), but re-invented in India in an autonomous and unique manner. Finally, I find incredibly forceful the idea of the community of ‘immortals’—mortal people personifying an immortal Idea. Slavoj Žižek

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Soumyabrata Choudhury  3

Soumyabrata Choudhury is Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has authored Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth, and articles on ancient Greek liturgy, the staging of Ibsen, psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, Schiller and Hegel.

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Soumyabrata Choudhury  5

Ambedkar and Other Immortals An Untouchable Research Programme Soumyabrata Choudhury

6  Ambedkar and Other Immortals

Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme First published 15 May 2018 ISBN 9788189059859 © Soumyabrata Choudhury

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Navayana Publishing Pvt Ltd 155 2nd Floor Shahpur Jat, New Delhi 110049 Phone: +91-11-26494795 navayana.org Typeset at Navayana in Dante Printed by Sanjiv Palliwal, New Delhi Subscribe to updates at navayana.org/subscribe Follow on facebook.com/Navayana

Soumyabrata Choudhury  7

To the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University who didn’t let the authorities pass —and showed the way

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Soumyabrata Choudhury  9

Contents

Foreword Aishwary Kumar 11 Preface 17 Introduction 21 Dalit: Elements of a Sentence-to-Come

58

On Conversion: Beyond Protective Discolouration

87

Anathema and Anachronism: Utilizing Ambedkar’s Critique of Gandhism for Our Times

114

Caste and Debt: The Case of Ancient Greek Liturgy

140

Ambedkar and Other Immortals: A Note on Comparative Politics and Incomparable Events

162

Ambedkar Contra Aristotle: On a Possible Contention about who is Capable of Politics

199

Ambedkar and Pericles: A Concluding Exercise in the Immortalist Method of Comparative Politics

232

References

251

Acknowledgments

260

Index

262

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Soumyabrata Choudhury  11

Foreword

Something singular, irreversible and poetic—an event— occurs when an entire tradition of thinking about politics encounters for the first time the figure of B.R. Ambedkar in New York City in 1916. Not the historical person and body of the twenty-five-year-old prodigy who reads his groundbreaking seminar paper Castes in India for his Master’s degree; rather the figure and name of analytic courage as such, which we have come to identify as “Ambedkar” appears in that city, before he incandescently proclaims his “faith in equality” a decade later in the Bombay Presidency. Together these appearances constitute an event in thought, a tectonic shift in the very art and activity of thinking, which soon give form to the contours of a new axiomatics of equality on the firmament of twentieth century democratic and constitutional theory. Unconstrained by the time, space or pace of modern India, as Soumyabrata Choudhury reminds us in this work of dazzling brilliance, Ambedkar’s affair with language passes through the thinking of those often far away from

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him in time and place. It threads through the thinking of those who think about equality sometimes in the throes of revolutionary passion, sometimes in the midst of fratricidal stasis, sometimes in the midst of the most intense experience of inequality, yet all of whom, in doing so, become equal to the task of thinking equality as equals. In Ambedkar and Other Immortals, Choudhury probes these immortal extremities of equality (points of force and fragility, where equality comes the closest to inequality itself), offering a profound meditation on the encounter between Ambedkar and the craft of thinking as such, at once extracting him from the disciplinary trappings of (brahminic) context and rehabilitating him in a philosophy of heretical encounters. In Ambedkar, one confronts a thinker whose encounters do not add up to the immeasurable singularity of his thought. Even heresy, when it encounters him, is subject to labyrinthine displacements, and heterodoxy exposed to blinding bends. Not for nothing did one of Ambedkar’s readers, upon seeing a copy of Annihilation of Caste in 1936, unwittingly sigh, “Thank God…he is singularly alone.” Choudhury grapples with Ambedkar’s singularity—and his fearless solitude—with unrivalled audacity, as he pauses painstakingly on syntaxes, words, sentences, and names: those elements of Ambedkar’s language whose depths have barely been skimmed, whose heights barely comprehended, and whose dots barely triangulated. When Choudhury approaches these triangles of words and names, he draws us not merely to their logical structure but also to the geological force with which Ambedkar assails them, at once

Aishwary Kumar  13

dissembling and reassembling his earthy system. The materials may speak in deceptively ordinary language, as Ambedkar often does. But the task to retrieve Ambedkar’s axiomatics of equality, without, at the same time, being constrained by equality’s generic ubiquity is anything but ordinary. Not many before Choudhury have been able to—and few after him might—defy so many laws of genre that prohibit us from touching Ambedkar the thinker even today. To glow in the aura of this ineluctable constitutionalist is one thing, to crack open a place in time where Ambedkar speaks to Pericles—in the manner that Ambedkar lets Siddharth speak to Marx—another. To tirelessly invoke the Constitutional Assembly Debates is one thing, to render Ambedkar’s interventions in Delhi inseparable from the theatre of his speech in Mahad another. To liberally cite Ambedkar on everything today is one thing, to make Castes in India militantly teachable another. Choudhury twists himself free from the formidable logic and history of condescension— which is to also say, sovereignty—that scaffolds historicism’s hierarchies, and assembles a new archive for Ambedkar. His originality lies not only in making comparable what is incomparable, or in making commensurable what is incommensurable. Rather, it lies in unapologetically embracing the mutinies of imagination that lie behind every thinking of the incommensurable as such, and to do so only on Ambedkar’s own terms, inscribing incomparable events at the heart at once of universal history and of specific modalities of material violence. To read Ambedkar and Other

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Immortals is to not just get a lesson in Ambedkar’s politics, it is to come home to the mutating shapes and curves of human inequality, and to do so in ways institutions remorselessly deny. The consequences of this homecoming—or better, this search for a refuge where the thought and disposition of equality might be freely shared—are monumental. Choudhury’s inexhaustible reserve toward Ambedkar’s texts, his commitment sometimes to the sheer physicality and physics of books such as The Buddha and his Dhamma, give us not only, as he modestly puts it, a “speculative philology.” It gives us a bracing philosophy of reading, one whose sense of freedom is heightened further by the fact that it is at the same time—and in equal measure—a scrupulous reading of philosophy. A reading that shrinks the dark shadow of academic brahminism which still obscures the unconditional passion and dissident joy of Ambedkar’s political and social imagination, his indomitable humour, his theoretical exactitude, his stunning epigraphs that pierce in sentence-length arrows the zealously guarded borders of entire traditions. There is, we are told, Ambedkar the constitutionalist, don’t you remember? Yet, what of Ambedkar the ironist? Where is Ambedkar the craftsman, wordsmith, democrat, each unthinkable without the other? Where is Ambedkar—to recall the names he gives to his travels in force himself—the archaeologist, palaeontologist, and painter, each exactingly woven with the other? Turning the tables on those who denounce Ambedkar as too Western but offer nothing besides civilizational

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doxa couched in postcolonial tongues, Choudhury stages a masterly reversal as he meticulously, and yet, urgently, presents Ambedkar as India’s first Europeanist. It might take us some time to come to terms with the sheer immensity and originality of this gesture. Fearlessly factional yet unapologetically universalist, methodologically separatist yet rigorously faithful to the idea of a community of equals, Ambedkar—and Ambedkar and Other Immortals—forces a turn in the vision and rigour of two thousand years of democratic thought. But it is in Mahad that the event shatters the silence. In returning us to those early moments of appearance of dalit rigour, Choudhury has pressed upon us a series of questions unprecedented in political philosophy, cutting to the heart of India’s institutional prejudice and searing violence. What is dalit rigour? What would an event worthy of this rigour look like? How rigorously must such an event be rethought and reclaimed today, beyond the crippling shadows of disciplinary orthodoxy and majoritarian mediocrity? Above all, who thinks of this rigour most unapologetically, most immortally, and yet, always as an equal, beyond liturgical—and curricular—prohibitions, unconstrained by the injunctions of nation-state sovereignty, among a fraternity of strangers? In retracing the probing diagonals and analytical arrows of Ambedkar’s insurrections, Ambedkar and Other Immortals has achieved what few before it have. It has rendered our conception of the event—any event that is still to come—inseparable from the rigour of Ambedkar’s experiments in equality. Make no mistake about Choudhury’s “untouchable

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research program.” There is hardly a thinker so sophisticated and powerful in our time who has dared to both begin and end a work of such sweeping consequence with that singularity we now know as Mahad, the town where Ambedkar, by a lake, at an immortal moment in 1927, announces the establishment of the “norm of equality” for India. With Ambedkar and Other Immortals, Soumyabrata Choudhury has ensured that this expression will never be the same again. Nor will the figure and spirit of the student, whom Choudhury inscribes everywhere in his book, who alone can truly give back Ambedkar the gift of time that he continues to give them. Aishwary Kumar Stanford University 18 March 2018

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Preface



The book is an attempt to assemble the key elements of a possible “Ambedkar-thought”. It wagers that B.R. Ambedkar’s thinking, carried out in a variety of historical and intellectual contexts, has a systematic core. The strategy of the book is to read Ambedkar’s texts closely and, in part, speculatively. But there is no particular arrangement of these texts, whether chronological or structural. Rather, the choice of texts analyzed depends on this author’s own projections from Ambedkar’s historico-philosophical “research programme” into what the book dares to call the sphere of a certain “immortality”. The research programme suggested is the following: In the concrete situation of intense caste discrimination, of which untouchability is the limit articulation, Ambedkar produces the critical theses that caste is a systematic object constituting a regime of “wrong relations”; and that this regime of wrong relations is a political regime which is commonly called “brahminical” and which Ambedkar occasionally calls, in the style of post-revolutionary French

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history, “the old regime”. While tracking these Ambedkarite theses in several of his texts, the present book speculates that the force of Ambedkar’s critique is itself based on an axiomatic affirmation that unconditional equality exists even within and beyond the worst experience of inequality. In this sense the book treats Ambedkar’s texts as axiomatic documents that declare equality without the need for the proof of equality. The figure of speech invented for the upsurge of the axiom of equality is “immortal”. The further political argument of the book is: whoever historically embodies the upsurge is a type of “historical immortal”. This speculative schema is substantially inspired by the work of the contemporary communist philosopher Alain Badiou. But the actual investigations of the book’s chapters give a particular meaning to the schema. The meaning unfolds in several comparative deployments of “Ambedkar-thought” in relation to other axioms enunciated by other historical immortals. Some of these comparisons have a Europeanist interest—the comparisons with Aristotle, Pericles, Abbé Sieyès, among others—and some have an ‘Indianist’ interest, particularly the one with Gandhi. However, the immortalist method of the book wagers that any comparison between contingent historical figures—Ambedkar and others that he reads or doesn’t read, refers to or doesn’t refer to—becomes a sort of speculative imperative under the pressure of specific axiomatic upsurges. Axiomatic because in specific historical circumstances certain principles are declared whose effectiveness at that point lie in their axiomatic utterance

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and not in their demonstrated value. These upsurges though incomparable to each other, between themselves form a kind of reversible eternity. There is no hierarchy of axioms, no history of one historical immortal owing a debt to another. The title proposed for the book is not without some irony because what historically formed itself as an “untouchable” research programme in India wouldn’t have been possible without the emergence of such untouchable-immortals as B.R. Ambedkar. The present work avoids relishing this irony and instead traces the path of an arrow from the past to the present, where the name dalit is unavoidably heard. Is dalit a sociological identity which collects earlier untouchable identities, is it a particular name among others of a universal egalitarian research project, or is it the combative and aristocratic exemplar of a generic intelligence seeking emancipation from our present-day brutalizations of thought? The book tries to guard the echo of these urgent questions during its several speculative detours.

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Soumyabrata Choudhury  21

Introduction

I Delicately and compulsively turning another page of the Government of Maharashtra volumes of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar’s writings and speeches, one does not for a moment doubt that one is reading the words of an undisputed master. In the solitude of the library or the confines of her study, the reader doesn’t cease to be swept up by the signs of mastery— the bold hypothesis, the painstaking documentation, the elegant argument, the scrupulous revision and the consummate demonstration, not to mention a felicity of expression in English, the language harnessed to a perfect serviceability. The concomitant result is that not only does the reader thrill in the presence of rare genius, she is also secured by its benevolent guidance. She is a fortunate student to have found the teaching born of exemplary scholarship, even if the exemplar is no more. The above experience is as true as any but it excludes some further possibilities within the equation delineated between the reader and the words of a master. First of all, the master is not simply an extraordinary scholar, writer and

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teacher. He is someone who at one point in life will say, “I have decided to change.”1 Thus he is also a convert. When is it that a doctor-diagnostician becomes a convert-militant? When does analysis yield to decision? These possibilities bear examination. The reader-student—held in the security of the master’s work, forever indebted, a debt accepted lovingly—is not a solitary pupil of a rarefied school. She is one among a people, part of a historical collectivity who read, write and think in the light of words past, present and—who can say— the future, deciding what is to be done today. Whether to “change” and in which way. To this extent, the possibility requires to be examined that instead of merely thrilling to and being moved by the words of Ambedkar, what is the process of reading those words exactly, faithfully and historically? Which is to ask, how does one read immersed in the alien solitude of the words while never giving up on speaking in one’s own voice in the clamour of the present? Let us summarise this point by saying that to speak in one’s own voice(s) means to be able to find the words of one’s own decision(s). Further, when it is said “one”, the “one” is the reader-student who takes her coordinates from the sovereign master amidst intellectual uncertainty while also remaining a one among “ones” who make up a collective subject that reads, writes and thinks, never ceasing to expose itself and its masters to the tumults of history. II The history of the reading of Ambedkar’s works shows at least two tendencies that both intersect and contend with

Soumyabrata Choudhury  23

each other in the present. The first tendency crystallizes into a project of including Ambedkar in the dominant institutions and paradigms of social knowledge. Why is this project indispensible? Because its stakes are in producing something like a ‘normal’ institutional access to Ambedkar’s ‘exceptional’ intellectual position in the history of social analysis. In other words, the interest of the project is to include Ambedkar in the productive apparatus of the university built with discourses of scientific method and claims of verifiable knowledge. Indeed this productive ‘normalization’ is indispensable because it is the measure of Ambedkar’s public existence as a scholarly resource—which the university, qua its literal meaning, universally protects and dispenses. Yet having said this, the project turns out to be internally complicated. The complication is the following: While a large part of the institutional space of the university remains dominated by a kind of brahminical power-elite (or clique or gang) which continues to resist the ‘normalization’ and legitimation of Ambedkar the scholar, this elite finds it increasingly difficult to escape the aura of Ambedkar’s exceptional position, his ‘mastery’. This has a peculiar effect: On the one hand, very few today dare deny the master’s originality or his erudition; on the other, only a small section of the professors of sociology teach Castes in India: Their Genesis, Mechanism and Development, and hardly any professional historian is caught discussing Who were the Shudras? as a historiographical intervention.2 It is interesting, if not ironic, that those who laud and exclude Ambedkar do

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these contradictory acts on the same ground. Which is that Ambedkar’s position is exceptional and factional.3 This is the same as saying, Ambedkar’s mastery is already politicized by its singular source in a factional identity that threatens to disqualify it from entering the universal space of—pardon the tautology—the university. Then comes the blackmail: If Ambedkar’s access to the discourse of the university has to be secured and normalised, then Ambedkar’s identity must be rendered ‘normal’ even while it becomes more and more impossible to disregard the singularity of that identity. How to accomplish this tactical balance within the historical complication of reading Ambedkar? A significant though recent development on the fringes of the institutions of knowledge is the one which responds to the Ambedkar-aura and Ambedkar-complication by risking the invention of exceptional names for the exceptional thought. However, the status of this development within institutional procedures that legitimize knowledge remains uncertain. Some of these improvised names are—postcolonial cultural research, cultural studies, history of ideas with a focus on comparative study of Ambedkar and others, most notably Gandhi….4 In my view, an old, simple and rather noble name can round off and dignify these efforts on the fringe of institutions. It is the name “philosophy”. Yet this name is hardly ever mentioned. Also, an old, complicated and rather coarse name—“politics”—captures the stakes of these efforts. But “politics” seems to spell some sort of foundational danger to the project of normalising and legitimising Ambedkar, giving way to the word “culture” within the institutional

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vocabulary of the university. At this level “culture” is the compromise effected between the brahminical power-elite and the liberal academic conscience of the university. Between power at the centre and conscience on the fringe, there is one point of intense agreement: the university must be protected from factional politics, factional names, factional readings of factional and divisive authors. In this cause, the name “Ambedkar” must be redistributed such that its factional pungency is distilled into the pathos of a marginal cultural existence and its masterful aura is dispelled over the tautologous space of the universal university. The second tendency of the history of reading Ambedkar crystallizes into a refusal to compromise on the factional singularity of Ambedkar and its exact function of dividing the university at the place of its most stubborn fragility. The university must be divided at its stubborn, fragile and casteist place of existence and point of articulation—this is the task taken up today, uniquely and irreducibly, by groups such as the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle (APSC) in IIT Chennai, the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle in IIT Bombay, the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) in Hyderabad Central University (HCU), the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students Association (BAPSA) and the United Dalit Students Forum (UDSF) in Jawaharlal Nehru University, among many other centres coming up in universities (see Dhonthi, 2016; Teltumbde, 2016a). The method of division adopted by these groups, study circles and collectivities does not content itself with the operation of including Ambedkar into the pre-given space of the university; it divides the idea that the university

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is given as an immaculate totality. In exposing the casteist infrastructure of that idea which assimilates the structural violence of brahminism to liberal bad conscience, the divisive method is Ambedkarite in a precise sense, running far deeper than the superficial inclusion of Ambedkar the sociologist or Ambedkar the historian. Or for that matter Ambedkar the scholar versus the agitating Ambedkarite student-activist. The Ambedkarite method is to divide the natural consensus that there exists as such a national-social totality called India. The university is a structural and spatial microcosm of the violence of the larger consensus—the Ambedkarite politics of reading within the university, while dividing and exceeding the latter, is accomplishing this today. The method of division is also a new Ambedkarite philosophical operation upon the phantasmatic body of the so-called one Indian society and nation. Insofar as it is philosophical and interests itself in declaring new and unforeseen ‘ideas’ freeing themselves from the dead weight of national phantoms, it is a divisive and emancipatory method. Which are these ‘ideas’? What is the historicity of their invention? This book will be concerned with these questions. Suffice it to say here that the search for the emancipatory idea is not led by an exotic ontological desire of the new. It is the search for the new in the being, disposition and nomination of the world at its most ‘factional’ point. Pending the substantiation of this cryptic claim, let me speak a little more of these contemporary ‘factions’ of society that occupy, by their factional virtue, the points of the greatest potential for change. APSC, ASA, BAPSA, UDSF… seem to

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be saying today what Ambedkar, in an act of public solitude, said, in 1936, “We have decided to change.” They are clarifying and testifying to the following at the very moment of their militant and conversional decision(s): ‘We will not change our factional status to the simple universality of university and nation by entering its foundational consensus. In view of the fact that it is the violence of the consensus that creates and excludes the faction eternally, we will carry on our research-programme inventing entirely new universal propositions. We will do so in the real history of factional sequences that add up to only the star mark on the university form by the column for Scheduled-Caste students, not the stardust that unites us all to an egalitarian eternal universe of the skies which the university can at the most teach in its physics textbook but not be true to in its existential and political life. So we have decided to change in nearly hopeless circumstances but emboldened by at least two stars that shine with an egalitarian light: B.R. Ambedkar the star, or should we say, the dust, of egalitarian politics, and Rohith Vemula, of egalitarian science.’5 III Let me clarify that when I speak of a certain factional integrity in the contemporary movements of reading Ambedkar, I do not enthuse over an Ambedkarite orthodoxy. Quite the contrary. The milieu I invoke is characterized by a heterodox vitality. What do I mean by that? Well, the best lead is afforded by the word “association” as it features in such names as Ambedkar Students Association in Hyderabad Central University, which today is at the crossroads of a

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new political vitality and renewed institutional violence. “Association” was a word Ambedkar repeatedly affirmed to convey a kind of generic definition of politics as collective life of association.6 People enter into associational activity not because they belong to the same family, caste and nation but because they share new “common feelings” at the risk of disaffection from given forms of belonging. This disaffection is not mere wilful sedition; it is the result of encounters with others, other affections, other ideas and paradigms of thought that produce a type of fraternity with strangers.7 The condition for this fraternity is clearly the freedom to encounter others in their strangeness—but it is also the unforeseen contingent possibility of sharing in a common egalitarian utterance. “Common feelings” are the same as a new form of heterodox common speech. So the question arises, which are these forms, these alliances and ‘mixtures’ that groups such as the ASA are entering into? This is a tricky question since interested parties jump at the first opportunity to indict, “Look, these groups are not even able to retain their factional integrity… even their pure dalit status because they fraternize with and are corrupted by anti-nationals who love Afzal Guru and Yakub Memon…”8 “Pure dalit”? This brahminical oxymoron of the recent patrons of Ambedkar apart, the Ambedkarite associations also take care to set the record straight. In effect, they are saying: “Don’t take it for granted that the Left is our natural ally and we accept that relationship either historically or theoretically. Everything has to be tested. There is nothing to guarantee that the

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encounter with the Left will not be a bad encounter. Even the encounter of the two masters, Marx and Ambedkar, must be tested in the situation of history and the constellation of thought.”9 It is interesting to note that in contrast to the affirmative scepticism of the Ambedkarite association(s), the Left, which over the years has read Ambedkar and the caste question restrictively and poorly, exactly like the brahminical centrist parties starting with Congress and the fanatical Hindu parties BJP downwards, sings the pain and glory of a pure dalit subject today. It proposes new theoretical configurations—Ambedkar–Marx, Ambedkar–Marx–Bhagat Singh, Ambedkar–Marx–Gandhi–Bhagat Singh… that still don’t address the fundamental point: the question is not what tactical common ground can be found among great world-historical thinkers; the real question is, which is the exact measure of a thinker’s singularity, her exceptional, even factional, position from where an arrow can be shot in another direction with no calculable target apart from a new vital wound of thinking? It is more or less settled that the Left has no new arrow to shoot—but is it within their capacity to receive a new Ambedkarite wound? This is what the ASA and others are asking. IV The book started with mute wonder at the sudden illumination of the master’s words in a somewhat dimly lit library in Delhi. It ends with a series of rather brusque public provocations by way of introduction. In between lie stutterings in my own voice and my voice is composed of

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other “tongues”.10 Much of the clamour to follow and all of the aphasia can be traced back to this voice, and my voice is citation, only citation… of what? Of words, of light—and their respective darkening. In the earlier section I, in my own voice, have cited a dark chronicle of the present—or at the most, its difficult light. I will now try to isolate the general theoretical problem of the book from the current exigency: is it meaningful to speak of an idea of equality in the absence of practical and historical equalization of peoples and groups, individuals, classes and ‘castes’ of society? Contrariwise, how is the very project of practical equalization thinkable without the pure existence of some rudimentary thought of equality? A second layer of interrogation follows: suppose one were to make a hypothesis which some would consider outrageous, others obvious—that there happened in Indian history an ‘event’ which brought into existence the notion of equality in a drastically unequal society for the first time.11 Let us call it an Ambedkarite hypothesis on an event of change, in other words, a revolutionary hypothesis. The question then is, will we embark upon a social, political and moral evaluation of actual historical equalization of subjects under the star of the revolutionary hypothesis? Or, will we also consider the effect of the hypothesis on those past generations who were the victims of oppression and injustice, now dead with no hope of practical equalization? That is to ask whether it is possible to build a new perspective on all history which offers a spectral egalitarian value on all subjects, past, present and future as if a philosophy of history is being

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created in the image of a new eternity (Benjamin, 2006). In the same way that a new scientific eternity created by the Galilean cosmological revolution was reflected in Rohith Vemula’s parting imagery… In general, how does one make sense of the theory that the idea of equality applies only to subjects under a constitution with egalitarian democratic features. And if one accepts the revolutionary hypothesis which accompanies such a constitution, then the puzzle posed is, do we say only the peoples, classes and communities in a post-revolutionary society are to be thought equal, and there is henceforth a moral imperative towards practical equalization but people in pre-revolutionary societies are not equal? Before the Civil Rights movement, Blacks were not equal? Before the Suffragette movement, women were not equal? Before the Indian Constitution post-independence, dalits were not equal? This line of enquiry leads to the counter-factual scenario that in a counter-revolutionary turn of events— as in the present12—when the idea of inequality will be enforced in society and people will be minoritized and discriminated against, there will be inequality. The generic essence of social humanity will have changed and human beings will have become unequal.13 Faced with these puzzles, one option is to abandon the revolutionary hypothesis, the axiomatic pre-existence of the egalitarian utterance and to measure equality–inequality by indices and predicates within material social conditions. In the circumstances, one promotes the programme of predicative equalization with the proviso that there will

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always be some predicative inequality.14 The primary social values then must be shifted from unconditional equality towards peace, harmony, law and order, technological development—and most importantly, trade-off and compromise in situations of conflict and crisis, which under these conditions, are bound to be recurrent, if not perpetual. The other option is not only to retain the revolutionary hypothesis but also to extend its scope to the past and the future. Let me cite Ambedkar’s theoretical decisions here, which I will develop in the rest of the book. At Mahad, in March 1927, Ambedkar said that the untouchable agitators were not merely breaking upper-caste rules by drinking water from a public tank, they were declaring “the norm of equality” for the first time.15 Now Ambedkar, without ever giving up on this revolutionary claim to axiomatic equality also insisted on a revolutionary hypothesis over the course of his work that ancient India saw an original egalitarian change of society with Buddhism.16 The double theoretical decision(s) signified that Ambedkar’s own decision to change in 1936, and the untouchables’ decision to change in 1927, are also decisions to test the hypothesis that other peoples in other times also displayed the courage and wisdom to change. According to the results of the modern test on ancient history, the Buddha taught how human beings might dispose themselves towards each other according to the “norm of equality”—a notion of dispositional equality that Ambedkar will cite in 1956 with The Buddha and His Dhamma in his own voice.17 Just as in 1927, the Mahad Conference declares equality for the first time in its own collective voice…

Soumyabrata Choudhury  33

It is also worth noting that in the period between 1947 and 1950, when Ambedkar, as Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly, participated in debates over reservations for SCs and STs, he was engaged in two asymmetrical operations. On the one hand, he was advocating the cause of a predicative equalisation of individuals and groups with respect to the fields/indices/ predicates of education, political representation and employment; this project, by definition, accepts unequal terms of society as they exist and the reservation policy is only a time-bound compromise based on this acceptance. On the other hand, Ambedkar, in the Constituent Assembly, was also prescribing an absolute axiomatic test for the ruling castes and classes that they accept reservation as an enforcement of unconditional equality with the unequals, an enforcement of the revolutionary hypothesis.18 So a philosophical synopsis of the book might be the following: It reads Ambedkar for his unconditional commitment to the generic essence of human existence as social—something he shared with Marx—and analyses his specific texts within this commitment along three dimensions of the idea of equality: axiomatic, predicative and dispositional equality. V From Ambedkar’s philosophy to his method: I would now like to consider some aspects of what I will call Ambedkar’s methodological separatism. Which means, Ambedkar didn’t believe that there could be a simple and immediate emancipation through the untouchable’s radical separation from Hindu society and its structures of political power.

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The process of emancipation had to follow a more dialectic path in that it had to pass through a stage of separation as separation. The untouchable had to reflect on her social separation in thought and, in that act, produce the ‘notion’ of this separation.19 But to produce such a notion means that now the untouchable knows the conditions of her oppression, that is, the caste condition of Hinduism, and through this knowledge derives the logical prescription of annihilating these conditions as she lives and sees in these dialectical acts of a methodological separatist, the life of an outcast, an alien who thinks. Like Antonioni’s heroine from the film Red Desert, the untouchable can say, “I am not alone; I am separate.” At the same time, one must be careful to note that the becoming-conscious of the untouchable is not some miraculous gift of absolute knowledge coming from Ambedkar’s genius or any other act of grace. The becomingdalit of the untouchable is a collective research programme situated between events of decision and intervention. The plan of this book is to cite ‘traces’ of these events as they populate Ambedkar’s texts. The hypothesis underlying the plan is that what has been called consciousness or even dalit knowledge—some call it conceptuality20 —is a trace of its historicity, its eventness. But the emergence of a trace in thought is a shattering diagnosis because it is equally the manifest emergence of separation at the heart of tremendous unities being forged in Ambedkar’s own time by both the Gandhian Congressists and the European Orientalists (who the Hindu Mahasabha essentially followed), unities such as

Soumyabrata Choudhury  35

a Hindu–Indian nation and society.21 Again, this does not mean there is, in his texts, the material for an Ambedkarite nationalism or anti-nationalism as a matter of choosing between alternative political philosophies. If there is an inaugural dalit philosophy in Ambedkar, it is one that raises the stakes of politics to the thought of universal egalitarian society from the political innocence of those who think society is the natural ontology of a village, a community, a sort of dispositional totality of those deemed to belong together by natural disposition. The innocents do not notice that “nature” and “disposition” are contradictory because the former is intrinsic while the latter is composed of a million ‘habits’. This is the ideology of a kind of Gandhian nativism that exerts a considerable influence among the post-colonial critics of euro-centric modes of thought and forms of life. However it is worth asking here whether it is possible to conceptualise a theory of dalit nativism even while delicate ‘upper-caste’ sensibilities shudder at the excesses of a politics of dalit identity? The answer lies in the question: dalit identity is an affair of politics, not native ecology. The stakes of politics are also raised beyond a national ontology that inevitably leads to a love of the state. Ambedkar’s republicanism is not a mere statism because it takes the extreme risk of enforcing the state’s constitution not simply to strengthen and reinforce its given historical society but to expose the latter to its structural separatism and degradation. This is a limiting case of what I have called Ambedkar’s intervention because in a measure such as reservation, the state not only aims to emancipate social

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inequalities through legislative-legal provisions, it also divides society into its unequal reality and its egalitarian axiom consciously. Precisely to this extent, such a measure is received with fury by one part of society and enthusiasm by another. Both emotions are inaugurally anticipated by Ambedkar’s divisive and emancipatory interventions, which can be grouped in at least three clusters—linguistic, social and political. VI The book opens with a reading of Ambedkar’s short essay “Away from the Hindus”, written in the wake of a Mahar Conference at Bombay in May 1936. In this conference it was decided that the mahars—Ambedkar himself was one— would “abandon” Hinduism. Ambedkar’s essay considered such an abandonment and the openness to conversion thereupon from a theoretical interest. Here Ambedkar proposed an ontology of change or conversion based on a theory of names and the status of the act of changing of names. Naming or re-naming becomes the first decision towards the actual material change of the social position of the untouchable people under the larger axiomatic decision of human equality. But while indispensable, re-naming is not a sufficient condition for this change. At the same time, it is crucial to note Ambedkar’s conceptual intervention in the collective site of language and its historicity to produce a theory of change and conversion. In the following chapter, the linguistic-conceptual intervention is taken up at a more general level. Castes in India (1916), Annihilation of Caste (1936) and The Buddha and

Soumyabrata Choudhury  37

His Dhamma (1956), three works spanning Ambedkar’s entire life, are seen as exercises in producing a continuous, if elusive, red thread of new thought and new effects of language. In this effort, “dalit” appears as an effect of language, a decision on the name, a syntactical and propositional act with tremendous ‘dispositional’ consequences for social life. Yet nothing is finally resolved and the exercise of power of the old ‘traces’ of names, discourses, bodies of the old casteHindu regime continues so as to re-consolidate its traditional hegemony by either cutting off the new red thread or swallowing it back into the cavernous Hindu belly. The first two chapters are built on a double thesis: (a) there is a kind of homology between language and society as two structural totalities and (b) there happen contingent events of invention/innovation that break these structures and re-orient them towards new linguistic and social configurations. The third chapter confronts these theses, as argued and extracted from reading Ambedkar, with Gandhi’s thoughts on the immemorial (or sanatan) status of a social, religious and civilisational totality (such as Hindu, Indian, and by extension, Christian, Western and so on). The site of this confrontation remains linguistic—with two key words, anachronism and anathema, from Ambedkar’s chapter on Gandhism in his 1945 work What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables—but the chapter extends the issue(s) to two further sites: first, the constitutional site where Ambedkar risks writing a new constitution for a new regime even as he forges that very object of his creation as a new weapon of intervening in if not destroying the old regime;

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second, the site of contemporary Indian society where we see a violent confrontation between the Ambedkarite decision that the constitution will be an enforcement of equality which does not as yet exist and the Gandhian-Hindu prescription that India has a ‘natural’ constitution for social harmony which must be faithfully obeyed, even if real history produces endless examples that refute such a ‘natural’ constitution. The next section is a kind of intermezzo. It marks a passage from the linguistic and social sites of intervention to the domain of Ambedkar’s philosophy of politics. The intermezzo itself is formed from a speculative comparison between ancient Greek society and Hindu social structure with respect to the relation of caste and debt. The comparison is based on a counter-intuitive thesis: Debt is a form of power and peculiarly, the more powerful castes—the brahmin, to begin with—have a greater ontological debt to society22 and that fact makes these castes possess a greater stake in the social totality.23 In this, the Hindu caste, in its inner constitution, is similar to that part of the Athenian population which participates in the period of ancient democracy (fifth century BCE) and unlike slaves, foreigners and women, the Athenian citizen-caste has a greater debt of participation and stakes of power in society—a certain purity is implied in the system of belief that the Athenian citizen was a pure native autochthonous in origin and of course male. To this extent, the condition of the caste system and political democracy are predicated on a subjective politics of graded debt with a descending order of ontological debt24 and ascending order of political power. The difference is that

Soumyabrata Choudhury  39

with democracy, the highest level of the citizen-caste where the greatest debt and power coincide simply excludes from the political constitution all non-citizens while Hindu caste society constitutes its sovereignty by infinitely including all its minorities, its minor debtors never ceasing to minoritize them further. The chapters that follow try to imagine Ambedkar as India’s first Europeanist.25 They are also experiments in a comparative politics that is as counter-intuitive as the intermezzo. Can a comparative politics be the science of studying singularly localized and incommensurable events in history? The book’s main wager is that comparative politics can only be born in the localization of the incomparable event insofar as politics is the generic thought of the event anywhere in the world. And so, whether it is Ambedkar’s Constituent Assembly speeches and Pericles’ funeral oration in fifth century BCE, Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste and Aristotle’s Politics or Ambedkar’s speeches at Mahad in 1927 and the proceedings of the National Assembly in 1789 revolutionary France, they all testify to an experience for which there can be no objective witness or subjective voyeur—the ruptural experience that something entirely new and generic called politics exists. This is not to assert that Ambedkar, Pericles, Aristotle, Abbé Sieyès or any other thinker will draw the same local or national consequence of the generic upsurge but the compulsion to draw some consequence comes from the same universal exigency: politics exists.26 The concluding chapter of the book introduces the figure of the historical immortal as the subject who receives

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the above exigency like a vital wound to convert it into a new arrow of thought meant for anyone. To this extent, if Babasaheb was a historical immortal, dalit is anyone who is able to receive his arrow—and to never stop receiving it. Additional note on methodology

Since this work has a fundamental relationship with and owes an essential debt to the philosophy of Alain Badiou, let us put it to Badiou’s own methodological test. Badiou’s test is based on the thesis that for every discourse put out by the author, there is always another one that is presupposed by it and supports it. The test is whether the explicit or manifest discourse is aware of its own presuppositions and avows them. This obviously leads to the further enquiry whether a discourse adopts a critical standpoint with regard to its latent structure and discourse, and in specific methodological conjunctures, is capable of rebelling against and abandoning its latencies. The flipside to this imperative of a kind of selfreflexivity—though not of an external authorial self merely but of the procedures of discourse itself—is that if the imperative were not to be obeyed, the result would be to perpetuate what Alain Badiou calls, “obscurantism” (see Badiou, 2014). Every discourse that pretends to possess an absolute and immediate transparency, with no presupposition, historicity or heterogeneity, is actually “obscure” because by the very claim of its transcendence, it loses its materiality and worldliness. Then it doesn’t remain a discourse, and instead becomes an immaculate

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and immemorial truth. The obscurantism lies in the fact that while there is no evidence or argumentation as discursive operations or procedures of this immemorial effect, it is an effect of discourse. It is an effect produced at the threshold of a certain procedure of violence when the discourse of so-called science or argumentation has become an unleashing of dogma—but without avowing that one has supplanted one discourse by another, demonstration by fiat. It is not difficult to see that religion serves as a paradigm of this obscurantist discursive violence but as Badiou will not stop noting, contemporary capitalism is as much a case of globalised obscurantism which doesn’t stop generating counter-obscurantisms, including religious ones, on a global scale. One must be careful not to identify the excavation or self-reflexivity of manifest discourse with a project of naming the latent discourse. Even a name is an operation with a transcendental effect at a certain level of discursive production. So we could say with justification that the basis of liberal democracy remains theological (à la Carl Schmitt) or that the real source of Islamic Terror takes us down to the circuits of worldwide capitalist violence but the force of the analysis doesn’t lie in the name or label “liberal democracy”, “religious fundamentalism”, “globalisation” and so on. It lies in the logic of immanent entanglement of these names at a concrete level of analysis that is processual and anonymous. It is when we are unable to distinguish the manifest surface of discourse from all its latent tumults, and yet we are obscurely aware that there is an other, heterogeneous discourse at play

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that the real task of thinking begins. Of course thinking must never give up on the passion of analysis and do its best to resolve every issue into its appropriate position and profile. Yet this analytic passion, while not giving up on the possibility of some certainty, is infinite. While the task of thought is also to decide on real situations as to which standpoint and site to take even while being engaged in classifying all the aspects of this situation. It is at this level that thought decides on a name to subjectivise a situation and separate some of its subjects from the others within a plane or world of otherwise ‘in-separate’ elements and actors.27 This name, we can also call “axiom” to designate the fundamental methodological hinge of this work. It is true that the notion of an axiom originates in Euclidean geometry, travels far and deep into the history of mathematics and has a specific meaning in first order logic. In fact, Badiou’s The Concept of Model, an early work (2007a), is a formidable treatise on these questions, making crucial and difficult distinctions between logicist treatment of axioms and ‘true’ axioms in mathematics. However, I would desist from going that far and turn to Ambedkar’s use of axiom. Dhananjay Keer cites Ambedkar’s declaration that the egalitarian presupposition of universal human worth that everyone possesses is axiomatic. It is worth one’s while to listen to Keer’s citation from Ambedkar in the context of his views on the impact of the Bhakti poets on the caste system [yet] from the view point of the annihilation of caste the struggle of the saints did not have any effects on society. The value of man

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is axiomatic, self-evident; it does not come to him as the result of the gilding of Bhakti. The saints did not struggle to establish this point. (Keer 2009, 109)

Now, it seems to me, that this is a classic ontological axiom that enables humanity for politics. In that sense, Ambedkar, even while carrying out the most excruciating concrete analysis of real historical situations, decides on an egalitarian axiom to separate those subjects who will follow it as a universal principle of politics from those who won’t. This separation, thus, is both methodological and political or rather, this methodological choice is as much Ambedkar’s political choice. It is essential to grasp here that at this level of a decision on principle or ‘true axiom’, Ambedkar simply can’t be culturalised in any direction. We cannot say that Ambedkar follows the principles or axioms of the French Revolution or the European Enlightenment or whatever because it makes no sense to name an axiom culturally. The axiom is politically animated by many ideological, historical and cultural names in the history of politics but in itself, it is the avowed presupposition of a new name to enable a political separation of new subjects. Insofar as it is a presupposition it should be latent but insofar as it is frankly avowed, it makes the latent depths rise to the surface of historical time to risk or as Badiou would say, wager a new principle. This is perfectly consistent with Ambedkar’s distinction in Annihilation of Caste between religion of rules and religion of responsibility (see Ambedkar, 2014, 304–7). In the latter, the religious narrative and nomination originate in the act of taking responsibility for a new principle which itself is not

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religious. The principle is an axiomatic ‘true invention’, a new name, which takes the risk of going unrecognised and hence remains anonymous till it is institutionalised as a positive religion—or as a religious name insofar as all religion are names, only names… The axiomatic methodology Ambedkar urges us to extract from his life and works is essentially political. I primarily try to perform this political extraction from Ambedkar in this work. The extraction, as I have indicated, has to take place both at the latent and manifest levels of Ambedkar’s discourse—and mine. Again, this has nothing to do with listing the names of Ambedkar’s alien European influences and alien Indian ones—or mine. The task, I reiterate, is political not scholastic. Nevertheless it is entirely justified to ask for an account of the disciplinary and cultural consequences of the Ambedkarite principle(s) unfolding up to the present moment. I spent the main portions of this introduction articulating the position of a work like this with the chain of effects that are making and unmaking us today resulting from Ambedkar’s axiomatic declaration(s). I summed up the totality of these effects in both their decisive impact and undecidable life with the phrase “revolutionary hypothesis” of Indian history, whose partisan name is a dalit revolution. In this added note, I am abstracting the possible significations and misunderstandings attached to the question of axiom or principle in Ambedkar. Badiou’s philosophical radicalisation of the axiomatic method as originating in logic and mathematics, with shuttering consequences for a thought of politics, provides this exercise

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with a framework. This however has nothing to do with any Ambedkar–Badiou synthesis as a synthesis of great men and thinkers. In the same way that there is no Ambedkar– Mao, Ambedkar–Bhagat Singh, Ambedkar–Marx fusion of personae. But there could well be an Ambedkar–Badiou, Ambedkar–Mao, Ambedkar–Marx effect to the extent that in a world prescribed by the egalitarian axiom, there can be an Ambedkar–anyone effect.28 The politico-axiomatic method that I improvise for my actual series of analyses is only a very limited and finite mandate I usurped from an infinite task at hand. So nothing I achieve—or don’t achieve—here detracts from other discourses on Ambedkar, not merely the latent ones I carry in my own but other manifest discourses, radically manifest in radical otherness, but Ambedkarite, very Ambedkarite… For instance, the generic anonymity of new principles that resists cultural appropriation from any direction or quarter, can be richly supplemented with Ambedkar’s own immersion in the cultural, no, poetic world of someone like Kabir (see Keer, 2009, 495, for Ambedkar’s three teachers Buddha, Kabir and Jotiba Phule). In politics, the path had to be ungilded, brief, hard-fought, axiomatic and utterly exposed to the contingency of the axiom or principle proffered. In the worlds of Kabir, the saint-poets of Maharashtra and elsewhere, the path was both longwinded and elliptical, oblique and immediate, spiritually emancipatory and politically indifferent, Ambedkar saw great virtue and potential for popular sensibility in the experience of a poetically lived world insofar as that world opened up

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infinite qualities or predicates of vital existence, infinite feelings and dispositions to an affectively discriminated and manipulated people. The world of Kabir that Ambedkar loved so much was then a predicative world opened up to an egalitarian imagination. Did Ambedkar’s preoccupation with the Buddha culminate in an actual synthesis of poeticpredicative equality with the axiomatic decision of equality along with an ontology of shunnyata or void? I am inclined to postpone the investigation of this question in a systematic way within the limits of this book. I know that very capable thinkers are approaching such a possible culmination, though from angles very different from mine.29 My only point here would be that even such an envisaged culmination would be an effect or consequence of some contingent and rigorous risk of a principle or decision of thought. Given that it is not a scholastic question but one of political and existential responsibility for a decision of thought that does not consecrate but separates, we must confront the unavoidable consequence that every ideal culmination is also a real separation. I will close this note on methodology with two clarifications. The first one concerns the actual choice of texts from Ambedkar. Is it a matter of serious neglect that I do not carry out either historicist or contextual analysis of Ambedkar’s writings and speeches in a systematic way? Well, in some cases the context is more visible, in some less. But the point is that it is a risk the author is bound to incur when she tries to reconstruct the speculative line that shoots off like an arrow from within the limits of a context

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to assume the universality of a principle. Such axiomatic enunciations, in non-formalised contexts (as opposed to formal mathematical ones), neither have an even distribution nor encoded appearance. Principles are abstractions that have to be partially torn from contexts and what we lose in empirical content we gain in speculative intensity. That is why I have spent unexpected amounts of time on one or two sentences sometimes from Ambedkar’s books—the chapter “A Plea To the Foreigner” being the singular focus from What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables to extract the principle “thought is nobody’s monopoly”30 — and sometimes, his speeches—the intensive analysis of the relationship to the French Revolution in the March 1927 speech at Mahad for instance.31 I would even go to the extent of saying that a strictly contextual analysis often suppresses a principle because the latter’s marginal, even casual entry into discourse holds little interest for a research governed by dominant historicist values. Thus the effective historicity as well as universality of a principle have to be often redeemed from historical pressures of a text. The second clarification pertains to the opposite concern. In my actual distillation of words, sentences and situations of the discourse in question, that is to say, in the pragmatics of my own method, I use a heterogeneous set of conceptual tools. They neither necessarily have a disciplinary homogeneity—I wouldn’t be able to declare my concepts as being consistently philosophical or literary or strictly belonging to the science of politics—nor are the theoretical architects of these concepts always part of or

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aligned to commensurate schools of thought, ideologies or political persuasions. But occasionally, the very degree of incommensuration between the larger philosophical stakes of an argument and the pragmatic or contextual effectiveness of a conceptual tool becomes the test of tenacity for a new hypothesis. For instance, in the chapter on Ambedkar’s critique of Gandhism I conduct what I call a “speculative philology” of two of Ambedkar’s words regarding Gandhi’s attitude to caste.32 In this I create a speculative context or neighbourhood where an unlikely relationship between Ambedkar’s thought and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s language-philosophy unfolds. The move made here is highly strategic to achieve some philological effects that makes the latency of Ambedkar’s text rise to the surface like the water-level of thought rising above the political dangermark for a certain Gandhism. But this strategic effort in no way signals a political commensuration between Ambedkar and Deleuze. And yet when we look at this unlikely relationship through a prism, the prism of Alain Badiou’s philosophy of radical change, we begin to notice that something fundamental and enormous is at stake. Badiou (2007b), who considers Deleuze to be his master, opposes him on account of Deleuze lacking a theory of exceptional change, that is, a theory of revolution.33 Since Deleuze thinks of being as pure difference and nothing but difference, he doesn’t adequately consider the distinction between pre-revolutionary hierarchical difference and post-revolutionary egalitarian difference. If this is the crux of Badiou’s diagnosis, then what

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Deleuze allegedly lacks is the void-point between difference as ‘normal’, banal difference and the exceptional difference that a revolution is. Clearly this Badiou-schema corresponds to Ambedkar’s project of analyzing the system of graded difference that is caste politically, not ‘normally’, annihilating this system decisively (“I have decided to change”) and envisioning a post-change life of difference, only difference but equally, only equally (in The Buddha and His Dhamma). Thus we see that despite the incommensuration and during it, a strange relationship between utter aliens begins to form: In a prechanged world, all philosophy of ‘normal’ change and banal difference is a comprador philosophy that maintains the graded articulation of caste as a system of minimal and endless differentiation.34 In a changed world, where all difference would be lived as egalitarian dispositions to difference, we will all be Buddhist and Deleuzian, including Alain Badiou and B.R. Ambedkar.

NOTES 1 Towards the end of Annihilation of Caste, his 1936 speech which was not delivered, Ambedkar says, “I have decided to change. This is not the place to give reason.” One may note that in the latest annotated edition of Annihilation of Caste—a valuable detailed effort—these precise words of decision defy academic annotation. One might almost say Ambedkar refuses the future reader/ listener such annotation. See Ambedkar, 2014, 316. 2 For a notable exception, it is imperative to consult Christophe

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Jaffrelot’s readings of Ambedkar. Moreover through Jaffrelot, one is informed of some truly interesting interpretations made by French sociologists of Ambedkar. Unfortunately much of these are not available in English translation. For instance, Jaffrelot (2004, 322) refers to Olivier Herrenschmidt’s contribution to understanding Ambedkar’s inaugural thesis in Castes in India (1916). 3 I am referring here to those academicians of the university who cannot ignore Ambedkar but will not comprehensively teach him either. In the sentences to follow I try to counter-activate this alleged factionality into a divided Ambedkarite universalism. The university is not able to ignore Ambedkar any longer because of the political success of the dalit campaign(s). So the voices of the brahminical university speak both in resentment (since they can not do anything about the situation) and manipulation (try to create a tokensitic strategy to include Ambedkar within a formal pedagogy of the social sciences and humanities). 4 It is possible to trace this trend back to the pioneering, revisionist work of D.R. Nagaraj (2010) in the 1990s. We see the methods of literary studies play a crucial part in cultural and political analysis with Nagaraj. With him also emerges a kind of political cultural ‘middle ground’ where a comparative analysis of Ambedkar and Gandhi can unfold. 5 “I loved Science, Stars, Nature, but then I loved people without knowing that people have long since divorced from nature… The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of stardust.” Rohith Vemula (2016) wrote these words and a few more, before killing himself in HCU. Maybe someday someone will write a tract, or a poem called “Stéphane Mallarmé/Rohith Vemula: To a constellation.” Till then, I will take the liberty of reporting that recently when I met some of Rohith’s close friends at a

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conference, they recalled how much he loved some of the recent writings on Ambedkar, how he loved the life of that writing. One of his favourite contemporary authors was Aishwary Kumar who recently published the book Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Risk of Democracy (2015). 6 Ambedkar’s linguistic map of collective political dispositions determined by generic human sociality will concern several of the chapters of this book. Between Castes in India (1916) and Annihilation of Caste (1936) not only does a substantive common project of thinking caste out of existence obtain but also an affirmative project of egalitarian linguistic creation. One such creation is the word “association”. Again, for all the influences underlying Ambedkar’s ‘decision’ on words, the annotated edition of Annihilation of Caste (2014) is invaluable. 7 This point will return in the course of the book. The topical interest of the point is that in recent scholarship there is a tendency to prioritise the importance of fraternity over liberty and equality for Ambedkar. The form of life which is correlated to fraternity is mostly religious and specifically Buddhist in relation to Ambedkar. This settled nature of the preference completely overlooks the experience of shock that underlies all real fraternity because the latter happens as a result of unforeseen historical encounters that ‘force’ new dispositions, new ‘uses of bodies’ on behalf of all the subjects of these encounters. Religion including Ambedkarite Buddhism is a new and unforeseen form of life or ‘use of bodies’, not a pre-given prototype of fraternity. See Agamben, 2015. 8 This is the essence of the initial incitement by Union Minister (of Labour and Employment) Bandaru Dattatreya when he wrote to the Ministry of Human Resource Development about the ASA’s reaction to Yakub Memon’s execution on 30 July 2015 (Ravishankar, 2016). This is an incitement to state and social paranoia that from then to the present has worked like an endless bad dream. The

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cold-blooded logic setting up the game of delusion is to deliver the following argument to the public: “Dalits are supposed to be selfenclosed, if unfortunate, victims of some social problems. How can they get ‘mixed up’ with other issues, which is none of their business? In which case, they must be nursing impure non-dalit agendas…” 9 As an important representative text of Marxist reading of caste within the history of the Indian Left, see Ranadive, 2002. 10 See the foreword by Diagne (2016, x) to Barbara Cassin’s book where she writes of Hannah Arendt’s relation with English in exile and her German ‘mother tongue’, a point that helps us to think about Ambedkar’s relationship to the English Language. Isn’t it the case that for Ambedkar, while Marathi is his ‘mother tongue’, English too is a ‘tongue’, not merely a language? Doesn’t Ambedkar display the contradictory attributes of idiomatic inherence and ceremonial formality with regard to English? Any thesis on Ambedkar’s bilingualism must take into account this asymmetry and equality between tongues. 11 There are always two “first times”. The militant of the event is defined by someone who decides that an event took place in history for the first time. See Badiou, 2003. 12 In the fourth chapter, “Caste and Debt”, we will read Ambedkar’s diagnosis that the counter-revolution hates the fact that it owes its existence to an original revolution and would like to default on that debt. How it does so is a fascinating enquiry. Sometimes it does it so quietly, so normally that you would think the counterrevolutionary way is the way of life as usual. It was never any other way. In other circumstances, the counter-revolution raises its pitch to such a deafening level that it almost shatters all public sense of historicity from which the present state of affairs arose. At most, it is willing to concede that history exists but only to serve the privileges of the superior present. Peculiarly, it also asserts that the present is the most perfect incarnation of an immemorial

Soumyabrata Choudhury  53

(sanatan) past that is more ancient than all history, hence more enduring than all historical change. Thus counter-revolution becomes that historical change of regime that abolishes all change, all historicity. 13 An operative meaning of the generic essence would be in crisis in times of empirical inequality. But will the operative meaning be truly conceptual? Operationally, many so-called ideas of inequality both determine our lives and hold ideological sway. However, all such ideas confuse the operational part with the generic part. So the argument will usually go like this: in certain empirical matters of high importance like national security only essentially meritorious people should be inducted. Here we clearly see the conflation of something relative to a specific operational context (national security) with something generic (fundamental human capacity) for associational sensibility and responsibility. So it seems that there is no difficulty recognising both the actual phenomena of inequality and the fundamentally inconsistent structure of the inegalitarian idea. In fact, we can recognise both these only if we submit to the speculative risk of the revolutionary egalitarian hypothesis. 14 There is of course the empty formal equality of a so-called democratic state. At the level of common prejudice as well as the ideologies of, for instance, free market or brahminical dogmatists, such empty rhetoric does become the alibi to inflict taboos on society forbidding us to even mention the least real predicative inequality. However one of the more practical justifications for both recognising predicative inequality and retaining the horizon of formal equality is to reduce predicative inequality to either a question of lack of individual opportunity or the relative incompetence (that is to say, a predicatively evaluated incompetence) of some individuals relative to others in a situation of equal access of opportunity. Even in an ideal situation where everyone has formal opportunity at the same level, some will

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always be found predicatively less equal than others. And that will retrospectively be inserted into the generic universe of thought and the pure inegalitarian idea will be born. 15 Anand Teltumbde’s recent book (2016a) on Mahad has corrected the usage of the word “satyagraha” for the first period in March 1927 of the Mahad “revolt”. He points out that the initial plan in March was only to hold a conference. The satyagraha, planned but withdrawn eventually, applies to the December 1927 event which also involved the ceremonial burning of a copy of the Manusmriti. 16 The revolutionary hypothesis pertaining to the massive interruption of ancient Indian history by the teachings of the Buddha, as also the decisive impact of emperor Ashoka becoming Buddhist, are distributed throughout Ambedkar’s writings. We can see the fascinating and partially polemical consequences Ambedkar draws from the hypothesis in the essay “Krishna and his Gita” and the 1948 work The Untouchables. In addition, he defends the Buddhist revolution against several detractors in his speeches and articles till the end of his life. See Keer, 2009, 417–25. 17 As a compulsory reading on what I call “dispositional equality”, see the essay “Buddha or Karl Marx?” (BAWS 3, 1987b). 18 On this point, also see my related article (Choudhury, 2015, 29–34). 19 It is possible that more than anyone else, Gandhi understood the radical stakes of separation of electorates after the Round Table Conference in 1932—the separation of the Untouchable from the thought of Hindu social totality. Hence his radical recalcitrance and the blackmail of the fast unto death that followed. 20 There’s no better example of this than Gopal Guru’s singular contribution (2012). 21 However, we must not neglect the fact of there having been a unity of Hindu oppression though in a sporadic and dispersed way across time in the Indian subcontinent long before the colonial

Soumyabrata Choudhury  55

period. Ambedkar sought the structural logic of caste as a reason underlying this otherwise irrational long-lasting unity. 22 An interesting investigation might pertain to the comparison of ontological debt with Hindu karmic debt. Karmic debt is the Hindu brahminical justification for excluding and degrading a certain section of society as debts for their acts in their past lives. However ontological debt which I emphasize is a mode of actively structuring society in this life so as to practice exclusion, untouchability and discrimination in the paradoxical logic of the lower caste being excluded from ontological debt. While karmic debt is an ideological justification, ontological debt is a social operation. 23 “Ontological debt” is the term Charles Malamoud, the great French Indologist, uses in his reading of the Brahmanas to describe the brahmin’s privileged birth into debt without borrowing, an ontological debt to teacher and, parent that the lower-born will be ‘free’ of. This structure can clearly be related to Eklavya’s desire for debt in the dominant version of the story when he, a tribal boy, seeks Dronacharya as his teacher. For a discussion of Malamoud and the thesis on debt and power, see Choudhury, 2013. 24 Exclusion from citizenship among the Athenians had some theological basis since the citizens also belonged to the city’s gods ritually unavailable to the slaves and the foreigners. Moreover, what we are talking about is an originary structure of which a bloc of caste is the image. The question of secular transaction arises only when this bloc is historically divided up into many parts/castes. But even as a proto-phenomenon, the fundamental grid of inclusion and exclusion from debt in relation to political power is quite evident. 25 To be a Europeanist is to read the documents of European history to form a philological and/or political idea of Europe. Ambedkar clearly has an unprecedented political interest in Europe. He is not a philological Europeanist, nor is he a philological Indianist.

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Neither can he be brought together with those gripped by a Europhilia in the colonial period, for instance the literary enthusiasts of Bengal who loved the European poets (Shakespeare being the foremost). No doubt, some of these enthusiasts turned out to be masters themselves, such as the nineteenth-century Bengali litterateur Michael Madhusudan Dutt. 26 A fundamental clarification: the comparative studies in the book are not a study of the actual historical influences on Ambedkar. They are frankly speculative. Whether Ambedkar read the authors I compare him with, and to what extent, is not pertinent. They are all authors who responded to the exigency of local events of politics in their contexts and drew worldhistorical consequences—that is the basis for these ‘speculative’ comparisons. 27 This is a crucial dimension of what, following Badiou; I have called a “situation” of the world as it presents itself. The situation is not a simple analyzable compound of its elements. “Elements” are used more in the mathematical sense of set-theory that while existentially they will present themselves as entangled with or ‘in-separate’ from each other, they can be ordered into “sub-sets” or sequences. But this happens with the intervention of an agency or subjective force that creates a fissure in the situation. Every ordering is also then the risk of a disorder of the given ‘law of the situation’. Thus the law of caste in the brahminical social situation is dis-ordered by Ambedkarite and dalit interventions. 28 For example, if one were to consider the embattled Maoist movement in Maharashtra and maybe Andhra and Telangana, over several years, there is a clear Ambedkar–Mao effect on the ground in these histories. These movements are also, at some singular level, Ambedkarite. But these ‘effects’ of historical materiality and mutation cannot—and must not—be retrospectively attributed to some ideal causal machine which is an Ambedkar–Mao–Marx ideological and personological machine.

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29 Here I am particularly thinking of Aishwary Kumar’s Radical Equality and its last chapter on Buddhist ontology of shunnyata and the enormous potential for future research that lies therein. I am also thinking of Y.S. Alone’s courageous adherence to a Buddhist logic of rational contingency in the face of dogmatic and fatalistic philosophical alibis for the Hindu social order (-disorder). See Alone, 2017. 30 See the chapter “Ambedkar contra Aristotle”. 31 See the chapter “Comparative Politics and Incomparable events”. 32 See the chapter “Anathema and Anachronism”. 33 It seems clear to me that what Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze, in their shared philosophical vocabulary, call “event” has its real site of contestation in the political idea of “revolution”. 34 Postcolonial intellectual trends have shown a marked comprador tendency when they have promoted and celebrated so-called cultural and other “differences” in structurally unequal societies. Much of the theoretical impetus to do this has come from philosophies of difference in the 1960s and 70s which challenged the Marxist and Hegelian dialectic in a political context where this dialectic represented a kind of internal colonization of the idea of revolution. But this colonization and the resistance to it were phenomena within revolutionary history not outside or against it. In societies colonized by foreign sovereignties and subsequently liberated from them, with the unequal structures of these societies more or less intact, it is strange to witness a postrevolutionary fervour for “difference” in societies desperately searching for a revolutionary hypothesis or idea that would not misrecognize the notion of inequality for the being of difference. This is the place to remind ourselves of Ambedkar’s motto that to annihilate caste one must annihilate the notion of caste.

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1 Dalit: Elements of a Sentence-to-Come

I do not have any hypothesis or speculative imagery to offer with respect to the totality of Ambedkar’s thought. I do not think there can be a line of thinking that can be imagined as coeval with his intellectual formation—neither a line of maturation, nor a line broken by an intellectual caesura or spiritual conversion, nor a line that turns back on itself in ideological retreat. I do however consider it worthwhile to schematize the long-term trajectory of Ambedkar’s use of language (mostly the use of English), which I have done in the following way: in 1916, with Castes in India, Ambedkar used words like a scientist—selecting key symbols, which also operated as concept words, and combining these identified symbols to create higher conceptual units; in 1936, with Annihilation of Caste, everything seems already plunged in a historical world of conceptual propositions. Ambedkar must intervene and modify the key elements of this world —words and concepts—to disrupt, even annihilate, the very world they emerge from. Intervention, modification, annihilation… are all performed under the double pressure

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of polemical exigency and universal or axiomatic rationality. In 1956, with The Buddha and His Dhamma, Ambedkar writes a Book: the words, propositional chains and conceptual grids must now enfold their logical and polemical moments of emergence while also surpassing them to become a ‘body-inthe-world’. This body—a Book—is strangely also a narrative world—the narrative of the Buddha—and yet the Book, beyond its narrative content, ‘makes’ a body or acts as a body in the same way that a ‘people’ assembled beyond a threshold of dispersion make or act as a social and national body. This, I think, is a viable schema for Ambedkar’s systematic horizon of actual language use over the years. But it can be justly pointed out that the above intuitive picture, in fact, does provide a line of development for Ambedkar—something like his developing into a public discourser and polemicist from a sequestered scholar. That is not an image I intend to promote and to shift from this angle of vision to the question of Ambedkar’s systematic horizons that subtends the history of his use of language we must insert this horizon within language itself. This, then, will be my main argument: one particular meaning that we can give Ambedkar’s so-called ‘pragmatic’ philosophical temperament, apparently transmitted to him by his American teacher John Dewey, among others, is that it is a temperament acutely sensitive to the pragmatics of language. The argument must however continue to further assert the systematic stakes of such a pragmatics that can be extracted from the being of language. The “system” then is not understood to be a greater whole made of language use

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and the architectonic of extra-linguistic contexts of that use, whether historical or speculative. The system is a synthesis performed by Ambedkar’s thought on the historicity of language as such. Illustrated by examples from select Ambedkar texts, there will be three parts then to what is to follow: the pragmatics, the being, and the historicity of language. Before going further, let me anticipate the following objection: doesn’t the preoccupation with language detract from paying sufficient attention to Ambedkar’s role and interest in the real world, the social world of caste and oppressive inequality and at once the ‘national’ world to be constituted and to come as the solution to society? It is interesting that many commentators who hail Ambedkar as a leader of the untouchables—that is, a public figure thrown in a milieu of social agitation and political engagement—while acknowledging, with admiration, his status as a scholar do not observe the connection between the two. The admiring intuition is of him as a man with versatile personae—each of them singular, a man who could play such a vital role in the clamour of public life and yet cultivate the refined solitude of a scholar. In my view, this dramatisation should be abandoned in favour of a public¸ social, and singular thesis, that Ambedkar’s intellectual passion consisted in painstakingly and ceaselessly symbolising reality and such symbolisation, primarily, was an affair of language. Conversely, Ambedkar refused to accept a so-called reality as brute or mute, however brutish and indifferent the encounter with such reality might be for someone born an

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untouchable. Which meant that he rejected the immemorial brute or divine necessity—which were often one and the same thing— of a situation apparently given to a people as the perpetual blow of destiny. In other words, as an axiom, Ambedkar refused ‘destiny’ and affirmed the access of situations to a kind of intellectual processing. As a scholar, Ambedkar might have been speaking on his own highly rigorous terms—but he was speaking to others who were all part of the same intellectual programme, all scholars-tocome and flickering emblems of a future dalit rigour. Such a rigour is today often banalised as ‘dalit identity’ or ‘identity politics’. However, when the birth of the term ‘dalit’ in language is studied it refers to a rigour which involves the double task of occupying the exact place of the untouchable in social hierarchy and separating from that place/identity in the light of a thought of future egalitarian society. At the same time, the actual thinking of equality must be conducted now, in the present, by those deprived of real egalitarian existence. In other words, the task of generic thinking of equality is not the generic privilege of everybody. The condition for this thinking is the experience inequality. However in thinking of equality, the unequal becomes a new subject which with a certain force and delicacy we call dalit. But the dalit doesn’t think merely for herself; she thinks equality equally for everybody. I will try to prehend through a few examples Ambedkar’s intellectual exercises as on-going parts of this future rigour of language which is as much a rigour of concepts, and glimpses of Ambedkar’s “logical revolts” which initiated a

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cascade of similar revolts into the future—our present. Castes

in

India

(1916):

“Imitation”

–

“Innovation”

–

“Excommunication”

To reiterate a statement from the foregoing: symbolisation, primarily, is an affair of language. One should add, an affair of ordinary language. Which implies that in general, with the common deployment of language to express ordinary and extraordinary things, no conceptual code is attached as a specialised instrument to the ‘common’ of language. While conceptualisation proceeds from plural sources, they don’t attest to the application of a code—a kind of conceptualisation without concepts proceeds as the primary flow of ordinary language use. Yet, it is in the intricate tapestry of this very use that the red thread of the new concept suddenly appears as the immanent index of a new thought. To all appearances, in Castes in India: Their Genesis, Mechanism and Development, Ambedkar, making a seminar presentation at Columbia University, New York (on 9 May 1916), spoke with concepts as does science (BAWS 1, 1979a). In this case, that science was anthropology. Though Ambedkar did not speak with the esoteric rarity more befitting of a mathematician, his anthropological presentation nevertheless seemed to take for granted that it was within ordinary language that the rarity of a concept is to be found. The only condition was of course scholarly acumen, diligence, knowledge—all of which Ambedkar amply possessed. It is the same thing as saying that Ambedkar, as a young scholar, took for granted ordinary language’s own specialized hollow

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where the concept and its code were secured. But if this be so, how to account for the new concept, the new red thread of thought for which no concept is readily available? Does Ambedkar not enquire into language’s immanence to the world and the immanence of the new to language? Does he not take (ordinary) language for granted—and by virtue of that, the world? That security is exactly what the main thesis of Castes in India opposes. It is as if the process of genesis, mechanism and development of caste that Ambedkar analyses, explains, and thinks in the presentation reflects in the mirror of the analysis the institution, consolidation and crisis of language. Conversely, it is incumbent upon language to signify the emergence of new castes, as much it is to appropriate new social forms in its established structures. The entire burden of pragmatics, being and historicity must be shared and distributed between these tasks of language. The presentation of Castes in India almost exactly describes the same burden at the level of caste. So it isn’t inappropriate to detect a kind of homology of caste and language in the presentation. Let me substantiate this point through Ambedkar’s overall premise and the speculative development of this homologous structure through the triangulation of concepts he draws out of ‘ordinary’ languages in the manner of a scholar-scientist. In this, he retains the fluency of these concepts as words within the flow of (ordinary) language in the engaged style of the contributor to a ‘vulgate’. The triangulation is as follows:

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Imitation

Innovation

Excommunication

Premise: Once in historical operation, the System of Castes functions mechanistically. It is lived out by people in (Hindu) society ‘habitually’. This, Ambedkar asserts and seeks to demonstrate. But in its origin, caste is not psychologically premised in any way. The problem of premise is to find the statement appropriate to the artificiality, the non-natural origins of caste. Ambedkar takes an interesting, if brief, pause over the word “origin”. He writes, ‘The question of origin is always an annoying question and in the study of caste it has been sadly neglected; some have connived at it, while others have dodged it. Some are puzzled as to whether there could be such a thing as the origin of caste and suggest that if we cannot control our fondness for the word’s origin, we should better use the plural form viz. “origins of caste”’ (14). Ambedkar neither displays particular fondness for the word “origin” nor does he dodge it. He doesn’t opt for a generalised plurality of origins. However, on reading the presentation carefully, we find that the question of origin is doubly premised or that there is a double origin playing out in the thesis. The double origin can be explained with the two terms: the singular caste (a notion) and the plural castes

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(the reality). Ambedkar speaks of “fissiparous” (21) origins of caste as a perpetually relational emergence. At the same time, he activates another origin which lies in the being of caste itself. In other words, there must exist a kind of ‘substance of society’; or more ontologically put, the ‘being’ of society, alongside every ‘origin’ of a new castefragment. It is the homologous articulation to the status of the utterance “there is language” as a premise for the ‘fragments’ of language use, language acts and utterances. Ambedkar’s image here is telling: “Caste in India means an artificial chopping off of the population into fixed and definite units, each one prevented from fusing into another through the custom of endogamy” (9). Ambedkar uses caste both in the singular and shows how it subsequently moves into a plurality of castes. The mapping of facticity on to the ontology of society is implied therein. There is no doubt that Ambedkar’s ‘scientific’ interest is in fabricating and using concepts to delimit and demonstrate the mechanism and development of caste, its essential plurality and relationality. My view is that even in the conceptual demonstration, there is a general ontological interest at play and through his several ‘specialised’ texts, 1916 onwards. It is this interest, which goes beyond the specialists’ mandate, that will produce the new emancipatory ‘events’ of thought and language. In the 1916 seminar, the three main concepts being used to explain the spread of caste in India are “imitation”, “innovation/invention” and “excommunication”. Before going through one concept at a time, it will already have been

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clear in the laying out of the series the uneven provenance of the concepts. While “imitation” is a literary and sociological concept, and “excommunication” clearly has ritual-religious origins, “invention” or “innovation” are indiscernible from the status of being ordinary words.1 Yet they are put to precise conceptual use without apparently affecting this indiscernibility. That inconsistency is, I think, the creative specificity of Ambedkar’s conceptual practice, but before we move to the larger conclusion, one concept at a time. Imitation: Castes spread by the “infection of imitation” (18). Otherwise put, imitation leads to the production of many of the same. Indeed the entire force of the concept of “imitation” is vested in demonstrating the monotonous seduction of the “same”, which is also in the jargon of literary theory called “model”. Ambedkar, citing Walter Bagehot’s Physics and Politics (1872), refurbishes the structure by also stressing a psychological theory of imitation. So the monotonous yet seductive power of the model reproduces the “same” on the same scale as the propensity to imitate discounts the monotony and is seduced by the prestige of the model. Like Ambedkar argues, the brahmin exerts a seductive power and is the object of imitation by being at the apex of caste hierarchy; hence the brahmin is the model to be imitated. At the same time, in every imitation it is re-established that the brahmin monotonously occupies the fixed place. The brahmin hence is not a real hero but a typological figure, a living cliché. This is the most general outline of the theory and it is mostly etched with psychological and literary hues. Ambedkar specifies the general scope with

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the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde’s concept of “imitation” as applied to the spread of caste. For instance, Ambedkar utilizes Tarde’s law that imitation spreads from the “higher” to the “lower” rungs of society to describe the brahminical model’s “infection” which spreads to the lower castes.2 It is the infection of sovereignty by the mechanism of imitation. Now, in my view, this interpretation’s sociological character must be supplemented by its rhetorical diagnosis. Thus, what is really at issue is not the simple external imitation of a sovereign ‘model’ but the rhetorical modeleffect, which creates the structure of and belief in sovereignty. In its rhetorical flourishes and turns, language surpasses its mere use and manifests a phantasm, which is the presence of language itself. It is as if with these rhetorical acts language arrives in full splendour and delivers its sovereign blow. The total sovereignty of language is produced by the local effects of language. Homologously, through the infection of imitation, not only is a graded social sovereignty articulated, but society itself is produced as sovereignly given and immemorial. The brahminical caste structure then appears by the conflation of local imitative effect and total ontological phantastication as Hindu society as such. However, Ambedkar doesn’t rest with an extraordinary ‘scholarly’ appropriation of Tarde. His conceptual description, in its very elegance and precision, is a higher-order critique of the phantasm of social ontology. His is as much a critique of the concept of “imitation”, which smuggles in a partisan ontological result through an apparently neutral and specialised sociological “word”.3 What is that critique? What

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is its concept? The answer is in two words that Ambedkar uses interchangeably—“innovation” and “invention”. These words are from his own ‘vulgate’ of conceptual vocabulary indiscernible from ‘common’ language, yet unmistakeable. Innovation/Invention: “Imitation is easy and invention is difficult” (19). This elliptical line comes at the end of an extremely rhetorical paragraph in Castes in India. Describing the power of the brahminical model for the caste-imitator, he writes: The Brahmin is a semi-god and very nearly a demi-god. He sets up a mode and moulds the rest. His prestige is unquestionable and is the fountainhead of bliss and good. Can such a being, idolised by scriptures and venerated by the priest-ridden multitude, fail to project his personality on the suppliant humanity? … Such a creature is worthy of more than imitation but at least of imitation… Frail humanity! Be it embodied in a grave philosopher or a frivolous housemaid, it succumbs. It cannot be otherwise. Imitation is easy and invention is difficult. (19)

We could say that Ambedkar, with his deliberate use of hyperbole and rhetorical crescendos, mimics the rhetoric of the ‘model-effect’ generated by imitation. The elliptical conclusion to the rising tone of the above paragraph up to the crescendo is peculiar. It is peculiar because in contrast to the sociological and structural concept of “imitation”, “invention” is completely abrupt and open-ended. Invention vis-à-vis what? In relation to the endogamous caste rules to relatively modify the brahminical model within society? Or in relation to the ‘phantasm’ of society itself ? But does invention result from a transformative or revolutionary agenda? Or, is it a chance

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event that nevertheless has momentous consequences for the structure and the phantasm? Ambedkar doesn’t give a systematic answer to any of these possible queries but minimally unfolds the elliptic word “invention” by writing a phrase in its stead a couple of pages later: it is a “novel way of thinking” (21). My contention is that the ontological stakes of the “new”, latent in the phrase, pertain to Ambedkar’s critique of the phantasmatic givenness of the sovereignty of society (brahmin being both the model and the model-effect of this). It further pertains to his vision of true social being as a question of interruption of history of society rather than that vision being the premeditated ‘origin’ of that history. Such an origin is indeed the brahminical phantasm that Ambedkar would explain in order to demystify and dispel it. But what is the meaning of “interruption” that “invention” or a “novel way of thinking” brings about? I think it is crucial to understand that in Ambedkar’s treatment the interruption of history is not a historical interruption. It is a conceptual interruption that, in a sense, disturbs given philosophies of history. Yet one must qualify further that this conceptual interruption is not the ‘doing’ of the concept by itself. How could it be so since a concept must exist in a given constellation of concepts, and the discourse of the concept is already implicated in historical sequences and narratives? But in the terse formulations of Castes in India it is not easy to find anything more systematic—or visionary—than this above index. Indeed “invention” or “innovation” are indices of an enigmatic and anonymous ‘event’ of novelty in the

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caste-logic of sovereignty articulated through imitation. As indices the words necessarily came from ‘common language’, because the effects that these indices point to in the overall mode of interruption are expressed in analogies and metaphors from ‘common life’. In Ambedkar’s triangulation these effects are so perilous and disturbing that they lead to the third conceptual ‘act’ in the triangle: faced with “novel ways of thinking”, the sovereign must excommunicate the new. Innovation may be of any kind, but all kinds will suffer the same penalty. A novel way of thinking will create a new caste for the old ones will not tolerate it. The noxious thinker respectfully called Guru (Prophet) suffers the same fate as sinners in illegitimate love. The former creates a caste of the nature of a religious sect and the latter a type of mixed caste. Castes have no mercy for a sinner who has the courage to violate the code. The penalty is excommunication and the result is a new caste. (21)

Excommunication: In this enormously condensed and lucid passage, we find at least two great dimensions sweeping up the process of caste consolidation. They are the dimensions of temporality and language. As types of speech, the prophet’s prophecy and the lover’s utterance (“I love you”) invade the fortress of the phantasm, whether that be of society or language. But these “types of speech”, in so far as they are events, introduce historicity to the mechanisms that pretend immutable origins and immemorial functioning. The historicity of language and the historicity that recommences the very being of history out of caste-petrification are the same here. “Invention” means nothing else but the invention of historicity.

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However, “excommunication” is nothing else but speech. Its ritual, tragic-theatrical and legal-political provenances all testify to excommunication being a type of speech that, while resulting often in spatial and territorial exile, is essentially an exclusion from what, modern terminology would call, “free speech”. At the level of Castes in India, the proposition is speculative but in the section to follow on Annihilation of Caste, I hope to show that Ambedkar develops an idea of “communication” that is the antithesis of “excommunication” practised by old castes to the ‘new’ so as to enforce new castes on that very ‘event’ of the new. In this precise sense, “free speech” will be common acts of language that belong to the historicity of the new as opposed to the enforced speech of caste that excommunication replicates in the heart of “invention” and the “novel way of thinking”. Such replication, apart from its punitive purpose, produces the immemorial reassurance of the givenness of society. Homologously it can be proposed that the fiat that excommunication directs at the new utterance(s), at the speech of the ‘new’ closes in on that newness to envelop it with the phantasmatic being of language as such. For instance, in our times it is an acceptable proposition for a brahmin to claim reverse discrimination and say ‘I am the new dalit’, and even seek reservation. Such an assertion has two aspects. One, it is the appropriation of language at the level of cliché such that dalit becomes a typical word to claim political and social marginalisation. Two, even such an attempt to render it a cliché is possible today because of a new historicity of language within which dalit is a revolutionary word for

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social emancipation. The irony is that once such a revolution takes place everyone has the right to the word even at the danger of reducing it to a cliché. Ambedkar’s conclusion is that excommunication replicates caste in the very space of the exile from caste. This is the envelope of society—and language—that includes their excluded spaces and discourses. That is possible because the envelope is a temporal one and it flattens the upsurge of a new utterance, an ‘invented’ use of life and language, a love, an idiosyncratic prophecy (by an otherwise “noxious” prophet), an unforeseen motley people… a new ‘concept-word’ into the single time of sovereign language and society. Within this sovereignty, an infinite gradation of caste(s) and language(s) is not only permissible but essential. This, in my view, is Ambedkar’s compressed thesis, literally and by homological extension. Annihilation of Caste (1936): “Similarity” – “Common” – “Communication” Hindu society as such does not exist… There is an utter lack among the Hindus of what sociologists call “consciousness of kind”… In every Hindu the consciousness that exists is the consciousness of his caste… They [the Hindus] have insisted that underlying the apparent diversity there is a fundamental unity which marks the life of the Hindus in as much as there is a similarity of habits and customs, beliefs and thoughts which obtain all over the continent of India. Similarity in habits and customs, beliefs and thoughts there is… similarity in certain things is not enough to constitute a society. Men constitute a society because they have things which they possess in common… And the only way by

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which men can come to possess things in common with one another is by being in communication with one another. This is merely another way of saying that Society continues to exist by communication indeed in communication… Parallel activity, even if similar, is not sufficient to bind men into a society… parallel performances of similar festivals by different castes have not bound them into one integral whole. For that purpose what is necessary is for a man to share and participate in a common activity so that the same emotions are aroused in him that animate the others. (1979a, 50–1)

To recall the controversy surrounding it, Annihilation of Caste was meant to be a speech Ambedkar would make at Lahore on the occasion of the annual conference of a caste-Hindu social reform organisation Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (literally the Forum for Break-Up of Caste) in 1936. The proposed address, however, was postponed sine die by the organisers once they read the text of the speech which was circulated amongst them in advance at their behest. The Jat-Pat Todak Mandal communicated to Ambedkar that as a Hindu social reform body, it was unwilling to host a speech which declared that the speaker was addressing the audience the very last time “as a Hindu” (31). The text, unmodified and unabridged, was then made available to the public by Ambedkar, who printed it at his own expense. It seems to me that its peculiar history makes Annihilation of Caste also a peculiar discourse. It is as if all the polemical and pragmatic effects of a speech are contained and suspended in the text; and being also a discourse of truth, it ‘converts’ the effects of the (suspended) polemical performance into ‘impersonal’ and ‘universal’ propositions/

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sentences. Of course the circle closes in on itself since the effects are themselves, in the first place, the results of the ‘true’ propositional sentences. It seems to me that history— and Ambedkar’s genius—crafted a peculiar discursive nexus in Annihilation of Caste whose dialectical method is a dialectic of war (the original Greek meaning of polemos) and truth (the stakes of knowledge and science). Yet we miss the crux of the matter if we neglect a third moment in the discourse whose exigency produces the most insistent (creative) pressure on Ambedkar’s conceptual genius. This is the moment of decision. Of course a sequential build-up in the reader’s mind could well picture the decision as the culmination of Annihilation of Caste such that all the propositional ‘reasons’ lead to an existential decision. Ambedkar decides to not be Hindu since the ‘reason of Hinduism’ is something like caste (non)society. But surely that is not how the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal takes it. For them it is not the argument that Ambedkar’s reasons are wrong for the decision he takes. It is rather that the decision in itself, in so far as it is an act of language, for right or wrong reasons, is inadmissible. The violence and the incitement are inherent to the warlike use of language where the mandate of the organisation was reform, which essentially is a peacetime activity.4 So logically, either Ambedkar’s concepts and his conceptual sentences are results of his militant (warlike) decision and not the other way round. Or the decision is an empirical—and dispensable—appendage to a conceptual and critical discourse which is a peace-time discourse with no essential conflict with (Hindu) reform. However, it is as

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this level of choosing between the two external alternatives that Ambedkar’s actual ‘dialectic’ operates to produce a somewhat different line of argument. Concisely put, Ambedkar shows that no decision of (and on) existence is possible without reasons—for that would be the ‘madness of Manu’5—but no reason can be truly formulated without decisions of thought. Hence the conceptual world that a ‘man of reason’ (if Ambedkar has to be contrasted with Manu) fabricates is a world between two decisions, which are also two limit-situations vis-à-vis ‘acts’ of so-called reason. For Ambedkar “equality”, “liberty”, “fraternity”, the conceptual slogans of the French Revolution, are not mere ‘reasons’ or ‘arguments’. They are decisions woven in the fabric of language historically transmitted.6 The conceptual world of Annihilation of Caste is created from within language but as if propelled by two exorbitant acts of language: the decision on equality, liberty, fraternity, and the decision not to speak—in another context he will say ‘die’7—as a Hindu anymore. It is at least one act of language on Ambedkar’s part that the caste-Hindu reform organisation Jat-Pat Todak Mandal effectively excommunicates but in doing so reveals its essential anxiety about the very historicity of language that is able to produce this ruptural effect. My contention is that through the mutual passages and impasses of the three words—“similarity”, “common”, “communication”—in this text, it is the historicity and invention of language as the counterpart of society that is in question. Similarity: Schematically put, what “imitation” does in Castes in India, “similarity” does in Annihilation of Caste.

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Though the former is more canonical as a sociological and literary concept and the latter is ‘indiscernible’ from ordinary language use, the two are united in demonstrating the habitual multiplicity of social (and linguistic) behaviour in societies such as Hindu. Hindu society boasts of a cultural plurality and an underlying unity at the same time. In Ambedkar’s view—and this is consistent with his scientific proposals in Castes in India—the diversity is only an internal differentiation within a dogmatic unity, and the unity of a habitual repetition of “similar varieties”. To “habit”, Ambedkar counter-poses “constitution” when it comes to grasping what we have called earlier ‘the being of society’. In this opposition, Ambedkar is as significantly antiAristotelian as he is anti-Hindu in orientation, as we shall see in the penultimate chapter of the book. Unlike Aristotle, for whom the theoretical constitution of a city-state (politiea) is inseparable from a practical and habitual conduct of virtue (areté), Ambedkar starts with the breaking of all past habits. This is that much more urgent when confronted with the immemorial inertia of Hindu habits. So between “habit” and “constitution” must intervene something like the “new” whose emergence is exactly what I have indicated earlier as an exorbitant act of language and thought. In Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar calls it the constitution of a life-in-common by acts of “communication”. To “habit” Ambedkar counterposes the constitutive concept of “act”. Before we go on to the affirmative ideas of the “common” and “communication”, the negative diagnosis of “similarity” bears repetition, in line with the earlier description of

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caste-imitation of the “model-effect” which is lived out as the phantasm of society as such. In Annihilation of Caste, this earlier structural critique of Castes in India is richly supplemented with diagnoses of subjective replications of caste through the granulated potentiality of popular social habits. Habits are the micro-infrastructure of society in so far as the latter is only an arbitrary jointure of such habits. This is the meaning of “similarity” which is unable to constitute a new form, as if the constitution of society were happening for the first time. Instead similarity and its habitual multiplication granulates the givenness and sovereignty of society into pseudo-acts of sociality. The examples of these ‘cultural’ pseudo-acts are “parallel performances of similar festivals” that are nothing but periodic monotonous expressions of the micro-infrastructure of society that is truly caste (51). So the imitative infection of caste that articulates the “graded sovereignty”8 of the phantasmatic (non)sovereignty of (non)society is able, paradoxically, to generate an artificial vitality and fervour that accrue to the praise of the consensual label and object called “culture” (72). Ambedkar, to this extent, is a pioneer in the long critique of the short history of cultural studies. Common: “Common” is, indeed, the most indiscernible— so common!—of words in language with remarkable uncommon effects. Nothing proves this better than the widespread reaction the word “community” draws from both a specialised and non-specialised audience. The proof reaches a crescendo—or cacophony, according to your taste—with the use of the word “communism”, whose

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root word, root idea and root wager is the “common”. However in Ambedkar’s text the formulation is specific: “To have (a) similar thing is totally different from possessing things in common” (51). There are at least three obvious ways of understanding this statement—economic, legal, and republican. Unlike the economic and legal ways that demarcate a productive and juridical domain “in-common”, it is the republican question par excellence: what is the ‘thing’ that we are. We might call this the congregationist question as opposed to the segregationist caste question(s). Now for the juncture of Annihilation of Caste in 1936, we can find a genealogical thread of the “common” with the “fraternity” of French Revolution as well as an anticipatory thread to the Sangha (commune) of The Buddha and His Dhamma of 1956.9 There is no doubt, based on the evidence of his myriad writings, of Ambedkar’s attraction to congregations.10 At the same time, it is precisely at the juncture I refer to, in the moment of decision and rupture, that Ambedkar is most exposed to the tremulous thought(s) of society, non-society … and something like a “society-to-come”. Which is to say that Ambedkar is exposed to the events of these thought(s) in the presence of decision, of rupture. In my view, language, not in its phantasmatic presentation as sovereign, but as ‘free use’, embodies the event, its trembling and its (im) possibilities. In that sense, the question of the “common”, unlike the imperative and reflex of habit, is a question asked for the first time: it is like asking for the first time, what is true society? It is to make language say that society comes into existence with the sentences (un)uttered in 1936. This act of

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language, whose historicity is the inscription of ontology in discourse, Ambedkar will call “communication”. But before that affirmation, a parenthesis. Ambedkar’s attraction to congregations, anthropologically rationalised and expressed in cultural, political and religious terms—a psychological judgement, if any—must be supplemented with the ‘exposed’ ontology and ‘free use’ of language that characterise Annihilation of Caste. That is to say, Ambedkar’s primary attention is not to pre-existent ‘forms’ of congregation but to ‘acts’, which he called “innovation” in Castes in India, that re-position the concept of the ‘common’ and its constitution into actual congregations, as if for the first time. This interest in—rather passion for—the new is the point of departure for thinking about congregations in the 1936 text. It is not an unreasonable hunch that the very indetermination opened up by Ambedkar’s decision to abandon Hinduism makes his organisers tremble more than would the formal determination to ‘convert’ (that will be of course a new object of cultural anxiety after several years). With the excommunicating act of postponing Ambedkar’s speech sine die, the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal, while preventing a ‘public constitution’ of a new thought, constituted as it were a vicarious trembling on behalf of all those absent audiences that the excommunication was aiming to save. Communication: In terms of the concept discussed in Castes in India, one can say that “communication” is precisely that which excommunication excommunicates. Illustrating from the examples of the 1916 text, “communication” is that innovative upsurge, that sudden invention, which, as

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in novel ways of thinking and new love(s), expresses another stake in the world which is not that of social legitimacy. The latter can be secured only from the granulated and imitative mechanisms of an infinitely graded caste system but the ‘act’ of communication is interested in something else. In Annihilation of Caste it appears that unlike the phantasmatic stakes of an immemorially pre-given sovereignty of society, communication’s interest is in the very ‘coming-intoexistence’ of society. Like in the historicity of the thinker’s and the lover’s enunciations, it is as if language itself comes into being through communication, it is as if society comes to pass for the first time, voided of habit and non-derivable from the multiple alibis of the same. It is at this point that Ambedkar must answer the question: what is the proof of such a historical yet non-derived birth of society. This is a huge challenge, because at this point, the orientation of the concept is neither genealogical nor analogical. We have seen the genealogical connection of the ‘common’ with the slogan of “fraternity” in the French Revolution. In the essay “Away from the Hindus” written after the Mahar conference of 1936 in Bombay when it was resolved that the untouchable caste would abandon Hinduism, Ambedkar drew out an important analogical possibility of new communities upon religious conversion which would be non-descensional and not derived from the model of the ‘natural’ family.11 But in Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar’s effort is to direct the orientation of the concept to its own birth—in that sense, denuded of any other heterogeneous prostheses, restore it to its free play

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as the very act of communication which gives itself to be thought, and as a result also gives a kind of solitary, almost alien, conceptual testimony which denies itself philological debt and patrimony. Placed upon this philosophical, not philological, (non)ground Ambedkar gives his reply that the proof of “associational” acts of communication that constitute society and bring it into existence in order to also maintain it, is that such acts arouse a shared and common “emotion”. Emotion is proof of the act whose thought the concept grasps—to be exposed to its own effect. I suggest that this subjective threshold of Ambedkar’s extraordinarily lucid proposals brings up the most elusive and delicate part of his thinking which is that the shared and common emotion that rises out of “communication” is an emotion hitherto unknown to the habits of the heart. It is based on this revolutionary thesis held up with a kind of firm delicacy that Ambedkar will refute Gandhi’s criticism (of conversion in particular), according to which the heart is indeed the most precious locus of all valued institutions (like religion in particular) that codify and illuminate its emotions (51). Indeed, for Gandhi the knowledge of the heart ensures for society a ‘known humanity’—religion being such a great ensurer. For Ambedkar, the entire untouchable ‘researchprogramme’ in history, of which religion to convert to, arises from the non-codified, non-known subjective threshold whereupon a people feel an ‘emotion’ hitherto unfelt. The arrival of the threshold is entirely anonymous, historically concrete and culturally non-derivable. The ‘reason’ of religion must follow from this event of arrival, not lead to it.

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This is the experience which is subjective and popular before being the experience of a popular subject. In conclusion, let me draw two consequences from the above thesis—one ontological, the other materialistic, but both with material implications for politics of new congregations. First, ontologically speaking, the experience which does not yet belong to any subject-of-the-world does belong to, what might be called, the chance of the world. The ‘chance of the world’ is the world’s indiscernible selfdifference from how it was when all hearts were codified and all subjects belonged to their identities. Conversely, this indiscernible difference also results from the ‘act’ of communication, which Ambedkar says arouses the ‘common’ emotion.12 Because the emotion is ‘common’ and ontologically speaking, can be experienced by all, its historicity and point of subjective application remain indiscernible from all the ‘known’ subjects and forms of belonging. This might be seen as a sort of banal phenomenological egalitarianism. But because the emotion is the singularly unforeseen result of a new act, its status is radically non-common with respect to all the common habits of the heart-in-the-world in the sense of what Ambedkar calls “similarity”. This non-common common is the tremendous aristocracy of an experience, whose subjective threshold which many years after Ambedkar’s text we will not hesitate to call “dalit”. Which leads to the second consequence: What then is a dalit identity? What is the identity of a dalit body? What is the materiality of this identity? It seems to me that the ‘common’

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emotion that Ambedkar speaks of is not an effect of the pregiven capacities of the body, whether that be the privileged body of the brahmin, or the degraded one of the untouchable. For all those bodies would still be codified and articulated through the banal phenomenology of ‘equal’ experience(s) masking the infinite and monotonous systematic gradation of sovereignty and slavery, honour and shame. Against this stance Ambedkar’s decision is to abandon all bodies. From this void born of courage and chance, a tremendous, aristocratic, even snobbish, intellectual project starts whose main objective is to assemble and create a new body of egalitarian thought. “Body” is not used metaphorically here. Between 1935–36 and 1956, the well known search for the appropriate religion to convert to corresponds to Ambedkar’s as much as the generic untouchable’s passion to live the decision of conversion in new ways and dispositions of life. This meant voiding existing inegalitarian dispositions, thinking the thought of the ‘common’ and of ‘equality’ properly, hence aristocratically, and creating a new congregation. Such a congregation would be an incorporation of this very passion, life and thought. At the level of Annihilation of Caste in 1936, the future name “dalit” is the faint trace of an eventual ‘body-to-come’ playing upon the luminous surface of the texts, propositions and sentences. The dalit is a sentence-tocome. In 1956, Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma will assemble a ‘book’ as a ‘people’ and into a new congregation and ‘common’.13 Yet the proper historical life of a ‘common’ is always singular, hence aristocratic. Today dalit aristocracy presents such a life of the common animated by a ‘common’

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emotion. I doubt whether a philology or genealogy of this ‘common emotion’ is possible or that you will find it listed among the rasas and bhavas of the Natyashastra.

NOTES 1 A whole panoply of religious anthropological, theatrical to philosophical literature exists on the act and meaning of excommunication. Random examples are the works on the Greek pharmakon and the concept of katharsis, also the excommunication of Homo Sacer in Roman law. It seems to me that in contrast, the only real theoretical, ‘specialised’ literature on the term ‘innovation’ or ‘invention’ is more recent, and of an economic to managerial type. Ambedkar’s rigorous usage definitely does not fall in such types and is not ‘specialised’. 2 Though it is beyond the scope of this paper, I think it can be shown that Tarde’s own sociological concepts have a displaced connection with Aristotelian, ‘Aristotle-infected’ Christian metaphysics (Meister Eckhart to Thomas Aquinas) of a sort of “graded nature” and God overseeing that imitative hierarchy. BAWS 1, 1979a, 19. 3 Does Ambedkar’s description of imitation anticipate M.N. Srinivas’s well-known thesis on Sanskritization? It seems to me that while Sanskritization refers to actual social accomplishment of ‘lower’ castes by becoming Sanskritized, which also reflects a kind of historical mobility of social classes, Ambedkar’s concept of imitation points to a structure of desire. The rhetorical structure of caste is sustained by a single brahminical desire to imitate. To exaggerate Ambedkar’s thesis a little, everyone desires to imitate including the brahmin. 4 The forum that invites Ambedkar contains in its very name the idea of dismantling—even annihilating—caste, with the word

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todak. However, in their actual excommunication of Ambedkar after seeing his address, they reveal the limits of their actions which do not measure up to the intent of their language. I owe this point to S. Anand; also see Ambedkar, 2014. 5 “Against the Madness of Manu” is of course the title of Sharmila Rege’s selection (Ambedkar, 2013) from Ambedkar’s writings and speeches. The phrase, “Manu’s Madness or the Brahmanic Explanation of the Origin of the Mixed Castes” was the title of one of Ambedkar’s essays published posthumously in Riddles in Hinduism (BAWS 4, 1987c). But the question of “madness” arises in Ambedkar not only for the puzzle of Manu’s terrible laws; it also arises in a larger context—the context of ‘reason’ itself. It arises as the enigma of how can a rational person not consider the Hindu caste system, including Manu’s laws, mad? Obviously targeted at Gandhi, the judgement is that whoever doesn’t recognize the madness of caste is not being a ‘man of reason’. Here it is interesting to note Ambedkar’s frequent equalization of the words “mad” and “absurd”. 6 This decision on the slogans of the French Revolution was already taken in March 1927 when drinking the water of the Chavadar Tank at Mahad. That, according to Ambedkar, was the real issue—to declare “liberty, equality, fraternity”. Yet this must not be taken as a borrowed cultural influence from the West. The decision at Mahad places Ambedkar and that moment in constellation with the French Revolution through a twist in the topology of time. And like we saw in Note 1 to this chapter, Ambedkar added manuski (“humanity”) to “liberty, equality, fraternity”. 7 “Because we have the misfortune of calling ourselves Hindus, we are treated thus. If we were members of another Faith, none would dare treat us so. Choose any religion which gives you equality of status and treatment. We shall repair our mistake now. I had the misfortune of being born with the stigma of an Untouchable. However, it is not my fault; but I will not die a Hindu, for this is in my power.” (Zelliot, 2013, 147)

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8 While the constitutive elements of the thesis are stated in the 1916 Castes in India, the famous coinage “graded system of sovereignties” takes place in Annihilation of Caste (1936). BAWS 1, 1979b, 72. 9 One must tread carefully here. There is absolutely nothing to show that Ambedkar himself writes a text, for example The Buddha and His Dhamma, anticipating a result already propelled by ‘psychology’. The introduction of The Buddha and His Dhamma is an object-lesson in minimal rigorous thinking so as to start the project of “book of Buddhism” as merely a ‘book of problems’. Without a trace of triumphalism, the introduction mentions the fundamental reasons why extant Buddhism would not persuade an objective reader. See BAWS 11, 1992b. 10 See the section on “Sanghatan” which is not only an organization but a subjective locus of courage, strength, power and its exemplification in Islam, Sikhism (among other congregations). See BAWS 1, 1979b, 55–6. 11 See BAWS 5, 1989b. We take this essay up for the further discussion in the following chapter, “On Conversion: Beyond Protective Discolouration”. 12 For a crucially different view on the Ambedkar–Gandhi choreography, see Nagaraj, 2010. 13 This large assertion, to be rendered concrete, must be elaborated in the light of the mass conversion of 1956 of the untouchables into Buddhism as a mass communicative action in the Ambedkarite sense. ‘Buddhism’ is a new, common emotion shared in the unforeseen act of hazardous ‘communication’, an emotion that earnestly prescribes the creation of a new collective body, in spirit and in letter. A ‘new Buddhism’ is the creation of a perspective on religion as emancipatory literacy on the condition that the hitherto ‘illiterates’ themselves create the new letter of faith—and knowledge.

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2 On Conversion: Beyond Protective Discolouration

The distinctive contribution that B.R. Ambedkar made to the question of conversion, which hitherto had been dominantly presented as a politico-theological question, was to clarify it with a new tool of thought. This tool was a complexly articulated theory of names. I would like to argue that only upon a sufficient appreciation of this theory of names, in all its semiotic, pragmatic and ontological richness, will we be able to grasp its implications for the historical terrain upon which it was effected. Then we may undertake further the more perilous, and surely more urgent, task of moving from Ambedkar on conversion to Ambedkar’s conversion. Such is our limited mandate: to perform the melancholy exercise of internalizing a set of abstractions that make a theory so as to enable the perilous tracking of a threshold, or maybe several sub-thresholds, of decision. From the desolate empire of meaning to the vibrant life of a wound: such is the intelligibility promised to our labours. But surely this was not the case with Ambedkar himself. Nothing was promised— and nothing needed to be promised—to Ambedkar in the

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shape of compensation for his theoretical labours with some sort of historical fulfilment of vital destiny, because at every point Ambedkar’s decisions were as much decisions of thought as decisions of life. In thinking, he was already intervening in the plan of destiny, and in this wounding caesura of thought he was setting up for himself the existential challenge of living without destiny. I think Ambedkar understood this challenge to be one of living a true ‘political’ life—and we can extrapolate from this that all the force of tragedy that invests his life does not essentially dislodge the core of Ambedkar as a political and non-tragic thinker. Let me illustrate. The essay that I am mainly going to read here for the purpose of reporting Ambedkar’s theory of names as a useful perspective on conversion, entitled “Away from the Hindus” (BAWS 5, 1989b, 403–21), has three dimensions. The first internal dimension is an evaluative one which arises from the theoretical expedient: what abstract parameters will the ‘convert’ choose—theological and political—to make her act meaningful and justifiable. The first dimension passes into the second one because the question of justification is posed within a polemical milieu— which means that the test is in lively interaction with a host of interlocutors, some of them hostile and intent on proving the cause of conversion absurd if not damaging. But the third dimension is the most concrete one because it redirects the theoretical gaze and the polemical attitude towards the historical moment of a decision. The theoretical expedient and the polemical fury are only epiphenomena of the declaration by the mahar community at a conference in 1936

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at Bombay that it will henceforth abandon Hinduism and be open to conversion to some other religion (403). Expressed as a formal resolution, this decision is neither theoretical nor polemical; it is concrete and true. In a way everything that follows in Ambedkar’s essay, with its theatre of speculative warfare with the hostile Hindu and analytical contest with the secular sceptic, assume their real place in the light of the affirmation of the mahar decision. This decision is not sunk into the solitary interiority of any one individual, even if that interiority were as fabulous as Ambedkar’s own. Rather it issues from the popular solitude of the mahar who lives in the clamorous world seeking a minimum access to other forms of speech, body, thought and being.1 This amounts to saying that Ambedkar’s essay, at every point, affirms the affirmation of mahars who seek a new form of the world in the world. 2 I realize that the above has a ring of emancipatory dogma to it and anticipates the ontological horizon of conversion which, methodologically speaking, should be reserved for a later stage of the unfolding of the argument. However, I readily commit this infraction to distinguish the specialist’s limited scope of analytic rigour and synthetic judgment—in that order—from Ambedkar’s situation of theory. Like any situation, Ambedkar’s theory is plunged in syntheses of forces, one of which could well be a unilateral, undemonstrated, ‘natural-axiomatic’ emancipatory force. In other words, it is no mere utopia for which I deliberately let loose my ‘scientific’ reins but for the force which the specialist must recognize as irreducible and yet acknowledge as the ‘milieu’ which perpetually precedes the separation of thought

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and act, theory and application. In terms of the historical reference mentioned earlier, we must not—in our reading— intervene in, nor must we ever neglect, the historical fact that even as a ‘theory of conversion’ was on its way, whether created by philosophers, theologians or by a thinker without destiny like Ambedkar, there was always already conversion.3 Before we read relevant sections from “Away from the Hindus”, I am obliged to make a clarification. Lest I be misunderstood to privilege the greater materiality of Ambedkar’s situation over the so-called specialist’s dull and neutral ‘discipline’, I must state that specialization is the specialist’s situation. Indeed, the material specificity of specialization doesn’t exhaust the ‘person’ of the specialist— and she could well be swept up by ‘other’ passions, more popular, more solitary, more enigmatic combinations of both. My intention in the above was to suggest that the specialist occupies an interesting but narrow precipice separating the materiality of a ‘milieu’ from the objectivity of a ‘form’.4 And by the dull—but sacred!—duty of the specialist, she must insist on the separation, while also being the still wind, the connecting tissue, the sacrificial mediator keeping the two zones in disparate contact. A Reading of “Away from the Hindus” in Six Parts

Milieu This essay—a chapter in the posthumously published Untouchables or the Children of India’s Ghetto (BAWS 5, 1989b)—begins with a reference to the Mahar Conference in Bombay in May 1936 when it was resolved that “one way

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to solve the problem of the Untouchables is for them to abandon Hinduism and be converted to some other religion” (403). This conference had been preceded by Ambedkar’s announcement on 13 October 1935 at Yeola, near Nasik, where he said: “I had the misfortune of being born with the stigma of an Untouchable. However, it is not my fault; but I will not die a Hindu, for this is in my power” (Zelliot, 2013, 147–56).5 Which was followed by the invitation for the presidential address at the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal’s annual conference in Lahore in 1936, and the subsequent cancellation of Ambedkar’s address because of his declaration of leaving Hinduism. This address, published as the classic text Annihilation of Caste, drew criticism from Gandhi to which Ambedkar replied—we know this too (BAWS 1, 1979b). In the present reading, however, I will keep to the letter of the essay/chapter “Away from the Hindus”. Ambedkar starts out by talking of the Bombay conference but he narrates this as a proof of the untouchable’s capacity to deliberate, think and reach a decision to abandon Hinduism. What is the nature of such a decision? Clearly this is not a decision to convert. It opens up the possibility of a future conversion in the most undetermined way by determining to abandon Hinduism. Hence the strangely indeterminate yet highly determined use of the word “away” in the title. It is as if everything is distributed between the modalities of abandonment, a future conversion and the continuous life—which is also an infinite horizon—of ‘being away’ from that which has been abandoned. It is the ceaseless abandoning of that which is

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abandoned, the continuous revocation of what has been revoked (Agamben, 2005a, 22–5). As a contiguous milieu of Ambedkar’s texts, it is an infinite ‘deciding’ of what has been decided that characterizes the historical vigilance of the mahars and the untouchables; it is as much their revolutionary ‘virtuality’. But this is exactly the point at which we must arrest our reading to say that Ambedkar’s stakes are not merely in the generalized emancipation of a ‘virtuality’ or a ‘capacity’ but in the actual intervention that the untouchable-mahar decision creates in the fabric of historical being. At the same time he will not overstep the very caesura that the ‘abandoning decision’ produces in history. He will not anticipate the conjuncture of 1956 when the material of a milieu and the objectivity of a form will be fused in the decision to become Buddhist and to write the book of this fusion—The Buddha and His Dhamma.6 I think at the time Ambedkar is writing “Away from the Hindus”, he utilizes the time of the caesura to ‘convert’ it into the tool of thought which is theory. A whole series of theoretical virtualities to syncopate with the tremendous affirmation on behalf of the mahar-untouchables of a hollowed-out, empty time: such is Ambedkar’s contribution in “Away from the Hindus”, a concise, lucid and interesting development of a theory of names. Name In a way I suggest we read the chapter backwards. Upon a thesis on the ‘event of the new name’ that marks conversion, we confront the demand of the new name to be incorporated

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into a commensurately new collective body. Such a collective body solicits the inner rational structure which Ambedkar calls “kinship” that the untouchables seek to enter into.7 Only when this kind of a ‘thinkable form’ is accessible to us, can we rise to the level of an ontology which prescribes universalization and equalization of ‘life-values’ that every human institution, including (and specially) religion, must follow. As a post-script to this inverted architectonic, we can extract from Ambedkar a kind of calculus of ‘moral use’ of religion and only such use justifies religious belonging— neither theology nor ritual practices, not even the passion and pulsation of faith. I speak of an inverted architectonic because in Ambedkar’s own construction, the ontological prescription comes first. It is a prescription towards fundamental equality which is applied to ‘life’ and the ‘value’ which is produced out of this contact. That is, Being . Life = Value (where Being touches and multiplies Life, Value results). Religion must universalize this ‘value’ to be acceptable and promissory. Then he employs a good amount of anthropological material to propose an internal structure for the ‘form’ of this universalization. This structure is pivotally dependent on the element of kinship, with the extraordinary twist that that kinship whose model is the ‘natural’ family, in the case of conversion, must be the unforeseen knot that ties together in a non-natural, non-descensional way the Stranger, which the untouchable has been forced to become, to strangers who arrive with unforeseen communities.8 Only when Ambedkar has imagined such a sequence of untyings and re-tyings of

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bodies and forms does he come to the extremely localized and singular operation of the giving and taking of new names. My contention is that this concrete localized operation, over all its analytic and synthetic dimensions, doesn’t ever cease to gaze out at the non-localizable, yet indubitably real, ‘scene’ of the encounter between the Stranger and the strangers. Now let us go through the stages of the operation of the name. The first stage consists of Ambedkar’s hard-headed, even dry, rebuttal of the exalted attitude that views the name as a dispensable externality—a view expressed in Shakespeare’s poetry (“a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…”) (BAWS 5, 1989b, 419). But it is the name of the untouchable that stinks! All options of calling the untouchable by another name are foreclosed by the historico-social violence of imposing a ‘generic name’—untouchable— which collapses all particulars, all the jati names, into its stinking generality. This is of course the eventual material criticism of the Shakespearean aristocracy of unbound fragrances; it is also the essence of Ambedkar’s refutation of Gandhi’s inflexible insistence on “change of heart” as the guidepost of true converts. Neither the smell nor the heart of a rose, neither its melody nor its gospel is the real issue for Ambedkar.9 The real of the question of conversion arises from the material effects of the apparent generic neutrality of a name—“untouchable”. The name’s ‘incorporeal body’, which is incorporated into the sensorium of the world as a stink and an ignominy, gives the lie to its neutral form.10 Ambedkar’s accompanying move in the operation of the name is methodological, but with tremendous

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critical implications. A name is a “symbol” standing for a common platform that gathers varied particular instances and saves the subject “examination” of the singular case (419). This pragmatic economizer when returned to real history is revealed to be a mask, a pseudo-common name, the caste name as it were. The caste name masks the actual fragmented dispersion of “unsocial” individuals. Hindu society is in actuality a (non)society, in which caste names mark and mask as immemorially given forms of conviviality, kinship and law. But the really demystifying implication of Ambedkar’s pragmatic point is that the denominalist practice of untouchability, wearing the simpler mask of the “common name” (159) and the more inscrutable and ‘neutral’ one (a Noh mask as it were) of the ‘generic name’ is a singular case of historical usurpation of bodies, peoples and names. The caste-abduction of the anthropological performativity of names that are channelized through lines of kinship is a historical singularity. For instance, a particular caste whose name emerges in certain determinate circumstances is rendered immemorial by the power which the name exerts across history and eventually at the level of pure mythology. Every jati name is equally a mythical name. So long as Hindu (non)society refuses to recognize the logic of this historical singularity behind the (iron) curtain of a so-called ‘common name’ (which, according to Ambedkar, is also an endogamous closure), it is up to the untouchable’s own actual intervention into its historical arrest to free this logic and make the counter-move of an ‘other’ name. One counter-move the untouchables make is the move

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of “protective discoloration”. Illustrating this, Ambedkar writes: “There is a general attempt to call themselves by some name other than the ‘Untouchables’. The Chamars call themselves Ravidas or Jatavas. The Doms call themselves Shilpakars. The Pariahs call themselves Adi-Dravidas, the Madigas call themselves Arundhatyas, the Mahars call themselves Chokhamela or Somavamshi and the Bhangis call themselves Balmikis. All of them if away from their localities would call themselves Christians” (419). Following this extraordinary scenario where historical actuality is pregnant with the scandal of a new genericity (which Christian stands for in the citation and I will explain), Ambedkar writes, “The Untouchables know that if they call themselves Untouchables they will at once draw the Hindu out and expose themselves to his wrath and his prejudice. That is why they give themselves other names which may be likened to the process of undergoing protective discoloration” (419). Everything in the above is concentrated in the localization and manifestation of the name. What space of belonging does a name attest, what mode of being does it manifest? Localization and manifestation are the two features that account for names as operators of discernibility. But the terrible paradox is that the Untouchable is too discernible, belongs too much to Hindu (non)society, is too manifest in her mode of being whose colours are as degraded as they are vivid.11 Hence the search for camouflage like that of a threatened creature exposed to predation, the search for “protective discoloration” of Being endangered by Recognition so as to become indiscernible. Against the great

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subaltern narratives of ‘other’ names of history, other depths of belonging and modes of discernment, Ambedkar reads “Ravidas”, “Shilpakars”, “Chokhamela”, “Balmiki” etc as products of tactical decisions made by individuals and communities under the pressure of circumstances and conditioned by their immanent demands.12 Ideally if the chain of conditions—which means the state of belonging to Hindu (non)society—could be broken, the untouchables would truly have gotten away, decisively escaped to that zero degree of localization from where a new generic name can be decided and adopted. Ambedkar calls this name “Christian”. This is the point at which we come upon a most interesting problem in Ambedkar’s theoretical proposals. How can a generic concept or a generic name repeat a historically particular signifier without itself becoming particular? How can “Christian” be both historically particular and generically unforeseen in its newness? Isn’t the explanation of a particular religion with a sociological and theological influence in colonial history promising “happiness” upon conversion to be taken seriously?13 Of course it is to be taken seriously and in the period between 1935 and 1956, Ambedkar’s search for “happiness” led him to religions (including Christianity) for their theological, political, even their aesthetic promise. However, this available purchase on cultural-historical terrain shouldn’t prevent us from going back and paying attention to the “away” of “away from the Hindus” or “away from their locality”. It seems to me that the ultimate aim of “getting away”, which I have called a zero-degree localization, also has a crucial subjective side.

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The subjective aim is the untouchable accomplishing a state of radical disinterest in Hinduism. It is not enough to engage with its evils and anathemas; one must push the logic of anathema to its conclusion, which is to produce a subjective rupture with the inherited ‘Hindu’ situation.14 Ambedkar doesn’t flinch from asserting the ‘negative’ demand in many a delicate historical situation (the temple entry question of the 1930s, for example) that the untouchables, as a class, do not play into the game—which is also to not submit to a destinal blackmail—of identifying their rights with their ‘corrected’ status within Hinduism. To not play into the axiom of ‘belonging’, for better or for worse, to Hinduism, which effectively means to the closure of a name. That is the reason why the untouchable must subjectively separate from Hinduism, not merely through revolt (for that too is engagement), but through a withdrawal of interest from the ‘eros’ of the Hindu. That is why when D.R. Nagaraj, who, following Gandhi, says that the untouchable and the privileged caste must complement each other in a mutual conversion, is wrong. For he assumes that the untouchable is as much interested in maintaining the Hindu order as the brahminical castes, even if in a reformed fashion. This is not axiomatically necessary or a matter of cultural destiny (Nagaraj, 2010, 21–60). This is the subjective ‘mutuum’15 that precisely conserves the speculative value of the so-called ‘totality’ which is Hinduism, in the ‘heart’ of the uppercaste as much as of the untouchable. Hence the heart is already codified and no conversion beyond the measure of the ‘mutuum’, a conversion that produces dis-interest and

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‘acedia’16 in the heart vis-à-vis Hinduism, is possible. So no conversion is truly possible, QED. The “Christian” in “… call themselves Christians” corresponds to this zero-degree belonging and localization in the form of a particular historical cipher of a generic possibility. “Christian” is a generic particular which only indicates in the situation of the Untouchable—and the situation of Hindu (non)society too—the emergence of a new possibility of ‘becoming indiscernible’ that is not the tactical attenuation and camouflage of “protective discoloration”. “Christian” is a kind of historico-fictive signifier of an event ‘on its way’, an event to come. So the question of philosophical logic is, does Christianity stand as a name for an event to come, which will also be, in this emancipatory cascade, a name that is much truer and consummated in the ‘acts’ of conversion? In other words, is conversion an affair of the name? Is the event nominalist? Body, Being, Thought, Use: Four Reasons Why the Event of the Name is not Nominalist

Why does “protective discoloration” fail as a tactic of indiscernment of the untouchable? Because the untouchable is “run down to earth and made to disclose that he is an Untouchable” (BAWS 5, 1989b, 420) by the Hindu with the relentless application of the law of caste name as inflexible “locality”. Neither the nominal “Hindu” nor the historical improvisations (“Balmiki”, “Adi-dravida”, “Chokhamela” etc) will do—the Hindu wants to touch the body of the caste name, he wants to touch the untouchable with a desperate epistemic

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urgency that behoves the obsessive, even, paranoid lover. What is at stake in the physical exclusion of untouchables to the point of proscription of even their shadows is the ‘making present’ of the untouchable’s incorporeal locality—the desperate stakes of codifying through the caste-name all the ‘virtualities’ of the untouchable’s body. In these virtualities lie as much the infinite serviceability of the ‘shudra’ of the Manusmriti (without resentment) as the habitual degradation of the “antyaja”.17 It is precisely to this obsessive and exhaustive suction into presence and discernment by name that the untouchable must oppose an exclusion from presenceby-exclusion. Ambedkar says that the method of protective discoloration will not serve the above purpose. But it seems to me Ambedkar also says that the formal appropriation of a historical particular name as a generic possibility (“Christian” for instance) is too formal a solution to the problem. Indeed the solution is “conversion” but not understood as merely a nominalist upsurge. “The name matters… the name can make a revolution in the status of the Untouchables… the name must be the name of a community outside Hinduism and beyond its power… Such a name can be the property of the Untouchable only if they undergo religious conversion. A conversion by change of name within Hinduism is a clandestine conversion which can be of no avail” (420). We see clearly the equally great investments in the decision unto a new name and the conditions that will make the name work—or not work. However these conditions aren’t simply extra-nominal. The real struggle of the untouchable to find a ‘proper’ name (“property of the Untouchables”) is to find the

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proper name of a collectivity whose singular dilemma is how to become indiscernible with respect to the “common name” (caste name) that localizes this collectivity. The proper name then must have the negative advantage of rendering the untouchable indiscernible to the Hindu and the positive content of being the affirmation of this very indiscernibility and singular collectivity. It is pertaining to this struggle and dilemma that Ambedkar’s theory of names must be rejoined to his proposals on liberatory “kinships”. Earlier in the essay Ambedkar distinguishes between kinship and citizenship. The latter seems to have a more stable, even static, definition. All it involves is an allegiance to the state and, one might speculate, to a ‘name’. This name will admittedly enjoy a kind of ‘national’ content that must compensate for its thinness with a political intensity that invests such nomination/avowal of name conjuncturally. “Kinship” is more complex because it involves the binding of bodies that forms community and the simultaneous transmission of kinship names through the capillaries of these ‘bound’ and ‘networked’ bodies. “Kinship” then is both a real entanglement and a formal schema. And, Ambedkar shows that its complexity is a function of historical evolution (416). The fascinating interest of all these definitions and proposals is that Ambedkar’s essay is oriented to ways of escaping bonds of kinship, and modes of dissolution of communal bodies. This orientation is only possible for the thinker ‘without destiny’, which includes the destiny of anthropological theories. Beyond these theories, Ambedkar asks for a theory of kinship with ‘others’ which

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clearly requires the ontological awareness of two orders of otherness: one, the encounter that makes the other ‘comeinto-existence’; and two, the otherness that hollows out a portion of existence from the assured continuum of a self in the mode of a ruptural event. The point is both orders affect bodies and their entanglement. An encounter mobilizes and metamorphoses bodies; while the ruptural event produces a body, a peculiar one which is hollow and intensely shimmering at the same time. Everything that Ambedkar proposes towards kinship with ‘others’ concerns both a new mode of ‘entanglement’ (or congregation) between the Stranger, who is relentlessly ‘away’, strangers who are ceaselessly ‘on their way’, and a zero-degree body, a hollow of no discernible corporeal properties. I will not deny that Ambedkar’s writings resist the mark and shimmering of the hollow that necessarily accompanies the zero-point of the decision to convert, and in a way enthuses (a kind of logical enthusiasm) over the new anthropological scenario of originals and converts congregating, inter-dining, intermarrying, upon conversion. Such a mark (of the hollow) paradoxically ruins (a bit) the perfect indiscernibility of a ‘new situation’. And yet in the epic passion of his own search for the religion to convert to, Ambedkar seems to repeatedly revisit the ‘scene’ of the hollow wherein the “away” and the “on its way”, the decision “not to die a Hindu” and the decision to live a new life communicate palpably but anonymously.18 In simple words, Ambedkar knows that there is a name to be rejected, a name to be converted to, adopted and avowed – but there is no name of the event of this conversion.

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No doubt despite his keen ontological sense of the inscrutability of decision, Ambedkar resists its ‘philosophy’ (in favour of a philosophy of a rational religion, which we will come to) because he doesn’t want the real collective and public movement of conversion by thousands of untouchables to appear merely subjective and contingent. He doesn’t want the deafening mouthpieces of history to keep reciting to later generations the condescending verdict of understandable, even justifiable, thoughtlessness of the movement of conversion. He wants to give it an affirmative thought-content and indeed the name is the primary vehicle of this effort. Towards the end of his life in 1956 such a name will have indeed been incorporated—a dalit-Buddhist history will have taken off.19 But at the time of “Away from the Hindus”, things are a bit “airy” (in Ambedkar’s words20) and the time of theoretical abstraction is also a time of waiting. It is during the time of this other Shakespearean passion (Ambedkar’s, Hamlet’s, why not!), that an abstract thinkable form of commensuration between ontology and religion might be presented. In 1956, with the The Buddha and His Dhamma it is not unreasonable to claim a fusion of ontology, Buddhist theology and collective politics. Though I must say the picture is vindicated only when we add to the fusion the act of fusion itself, which is Ambedkar’s “Bible of Buddhism”. I will go to the extent of saying that this act is the precipitation of a new letter of collective politics—what we can call today the politics of dalit literacy as the creation of a body/letter of being against the caste-name of a pseudo-being. But in

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“Away from the Hindus” the separation of theology and politics is stark. There is no religious ontology in Ambedkar. Religion is the considered application of certain key ontological prescriptions. These prescriptions are egalitarian and anonymously universal. All talk of secular ‘enlightened, ‘liberal-European’ universalism is going in the wrong direction. The theory is that religion brings the institution of a name to these anonymous prescriptions. So the question is: which are the religions compatible with these prescriptions? The important thing here is not to give an empirically specific answer ‘in Ambedkar’s case…’ but to state the striking hierarchy between the primacy of the ontological prescription and the partisan result that a certain religion fits/ follows the prescription(s) most adequately. Thus, there is no religious equality so to speak; because equality is not a matter of institutions, it is a matter of being. Now it wouldn’t be out of order for someone to point out that Ambedkar seems to base his ‘fundamental’ equality on some sort of an anthropological duality of peoples who value ‘life’ as the vital terrain of equal and shared existence, and those who don’t. Isn’t that an anthropologically guided ‘substantive’ ontology rather than a generic one? Isn’t Ambedkar looking for a kind of vitalist kinship that some religions institute, and which comes as a formal substitute for bonds of blood? But a careful reading shows that even the life-value parameter is only a ‘primitive’ anthropological one; what really is operative in the ‘modern’ cusp of the untouchable’s decision to convert is the rational criterion by which the institution of religion will encode and

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consolidate the subjective obligation (“the duty of the perfect obligation”) as a nodal movement of communal existence.21 The untouchable must convert to that religion which will grant her the right to be obliged to participate in a kinship whose analogical schemas might be blood and life but whose updated thinkable content is the pure form of the duty itself. This is clearly the blueprint of an Ambedkarite Kantianism except for the fact that Ambedkar never ceases to re-insert the “airy” formalities of theory into the material milieu of both physical and incorporeal and spiritual ‘use’. The religious name to which the untouchable will convert ‘nominally’ pre-exists the ontological—and incorporeal-material—rupture of decision but it is only the decision which makes the name manifest, in that sense, creates it. To be manifest is the gift of existence that an event makes to the name. My concluding thesis is that the manifest name to which an untouchable will have converted irrevocably bears the singularity of the conversion, which itself is anonymous. The anonymous singularity, however is not a negative perpetuity, something dark and lacking like a spectre from the dalit’s untouchable past; it is the power of affirming a potentiality of the name which then will have made a particular religious name—‘Christian’, ‘Buddhist’ etc.—into a generic, or in Ambedkar’s words, ‘universal’ institution. But because this generic/universal potentiality is the post-decisional/conversional life of the decision itself, the institution it inaugurates is an anonymous one. Religion, which is the partisan result of a rigorous and passionate collective investigation into the ‘milieu’ of history from

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which a ‘religious’ name to convert to must be extracted, is the ‘neo-institution’ of a name, or the institution of a neo-name. A neo-name is not an unknown new name one invents; it is the unknown in the known names, the new in the historical roster of names one extracts as a generic particular ‘neo-name’. However, the creative affirmation of the neo-name is not isolated from the ‘uses’ of that name in multiple contexts—which are not monotonously religious. The ‘uses’ of a religious name also keep the political, the social and even the aesthetic contexts inseparate from the ‘milieu’ of religion understood as a double institution: the institution of nominative and normative declarations (from the name to the “duty of perfect obligation”) and the institution of a ‘popular’ singularity whose proper name is something like a generic anonym.22 It seems to me that Ambedkar teaches us with his elegant and ‘airy’ pedagogy of the name in “Away from the Hindus” how conversion is the use of names that is neither nominalist nor hermeneutic. To end on a polemical and negative note, Ambedkar’s so-called pragmatism was not a nominalism and his thoughts on religion didn’t indulge in the mediocre pieties of hermeneutic philosophies—and philologies—of tradition. But to end like this is all right and in the spirit of things because after all Ambedkar’s theoretical and ‘airy’ discourse was nothing if not an urgent demand of liberation from the most polemical, negative and true exigency that could present itself—the exigency of the name “un-touchable”. A name which unfortunately—and mercifully—Shakespeare will not have smelt.

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NOTES 1 For the pioneering focus on the Mahar movement as formative of and not function of Ambedkar’s public philosophy, see Zelliot, 2

3

4

5

2013. Zelliot quotes from the 1935 Yeola Conference resolution on the possibility of “another society in Hindustan”. In an essential sense Ambedkar’s theoretical quest is to find the lineaments of a structure of emancipatory thinking that serves the question, which is also a motto: “Is another society in Hindustan possible?” Paradoxically the quest as much involves the de-constitution of all those structural features that are taken for granted in the speculative constitution of a “Hindustan”. The Hindus, then, like the other two estates in pre-1789 French Society, are dispensable in constructing the new idea of the ‘Hindustan-world’ (150). That is why in the larger scheme of things, Ambedkar’s relatively compressed, almost rarefied, (we will talk of his adjective “airy”) theoretical essay is always accompanied by ‘historical’ writings of a freer amplitude which throw up ‘examples’ of conversion unmoored from any necessary theoretical anchor. See BAWS 5, 1989c. We could, metaphorically perhaps, speak of ‘milieu’ as an ethological idea in the image of ‘thought’ as an ‘animal’ which adapts, camouflages, metamorphoses—and collapses—in interaction with an ‘environment’ which itself is not stable and has a plastic conduct in relation to all the ‘animals’ that populate it. The ‘objectivity’ of a form seems to pretend repose that is beyond animal restlessness and historico-environmental plasticity, a repose thus beyond the pressures of a metaphor. For a succinct and vivid account of Ambedkar’s speech, the mass participation of the untouchables in Yeola, Gandhi’s role in the temple-entry campaign of that time, his reaction to the Yeola resolution(s) and Ambedkar’s own generalizations towards a ‘pro-

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gramme’ of future conversion, towards an oriented philosophy of religion, see Zelliot, 2013, 147–56. 6 We will offer some speculations of the notion of the Book in Ambedkar towards the end of this essay but it might be pointed out here that in the piece “Buddha or Karl Marx?” Ambedkar indicates the line of his interest: it is not to speculate on the origins of the universe, through religious or social philosophy, but to reconstruct the world. The interesting point is that the ‘book’ which prescribes and charts out the path and programme of this reconstruction is part of that very reconstruction. The ‘book’ is a mirror of the world in the world; so a shattering and remaking of the world involves the same processes for the ‘book’—while reduplicating the same. Is it possible? In the 1950s Ambedkar will suggest that Buddha’s way of ‘acting’ was more suitable than Marx’s (as well as the French Republican Thinkers’) theoretical prescriptions. And he, Ambedkar, was in a way writing the ‘book’ of conduct and disposition for his ‘moment’ which was nevertheless theoretically consistent. How to make theory immanent to conduct such that the latter was voluntarily ‘disposed’ to right theory? For the possibility of a new thinking of the ‘book’ (or Book) in this light see BAWS 3, 1987b. 7 “How can they [the Untouchables] end their social isolation? The one and the only way to end their social isolation is for the Untouchables to establish kinship with and get themselves incorporated into another community which is free from the spirit of caste. The answer is quite simple and yet not many will readily accept its validity. The reason is, very few people realize the value and significance of kinship” (BAWS 5, 1989b, 413). 8 Following from anthropological citations from Robertson Smith among others, the figure of the “stranger” is counter-posed to participants in “fellowship” that make a ‘family’ only as an analogy with the parental descensional structure. Hence Ambedkar’s meaning of ‘kinship’ is not anthropological but ‘conversional’ or

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occurential/eventative. One ‘converts’ to a kinship, which is not founded on anthropological primitives—that is why the notion of “stranger” also becomes equivocal because the conversional fellowship is, and must be, a fellowship with strangers as strangers (417). 9 Ambedkar invokes, with a scepticism whose intensity corresponds to that of the metaphor in question, Gandhi’s metaphor that the true gospel of Jesus Christ (or any other ‘stranger’ divinity…) is like the gospel of the “rose” whose fragrance doesn’t require the ‘act’ of conversion to spread (BAWS 9, 1991a). 10 It seems to me that there’s an urgent task at hand, which is to write of a ‘history of the senses’ that composes and re-composes elements such as material occupation, caste experience and affect, to create a ‘domain’ for the constitution of a ‘dalit’ subject. A vivid example of this is the ‘leather-worker’ who is composed out of jati and varna, and is modulated by the experience of migration. This might be fruitfully seen as a history of incorporations of ‘incorporeal bodies’ that caste names are in the sensorium of the world. I am grateful to Rajarshi Dasgupta for having brought this invaluable point to my notice. 11 The term varna and its possible meaning, connoting colour, and its relation to the notion of protective discoloration might be a fascinating line of enquiry. 12 In a way we could say that Ambedkar never ceases to try to analytically—and ontologically, when the event arises—grip the subalternity of circumstances whose real presence doesn’t come to be visible in the dominant brahminical analysis of the present. But that presence is still in the present—and Ambedkar prefers to analyse its exigency rather than evoke, under its guise, ‘absent’ subaltern names of history. 13 In his chapter, “Christianizing the Untouchable” (BAWS 5, 1989c), Ambedkar records several key moments of the history of Christianity and Christianization in India. Is the account held togeth-

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er by the ‘unhappy outcastes’? Surely not theologically because Christian happiness is not of this world and predicated on salvation-history. But the interesting point is how in the history of conversion and so-called Christianization, theology and its dogmas adjust according to the ‘tactical’ evaluation of particular conditions needed to ‘provide’ happiness in this world. So the evaluation goes both in the directions of who needs happiness and who is capable of it. So according to the latter (the Italian Jesuit missionary Roberto De Nobili’s example of the seventeenth century is mentioned) the brahmin is more suited to Christianity while the Christian mission must also adjust to the conditions of the brahmins’ ‘happiness’. However in the case of the untouchable, the question of happiness is fundamental and goes beyond the particular historical conditions which precisely don’t allow that question to be raised. Jotirao Phule understood this as did Ambedkar—in our times Arundhati Roy once said that the “poor” take the question of happiness very seriously. This seems to mean something fundamental, ‘generic’—irrespective of their difference of signification, the poor and the untouchable, inseparable from particular historical conditions yet beyond them, raise the question of happiness unconditionally. Which religion’s evaluation will be equal to this announcement—that seems to be Ambedkar’s own evaluative enquiry on conversion of the untouchable in this world. See also Zelliot, 2013, 147–56. 14 In the chapter “Gandhism” Ambedkar points out that Gandhi, even at his critical best (or worst) treats caste as “anachronism” not “anathema” (BAWS 9, 1991e.) I have drawn out some philosophical implications of this diagnosis for our times in the third chapter, “Anathema and Anachronism: A Contemporary Utilization of Ambedkar’s Critique of Gandhism”. 15 The reason to use this somewhat exotic Latin word from ancient Roman history in this context is that the word “mutuum” expresses mutuality, relationality, even cooperation through the con-

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straint of a debt-relation. Mutuum refers to the provision of being able to pay in instalments in ancient Roman society where there was tremendous crisis of paying back huge debts to creditors who punished their debtor with torture and death. The authorities eased the situation by allowing the debtors to pay instalment, and this was called an arrangement of mutuum. This relation and its cooperative basis is not in opposition to unilateral capture of one party by another (nexum) but in attenuation of this capture to sustain a relation of power and dependence over time. In Ambedkar’s view, it seems to me, the “mutuum” would indicate the true asymmetry in the tactic of ‘mutuality’ when enforcing the fundamental Hindu ‘capture’—a capture by ‘instalments’ to extend the debt analogy. In D.R. Nagaraj’s essay (2010, 21–60), while definitely sensitive to this asymmetry, is also definitely drawn to the idea of mutuality as an ethos of mutual transformation. It is not only a question of the ‘parties’ to the Hindu social pact, it is as much the mutual historico-spiritual transformation of such figures as Ambedkar and Gandhi, according to Nagaraj. Sensitive yet speculatively sentimental, Nagaraj’s approach understandably has great appeal. It still neglects the fact that what Ambedkar calls “Gandhism” imposes a collective debt on Hindu (Indian) Society which is so attenuated that it extends from Gandhi’s own time to a kind of permanent Indian future. For “nexum” and “mutuum”, see Dumézil, 1988. 16 This is another ‘strange’ word—meaning sloth, remoteness and apathy—taken from Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, a strange book if any. The reason again is to proliferate a certain strangeness in circuits of mutual ‘belonging’ (Benjamin, 1998). 17 I have acknowledged elsewhere, as I do here, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay’s sharp pointer towards the issue of translation of the Manusmriti into English. How to translate, for example, the word ‘anusuya’, “without malice”, “without resentment”, etc? Here I

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will risk the speculative equation between the shudra’s infinite serviceability and the post-Taylorist figure of the infinitely flexible ‘knowledge-worker’ in the history of capitalism, so well brought out—among others—by the Italian Marxist philosopher Paolo Virno. I hope to develop this equation in a more concrete way in a separate investigation. 18 It can be seen from widely varied testimonies that each categorical name, including SC/ST, untouchable, Harijan, even dalit, is considered a wound of identity that would ideally close up and disappear into the smooth texture of an uninterrupted social body. Yet no one is ingenuous (or credulous, as belief is not a function of disingenuity/insincerity) enough to believe that a social body can ever be or have an ‘absolute’, unconditional givenness. The status of ‘absolute’ rather must be granted that moment of ‘decision’ in history when the wound of identity is both avowed and annulled in the same move. This is the move of an ‘anonymous’ absolute whose equivocal status yields both relentless identity politics and radical hollowing out of the stakes in social reproduction. In any case even in the most acute memorialization of identity what is involved is the memory of the ‘incorporation’ of the wound itself, of the hollow which voids the givenness of society. In Ambedkar we find as much the enormous suffering of the wound as the revolutionary historical ‘sense’ that the people wounded are already becoming some ‘other’ people, strangers and kins-people of another kind of ‘body’. 19 The hypothesis here, which needs to be scrupulously and courageously developed, is that Ambedkar’s book The Buddha and His Dhamma (BAWS 11, 1992b) is the creation of a new body, a body of the Letter or the Alphabet which encodes partially—with a tremendous quantum of historical indeterminacy remaining— the new collective movement of conversion. But as a Letter, The Buddha and His Dhamma incorporates the ‘intellectuality’ of the so-called lower castes that is also the emerging ‘element’ of eman-

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cipatory knowledge before being a revised theology of Buddhism. Ambedkar’s well-known statement of intention that he wanted to write the Bible of Buddhism must be understood as the desire to create a new body of the Letter among a tumultuous emerging congregation of new bodies and forms. Thus the equation: The Bible=The Book=The Body of the Letter=New Mode of Collective Incorporation of Popular/Dalit Intellectuality. 20 “This discussion on conversion may appear to be somewhat airy. It is bound to be so. It cannot become material unless it is known which religion the Untouchables choose to accept” (BAWS 5, 1989b, 420). 21 I am thankful to Mohinder Singh for having noted the oscillation in my formulation between the Kantian formalism that accompanies a certain communitarianism and my own partisan favour for a ‘communal’ composition of bodies and milieus. How much does it affect the truth of Ambedkar in my reading? Probably a decisive amount but I must carry out my wager at this stage for “the duty of perfect obligation” (417). It is interesting that Ambedkar’s citation from Robertson Smith’s account of the Old Testament Fellowship should have a formal-Kantian orientation. This is not the place to dwell on the matter but there is an engaging literature on the Old Testament Commandments of ethical duty perfectly corresponding to ‘empty’ Kantian imperatives. 22 This coinage is forcing Ambedkar’s elegant theory of names into the cipher of the event of conversion. It is an outrage inspired by Ambedkar himself, and Alain Badiou’s appropriation of Paul Cohen’s mathematical theorems, including the ‘forcing theorem’. These themes are too vast and exact to be taken up here. And unlike the ideas, the names of references can be dispensed with for the moment.

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3 Anathema and Anachronism: Utilizing Ambedkar’s Critique of Gandhism for Our Times

What is to follow will comprise three sections. The first section will disaggregate and discuss some of the key points of B.R. Ambedkar’s critique of M.K. Gandhi’s social and economic philosophy, what Ambedkar calls ‘Gandhism’. Among these points will feature two parameters by which Ambedkar evaluates Gandhi’s level and intensity of response to the caste system. These parameters are expressed by the two words Ambedkar employs: “anathema” and “anachronism”. We will explain the meanings we think Ambedkar wants to impart to these words in the context in which he uses them. This explanation becomes expedient because Ambedkar uses these words summarily, if not elliptically, towards the end of the chapter “Gandhism” from his 1945 book What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables (BAWS 9, 1991a). The second section will partly dislocate the two parameters of Ambedkar’s critique of Gandhism towards what will be called a ‘speculative philology’ of their signifiers (“anathema” and “anachronism”). The philological exercise will be speculative in the sense that it will provide a certain

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conceptual depth to these signifiers using resources extracted from contexts apparently remote from Ambedkar’s own. This exercise will relate the words Ambedkar addresses to the object at hand—Gandhi’s social and economic philosophy in conjunction with Gandhi’s explicit attitudes to the caste system over time, from the 1920s to 1945—with other signifiers and themes that, at least overtly, do not belong to Ambedkar’s object and discourse. One set of such signifiers and themes will come from the domain of philosophy of language, which clearly is not Ambedkar’s preoccupation in “Gandhism”. But the real interest here is in reapplying these lessons to the very context of Ambedkar’s critique. The wager underlying this attempt is the hypothesis that at the core of the critique there exists an elusive yet insistent speculative object. At the level of this unravelling, the critique and the debate between Ambedkar and Gandhi have a pertinence beyond the tumults of their historical emergence. The third and concluding section will suggest a utilization of the possibilities opened up by the first two sections but strictly re-insinuated in the following contemporary context. Suppose we grant that in India, at present, there is a general tendency of social subjects and communities to ‘feel’ what could be roughly called ‘symbolic violence’, and ‘perceive’ threats of such violence from other subjects and communities. The question that then arises is, does such experience of symbolic violence issue from one ‘part’ of the social totality, a part which can be suppressed, recognized, modified, assimilated, and re-symbolized?1 Or does the violence issue from the totality

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itself, which is society in the speculative sense? Conversely is the violence, or threat of violence, felt and perceived by one part of the social assemblage, one which can be numerically identified as ‘minority’ or ‘majority’, and can be evaluated as a part which is either essential or anachronistic? Or, does the violence and its perceived subjective threat arrive at the heart of society itself and open up a caesura, an anxiety, an anathema there? Referring back to the historical moment of Ambedkar’s critique of Gandhism, we can say there exists in this critique a dialectic of localization and universalization of violence. Violence takes place in particular historical sites and at the same time is raised up to the level of the totality of society, a totality that can never be a sentient object of the experience of violence. This dialectic arose from the tumults of Ambedkar’s times and it applies as much to our present situation and provokes our ability to think amidst tumult(s) today. I In Ambedkar’s 1945 book, the chapter “Gandhism” is the last one (BAWS 9, 1991e). It seems to be part of a triad that comprises “A Plea to the Foreigner” (BAWS 9, 1991c) and “What do the Untouchables Say?” (BAWS 9, 1991d). At least three features can be identified as common to these chapters that help recognise their triadic structure. First, they are written with an acute ear to the ground of imminent ‘national independence’ from British sovereignty. This work emerged against the grain of this vertiginous imminence of a new, collective, indigenous sovereignty. In what way? The texts could be said to balance, even contrast, the stakes of

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national independence expressed in something like ‘state sovereignty’, with what Ambedkar called “self-government” (203). In that exercise, these texts clearly questioned the status of a ‘national society’ as the spontaneous subject of a new, imminent sovereignty, and tried to expose such a subject to be an ideological decision, silently naturalized, rather than a well-founded historical reality. Methodologically, this also means that Ambedkar subjected the great—and true, why not!—political enthusiasm of the national movement to a rhythm of social and historical temporality that emanated from deeper, long-standing structures such as caste. This rhythm beats with a seemingly eternal monotony impervious to the immediacy of events in the present. The second point, which unites these three chapters, pertains to the obvious question of identifying the originator of the ideological decision to present a ‘national society’ as the natural protagonist of the political theatre of sovereign struggle. And how did the decision(s) actually produce their alleged effects of mystification on such a massive scale? To these questions, with various addressees in mind, Ambedkar answers with the name “Congress” and its strategy of a crypto-religious or crypto-Hindu majoritarianism. But the point of concentration of Ambedkar’s critique of ‘Congressism’ was not simply to drive deep doubt into the heart of the party’s secular credentials, but also to articulate its violent exclusions, and the silencing of this violence. Again, the articulation of such an exclusion and its silent naturalization, in Ambedkar’s view, resonated both in the immediate register of who gets to vitally express the political

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subjectivity of the national movement as well as in the speculative eternity of logical objects. This can be understood as a question of who enjoys the power of representing the nation and who is considered capable of doing so. Taken at the level of universal human potential, Ambedkar’s question is: who holds “the title deeds to humanity” (269) Thus, in these texts, the ‘untouchable’ was designated as the common name of the exclusion in the time of history, and in the eternity of logical humanity as well.2 But it is the third point of unification that should interest us the most here. This is Ambedkar’s analytical compression of a greater code and ideology than ‘Congressism’. This code subsumes the latter because its power and mystery are its utter self-exposedness to stakes incalculable by historical measures and yet seamlessly flowing into the most granulated particles of historical existence. They raise each particle to the life of eternity and hence express the stakes of truth beyond mere historico-political strategy. The whole purpose of “Gandhism” is to analyze and expose that very mode of self-exposedness that characterizes Gandhi’s technique of truth.3 We wouldn’t be wrong in saying that among the three, the text of “Gandhism” draws the battle-lines most clearly in the overall terrain of Ambedkar’s polemic and logic. The frankness of this polemic is in order because, with the analysis of Gandhism, Ambedkar is dealing with an object which is not any more the duplicitous structure of Congressist secularity. Here, he is confronting an object openly declared to be permanent and beyond the locus of temporal and

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intra-worldly transformation that defines “politics”. Call that object “religion”—as Ambedkar often does—but the word is deceptive. Gandhi’s frankness in uttering the word “religion” (at least in the English language) intends both speculative and historical effectiveness. In this way, he uses the word equivocally. For an object to be speculatively effective it must enjoy a status beyond historical intelligibility based on material experience (of which politics is an example). At the same time, the entire Gandhian technique is to prescribe a life of worldly, minoritarian, payable spiritual— and material—debt, albeit under the sign of an absolute debt which is unpayable. (I shall deal with this in some detail in the sixth chapter “Ambedkar contra Aristotle: On a Possible Contention about who is Capable of Politics”.) We could say that according to Gandhi the payable part of the debt is “politics”—the part which, under his leadership, the Congress mobilized so exemplarily—and the unpayable, absolute, speculative part is “religion”, of which the caste system is a paradigmatic part.4 The genius of Mr Gandhi is elvish, always and throughout. He has all the precocity of an elf with no little of its outward guise. Like an elf he can never grow up and grow out of the caste ideology. (290)

Doesn’t this superb imagery contradict our claim that Gandhi’s is a technique of truth? Doesn’t it convey dissimulation and disguise rather than the frank exposure of a truth, however contentious? Herein lies the real productivity of the imagery: in likening Gandhi to an elf, Ambedkar brings out the double character of Gandhism such

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that the latter stands as much for an elvish ability to change, transmute, contradict one’s position and appearance in the course of espousing a worldly philosophy, as it does for some fundamental, unverifiable and axiomatic verity beyond the appearance of worlds. At once play-actor, mythical, animal and precocious truth-declarer (or axiomatician), the “genius” of Mr Gandhi is that of a speculative and dogmatic child. This is the psychology that Ambedkar sees enacted in the history of Gandhian positions on “caste ideology” between 1920 and 1945, after which Ambedkar’s tract is written. Simply stated, this is a history, according to Ambedkar, of Gandhi’s movement from wholesale defence of the hereditary caste system to speaking in favour of the varna system instead of caste, and finally in the year 1945, repudiating the caste structure (which includes untouchability) as “anachronism”. But the real force of Ambedkar’s critique is that essentially, in all the frenetic movement and the detailed argumentation rationalizing it, Gandhi stays exactly at the same place. It is with his elvish genius that he is able to produce an appearance of such distinctive change that the very place of the object, that is caste in Hinduism, starts to lose its analytical markers.5 This, according to Ambedkar, is achieved by first moving from caste to varna, which is an occupational economy numerically compressing the multiplicity of caste hierarchy into an arrangement of three/four(?)/five(?) varnas, and subsequently re-collapsing the new arrangement into the erstwhile hereditary black hole.6 However, this violence is accomplished with the airy lightness of the elf, the imp, the

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goblin—and other such delightful speculative equivalents of “Mr Gandhi”. Nevertheless, Ambedkar makes it his job to find the hard ground of these evanescent gestures of inegalitarian conservation. It seems to me that in “Gandhism” Ambedkar finds that ground and measure of egalitarian thinking in economic equality. By that measure he judges Gandhian thought to have no “passion for economic equality” (282). It is as a result of this lack of passion that Gandhism substitutes for economic equality a prescriptive regime of spiritual obligations that ‘corporations’ owe to each other as part of a generalized alternative economy of spiritual or incorporeal debt (282). Nothing, in Ambedkar’s critical view, fits better into this corporate philosophy of debt and obligation than the age-old model of the Hindu caste order. I shall now turn to the difficult but indispensable argument of this critique. The Gandhian doctrine of “spiritual obligations” between corporations is exemplified by his doctrine of trusteeship, wherein wealth is to be trusted in the hands of the rich who are obliged to hold it on behalf of the poor. Ambedkar outlines this Gandhian idea and what it entails: The idea of trusteeship which Gandhism proposes as a panacea by which the moneyed classes will hold their properties in trust for the poor is the most ridiculous part of it. All that one can say about it is that if anybody else had propounded it the author would have been laughed at as a silly fool who had not known the hard realities of life and was deceiving the servile classes by telling them that a little dose of moral rearmament to the propertied classes—those who by their insatiable cupidity and indomitable arrogance have made and will always make this

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world a vale of tears for the toiling millions—will recondition them to such an extent that they will be able to withstand the temptation to misuse the tremendous powers which the class structure gives them over servile classes. (286)

For this doctrine to maintain itself and be unfettered by immanent historical transformations (inevitable in the material world), the status of the totality which encompasses and transcends these corporations must be conserved as unified, coherent and permanent. In being these, the totality itself must not be a corporation and hence must not be confused with any sovereign entity. However, it must also not be open to any fundamental intra-worldly change of status even while the world changes rapidly through the forces of chance, thought and will.7 This, in essence, is Ambedkar’s critique of Gandhi’s status-quoism, which produces a social philosophy of immemorial or hereditary caste, in some form or the other. Yet I would insist that the reason why Ambedkar finds Gandhism “interesting” (304) at all is not because of its dissimulating genius but because of its serious truth-effect. If the Gandhian doctrine of spiritual obligations must underlie the real defence of caste, then these obligations must be truly and subjectively lived in everyday material existence. The conservative power of Gandhi’s defence of caste comes not from overt doctrinal violence but from the proposal that caste, in Hinduism, is the articulation of true transformation of the mere individual—which is the decadent ‘modern’ subject of Western economism—to a caste-subject. This subject, who lives his (or her?) debt

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towards other corporations/subjects as heartfelt obligation individually, and on behalf of the totality which secures, or rather loves, the caste system but is itself not a caste. In the copious citations from Gandhi’s several writings on caste from different historical junctures, “Gandhism” manages to locate an unwavering speculative object—which is what Gandhism essentially is—with intensely damaging trutheffects. Of course nowhere is the damage more evident than when it is vividly brought out in these very citations how the shudra (or the ati-shudra8 or untouchable even more singularly) who is constitutively excluded from the truth of the totality and its highest stakes, contributes by service (without malice or resentment according to the Manusmriti, though no part of Gandhi’s texts cite this) to the welfare of that totality.9 Indeed, the truth becomes derisory when it is argued that the encoded brahminical capacity for learning, from which the shudra is excluded, is a capacity the brahmin holds on behalf of the shudra just like the rich trustee holds wealth on behalf of the poor. Thus from this totality the shudra is included by exclusion.10 According to the true complexity, delicacy and duplicity of Gandhi’s “elvish” philosophy, the shudra can be both excluded from the system of possible transformations that define the caste code (learning, war, trade) and be included in the totality. This totality is not a coded corporation/caste, on whose unmediated behalf the shudra, or the untouchable (more singularly again) can serve all their intermediate caste masters. No surprise then that the untouchables become the direct “children of

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God”, the outcast elves, the speculative children dearest to Gandhi’s heart. II Gandhists may say that what I have stated applies to the old type of Gandhism. There is a new Gandhism, Gandhism without caste. This has reference to the recent statement [in Hindustan Times, 15 April 1945] of Mr. Gandhi that caste is an anachronism. Reformers were naturally gladdened by this declaration of Mr. Gandhi… But is this really a matter of jubilation? Does it change the nature of Gandhism? …Those who are carried away by this recantation of Mr. Gandhi forget two things. In the first place, all that Mr. Gandhi has said is that caste is an anachronism. He does not say it is an evil. He does not say it is anathema. Mr. Gandhi may be taken to be not in favour of caste. But Mr. Gandhi does not say that he is against Varna system. (297)

This verdict comes at the very end of Ambedkar’s painstaking dismantling of Gandhism’s reformist construction of a varna system based on the division, hierarchy and articulation between either varnas (occupational categories) and/ or gunas (innate qualities). We could say, combining our two key phrases from the earlier sections, that Ambedkar wants to dismantle the theory and ideology of ‘reformed’ spiritual corporations, or to use Ambedkar’s own more graphic term, spiritual “gang[s]” (285). This is a crucial invective because Gandhism, in this view, packs together two mutually resistant bundles. It articulates the apparent speculative generosity of avowing spiritual obligations towards other social groups on behalf of the immemorial totality of ‘Hindu’ society (which is also a kind of godly

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society, “Ram Rajya”) and equally recommends the closed, “anti-social” structure of each group’s own immemorial place under the sun, which is what makes each group a “gang”. The contradiction is resolved by a terrible paradox: Gandhism articulates the twisted prescription that each group/corporation/gang must socialize its subject group— the one under it in the hierarchy—into slavish acceptance of the ‘anti-society’ that subjects it (285). Indeed, the more powerful groups have a spiritual obligation to undertake this socialization of the dominated groups—and the process has a simple, ‘modern’ name, which is, the “educat[ion]” of the slaves into enslavement (285). This tautological prescription has its lurid anti-social reflection in the powerful gangs’/ castes’ own socialization. In Ambedkar’s words, “It makes their culture sterile, their art showy, their wealth luminous and their manners fastidious (285).” It is from this perspective that one must evaluate Ambedkar’s dismissal of Gandhi’s so-called “recantation” (297). To say that caste is “anachronism”, that is, a ‘part’ of the totality that has fallen into obsolescence and degenerated into a kind of temporal appendage of another consistent time of society, is to completely ignore the vital coupling of the caste relation and the inconsistent and twisted subjective infrastructure of obligations that supports this relation and is absolutely contemporary with it. According to Ambedkar, this wound of inconsistency at the heart of the logical object that is caste (anti)society can have only one name: “anathema” (297). Before we go on to the ‘speculative philology’ of

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Ambedkar’s parameters it is important to be clear about what is at issue here. It is not as if between 1921 (when Gandhi was writing in Young India and other Gujarati journals about caste) and 1945, when he would have Hindu society rid of hereditary caste, there was no significant change of historical conditions and that Gandhi’s responses did not reflect concrete changes of the reformist programme. What Ambedkar says here, which he also said after the publication of Annihilation of Caste in 1936, is that Gandhi is still not thinking of the logical object that is caste. As long as he is not thinking that, he is also not thinking the logical object that is “society”, of which caste is not only a structural invariant but also the subjective locus of possible transformations that an individual could access as spiritual or corporeal possibilities within the modes of social existence. That is why Gandhi is not able to grasp the explosive (which is Ambedkar’s term again from “Krishna and His Gita”, in BAWS 3, 1987a, 375– 80) potentiality of the untouchables’ limit-position in the differential economy of caste. The untouchable occupies that singular limit of a general space of increasing delimitation of subjective/spiritual possibilities of every caste. She occupies the limit point of a delimitation of relative enslavements, that limit where no one can bear to stay too long.11 And the untouchable class has stayed there for at least two thousand years. Much as Gandhi would like that limit to be dissolved— and for the explosion not to take place—he is powerless to do anything about it until he starts thinking about the anathema of untouchability at the heart of caste.

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Two short exercises in what I have called ‘speculative philology’ somewhat at a distance from the historical tumult of Ambedkar’s critique of Gandhism: a) In the Hellenist Stoic philosophy of language, there occurs an interesting notion that the Greeks expressed by the word lekhton. Lekhton was to be distinguished from the statements of language—sounds, words, propositions, etc.— and the objects linguistic utterances were supposed to refer to. It rather directed attention towards incorporeal events of transformation that language-use effectuated (Deleuze, 1990). So, for instance, if I made the simple assertion, ‘the knife cuts the butter’, apart from the bodies (or corporations) of the world (the knife and the butter) and the acts immediately attributable to bodies (‘cutting’ attributable to the knife, or implicitly, the human agent who uses the knife, the butter which is being cut, etc.), there also comes into the world, with the assertion, a pure ‘cutting-in-itself’ as an incorporeal transformation. This is the lekhton of the utterance, its ‘pure expressed’ that, as if, is an incorporeal body, immaculate and thinkable as such, which gets re-implanted into the world’s pre-existent corporeal bodies in the very movement of its effectuation (so “cutting” as re-attributed to knife, agent, butter, etc.). But once brought into the world and remixed with it to become indiscernible, it could carry on existing as a possible transformation in the form of codes of the world. Or, another example could be the emergence of the word dalit. When we use the subject-form “dalit”, we can construe it in at least three ways: first, “dalit” can mean a subject born of an incorporeal transformation in history but now

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entered into the ‘codes of the world’ such as a constitutional rights-bearing collective. This collective is guaranteed and protected by the law but the law itself emerges out of an event of transformation that happens at the level of new utterances. The utterance ‘all human beings are equal’ was not necessarily justified by earlier social laws but once uttered it produced an incorporeal transformation which is something like the ‘becoming equal of humans’. The law retrospectively provides this event with a juridical framework. Second, “dalit” can mean that incandescent event of transformation that is sought to be extinguished by dominant spiritual corporations. For instance, these corporations would try their best to suppress the force of the utterance ‘all human beings are equal’. Third, it can also mean the struggle to force these corporations to incorporate the new subject as it is the passionate search for a new body of the event itself. So when Ambedkar tries to incorporate the dalit into the totality of existing society, the social corporations, or “gang[s]” (BAWS 9, 1991e, 285) as he would have it, would simply not listen to the utterance of equality; that is, they will not have dalit bodies as equal in their midst. Another illustration from the Ambedkar–Gandhi archives: one of the most ‘explosive’ points of contention between Ambedkar and Gandhi is the one of conversion. We could say that the speculative battle-lines are drawn in the real historical sites of this contention between Ambedkar’s call for the existential openness of pre-coded corporations to the incorporeal event of conversion and Gandhi’s paradoxical

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prescription towards the codification of hearts, where no such incorporeal event of conversion could possibly arise. This is a peculiar situation of the two interlocutors’ seeming to talk past each other, and yet producing striking effects.12 For Gandhi, conversion can never be true in its purported change of being because it is only an external change from corporation to corporation, nominal religion to another, and symbolic form to symbolic form. Real change must pertain to a change of heart—and if the grievance is only regarding an ‘anachronistic’ albeit great wounding part of the totality, then that part can be purified, or the totality can be purified of that part. This is precisely the logic which is built on the silent assumption—axiom—of the immemorial ‘true reality’ of the totality, and any change of heart must already be coded by the demands of this axiom. It is the unique genius of Gandhi’s philosophy to never corporatize the transcendence of the totality and instead to give it the mobility and minority of the elf that travels fluently between the sovereignty of Ram in Ram Rajya and the granulation (or minority) of the ‘swa’ in swarajya. The mobility and alterability of the swa’s (self’s) heart is forever subsumed by the immemorial fixity of Ram’s sovereign power. Hence the Hindu, according to Gandhi, cannot ever say ‘I convert’ with any true hope of expressing an incorporeal change of heart. The Hindu heart, in other words, cannot convert. It seems to me that between 1936, when in Annihilation of Caste Ambedkar declared that it was the last time that he was addressing the public as a Hindu, and his conversion

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to Buddhism twenty years later, his was the duration of the instant of an incorporeal event of transformation, a ‘converting-in-itself’ in intense and canny search of a new spiritual corporation. Indeed, this could be called the duration not of Ambedkar’s minority position but his caesural13 existence that had dared to grow out of the elvish shadow of Gandhi’s speculative totality—–for, as we have seen, Gandhism is precisely the encoding of the majority’s minoritarian programme. So the step beyond the unbearable limit-position of the untouchable was into a caesura, which, unlike the Gandhian totality, marked the passion of a historical existence, through and through, which believed a new immemorial was possible in history; which, when the time came, was unafraid to write a new Book of Buddhism. While this caesural courage drove Ambedkar on, it also made him articulate even more sharply his ‘logical revolt’ against Gandhi’s cathartic (or purificatory) understanding of caste as anachronism; it made him articulate the anathema of caste society as its ‘untouchable’ truth. b) In St Paul’s “Letter to the Romans” (9: 1–3), it is written: “I am speaking the truth in Christ… I have great sorrow and anguish unceasing in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut-off [anathema] from Christ…” (Taubes, 2004, 46). Without making any comparison between Paul’s position in Christianity with Gandhi’s or Ambedkar’s role in Indian history, it is interesting to study the work that the word performs in Paul’s text. Paul clearly exacerbates the function of the anathema beyond its ready roles as scourge and evil into a gesture

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of being itself. Paul would self-anathematize himself as an act of spiritual deprivation of Christ’s love for the sake of Christ’s love. It is a tortuous, involuted gesture of bearing the incorporeal wound of being-anathema on one’s own corporeal body. Granted the difference of the Pauline context (a redemptive and not an annihilative one), doesn’t there, in Ambedkar’s ‘logical revolt’, also lurk an ontological appeal to Gandhi to be the anathema of Hindu (non)society? Be its self-separative truth? Gandhi, despite all the fuss over untouchability, never actually undertook a fast for templeentry for untouchables; neither did he allow egalitarian participation of ‘Harijans’ in the management of the Harijan Sevak Sangh which he explicitly said was the penitential prerogative of the caste Hindus (trusteeship).14 The reason to pose these questions is the following concrete historical exigency: it was the indubitable exigency of that time that real individual and collective bodies, in the ephemeral instance(s) of historical time bear and incorporate the structural permanence of an anathema and not pretend they can dispense with their anachronistic habits of caste. It is also doubtless the case that no one occupied that individual and at once collective place better than Gandhi—Gandhi’s hyper-invested yet ungraspable ‘child-like’ historical body!15 But the logic is inexorable here. If Gandhi was the incorporeal transformation, the event of Indian history at a certain juncture, then by definition the event couldn’t be coded beforehand, and couldn’t be mastered—not even by the master logician of the historical process, B.R. Ambedkar.

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III If the challenge, “Let Gandhi be the annihilation of caste, if he can!” mixed with the appeal, “Because only he can!” was reduced to utter, well-demonstrated scorn, “As far as caste is concerned, he is just not thinking!”, it was on another terrain that Ambedkar could take much better control of an instrument that he himself was to substantially create—the Constitution—with an intensity that is today considered messianic. Ambedkar wanted the constitution in the making by the new Constituent Assembly (after 1947) to inscribe in the world a new incorporeal transformation called “citizenship” (42). He wanted the excluded castes, the untouchables, to be the new incorporeal “citizens” (42). It seems to us that this is Ambedkar’s rigorous desire and he does not want the ‘incorporeal’ of citizenship to be created in the image of a corporation among corporations. In a strange syncopation with Gandhi’s speculative totality, Ambedkar wants the form, or should one say the figura/ persona, of the citizen to be universal and indiscernible. However, unlike Gandhi’s totality, which, in all its subtlety, remains rooted to a kind of hereditary immemorial soil, to an autochthony, Ambedkar is the architect here of a “new immemorial”. How to forge this new immemorial that is the Constitution of India to actualize the goal we have tried to highlight? Simply the document and linguistic statement of the Constitution are not enough. The statement must effectuate the event of an incorporeal transformation, must create an ‘eventative’ body of the citizen. To achieve this truly emancipated political body, according to Ambedkar,

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the Constitution must, briefly but resolutely, undertake the peril of passing through the anathema of society, its structural wound; its universality must be entirely localized to its most fragmented particularity, its most ‘untouchable’ extremity. The brevity of this passage must be measured not only by the external parameter of number of years (ten years of legislative reservation, as was initially proposed) but as much by the coefficient of its intensity. In that sense, the Constitution, for all its universality, must be the intense space of a partisan enforcement of the event of generic equality— without devolving into the Gandhian cathartic treatment of purification of anachronisms. However, by definition, the event, which is an exception without the coded bodies/corporations of the world to support it, can’t be enforced. And a constitution, equally by definition, must be capable of encompassing all the bodies and codes in its jurisdiction. It can’t be, however briefly, its own exception and separation, its own anathema and abandonment. It can have exceptions by coding them— as Ambedkar knew better than most—as temporally and spatially delimited within the policy of “reservation”. In his own words, if constitutional rule was not to be “swallowed up” by its exceptions, it must codify the latter as socio-legal anachronisms (Sen, 2007, 110).16 The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, minorities as such, are constituted as anachronistic corporations, always and permanently on the way out… This seems to me to be the central meaning of Ambedkar’s much-mentioned remark on India entering a life of contradictions in the new

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republic to be lived out between political equality and social oppression, constitutional power for the ‘form’ of the nation and persistent disarmament of the contents of its society (BAWS 13, 1994a, 60–61). In conclusion, it could be said that between the making of the Constitution and now, a deeply fissured social consensus has been on the existence of permanent anachronisms. Where “anathema” consisted of a rigorous (and in the logical sense, permanent) structural potential of the most explosive kind, searching for its true realization or pacification in new incorporeal bodies—true dalit bodies—“anachronism” consisted of a terrible but dispensable historical wrong seeking a purified, loving, catholic(!) heart. On the other hand “permanent anachronism” secretes a totally circumstantial existential irritation and yet permanently ‘tends to’ and is repelled by other such “anachronisms” with an identical existential irritability, with a permanent propensity to hurt.17 At the very end, I must state point blank, just in case there is confusion about the matter that the “permanent anachronisms” are not the minorities for whom Ambedkar (and many others) argued in favour of constitutional safeguards. “Permanent anachronism” denotes society’s neurotic disavowal of its structural violence. It is a compromise manipulated by the majoritarian part of society with the minority, where instead of transforming to a state of generic equality the majority will henceforth see its own self in the image of a generalized minority, a more numerous bundle of anachronisms. Like all compromise-formations it carries deep unhappiness and delicate sensitivities. Most

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crucially, it is a badly unstable compromise, and ever so often lapses into episodic anathemas (that is, atrocities against dalits) incarnated in the form of atrocities with not just symbolic but real and the most deadly violence.18 But even then we seem to rush to re-negotiate the compromise instead of renewing Ambedkar’s critical exhortation to Gandhi: “At least think the anathema even if you can’t be it!”

NOTES 1 Examples of such symbolic threat-perception and the retaliatory violence—often physical—in the wake of such perception abound today. I will refrain from citing any because that will interfere with my speculative approach. But the milieu is well known, as is the rubric by which it is commonly called—“hurt sentiments”. 2 The use of legal language—“title deeds to humanity” (BAWS 9, 1991e, 269)—shouldn’t prevent us from entering the enquiry’s fundamental generic and logical depth. At this depth, the ‘untouchable’ is both excluded from and is at the very centre of caste relations. On the phenomenological level, of course, the form of the last one at the periphery—antyaja—is valid. But a Gandhian or Ambedkarite phenomenology shouldn’t commit the error of ignoring the ‘object’ in depth where it exists with a kind of unbearable neutrality. 3 We will not engage with the vast literature on Gandhi’s philosophy and its practices of and experiments with truth. Here, let me however say that Perry Anderson’s recent work on Gandhi and the Congress (2013) and Arundhati Roy’s engagement with Gandhi in her introduction (2014, 15–179) to the annotated edition of

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Annihilation of Caste, while very much on the lines of the Ambedkarite critique, fail to take the Gandhian stakes of truth seriously. They work in an empiricist mode whereas Ambedkar bases his indictment not on data about Gandhi but on the Gandhian system. 4

5

6

7

8

This is primarily Anderson and Roy’s philosophical failure. See in Ambedkar (BAWS 9, 1991e, 275), the citation from Gandhi Sikshan which says that the hereditary caste system works, like a military division, for “the good of the whole” (emphasis added). On the change from hereditary caste to the varna system, Ambedkar writes of Gandhi, “Mr. Gandhi has given a new interpretation of the varna system. He has changed it out of recognition” (290). In this context, Ambedkar does distinguish between Gandhi’s peculiar conflations and the Bhagavad Gita’s basing of varna on innate qualities (guna). In other places he carries forward his critique from caste and varna to guna. Gandhi’s numerical sentiment of reforming society from a teeming multiplicity to fewer blocs or corporations (from the ‘Many’ to the ‘One’ and the ‘one’ containing four blocs) is in evidence in 1925. But the collapse is imminent because the teeming multiplicity and the One of the bloc-society are perfectly consistent, as Ambedkar had shown very early in Castes in India (BAWS 1, 1979a, 3–22). I have indicated towards the end of the sixth chapter “Ambedkar contra Aristotle: On a Possible Contention about who is Capable of Politics” how in Ambedkar’s mention of the case of railways coming to India in Annihilation of Caste, we find the lineaments of a theory of ‘willing the chance that changes the world’ as opposed to a Hindu (Gandhian?) technique of paying back the debt of chance (Railways disturbing social segregation in India) with prayaschitta (repenting conduct that transgresses codes of the world). The use of ati-shudra is deliberate on my part to convey the continuum between shudra and ati-shudra with respect to the above argument. But it has to be clarified that Ambedkar prefers to use terms such as Depressed Classes or the capitalized Untouchable.

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Of course, the use of ati-shudra resonates with critical and revolutionary force in Jotiba Phule’s writings, and it must be noted that Gandhi too uses the term on occasion. 9 See Franco and Chand, 2009, 13. I would like to thank Sibaji Bandyopadhyay for pointing out the alternative translation of “malice” with “resentment” by Wendy Doniger (and its Nietzschean speculations in the Manusmriti). 10 This is a complicated point. In his ‘reformed’ texts Gandhi will say that the encoded capacities are actually available to the other classes too. So the shudra can also be learned. But, the shudra must not use learning to earn a living (as can the ‘higher’ castes). It is as if, in one kind of ‘free totality’ of human enterprises, there is unlimited transaction, while in a ‘bound totality’ of social-economic organization there is a strict coding of conduct. In Ambedkar’s critique what comes out vividly is (a) Gandhi’s favour for the ‘bound totality’, (b) the spuriousness of the free totality when unbound from historical-material life. 11 Here we remind ourselves of the Greek word ate in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, the limit-(non)space where, as the chorus says, Antigone has reached. Yet, as shown by Jacques Lacan in his Ethics seminar (1992), ate is not a place outside Antigone—she does not reach a place (ate) where no one can bear to stay too long. She is ate. 12 This counter-position was suggested by Partha Chatterjee following an improvised presentation of these points in 2012 by the author at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. 13 To the objection that Ambedkar believed the untouchables were Buddhists once and their ‘modern’ conversion to Buddhism only restored an original continuity of identity broken by a history of brahminical-Hindu oppression and appropriation, one must reply with several points: first, Ambedkar’s thesis must be seen in the light of his irreducible ‘modern’ experience of caesura. This means that any restoration of an original Buddhist identity—which itself

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was a product of an ancient egalitarian revolution in Indian history—can only be located within the brokenness of time in the present, in the here-and-now. This is a kind of becoming-dalit of historical time if we give the deeper meaning Ambedkar gave to the ‘broken’ in “broken men”, the apparently anthropological phrase employed in his The Untouchables (1948). Also, we must remember that Ambedkar, in this extraordinary work, starts with a kind of allegory of history as war where the subsequent chance event of one party winning over another results in a chronology and narrative of revolution and counter-revolution, oppression and the struggle for justice. There is nothing to say that new events won’t happen in history woven from chance, thought and exigent will—which gives rise to new incorporations, new collective bodies and forms… Now even if the name of a new incorporation/body is an ‘old’ one—Buddhism, for example—this neither attenuates the brokenness of time from which an event arises nor repudiates the invention of a new ‘promise’ within an old name. On the question of neo-Buddhism and Buddhism as a ‘neo-name’, the reader can go to the second chapter, “On Conversion: Beyond Protective Discolouration”. 14 See BAWS 9, 1991e, 268, on the issue of equal participation of Harijans in the management of the Harijan Sevak Sangh and the argument about the upper caste Hindus’ obligation to active penance granting them a superior incorporation of their debt as the only managers of the Sangh. 15 This tremendous insight we owe to anthropologist-philosopher George Varghese, who in a talk in Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2013 on the philosopher Alain Badiou, sweepingly declared that Gandhi created the “void-point” (Alain Badiou’s critical concept) in modern Indian history, which was the condition for an unforeseen, hazardous and courageous decision on who/what was to be the true subject to animate that void. Simply put, this means that Gandhi marks and represents the contingency of modern Indian

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history and not its inflexible destiny. In fact, Gandhi responds to this contingency with a virtuosity that’s only possible when history is staged neither on a civilizational nor on a social stage but on a ‘void-site’. The virtuoso makes something of the void, while the logician relentlessly analyzes and exposes the unfounded foundations of that which is made. 16 The reasoning here of course seems Gandhian and conservative, but it’s not mine. It’s the very logic of any constitution in so far as it must always be in a position to make the exception submit to the norm and the rule, even when the exception is so serious as caste discrimination. Ambedkar understood this as an inherent feature of any consistent constitutional thinking yet on the question of reservation he tried to offer a more radical justification to be found not in the Constitution but in his Constituent Assembly speeches. 17 Two caveats: first, when we say “permanent propensity to hurt”, we intend the verb to serve both: the active function of inflicting hurt and the passive one of being hurt; second, the ‘tending to’ of bodies to each other, which is also their tendency to be mutually repulsed, is an admittedly perverse utilization of the Spinozist notion of conatus. Though in Spinoza conatus refers to a body’s tendency to persevere in its state of being, in my usage I attempt the paradoxical meaning that while bodies encounter and affect each other, in a particular historical epoch it seems as if the contingent nature of encounters has become a permanent propensity to affect (in this case, hurt) each other in the same pattern, as if eternally. 18 Let it be noted that ‘atrocity’ today is a part of both ritual and legal vocabulary; the ritual meaning is anathemic and accursed, while the jurisprudence behind the legal meaning recognizes the anathema and seeks emancipation from it. This is the closest we can get to the idea of justice within the limits of contemporary constitutional law.

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4 Caste and Debt: The Case of Ancient Greek Liturgy

B.R. Ambedkar, in one of his several powerful and compressed theoretical formulations, said that there is never a single caste, there are always castes (BAWS 1, 1979a, 20). Yet he also said that castes are actually formed by endless fragmentation, fractionalization, “chopping off” of a single bloc of society, an original proto-caste (9). This process of “chopping off” doesn’t essentially modify the substance of the bloc, but instead multiplies and ‘grades’ it. If this substance can be taken to be an amalgam of social and juridical power—a kind of constituted sovereignty—indeed the eventual result of caste relations that compose the social field is that of a peculiar ‘graded sovereignty’. The ‘one’ bloc and ‘many’ castes, taken together create an antinomic situation, where the monotonous nature of power or sovereignty constituted in some distant past is repeatedly expressed by more and more recent, more and more numerous ‘imitators’ of that power— caste-imitators as it were. So, in Ambedkar’s view, this nearly obsessive temporal repetition of castes, and the fixity of that which is repeated, meaning brahminical sovereignty in the

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Indian case, produces a bipolar effect. On the one hand, there is an effect of the swarming of castes (jati) and on the other, there is one of immemorial and impassable sovereignty— that then must be of divine order, not temporal, and must be a fundamental that isn’t historically constituted. One of the moments of disjunction with the above speculative ‘model’ created by Ambedkar is the historically specific ‘non-Indian’ moment of the birth of democracy, let us say 450 BCE in ancient Greek society during Pericles’ time. Remarkably disjunctive because we are actually witness to the historical constitution of democracy as an intra-temporal worldly event in the city of Athens. The type and modality of democratic power, sovereignty and rule are questions of historical emergence, constitution and modification. This is exactly the opposite of the immemorial, monotonous and obsessive effect of sovereignty in ‘Indian’ caste society. I can hear the exasperated query: what is the point of all this? Why this dysfunctional comparison at all? Well, I think that the archival access to the Greek events and its history of constitutions actually reveals that in a very precise deployment of social and political logic, Athenian democracy was formed as a single ‘bloc’ of juridical and social authority. Furthermore, this authority was subjectivized in the generalized figure of the citizen. We might go to the extent of saying that democratic subjecthood in ancient Greece was constituted as a ‘citizen-caste’. As an objective form, this citizen-caste was characterized by homogeneity, internal equality and incommensurability with the non-citizen population. In Aristotle’s Politics, we see this relation of internal

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equality and incommensurability with ‘others’. Aristotle clearly forbids a whole range of people, including women, slaves and foreigners, from access to citizenship on the grounds of inherent substantive inferiority. However, we also get a somewhat displaced and even oblique hint which indicates a more insidious logic that structures and cements Greek society. That hint is present in the Book VIII of Politics (in Ford, 1995).1 With regard to the different political utilizations of different classes of music, Aristotle makes the brutal point that the lowest class of music, which he calls ‘kathartic’ music, actually doesn’t purely correspond to the sensibility of the lowest social strata—outcasts like women, foreigners, labouring slaves—but is a type of ‘enjoyment’ meant for all. Clearly the boundaries of social stratification have been displaced on to the ontological space of something like the ‘human animal’. In so far as we are human animals, we are all susceptible to enjoying a ‘low form’ of kathartic music. But Aristotle’s educational task (paideia) in Politics is to teach humanity its lesson in constituted political life. This he does by objective methods of cultivation of virtue (areté); but more crucially, he wants to instill in the human animal the obligation to transform itself to a ‘subject’ vis-à-vis a threshold of subjectivation. This threshold would both separate and put into repulsive contact ‘caste’ and ‘out-caste’. Through this oblique hint we get the glimpse of a second logic, which is not the logic of ‘graded sovereignty’ obtained in the caste system, but it aspires to that very result by refurbishing it. This could be called the logic of debt. At this point, assuming that my objector is a little less

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exasperated, he could still step back into the arena and interject: “So what’s the big deal? Isn’t there always a debt to imitate the highest caste, the brahmin, in the schema of ‘graded sovereignty’? Further, doesn’t Ambedkar say that when someone or some group intervenes in the status of the very model of imitation (the brahmin) then the person and the group are excommunicated? Doesn’t he contrast this debt with revolt and creativity?” And with love too! Except that here we are interested in a far more limited analytic task— which is to analyze the codification and practices of debt, if any, within the single ‘bloc’ of the Greek democratic ‘caste’. What if such an investigation shows that the very model of juridical and social mastery embodied in the proto-caste is a positive function of debt? What if the master caste is the one that ‘enjoys’ the greatest and an originary debt?2 Would that be a refutation of the thesis that according to the schema of graded sovereignties the magnitude of sovereignty is inversely proportional to the magnitude of debt? Which then disorients the rousing possibility of refusing the debt, through egalitarian revolt as much as through egalitarian love? Or what if there are two modes of debt both entwined in a twisted relation of apparent contradiction and deepseated complicity? And what if the ‘democratic’ paradigm is the most evolved space of putting this twisted relation of caste and debt to use? The archive of ancient Greek history gives us access to at least one type of civic practice that actualizes the real stakes, hopes and dangers of the admittedly rhetorical questions raised here. That is the practice of ancient ‘liturgies’3. I will

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lay out the lineaments of these liturgical practices to try to extract their ‘logic’ that I will call a logic of debt, and try to articulate the same with the ‘model’ of caste we started with. I shall flatter myself and hope that at this stage my objector, though skeptical of my success, will at leastbe a little interested. I Neither philosophers nor philologists are unaware that “liturgy” applies to a wide range of practical contexts and possesses a substantial accretion of meanings. However in general, liturgical practice is identified with religious or ritual performance. In the West this stabilization of the meaning and pragmatics of liturgy is hosted by the ritual contexts of Christian (Catholic, in particular) religion. However, Comparative Religion studies rituals across cultures and often ‘names’ liturgical subjects beyond specific religions so as to inscribe them in national, and international regional ‘cultures’; hence liturgies of Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America etc.4 Then there are the scintillating improvisations in response to exigencies of history—hence political liturgies, military liturgies, militant liturgies, protestant liturgies, dalit liturgy, and so on. It seems to me that in all of these variations and accretions in its—let us say post-Greek—career, liturgy possesses two constant features, both exemplified in the site of religious performance of rituals. First, liturgical performances (gestural, musical, combinations of these and other elements) take place in the presence of a multitude of bodies and sensoria. Second, the ‘irrationality’ of the

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performance seems to be that it transforms the multiplicity into a congregation, the multitude of bodies into one liturgical body. Performance Studies calls this transformative power and promise the “efficacy” of liturgical performance (Dox, 2004). Political theology will map the transformation of a multiplicity into a congregation onto the secular passage from a tactical ‘state-of-nature’ to a constituted ‘people’.5 In theological politics, a mass of individuals becomes a liturgical God’s people under specific ritual conditions. In a secular constitution, or a Hobbesian pact, people come together to form a state, which they agree to obey as if they are obeying a new secular god. Secular politics uses the same mixture of terror and love to secure popular obedience as theological politics does. Despite this attempt at elucidation, everything seems too doctrinal and irreducibly empirical, or should one say, sensual. The possibility of the transformation is encoded in dogma (of religion, law etc.); but the efficacy of the same is entirely concentrated in the sensual presence of bodies and their ‘penetration’ by a common, newborn intensity. Everything is rigorously necessary and everything is tremulously contingent. The Greeks bring a philological and ontological surprise to this highly volatile scenario. The Greek surprise of moderation begins with giving liturgy a very simple meaning—‘public service’. Before making this meaning more concrete with examples from that period, let us pause to look at this conjunction ‘public service’ once more. It can connote at least two senses: either the service referred to is a service for the benefit of the so-called ‘public’, or the

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public itself performs some service. To my mind, one doesn’t exclude the other. ‘Liturgy’ or ‘public service’ seems to indicate the service a public performs towards itself. Yet the verb ‘perform’ is misleading here. The Greek idea of ‘public service’ instead of being the generous (and inescapable) enactment of a potentially global religious service is the limited and qualified encoding of serviceability within the Greek city (polis). Let us say that this limited generalizability of service— both the capacity to serve and be served—defines the protocaste governing the Greek city. In the age of Pericles during the democratic reforms of the fifth century BCE in Athens, this above meaning is rendered concrete and conceptually consolidated. Pericles instituted a system of public service by setting up a fund which was called theoric. This fund was used to disburse small amounts of money—doles—to citizens undertaking specific civic activities. So the citizens were paid out of this ‘dole’ to attend the theater; the ones doing jury service were paid out of the fund; the infantry was publicly funded; the citizen-population bought grain using the payment by the state (Cartledge, 1997). These were all examples of ‘public service’. Even a quick glance at the practice shows that two modalities of service are implied here. The payment is for the service provided by the citizens: and it also, in a symbolic measure, serves the ‘serviceability’ of the citizens. This second modality is crucial and subtle because it is imputed to the capacity of the citizen to serve rather than the service itself. Clearly it is at this second ‘virtual’ level that the subjecthood of the

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citizen is decided, that the true ‘being-citizen’ of the formal citizen is reflected. The citizen is constituted by a capacity, a generalized serviceability—and at an elementary level of abstraction, this is the first appearance of the ‘common’ (koinonia) of the citizens. At this juncture, we need to remind ourselves of Aristotle’s dismal universalist proposition of Book VIII of Politics and undertake a vigilant repose. What is the vigil demanded by Aristotle’s proposition that the kathartic ‘in-capacity’ of enjoying a certain type of ‘outcast’ music is universal? The vigil is towards guarding against simply accepting the citizens’ capacity as the simple ontological opposite of the outcast incapacity. The vigil is as much towards searching for technologies invented by Greek history to secure citizens against their non-universalist in-capacity and its fluent (cathartic) pleasures. Let us call them “technologies of constitution”. I suggest that the liturgical system or the system of public service is one such technology of constitution. How so? Very early in my research, I was led to ask, what was the significance of the fact that the liturgical amount was a small one, in the nature of a dole and not a salary or remuneration for professional services? What was the significance of the convoluted practice of the citizen first being given the so-called dole and then paying out of it to attend the theatre? Why not let him in for free? Especially given Pericles’ admirable words in a funeral oration that poverty not be allowed to disable a citizen from participating in the civic life of the polis (Cartledge, 1997, 9). The first answer to this puzzle that suggested itself, as if

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in a flash after a period of stupor, was the following. The dole was a material-monetary marker with a symbolic function—it marked the threshold of separation (and ‘repulsive contact’) between the citizen and the non-citizen. So women, slaves, foreigners might well be present in the theatre, they may pass through it like insubstantial shadows with no visage or orientation but they couldn’t be called upon to ‘participate’ in the theatre as citizens. But this structural/symbolic function doesn’t explain the ideology of the separation itself: it only expresses the separation. How to explain the emancipation of a certain class of the population above the universal kathartic threshold of the ‘human animal’— unless it be by empirical sociological parameters like race, ethnicity, gender, labour/leisure dichotomy and such? These are all implicated in the separative hierarchy, and none is decisive as the determinant or constituting cause.6 I think the technology of this separative constitution is liturgical in an absolutely superficial, arbitrary, violent and naturalized way. The liturgical fund creates the threshold above which the citizen-community forms its public space and ‘thing’ (res publica?), its objective sites of presence and participation, power and rights. Now anyone can see that the above statement is completely empty and tautological—and I contend it is entirely substantive and true. How to resolve this deadlock? I think we need to enter a second and more insidious subjective circuit of liturgical logic in this effort. And what circulates in this network weaving the subjective side is liturgical debt. Before we understand the content and mode of debt, we

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must grasp the axiomatic violence of liturgy that it prescribes citizenship rather than ideologically support or justify it. It is, indeed, the axiomatic enunciation of a ‘citizen-caste’ that is in question rather than an ideological discourse on citizenship, community, caste, etc. The subjective point of application of this axiomatic violence is the command the citizen issues to himself to fulfill his civic debts and duties. Interestingly the command is egalitarian within the liturgical limits set up by the city. It is even democratic and emancipatory to the extent that it promises the civic transformation of the individual human animal into a political being by participating in the public life of the city (polis). I believe that by this latest move we elevate the mere formal tautology into a productive axiomatic violence which mobilizes a topology of the subject. II To schematize the logic of debt in the Athenian liturgical context, let the money-dole paid by the state be prescribed as a kind of cultural credit to the citizens for which the money is only a nominal symbol.7 The credit is to the citizens only but their ‘being-citizens’ is now ontologically dependent on the paying back of the credit with the “participation” and “transformation”. In other words, paying back with a certain ‘cathexis’ of subjective life to the prescribed end of ‘becoming-citizens’ in a true sense, is not merely a formal one. What does “true” mean here? Does it mean some sort of a test of individual citizens so as to evaluate which one makes the grade as truly ‘participating’ in civic life? That is certainly not the logic of debt prescribed here and we must see how consistent the logic is with the

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axioms of homogeneity, internal equality (isonomia) and incommensurability with ‘others’. It is consistent only if with every case of individual debt and obligation the real ontological level targeted is a kind of ‘public ontology’. This is a crucial stage of the argument. The ‘public ontology’ indicated here is not the religious public congregation produced into significant presence through the ritual transformation (the Catholic ritual of the Eucharist, for instance). The public is not to be imagined as a collective body participating in direct democracy whether in ancient Greece, post-revolution France or the mohalla sabhas of the Aam Aadmi Party. What is really sought to be encoded within the homogeneity, equality and commensurability of the ‘citizen-caste’ is an interlocking system of topological and incorporeal ‘objects’. These objects could also be called public virtualities.8 The ‘training’ (paideia) of the individual is not simply a moral training subtended by a theory of virtue (areté) appropriate for the city. The training is rather oriented towards a difficult, austere and fiercely modulated incorporation of bodies into pre-coded loci of possible subjective transformations within the various civic activities of the city. “Participation” is the payment of a debt through this delicate vigour of paideia, a debt which arose from the cultural ‘public’ credit expressed in the liturgical fund and given to citizens to enable a topological entry into spaces of incorporeal transformation rather than a simple physical entry into a ritual space. The example of theatre attendance can clarify an abstract set of contrasts between a ‘public ontology’ defined through

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axioms of homogeneity, internal equality (isonomia) and incommensurability with ‘others’. It is consistent only if with every case of individual debt and obligation the real ontological level targeted is a kind of ‘public ontology’. This is a crucial stage of the argument. The ‘public ontology’ indicated here is not the religious public congregation produced into significant presence through the ritual transformation (the Catholic ritual of the Eucharist, for instance). The public is not to be imagined as a collective body participating in direct democracy whether in ancient Greece, post-revolution France or the mohalla sabhas of the Aam Aadmi Party. What is really sought to be encoded within the homogeneity, equality and commensurability of the ‘citizen-caste’ is an interlocking system of topological and incorporeal ‘objects’. These objects could also be called public virtualities.8 The ‘training’ (paideia) of the individual is not simply a moral training subtended by a theory of virtue (areté) appropriate for the city. The training is rather oriented towards a difficult, austere and fiercely modulated incorporation of bodies into pre-coded loci of possible subjective transformations within the various civic activities of the city. “Participation” is the payment of a debt through this delicate vigour of paideia, a debt which arose from the cultural ‘public’ credit expressed in the liturgical fund and given to citizens to enable a topological entry into spaces of incorporeal transformation rather than a simple physical entry into a ritual space. The example of theatre attendance can clarify an abstract set of contrasts between a ‘public ontology’ defined through

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presence and one defined through virtuality. In ancient Greece, the mass phenomenon of theatre attendance during the city Dionysia, a seasonal festival of performances, easily lends itself to the image of community (koinonia) which is realized and intensified through amassing performatively affected bodies. This is a Dionysian picture painted by many a literary scholar and political scientist who correlates boisterous theatre attendance to political participation in direct democracy. In Laws, Plato himself mocked the wisdom of a theatrokratia, a mode of ‘theater power’ which is a caricature of a serious political assembly. Yet I’d suggest here that this popular picture too quickly reduces the virtual construction of the common of a citizen-caste to the empirical social group of citizens to which an individual belongs. The analysis must proceed in the other direction of gradation of scales. We will then see that in the system of interlocking topological spaces of virtuality and incorporation, theatre is only the most obviously visible and ‘present’ articulation of a logic which, in essence, is simultaneously granulated and abstract. Theatre is the occasion of the most subjective and convulsive (Dionysiantragic) aesthetic experience—and yet that experience must have the abstract neutrality of a pure formal transformation that a code imposes. The pure transformation from ‘human animal’ to ‘citizen’ when attending the theatre, when procuring grain, when doing jury service, when serving in the infantry… it must have the neutrality of what Max Weber called a “guild” even while subjectively the debt of the convulsed experienced is avowed with the fiercest

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partisan, Dionysian intensity.9 The experience is avowed as if the transformation itself of watching an Oedipus, a Bacchae, the Eumenides, in all their mythical familiarity and alien truth, was in question—and it exceeded all codification, all civic teleology. As if the structurally induced public debt of a particular state of Athens had become a pure act performed in anonymous, non-localizable and splendid publicity… To my mind, the great ‘casteist’ move of Athenian democracy was to collect and pre-codify the range of public experiences and acts into a neutral, egalitarian, common and severely limited generic virtuality, which can be called “serviceability” or “transformability” or “capacityto-participate”. So with this move, the aesthetic, political, educational, religious, and military transformations are all rendered commensurate by ‘coded’, ‘named’ and ‘nongraded’ intensities that incorporate these transformations, namely enthusiasm, purification, psychagogy, glorification etc.10 At the same time, the democratic amplitude that this proto-caste seeks to constitute is one which allows the maximal singularization of subjective experience—a singularization to the point of risking the lapse of the magnitude of debt into the inscrutability of the act. This brings up the third dimension of publicity or ‘public ontology’ besides the dimension of caste and debt/act. This is the historical creation of a state ontology. Within the Athenian limits of fifth century BCE, the state is a liturgical unifier or synthesizer of the axiomatic homogeneity of caste and the heterogeneous intensities carried by ‘acts of debt’. The state is a form of existence that provides a kind

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of managerial glue to the different domains and activities of society. In this sense, the state is statist social existence. Indeed, the state is ethical because the only modes in which the partisan heterogeneities of acts and the neutrality of civic codes can be synthesized are ethical. In a very preliminary way, on its endemic limited scale and magnitude, governed by the procedures of codification, the Athenian state converts the subjective variation in type and intensity of debt into a uniform ethical ‘substance’ of Greek existence which is something like “power” or “mastery” (egakratia).11 The state is the mode of social existence which oversees the limited ‘caste space’ of citizens who affirm debt as a mark and task of mastery, over others and over themselves. I cannot develop the point here,12 but in concluding this section I shall argue that the limited and well-defined parameters of Athenian society both make it imperative for the state to ensure the maintenance of these limits, secure the caste-commensurability of society as a single ‘bloc’ and make the state a strange topological space of ‘free play’ of subjectivation within the bloc. A Postscript

My objector can be doubly confirmed in his doubts about my ability to succeed in this present project when I admit a second time, close on the heels of the first, that I will also not be able to develop the narrative of the state’s synthesizing function in the West as the debt in that narrative is increasingly minoritized and infinitized. In the sixth chapter “Ambedkar Contra Aristotle: On a Possible Contention about who is

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Capable of Politics”, I argue that Gandhi is the most efficient implementer of the Western technology of minoritarian infinite debt in the Indian nationalist context. I won’t be able to say much here about the great shift of technical scale and ethical standpoint when we move from the limited ‘caste’ of Athenian citizens paying back small but discernible credits, to the global ‘population’ which divides into masterful debtors, who may be subaltern, or rather indiscernible, and those who are too poor to be in debt (Deleuze, 1992). This much I will still say to my objector—to keep him interested despite the worst doubts—that this later-day exposure of the limited paradigm of caste to the vertiginous infinity of capitalism doesn’t change the classical measure of a single ‘bloc’ of homogenous being by which to measure the infinite ‘events’ of the later hour. Let me call this the ‘brahminical’ measure of the social and political history of the West. At the very end, briefly, let me recuperate the polemical, even mocking, tone vis-à-vis my imagined objector and try to argue with him that the measure means something both necessary and dispensable. It is meaningful to measure the history of the West ‘brahminically’ because just like in India, Athenian society wanted to constitute a continuum of sovereignty in the first place and not a transcendental sovereign. This is not peculiar to the case of democratic society; it is a general law of group-sovereignty that precedes the transcendence of the regime of the single sovereign (Detienne, 2007). In a fuzzy way, “caste” might stand for group-sovereignty but the more precise liturgical deployment in Athenian history shows “caste” means

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also necessary discrimination and the necessary law of the discrimination against the ‘outcaste’. Democracy becomes an incomparably sophisticated, sustainable (in the long run) and heterogeneous synthesis that both imposes discrimination and naturalizes it by true egalitarian technologies and axiomatics. Ambedkar’s theoretical presentation of caste and castes, brahminism and imitative “graded sovereignty”, is as if the sheer naked multiplicity of castes has penetrated the solid brahmin bloc straightaway. Classical Greek dramaturgy, which condenses the topology of multiple subjectivities into antagonistic classes—‘caste’ and ‘outcaste’—is overrun by such a ‘swarming’ multiplicity. Of course Ambedkar is very clear that the swarm itself is an order and Indian society is the order of anarchy.13 Interestingly, precisely because of this overwhelming immanence, brahminical (Indian/Hindu?) society must transfer its immanence wholesale to a doctrinal transcendence; it cannot inscribe the transcendental schema in this world of ‘caste’ and ‘outcaste’, which is one of the earliest palimpsests for writing into this world the transcendence of the Marxian classes in the modern age. Ambedkar, in fact, will suggest in his historical works, the contingent emergence of the ‘outcaste’, the untouchable in Indian history, a figure not originally inscribed in the logic of caste in India (BAWS 7, 1990b). In Indian history, the outcaste makes the immanence of the brahminical order fall into inconsistency. This is the central difference according to me: the Greek outcaste is excluded from the citizen-caste but is consistent with it; the Indian untouchable is included in the society of

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brahmins but inconsistent with it.14 Charles Malamoud has shown that in the brahminical system the highest caste has the greatest ontological debt, which is pre-ordained and mysterious (Hénaff, 2010). The incorporeal transformations of the castes, in the hierarchy, are proportional, in profundity and magnitude, to their paying back of their ontological debts. Reciprocally, their ‘caste-beings’ are elevated, purified, glorified to the measure of their payment with ‘duties’. This is a way of extending Malamoud’s lucid scheme. What is striking in this scheme is that it has no slot for ‘translating’ or ‘converting’ caste into power. That is Ambedkar’s point: “Graded sovereignty” is a hierarchy of most rights to least— and forever lessening—where infinite subjection to the brahminical model doesn’t lead to univocal formation of a brahminical subject of power. If there were such a univocal brahminical subject, it would be possible at least theoretically to oppose it with another subject which contests, usurps and annihilates that power to institute a new one. It seems to me that in his historical writings on the untouchable and in other places, Ambedkar opens up interstices and routes of escaping the above impasse. The untouchable is intensely socialized into caste-society, hence is not the excluded figure of ancient Greece—and yet she is present to society as nothing, as a void. It is not that she is a slave without freedom; it is that given the social rules, to talk of freedom is absurd. What follows is that the excluded class for which the outcaste is a prototype has an interest in the power of debt/ debt of power that constitutes the caste-sovereignty of

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the ‘society of citizens’, even if that interest is transitional and on the way to a new conception and vision of social existence. But the untouchable is a strange—and historically contingent—figure who mirrors the subjective fullness of the incorporeal possibilities of caste-codification with an objective nothingness. The untouchable is not excluded; she falls out in the very place of graded distribution of sovereignty to mirror the nothing of sovereignty. So the untouchable is in the historically contingent but exact position to take a radical disinterest in the type of power that constitutes Hindu–Indian society. She can, and must, expose her dis-incorporation from that history so as to withdraw all ontological support to it. In this way, she, the untouchable, may well open up the fourth dimension of a ‘separative’ public ontology. I think at the threshold of India’s ‘independence’ in 1947, and before he plunges into the passion of a new constitution, Ambedkar makes it possible to think of ‘separating’ and withdrawing interest from all measures of evaluating social existence hitherto presumed necessary—whether the measure be activated as an immemorial debt of religion or as the obligation to freely participate in the secular liturgy of a new nation.

NOTES 1 I will deal with Aristotle’s Politics in relation to Ambedkar’s political philosophy in greater detail in the sixth chapter “Ambedkar Contra Aristotle: On a Possible Contention about who is Capable of Politics”.

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2 For the distinction between the karmic debt of Hindus and the originary social or rather socio-ontological debt among the brahmins and other privileged castes, see note 23 of the Introduction. 3 The use of ‘liturgies’ here is not historically exact. In ancient

4

5 6

7

8

Greece, from at least the time of Solon, liturgies were instituted as part of funding certain public activities, like the chorus of Greek theater by wealthy private citizens. This practice carried on in the democratic period of the fifth century BCE in Athens. But something was added, which was in the nature of a more direct role played by the state, what I call the liturgical logic. And the way it is to unravel in the argument to follow involves the logic of public service, which includes both State and private agencies insofar as they institute a relationship of the public to itself. This relationship, I call, “obligation”. See Cartledge, 1997. As a remarkable example of the study of the mutual inclusion of Latin American and political liturgies with reference to the coup against Allende, the terrifying dictatorship of Pinochet which followed and the resistance built against this regime by a new liberation theology, see Cavanaugh, 1998. For one such formidable work on political theory in relation to liturgy and the economy see Agamben, 2011. In the light of the argument being presented here, the view that objects to the use of ‘caste’ for Greek society on the grounds that such a use confuses the ‘structure’ of caste (of which Indian society is the most vivid example) with a ‘substance’ of exclusion (such as ‘race’ in the case of exclusion of foreigners in Greece) can be judged to be mistaken. After all, along with foreigners, a range of the Athenian population (most primarily Athenian women) were excluded from the ‘society of citizens’. I have developed this idea in the first study on liturgy in my book Theatre, Number, Event (Choudhury, 2012, 1–55). However, I only just about touched the question of caste and debt here. I utterly submit to Gilles Deleuze’s inspiration when he creates a

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philosophical concept out of stoic linguistic theory of incorporeals (1990, 147). My submission though is an errant one for I surely misapply Deleuze’s concept. 9 “…the city democracy of antiquity is a political guild. Tribute, booty, the payments of confederate cities, were merely distributed among the citizens. . . The monopoly of the political guild included cleruchy, the distribution of conquered land among the citizens, and the distribution of the spoils of war; and at the last the city paid out of the proceeds of its political activity theater admissions, allotments of grain, and payments for jury service and for participation in religious rites” (Pearson, 1957, 9). 10 Each of the “incorporeal effects” could be seen as coded virtualities for theatre, education, politics, religion… Do they remind us of the Chaturvarna and its occupational structure? Only in the shudra, the function and the incorporeal effect coincide—which according to the Manusmriti is “service without resentment”. I thank Sibaji Bandyopadhyay for this particular translation. The translation suspends all affirmation of incorporeal transformation or subjectivation to this indeterminate and utterly negative attribute “without resentment”. The shudra as the ‘void’ Dionysian slave! O Nietzsche! 11 I will not bring up the teeming restlessness of the archive into which I let my statement sink back for the moment. Let me say that it is made between the restless ‘popularities’ of a Hegel and a Foucault. 12 This is a vast process in which the State loses its limited synthesizing viability to increase in scale, such that the intensity of heterogeneity multiplies. To the proportion that it becomes impossible to ethically make heterogeneity correspond to a homogenous civic ‘substance’, the political rationality of the State becomes sophisticated. In a way we move from the ethics to the politics of the State. Probably the point of culmination of this process is the raison d’état doctrine(s) of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.

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The raison d’état seems to internalize heterogeneity into the logic of the State itself such that all notions of right and legitimacy of state sovereignty must be qualified by the intrinsic political possibility of a coup d’état or state of exception. Hence the sophistication and unsurpassed violence of the modern state (Foucault, 2007). 13 See BAWS 5, 1989b. Ambedkar’s greater theoretical indictment of the brahminical monotony of Hindu social sovereignty can be supplemented with ‘secret’ nuances of debt to mastery and debt as mastery in several scenes of Indian literary history. In the Mahabharata, the story of Ekalavya is a case in point. First, the master (Drona) refuses Ekalavya, the ‘out-caste’ boy, his request to pay the former the debt to his self-avowed teacher. To be allowed to be Drona’s student is to be let into the enabling relation of ‘ontological’ debt. Then when Ekalavya transgresses the debt-relation by unilaterally submitting to it—as the student who teaches himself under the gaze of the unwilling teacher-idol, Drona, comes back at the end to apparently legitimize the transgressive relation by allowing Ekalavya to pay his dakshina (actual payment of debt to the masters) by cutting off and gifting his thumb which enables the student to use the bow and arrow in his apprenticeship to the art of the warrior (a privileged occupation of one of the caste Hindus only). So Drona, the master, legitimizes the relation to not only physically cut Ekalavya off from the occupation but also ontologically murder the ‘incorporeal’ transformation of ‘becoming-a-warrior’ at its birth. There is also the ‘tragic’ modality of debt as mastery in such a ‘modern’ story and poem as Muktibodh’s Brahmarakshas. A modality of ‘tragic’ consciousness at a critical turn in the history of brahminism reminding one of Hölderlin’s critical—and catastrophic—confiscation from the ‘Greek’ debt… 14 In chapter seven on Pericles, I will clarify that the Athenian democratic state did not consider any other state could be truly

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democratic the way Athens was. This is because democracy and autochthony are the same thing for fifth century Athens. Manumission does not in any way affect the fundamental hierarchy of being between the autochthon democrats of Athens and the foreign-born slaves-to-free men of others. Even women can only be naturalised. They cannot be included in the nature of the thing that is freedom. They can get freedoms but they cannot be free. In each of these ways the Greek model is oppressively consistent. The untouchable in the world of brahmins is in the peculiar position of both being codified by cosmogony and customary law while in actual social practice being at the heart of the functioning of brahminical society. In this respect the untouchable indeed is like the slave but not necessarily a formal slave like the classical case presents. Even brahminical texts, including the Manusmriti, speak of prescriptive distinctions between the different classes/ castes, many of which are based on both customary legendary narratives. There is very little evidence of the untouchable or even the shudra being ontologically excluded from something like a consistent ‘nature of things’ that Greek democracy was for the citizen-castes.

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5

Ambedkar and Other Immortals: A Note on Comparative Politics and Incomparable Events

I Into the mosaic of two citations: a. The French Revolution gave rise to two new principles— the principle of self-government and the principle of selfdetermination… The hope of humanity was centred on the fructification of these principles. Unfortunately after the lapse of nearly 140 years these principles have failed to take root. The old regime has continued either in all its nakedness or by making sham concessions to these two principles. Barring a few countries, there was neither self-government nor self-determination in the world (Ambedkar, BAWS 10, 1991f, 39–40).1 b. Do not let yourselves suppose that the Satyagraha Committee has invited you to Mahad merely to drink the water of the Chavadar Lake of Mahad. It is not as if drinking the water of the Chavadar Lake will make us immortal… We are not going to the Chavadar Lake merely to drink its water. We are going to the lake to

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assert that we too are human beings like others. It must be clear that this meeting has been called to set up the norm of equality… I am certain that no one who thinks of this meeting in this light will doubt that it is unprecedented. I feel that no parallel to it can be found in the history of India. If we seek for another meeting in the past to equal this we shall have to go to the history of France on the continent of Europe (Ambedkar, 1992a, 225). So will we build a comparative political perspective on something which takes place on the continent of Europe and something else somewhere else? Make a table of similarities and differences, neighbourhoods and strangenesses so as to produce a scale of comparison regulating the limits of what is comparable? Locate a common terrain called “politics” and duly cut off other contextual exoticisms? It is not difficult to derive this common task and terrain of politics by a kind of negative inference from the citations above: since the old regime continues (at least when Ambedkar is writing in the first half of the twentieth century), the ‘common’ of politics must be to oppose this regime. What issue can there be with this shared orientation, which prescribes the limits and imperatives of the task at hand? None except the naive objection that the apparently universal prescription of politics is actually prescribed by history. That is why the French Revolution “gave rise to two new principles” and whoever “thinks” of the Mahad Satyagraha in the light of its true meaning cannot doubt that it is “unprecedented”.

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It is indeed a naive objection not because the provenance and power of the universal are obvious to the sophisticated mind but due to the historical element itself, which in the said prescription is unprocessed, if not errant. Such processing will require the loosening of the straitjacket and the blurring of the sharp predicate “historical” in a presupposed “historical time” which forever precedes that which is unprecedented. The problem is the opposite: what is the historicity of the new, the unprecedented that erupts out of and into historical time, where political fulfilment is tied to the prescription of an emancipatory, even redemptive, horizon to that time? I think that is Ambedkar’s problem— and one shouldn’t get too upset with an eschatological insinuation in Ambedkar’s philosophy of history. The point is that the historicity of the new, which the French Revolution articulates as “new principles”, in the element of so-called historical time, erupts as an emancipatory prescription breaking that time into two: one part useless, archaic history of the ‘old regime’ (which continues!) and the other, a zone of ‘raw’ time of a new event of politics and not merely a political programme. Of course it could be argued that Ambedkar’s problem is not the ‘original’ event of the French Revolution; his interest is indeed in the ‘repetition’ planned for the Mahad Satyagraha.2 In response to this, we must look once more at Ambedkar’s words in their context(s). It is true that in one context—when Ambedkar was a member of the Governor General’s Executive Council between 1942 and 1946—the French Revolution is, as it were, already resolved

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and fulfilled into the new, modern principles of egalitarian politics.3 The Revolution is now a paradigm for this politics. Against this paradigm, the world is evaluated and judged; its emancipatory exigencies and programmes are prescribed. If the old regime continues in most of the world, it is not as a paradigmatic option any more, it continues merely empirically. The time of the pre-revolutionary world has been drained and denuded to an empty shell; the time of postrevolutionary history is full and consequential. Such is the mode of historical resolution and indeed of eschatological fulfilment of the ‘event’ of the French Revolution. It is the other context of the Mahad conference of March 1927, the other section of the mosaic, that reveals a strangely different and ‘raw’ design of the temporalization, not of a presupposed historical time surging from ‘empty’ to ‘full’ (or the opposite process) but of the event itself. Yet Ambedkar does not merely praise this event, the event as event at all. If event is the happening of what happens, the unfolding of its material sequence, then Ambedkar doesn’t encourage the overvaluation of the prohibited act of drinking water from the Chavadar Tank at Mahad. “It is not as if drinking water of the Chavadar Lake will make us immortal…” What superb contempt for that very symbolic-ritual meaning of the Mahad Satyagraha taken at face value which makes it an upsurge and transgression against the brahminical order! This cutting down to size of the redemptive pretensions of the ‘event’, with a single stroke of enunciation that cuts to the bone of the matter, parallels Ambedkar’s lowering of stakes on the Temple Entry evaluation. The parallel lies in the

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structural result that both ‘events’ fluently and far too easily re-insert themselves into the Hindu ‘totality’ albeit in a kind of dialectically emancipated form through the transgressive acts(s) and moment(s) of negativity. The totality itself is not, and must not be, emancipated because that would mean its dissolution into something unrecognisable as Hindu—that is Ambedkar’s point of demystification of the so-called event. And yet the Mahad Satyagraha is “unprecedented”. Its time is not the mere fulfilment of the reformist promise of ‘other’ Hinduism(s); neither is it the dialectical ‘solution’ of a Hindu ‘problem’, and by that token, of Indian history which ‘corrects’ the economy of wrong relations between historically finite and biologically mortal ‘subjects’.4 No, if the Mahad Satyagraha is indeed “unprecedented”, then the question to ask is, what takes place there such that someone is made immortal? An unprecedented if raw and excruciatingly recent immortality? It seems to me that Ambedkar is tracking a different political and conceptual thinking of the event from the expected one, a thinking tied to a differently immortalist philosophy of history. In grasping the above difference of thinking one must resist two temptations that seem to serve the thought a bit too well: the first temptation develops from the as if immediate saturation of the event—the Mahad Satyagraha— by its ritual-symbolic meaning mentioned earlier. As if to this immediacy of the great ritual transgression corresponds an immediately immortal subject this point onwards, which is transgressively purified of its erstwhile impure status. To this immediate and inflamed ‘untouchable’ subject of history

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strangely corresponds the immemorial ‘Hindu’ subject, whose permanent truth was always the highest stake in this double game of historical emancipation and vicarious immortality. Strange really that the latest vicar of ‘Hindu’ truth is the new immortal/immemorial, the untouchable! The second temptation to resist is the revolutionary one. It asks the people of the Mahad Satyagraha, as much as us at this inscrutable distance, to believe that the continuum of history is already breached; that modern politics already includes us in its epochal embrace; that the new immortal is already fulfilled in an exemplary instance of time. By this axiomatic logic, the breach in ‘Hindu’ history, hollowed out by the Mahad transgression, is only the vicarious functionary of the revolutionary immortality of the modern ‘idea’ of politics already inaugurated somewhere else. So if the Mahad Satyagraha is “unprecedented” only with strict reference to Indian history then such newness is also parasitic on a greater ‘modern’ continuum of time. This temptation of a parasitic immortality must also be resisted along with the autochthonous one. I suggest we carry out a ‘test’ of the event vis-à-vis Ambedkar’s declaration during the Mahad Satyagraha along the three following lines. First, if, according to what Ambedkar says, the true meaning of Mahad lies not in describing the action of drinking water from the tank but in declaring that the people are here to assert that they—the untouchables—too are human beings like all others, then is this local declaration also the local, almost isolated, birth of a new and generic idea of equality?5 The test is whether

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the Mahad declaration merely cites and applies an available ‘modern’ discourse and doctrine of equal rights or does it supplement, intervene and create a new performative immortality for a historical idea torn from the time of the “old regime”. Now the second ‘test’: it is the test of the thought of the event, understood in both directions of the genitive. Let us recall what Ambedkar says: “I am certain that no one who thinks of this meeting in this light will doubt that it is unprecedented” (Ambedkar, 1992a, 225). But the declarative—or performative, if you will—light of the Mahad Satyagraha is nothing if not the light of thought: this makes it an immortal light. It is the thought of the “norm of equality” (225), generically prescribed by the event which makes it as much the thought of the event in the sense of coming from the latter’s disappearing crystal in the shape of an inextinguishable light. Then the question is, who will think this thought of the event as an evaluation, a ‘test’ of the event’s irreducible newness? Who will be made immortal by thinking a new and immortal thought? What are our options? On this question of the so-called subject of the event, to my mind, we have three options to consider—the militant subject, the spectatorial subject and the discursive subject. Let me explain: a. The militant decides to commit to the thought of the event and thereupon bears it so as to follow through with at least a part of its consequences. To do so, first of all, she must wager that there is such a thought and show, to use Alain Badiou’s word, a kind of “fidelity” to it.6 The militant

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is anyone; yet she is always someone who raises the stakes of a localised isolate, which the event is, to the immortality of a “truth”. Nevertheless, the ‘composition’ of the immortal is extracted from the ‘atomic’ composition of the isolate: the militant is a rare, fiery and material cross-section of historicity cut from the passage between atomicity and immortality, between event and truth.7 In another style of expression, one might call the militant the bearer of the trace of historicity. Whoever will have declared that some people had declared that they were equal as anyone else because no one will have been unequal, is a militant. Hence the partisan and generic declaration of the Mahar thought, which is itself declared as the unprecedented scission between the untouchable and the Hindu, is essential to the condition of the ‘test’ of militancy.8 b. The militant subject clearly acts in the present so as to enforce therein another present. It is as if she impregnates the present with a future anteriority (“will have been”), so as to deliver a new, raw and revolutionary eternity to the time of the present in the present. The spectatorial subject, in contradistinction, takes a step away from the present. In “The Conflict of Faculties”, a short text written in the last decade of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant proposed the figure of the spectator as a locus of the thought of the just-concluded—and endless—French Revolution as significantly different from how the ‘actors’ of the Revolution were led to think about the event from within the thickness of its present element (Kant, 1979). The spectator, quite enigmatically, saw and thought about the Revolution in its absence. Here absence is not a pure void; rather what is

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involved is an operation of extracting a sign from the partisan activities of the militants of the Revolution. This is a sign of that ‘disposition’ or ‘tendency’ of which the ‘actors’ are not only possibly unaware but against which their localised interests often lead them to act. According to Kant, such a disposition signified by the French Revolution, against the bloody and partisan revolutionary actuality and despite it, is mankind’s disposition to a kind of universal “progress”.9 The Revolution must be absented from itself to be inscribed on the surface of ‘thought’ in the form of a sign and in the mode of a virtual event, or, if you will, a “permanent virtuality” (Foucault, 1997, 97). The spectator is not the one who ‘sees’ the Revolution enacted in history from the sidelines—there is no voyeurism of the event!—but the spectator is a kind of ‘virtual mankind’ which contemplates the Revolution in its absence and as a sign. While the militant has the dust of history in her mouth and is moved to further thresholds of passionate interest and incalculable decision, the spectator responds to the incorporeal ‘event’, to the revolutionary ‘virtuality’ with a neutral “enthusiasm”.10 Indeed with all the bloodshed and the heartbreak, the French Revolution is still a (no)thing of contemplative splendour and ‘shows’ that mankind is progressing! c. So might one say that irrespective of its empirical unfolding, the Mahad Satyagraha of 1927 is an event in the sense of a sign that signifies that Indian history is progressing? That the “norm of equality” Ambedkar speaks of is an index of approximation, a step towards the horizon of emancipation subtending Indian history as part of universal

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history? Unlike the ‘militant’ philosophy of history that interrupts the present with another emancipatory present— the norm of equality sounding the sweet clamour of this interruption—‘the universalist’ idea of progress is marked by stages or, shall we say, traces of historical discourses along a narrative path of emancipation. Now to institute the ‘test’ of discursive subjectivity vis-à-vis the event, one must test whether it is possible to carry out the relativising operation of freeing the traces of discourse from the global narrative so as to present them as a scatter of discursive events. Which implies asking whether it is possible to distribute the trutheffects of discourse according to a logic of egalitarian analogy (between discourses) rather than by the logic of subordination to a transcendentally regulative horizon such as “universal progress”. This double test is oriented to finally examining the problem of the subject whose ‘truth’ will be woven from the fabric of discourse. So the discursive test will replace the transcendental regulation imposed by universal history with the immanent analyses of discourses and their historicity. It seems to me that given these operational conditions, the deontological status and name of the subject will now be the decision of the professional archivist and scholar. It will be the historian’s greater hazard to balance a scholarly Kantianism and a disciplinary heterodoxy, if not militancy, under whose shadow she could name the Mahad subject not progressive or humanist, not mahar, not even untouchable but subaltern. The subaltern claims it is a ‘true’ name dispersed over the dust of the archive which has the potential of analogically rationalising

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and unifying the several other historical names.11 We are really down to the question of whether Ambedkar was militant, universalist or scholastic. Or, was he one among the long and weary list of permutations—militant universalist, scholarly militant, scholar-universalist, militant scholar…? Before plumbing for one of the options, let us look at what Ambedkar says at Mahad once again. He says that the water of Chavadar Tank will not “make us immortal”. The meeting is to “set up” the norm of equality. In this it is an unprecedented event. If one wants to think about it and find an ‘event’ to equal it, it will be found in the history of Europe (not India), i.e., the French Revolution. Notice that nowhere does Ambedkar say that the Mahad Satyagraha emulates the French Revolution. In fact, a little later—we will come to this in the next section—he will say that the 1927 movement can’t even be called “political” in the constitutive sense of the French Revolution which doesn’t mean that the Mahad intervention and its ‘social’ character make the ‘event’ any less unprecedented. But neither does Ambedkar say that the satyagrahis are entirely autochthonous forces sprung from a secret source of the earth of “culture” hitherto buried in the time of Indian history but the key to whose release remains elementally Indian. Like Jotiba Phule before him, Ambedkar’s ‘test’ here and elsewhere is always to ask the question: what is the real experience of the breach of Indian history vis-àvis the real experience of the untouchable over millennia, who experiences the lightning-flash of the cleaving and voiding moment of that history?12 Again, the questions resonate: is it the militant, the universalist, the archivist…

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or the untouchable herself who makes the militant decision, universalises the decision to the scale of an act of generic humanity, and writes her act into the flesh of the historical breach while vigilantly guarding the key to the code of reading the breach, thus incarnating in one immortalised scholarly body the historiographer and the archivist? It seems to me that in the background of these questions ranging from extreme minoritarian punctuation to epic crescendo, Ambedkar proposes something precise at Mahad as a way of making the event thinkable instead of either imitative or inscrutable. According to Ambedkar, one can think of the Mahad Satyagraha as equal to the French Revolution. This can be done analogically; at the same time, one must think of them as equal and incomparable. The analogical schema first: by virtue of their respective institutions of the “norm of equality”, Mahad and the French Revolution become analogous. But the comparison gains its real efficacy from the analogy of truth-effects that attaches to their respective discursive ensembles. If Ambedkar is not making the trivial point of similar forms of institution but that the two conjunctures are traversed by comparable truth-effects despite vast differences of the institution of historical discourses, then the further significance of this analogical schema lies in its common function in both cases that it consolidates the history beyond and against the old regime in the name of a new regime of truth-effect(s). So “norm of equality” is not simply a formal statement joining the two cases in an unequal synchrony of ‘events’—first, the French Revolution, then after a lag, the Mahad Satyagraha—

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plugged into a shared teleology of universal human progress; the “norm of equality” is the power of truth attached to that statement henceforth to be equally enjoyed by whoever utters it. By an analogy of enjoyment of true speech under the “new regime”, Indian history, 1927 onwards, is equal to any other. The job then is not to take one’s assigned historical place in an abstract schema of universal emancipation but to live an equal historical life of truth while analogically consolidating institutions and discourses of that life. Now the imperative of an ‘incomparable’ thinking. In the foregoing schema we saw the analogical productivity of truth. However, for it to pass between events and histories and invest subjects and identities, truth must also be anonymous. That is why despite the differential ‘state of institution’ of the “norm of equality” in different societies, as a truth the norm must itself possess an egalitarian, and anonymous permanent ‘virtuality’ for all. At this stage, though it is speculative to determine the concept of “all”, one can restrict the idea to the fact that the “all” here is neither a numerical count of everyone nor an alibi for something like a higher unity subsuming particular ‘ones’, such as one God or one Universe/World, etc. The “all” then becomes “one-all”. But as an effect of the analogical and virtual programmes of discourse, the “all” is also a negotiation of virtualities. This means that an immanent Kantianism of discourse persists and the experience of equality is intelligible only when supported by the anonymous web of discourses. The equality and anonymity of true discourses is the condition for all ‘modern’ political experience. However, what

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breaches the old regime is the actual declaration of equality. And if it, indeed, is the declaration of a breach, then the breach cannot be an effect of discourse; its anonymity is not global and virtual but local, here and now, the localisation of this here and now unto a void of all discourses.13 Yet there is a real experience of the breach—that is the wager of an unprecedented thought. No sense, no discourse, no anonymous profundity of analogies-in-depth must precede what is “unprecedented”. Ambedkar submits, in my view, to the imperative and wager of this new, raw and almost naive thinking. Yet to make thinkable what must be thought he undertakes the comparatist gesture. But this time the gesture is not analogical. It cannot be since any analogy between the experiences of breach between regimes of discourse, power and truth is totally void. What is the comparatist gesture then if not analogical? I will say that instead of seizing comparable attributes and relations which can’t exist between breaches of regimes, the gesture is absolute and egalitarian. It seizes upon the fact that in each case there is a breach, and this results in a void-material of historical time with which intense historicities are woven. That there is a declaration of equality in the French Revolution and in Mahad, strictly speaking, an absurd declaration in each case with no discursive support, is what unites them across an abyss. All subsequent discursive consolidation in history that will translate one ‘event’ into another must, every time, translate in a necessarily absurd language, the fact that the abyss itself is untranslatable (Benjamin, 1969, 69–82). That

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the gesture of comparison is absolute is because it seizes an experience which is untranslatable in each case; that it is egalitarian is because it seizes, in each case, an experience that is untranslatable. At the end of the first section, let me translate this thesis centred on the spatial image of the abyss as the (non)place of incommensurable egalitarian contact, of absurd effective comparison into some considerations on the time of such contact and comparison. In the above schematization of the ‘tests’ of the event we encountered three temporal perspectives. The first perspective, which is militant, with an eschatological twist, not only explodes out of the continuum of time a present time of the event, it also explodes out of the present another present. This other present was called “historicity” as opposed to the historical continuum (Choudhury, 2013, 142–45). The grammatical mood of the historicity of a new present is a peculiar future anteriority whereby the “norm of equality” will have been true and unprecedented every time it is declared, whether in the history of Europe, at Mahad or anywhere else; it is being declared even as I write… The second perspective is universalist but with a view on the event as sign. The word “perspective” is indeed apt here unlike in the militant case where the event’s immanent thickness absorbs all perspectival partialities rendering the time of the event “perfect” and at the same time ruining all hermeneutic binding of the event into meaning. Conversely, the universalist hermeneutic binding of the event—or a hermeneutic universalism of the same—avoids this “zone of indistinction” between perfection and ruination (Agamben,

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2005b, 26). It seems to me that the hermeneutic of the event as sign is the contemplative synthesis to be performed by the spectatorial subject. The spectator ‘absents’ the thick void of the event into a virtual staging of signs. This is not a theatre where we hear the hoarse cry of triumph and the tender entreaties in defeat coming from the battleground of history; instead a dispositio of pantomime stretches, with a kind of wispy gestural violence—the pure, thick void of the event into a tendency of time, a horizon of futurity, a ‘sense of history’.14 Though, in this scheme, the sense and the spectacle are not brought from the theatre of history; they play upon the surface of thought which has gone absolutely still with the shock that a sign of history’s sense and orientation has just fallen to the spectator’s contemplation. The subsequent enthusiasm that “the event shows, history tends to progress!” doesn’t disturb any of the stillness brought on by the inaugural shock, it is a still enthusiasm as opposed to the militant and performative intervention in the first case. Of course the affective metaphysic above is only possible on condition that the spectator reads signs and purveys discourses. Which means, she is confronted with the logical time of symbolic systems and makes something of this encounter as a ‘subject’. Unlike Kant’s epochal spectator in the age of enlightenment—and not the enlightened spectator—the discursive subject cannot read the protocols of one type of discourse as the entire horizon of historical sense and hermeneutic realization. In the first place she is subject to several temporalities of time and the resolution

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of this heterogeneity can only be that she decides to become the militant of some one time (of discourse) as against every other that she does belong to. How to arrive at this decision? Not by wagering the present as its immortal— and ruined—other, not by diagnosing the present unto its permanent if slight futurity… by what, then? It seems to me that historians of the Subaltern Studies school and some postcolonial writers take an impressive archival path to a fork on the road: a direction towards the genealogical constitution of the present and another towards the present as an exceptional event of the new. Further, it seems, in their admirable writings, they would perform the leap—a leap between history and politics—between the two constitutions of time. Because the merit of their work is precisely to show the relentless saturation of history by discourse, yielding a complex of logical times and the limits of symbolic representations of historical force—of revolts of time—the only way out of this impasse is to convert it into a conjunctural passage. History passes into the present of revolt through the force of its own internal repressions and dominations such that the subject of revolt is the correlated passage from an unconscious historical virtuality locked in discourse to a flash of counter-conduct and eventdriven “consciousness”. I think these writers have provided enough reason for one to say that what they occasionally call “consciousness” is event (Chatterjee, 2013, 73). At the same time, they would archivally support the historicity of “consciousness” with ‘another’ history which is marginalised and buried, subaltern and interstitial. There is a ‘messianic’

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solution to this equivocation. It is that the will to recuperate the subjugated documents of the past comes from the decision in the present to make the “tiger’s leap” from the torn present to the unredeemed past.15 The scholarly will to ‘another’ tradition of indigenous-subaltern egalitarianism of a historical society comes from the entirely unprecedented declaration of equality in the present irreversibly separated from the past. I think it is this threshold of absolute separation that prescribes the task of writing a history of relative proximity to the present threshold, a history of relative and ‘graded subalternities’ opening onto the chance of the present in whose alien element it is declared that all humans are absolutely equal.16 It is the historical scholar’s (unavowed?) decision on the chance of the present to mobilise the past as a history of subalternity relative to the norm of equality and as a history of the subaltern in the image of the absolute and immortal equal. In my view, the chance of the present, apart from prescribing the impossible genealogy of its ‘separate’ being also prescribes a separated eternity. Exactly at the cusp of an irreversible present, a time of reversible and aleatory eternity obtains where Ambedkar will experiment with myriad constellations all his life—constellations of one thought and one thought only. The “only” thought is the principle of thinking itself, which is neither a prescription of habit nor an ordinance of law. Thinking is the same thing as responsibility—and it always precedes every institution of religion and law. Caste itself is an enunciative apparatus of law and (Hindu) religion that prohibits thought in the sense

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of a ‘free responsibility’. Exactly in this sense the thought of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity, to which Ambedkar will add the Marathi word manuski, humanity—must be the ‘free responsibility’ of another society in another age.17 II “If we seek for another meeting in the past to equal this we shall have to go to the history of France…”18 Ambedkar’s first temporal perspective is that of the present—not which is analyzable into a causal depth of the past or reversible into a comparative perspective. Everything must begin again with the Mahad Satyagraha in December 1927.19 That is the unstated world-historical stress on “this” when Ambedkar says, “[W]e seek… in the past to equal this [emphasis mine]…” This unprecedented event is an event by virtue of being unprecedented. Which means that when Mahad in 1927 forces a caesura in the nominal continuum called “Indian history”, it as much hollows out a section from the continuum of continuums, the name of the time that nominally includes all times, i.e., from “world history”. The impasse of Indian history is an impasse of all history and any politics. Hence the subsequent passion will “seek” within the hollow the “equal” of this very hollow in any history. Ambedkar’s second temporal perspective is born of the irreversible world-historical position of Mahad—let us call it the perspective of “eternity”, more exactly, reversible, aleatory eternity. The eternity of a temporal hollow of history, it, nevertheless, obeys not the laws of history but the play of eternity. According to such ‘play’, the French Revolution is

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an equal of Mahad—that is Ambedkar’s comparatist thesis. What does the thesis imply? Once we agree that the event is a conjunctural effectivity based on nothing, on the nothing, the hollow that intervenes between the old and the new regimes, it remains for one to see how the event—Mahad—owes no debt to the temporalisation of historical time. Eternity is the state of debtlessness, an effective ideality which manifests the reversible perspective that no event owes a debt to another, that there is no history of events: Mahad and the French Revolution are gleaming historicities without any history temporalising them. In “Krishna and His Gita”, Ambedkar, when discussing B.G. Tilak’s apotheosis of the Gita in the rival context of the Buddhist revolution in Indian history, says that the Gita is a counter-revolutionary textual institution (BAWS 3, 1987a, 371). With the reference to Tilak’s “ingenious” argument against Buddhism’s precedence over the Gita, Ambedkar generalizes: “[W]ith them it is a matter of honour that counter-revolution should not be shown to be indebted to Revolution.”20 Counter-revolution doesn’t want to be seen to have borrowed from the time of the revolution and would present itself as an eternity. But it is a false eternity. Because counter-revolution would institute a debt of eternity and temporalise it as a ‘history of debt’. The debt which encodes history is the one the future must pay to the ‘monument’ of the event (such as the Bhagavad Gita). On the other hand, the meaning of “revolution” that Ambedkar gives to Mahad, and through it to the French Revolution, is that the Revolution as event interrupts the debt of the past (the old regime) and does

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not prescribe any new debts. The event is the effectivity of the hollow, the nothing that voids the time of the historical continuum—an effectivity which can also be seen as the real experience of a defaulting not just on behalf of the past debtors but also on behalf of the very element of the credit that is the time of history.21 The counter-revolution trembles before the breach of debt and quickly attempts to re-impose it even if in the guise of a revolutionary debt.22 It is as if the ‘subject’ is held within a heightened sense of obligation to the ‘monumental’ event borne by none less than the ‘immortal’ who is indifferent to the vicissitudes of historicomortal time and none less than the ‘partisan’ who is entirely enveloped by the interest of a historical aggrandisement. The counter-revolutionary ‘subject’ is dual—immortal and wounded to death, indifferent and driven by passionate interest(s), sovereignly eternal and adversarially tied to the revolutionary episode. The subject of the revolution, or the ‘event’, if you will, is double: in the element of a ruined historical temporalisation, she is wounded to immortality. In a milieu of interests and passions, she is moved to withdraw her stakes. Not to forge a separate eternal world but to expose an operator of separation in the time of the world which itself doesn’t belong to any form of historical time. Such an operator, an evental operator, gives itself to be thought while resisting given forms of ‘historical’ thinkability. I would like to suggest that Ambedkar performed two gestures of such defaulting ‘alien’ thought—the aleatory thought of comparison and the forcing thought of constitution. Let us take them briefly, one by one, and with that end this note:

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a. The Comparatist Gesture: In the preface to his 1873 work Gulamgiri (On Slavery), Jotirao Phule already makes a gesture which doubles comparison with stating that which is exceptional and incomparable. According to Phule, the mythological Parshuram from ancient Indian texts is seen to be a more fiendish and inhuman character than other such ‘world-historical’ fiends as Nero, Alaric and Machiavelli (Phule, 2008, 5). The extent of the genocide of those who belonged to the land by Parshuram to establish an alien brahminization, in Phule’s view, is unprecedented on a comparative world-historical scale. In a homologous gesture he, in this text, will hear a resonance between the great emancipator of this land from brahminism, Baliraja that is, with the Great Redeemer born in the West (47). The point is, Phule, while making these comparative statements with a global sweep, isolates and localizes the birth of the comparison in the historicity of the so-called brahminical insinuation in non-Aryan indigenous India. It is an exceptional—and exceptionally—brutal birth that must still be re-inserted into the history of the world, or more exactly, any history. What is remarkable is that this conjunctural risk of comparison which someone like Phule, and then Ambedkar, must take belongs, chronologically speaking, to the same age as Indological knowledges and orientalist comparativisms. The terribly complex economies of discourse instituted by these comparativist knowledges, apart from taking as their objects such specific domains as religion, mythology, grammar etc., institute as if

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a global abstract object—object of objects—which is “comparativity” itself.23 The world has suddenly become commensurable in terms of structural and philological ‘globalisation’. At this very instant of global intelligibility, an equally instantaneous birth takes place, which is literally exceptional to the structural ‘world-order’.24 The Indian untouchable, as much as the American slave, is literally exceptional to the abstract order which knowledge(s) hold in commensurable, egalitarian reserve on a world scale. But Phule, Ambedkar later, and someone like Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti nearly a hundred years before, are not interested in holding in counterreserve an alternative ‘subaltern’ local incommensurable tradition and temporality.25 On the contrary. They will have, instead of being the guardians of local exceptions to the world, excepted the world from its own arche-global philosophy of history, its world historical arche-tecture. For L’Ouverture in Haiti at the end of the eighteenth century, for Phule at the end of the nineteenth century and Ambedkar, round the corner in the twentieth century, the task is to force comparison out of the very crack of comparativity and its historico-philosophical power to declare concrete and singular world-historical events. Or rather, their declaration is the instantaneous historicity of events, their incommensurable comparativity. But once declared in this difficult element of historicity without any possible philosophy of history, the French Revolution, the French Revolution of Haiti, the Mahad declaration of the French Revolution—the event(s)

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are released into a playful eternity. The play consists in the fact that each event joyfully defaults on both the historical conditions from which it is born and the rousing inheritance of events from which it is supposed to draw its revolutionary credit. There is no order of events with structural relations and homologous properties. Unlike the scholarly perspective on ‘comparable’ social and cultural objects which gives them a kind of graded or hierarchical equality—so close to Ambedkar’s thesis on caste—the equality of events is the equality of their chance if treacherous birth. The play of chance is as much as the play of their aleatory (non)time rather than the time of history to which they ‘belong’. In this eternal (non)time of play there are gratuitous metrics of thought that are supplemental to the event in history.26 Thus, gratuitously, the French Revolution serves as a metric of thought for ‘measuring’ the Mahad Satyagraha just as the Mahad Satyagraha will have served as a metric for the French Revolution in the (non)time of eternity. Just as Ambedkar will have been the immortal lighting up the path for the revolutionary French thinkers of 1789 in a reversible egalitarian eternity. b. The Constitutional Gesture: Will Ambedkar have inspired Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès? Will, for instance, Sieyès’ pamphlet “What is the Third Estate?” (Sieyès, 2003) have been inspired by a text like “Who were the Shudras?” (BAWS 7, 1990a). On the one hand, even by our reversible parameter, that is unlikely: because while Ambedkar,

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in tracing a history of the formation of the shudras, as a kind of minoritization of a minority—in the same way that the formation of the brahmin is the majoritization of another minority—would like to void this category and begin history from a clean slate, Sieyès would affirm the ‘third estate’ as the sovereign constitution of a numerical majority.27 The erstwhile shudra will have become indiscernible from any other social group in a revolutionized egalitarian society while the third estate will have expunged the nobility and the clergy. And yet, at another level, in the further sections of his speech at Mahad in March 1927, Ambedkar precisely draws a comparison between the Mahad declaration and the ‘expulsive’ proclamations of equality by the French National Assembly in January, May and June 1789.28 What is the significance of this comparison? It is that the exercise doesn’t take place with the specific nature of social difference between Indian and French societies in view—in which case the caste system and the division of estates would be fundamentally irreconcilable—but from the perspective of the totality of society, which in both cases needs to be dismantled.29 In Ambedkar’s words, it is the intensity of the inequalities that is comparable, not their analytic constituents (65). Which can only mean the intensity is being challenged by another intensity, the intensity of the event(s) at hand. From this point of view the difference between the ‘third estate’ and the composition of the shudras and ati-shudras becomes “minor”.30

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Let me open a brief parenthesis here: it seems to me that Ambedkar and Sieyès occupy an analogous position as logicians and pamphleteers occupying the edge of an event. They are equally the exemplars of a logical and polemical culture. This means, the two figures are engaged in wars of discourses—Ambedkar with Gandhi, among others, Sieyès with Thomas Paine and others—and then, at the cusp of a historical mutation, riding a lightning flash, the two extract out of the situation of discourse, a true proposition that universalizes itself out and beyond the crucible of time. In following these protocols of war and truth, Ambedkar and Sieyès impart an ethical lesson too. You must be able to sustain a robust—even extreme—polemical culture, disabusing yourself of all illusions of natural consensus, to reach such a threshold which yields a new truth which becomes the operator of a new separation, rather than consensus.31 Though with very different historical modalities, they arrive at the same ‘separator’, call it the ‘third estate’ or the “comprehension” of shudras and ati-shudras (65). But the differentiations have comparable and different consequences for the ‘new regime’ as it unfolds in each case. It has been pointed out by astute commentaries, including by Christophe Jaffrelot and Olivier Herrenschmidt, that Ambedkar’s decisive thesis on a “graded system of sovereignty” regulating Indian caste society is based on the crucial value of minimal difference ( Jaffrelot, 2014, 322). Everything is arranged such that in the least difference between two rungs of a hierarchy, there is the reflection of the maximal functioning of the hierarchy itself, of sovereignty itself. In simple terms

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it means that between two lowly placed castes (jatis) in the system, where one is nearly the same as the other from the point of view of the apex of the pyramid, there might obtain a relationship of nearly absolute—brahminical—subordination. The system is so dense and labyrinthine with this weaving of minimal absolute difference that it appears, to borrow an expression from medieval Christianity, as if one has one’s foot on the neighbour’s head.32 Surely it is a matter of immense comparative interest to see Sieyès, in the years following the Terror, at least up to Napoleon’s empire, repeatedly, even obsessively, constituting the French Nation as a system scissored by ghosts of great pre-revolutionary forces (the Estates), now in the global form of revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, Thermidorians and Jacobins, republicans and monarchists…33 No more the voiding declaration of 1789; instead the constitutional gesture that ‘forces’ the event to convert the egalitarian and popular ‘immortality’ of an instant into a perpetual and historico-mortal republican hierarchy! Peculiarly, this constitutional path forged or forced out of revolutionary history culminated, after 1799, in the wake of Napoleon’s coup, in a system of gradual, or graded, election (in the political sphere) and promotion (in the non-political bureaucratic sphere) (Sonenscher, 2007, 77–9). Erected on an absolutely egalitarian base, Sieyès, to solve the problem of the base splitting into the old regime of hierarchy of discrete estates and the new (perverted) regime of binary hierarchy of ruling class and the governed, constitutes a system of dense and minimally articulated differences where every political candidate and bureaucratic aspirant would have to go through

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each stage of the system to be elected or promoted to the next stage. An excruciating step-by-step promenade across the staircase up to the apex proceeds by strangely mobilizing yet replacing the static architecture of death where everyone has their foot on their neighbour’s head and everyone dies on the floor they are born in.34 Is it any surprise then that Ambedkar in the chapter “A Plea to the Foreigner” (BAWS 9, 1991c), in his addresses to the Constituent Assembly of the new republic, and on several other occasions considered the Constitution to be an absolutely essential and essentially ‘forced’ document?35 Unlike Sieyès, Ambedkar did not—could not—accept the presumption of equality in the historical constitution of India’s political constitution.36 Which also meant that there couldn’t be the presumption of a natural meritocracy corresponding to political democracy. Rather, the issues of equality, democracy and meritocracy must be forced. The reason for this asymmetry seems to be as delicate as it is brutal: while Sieyès, a resolute anti-Jacobin if not conservative, belonged to the revolutionary sequence following the ‘event’, Ambedkar, while carrying the immortal void of an event in his heart and his writings, was abandoned to a counter-revolutionary history. In retort to this abandonment, Ambedkar, no Jacobin himself, nevertheless, puts the Constitution to a ‘forcing’ test—it is the test of political and administrative reservations for real unequals, also called “minorities”.37 Indeed, it seems to me that reservations are a debt that the counter-revolution must perpetually pay to the revolution it tried to swallow up and

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got stuck in its throat. Only when it will have breathed out and released its immortal anathema counter-revolution will also have realised that the event never prescribed any debts in the first place.

NOTES 1 At this time Ambedkar was serving as Labour Member of the Governor-General’s Executive Council. 2 For a substantiation of the ‘plan’ of the Mahad Satyagraha, its historical division between two phases, the exigencies of violence and the policy of restraint (not retreat), though without any comparative perspective with the French Revolution, see Zelliot, 2013, 74–82. While Gandhi’s term “Satyagraha” is usually applied to Mahad, one must remember that Mahad is a part of the history of “Conferences”, which are at once intellectual and militant assemblies of the untouchables. One must also recall the fact that Ambedkar at an earlier conference at Nipani in 1925, called the “Satyagraha” (he used the word) at Vaikom in Travancore on the Ezhava castes’ demand to use a Temple road, “the most important event in the country” (77) at that time. 3 While in what is to follow it will be parts of the Mahad address that will be discussed at length, Ambedkar’s references to the French Revolution in the later period (BAWS 9, 1991f) are crucial. It demolishes the axiomatic complacency of ‘we moderns’ that “we” are, unproblematically, living in the new regime. Ambedkar reminds us that insofar as caste exists, the old regime continues. And yet, we cannot not also live and think in the element of the new regime which is incessantly ‘impurified’ by the old in the name of a pure immemorial order, not a spatio-temporal or historical regime at all.

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4 Ambedkar himself said that fundamentally caste is “wrong relationship” (BAWS 1, 1979b, 89). This is an acute assertion of a logician of historical structures and not of a phenomenologist of intolerable “experience” or an exorcist of bad “substance”. But we must

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equally ask the fundamental question whether Ambedkar thought the wrong relation was correctible, without intervening in, if not voiding, the structure. We will, in the coming pages, touch upon this question, and Ambedkar’s thesis on the graded system of sovereignty/slavery, and the conclusion on the ‘relative’ Hindu against the absolute one. The Hindu always exists relatively while claiming a fictional absolute status. This is Ambedkar’s riposte to Gandhi after the latter’s repudiation of Annihilation of Caste. It is not difficult to recognize that the phrase “generic equality” denotes an effort of thinking the idea of equality without recourse to evaluating equality through equal empirical predicates and attributes in subjects. Generic equality is the thesis “There is equality” and not “X=Y” in this or that respect (with reference to predicates, p1, p2…). Clearly generic equality or axiomatic equality (though they are not the same) is a condition for empirical programmes of equality but does not depend on the latter. Moreover in Ambedkar’s own extremely subtle constructions or ‘theorems’ on practical equality, we see why equality, generically speaking, is a good axiom (58). In Badiou (2003). “Fidelity” is the English translation of Alain Badiou’s French translation of St. Paul’s use of the Greek word “pistis”. The common translation of Paul’s word is “faith”. The proposition incipient here is that the ‘thought’ of equality, which is an ‘immortal’ thought, is entirely immanent to, and is a kind of sub-set of the real elements of the ‘local set’ or the actual atoms of the isolate. This condensed idea is inspired by and a conscious misapplication of Alain Badiou’s “Real Atoms and Postulate of Materialism” (2009, 250–251). According to these architectonics of immanence, one doesn’t have

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to choose between a mahar movement, a mahar-led untouchable movement or a purely untouchable movement for characterizing the event(s) of this period. The mahar is one of the discernible names of the “real atoms”; the untouchable the immanent general name of the particular atomic names; and the name of the immortal, ontologically indiscernible from the historical atoms… dalit? Only insofar as dalit ‘discerns’ the immortality of a mortal and oppressed world. 9 On an interpretation of Kant’s diagnostic based upon the sign of the present and a possible event-philosophy, I provisionally refer the reader to my other work (Choudhury, 2013, 169–70). Here I analyze in greater detail the paradoxical situation of the distaste that Kant feels for the Revolution in its physical unfolding while praising it for its diagnostic value. 10 For another use of the word “enthusiasm” as the subjective passion of the revolutionary and the objective milieu of the Revolution, one can go to the sumptuous prose of Jules Michelet and his history of the French Revolution in the middle of the nineteenth century. For this comparison, see Choudhury, 2013, 154, Note 73. 11 It is important to note that between Antonio Gramsci’s usage of the term “subaltern” as a kind of non-unified “group” rather than strata or class transforms to an affirmative usage by the historians of the Subaltern School. But the real delicacy of the challenge is to maintain this powerful affirmation at the level of this fundamental socio-historical weakness. See Gramsci, 1971, 52. The relevant section is cited, with interesting effect, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in a recent polemic (2014) against Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. 12 It is true that Phule, unlike Ambedkar who wants to wipe the slate clean by reconstructing and voiding the history of the shudra, calls the shudras and ati-shudras aboriginals of the land. But even this ab-originality, this autochthony, to be rendered its due, demands a completely new and revolutionized thinking in the

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present. This thinking Phule calls “education” for which the British system of learning, which is a contingent chance of history, will provide the organon. Thus, according to Phule, the British policy of spreading their learning among the brahmins (whom he calls Bhatts) is to implement an insipid policy of educational ‘trickledown’. The Bhatts don’t know how to use the organon, they have no use of it! See Phule (2008). The preface is written in English by the author and the remaining Marathi text is translated by Maya Pandit. 13 In other words, there is no local ‘knowledge’, strictly speaking, supporting a declaration of equality, no local, hidden egalitarian tradition to be mobilised. This was Ambedkar’s early wager against recommencing the cult of Chokhamela among the mahars as an emancipatory kernel for the future. Willing to pay the price of foregoing the shelter of the great name of Chokhamela on this occasion, on another he will mobilize the name “Buddhism” as a kind of paleonymy, not a referent, of the new moment of conversion. See Zelliot, 2013, 52–7. 14 The word ‘sense’ here imitates the French ‘sens’, which means both meaning and direction. The point of historicity being against history is the same as that of the event without sense against a ‘sensetime’. 15 This image is from Thesis XIV of Walter Benjamin’s “The Concept of History”. Let me express my thanks to a reading of Walter Benjamin close to my concerns, which were greatly clarified by this reading. See Chowdhury, 2013. 16 “Graded subalternities” is another case of conscious misapplication—this time of Ambedkar’s thesis. There is some obvious resonance with Ambedkar’s alternative expression “graded slavery”; however the real significance of this coinage is a differential saturation of the social field foreclosing any politics as opposed to the image of the subaltern who is excluded from political subjectivity as constituted by the absolutely dominant class.

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17 See BAWS 1, 1979b, 74–76. Notice in this section the Kantiansounding ‘Ambedkar thinks, he doesn’t obey.’ 18 It is important to keep in mind that the Mahad Satyagraha was carried out in two parts. The first phase took place in the month of March 1927 (March 19th and 20th), when Ambedkar and a large number of other delegates marched to the Chavadar Tank to draw water from the tank as an act of breaking with the casteHindu prohibition. We must remember that the municipal law had already declared that the public tank was accessible to all, but the brahminical proscription remained effective till this revolutionary transgression took place. The second phase in December 1927 was preceded by both episodes of violence against the transgressors by upper caste gangs and a nearly baroque act of purification that the brahmins of that region performed in response to what they considered the impurification of the Chavadar Tank by the untouchables. For details, see Keer, 2009, 69–88. 19 Beyond all fetishism of the Book, whether to be venerated or burnt, the act of burning the Manusmriti on 25 December, 1927 at Mahad must be taken as an absolute beginnings of thought as a right, a potency, and as an affirmation at the exact point of its historical, enunciative and ontological capture. We must remember that at this fragile point of absolute beginning, the demand for a full right of thought is as much a minimal upsurge of a trace of thinking from the ashes of a Book, nay, book (Zelliot, 2013, 80). Also of interest is the fact that the idea of burning the Manusmriti was G.N. Sahasrabuddhe’s, a chitpavan brahmin. In the constitutive imagination of my thesis, the caste-Hindu participates in symbolic acts of solidarity to the fullest degree; the dalit draws the minimal real consequence for thought from such action. Ambedkar’s refusal to think the event at the level of mere transgression in 1927 must be joined to the question of how to think the burning of the Manusmriti. 20 That is why counter-revolutionary thought, while espousing

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a pure transcendent authority, must enforce this transcendence in the element of historical time. This enforcement can be analogical through schematic parallels between transcendental and earthly authority, or it can be ‘mysterious’ through the force of decision arising from a void, beyond all immanent legitimacy. In all this, counter-revolution will not admit that the void is an ontological break-out of and from the time of the world in the world which is sometimes called “revolution”. This double structure is to be found in the thought of such diverse figures as Joseph de Maistre, Carl Schmitt, B.G. Tilak, and V.D. Savarkar. 21 The most vivid example of such fundamental defaulting on the very system of credit and debt that encodes historical time can be seen in the refusal to pay tithes to the Church during the French Revolution. To not pay taxes to the Church was to default on the inheritance of a powerful social and cultural identity, effect a crack in the corporate form of the Church and to interrupt the time of political descent from the old regime. Choudhury, 2013, 202–8. 22 It is fascinating to see how counter-revolution responds to revolutionary violence and interprets it not as a means to a new historical society but as a sign that chaos, in the name of revolution, is here; that someone forgot to pay his debt to the true authority which is a mystery and a transcendence. There will always be blood but the question is whether its quantity is equal to the debt owed to the true sovereign whose tax-collectors (blood-collectors?) are the One King, One Culture, One Tradition and so on, whether there is uneconomical blood as price for revolutionary arrogance that there could be immanent constitution of sovereign truth. So the task is to use revolutionary-Jacobin blindness to a greater transcendental illumination, to prescribe a peculiar ‘revolutionary’ debt of eternal Tradition (143) for the substantiation of this point through an analysis of Joseph de Maistre’s polemic against the French Revolution. 23 A masterly representative of this exposition of “‘Indo-European’

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comparativity” is Dumézil, 1988. In a sense, we can say the notion of “Indo-European Culture” corresponds to and constitutes a neutral object “comparativity itself ”—and from this utterly objective, cold premise, the political critique of orientalism must begin. 24 This, I will say, is the birth of “comparative politics”, which, to all measures of comparativity itself, is an impossible idea because it is exceptional and generic at the same time. Conversely, it can be shown that global orders of knowledge-discourses are deployed as political exigencies in the face of exceptional ‘events’. Susan Bayly (2014, 47–87) persuades us that ‘orientalist’ policies of the British government and global notions of Indian caste-system, are not uniquely or even inherently knowledges of a biased (Eurocentric) type but the specific and unified political response forced by the ‘event’ of the 1857 Revolt (among other exceptional moments in history). 25 For a related but different view on the question of bringing together Marxist and several postcolonial literatures, see Negri and Hardt, 2001, 67–204 26 We call this gratuitous procedure a dalit ‘snobbism’, a leisurely thought of glacial constellations with a certain militant disinterest in the sound and fury of the world as it exists with reference to the Ambedkar–Gandhi debate in the sixth chapter “Ambedkar Contra Aristotle: On a Possible Contention about who is Capable of Politics”. 27 On the Estates-General in 1789 and the doubling of the vote of the third estate as a reflection of its majority, see Lefebvre, 2005, 98–111. 28 In his Mahad speech, Ambedkar builds a qualitative comparison between the estates of the old regime in France and Hindu castedivision in terms of corporate hierarchy of society and points out that at this point (1927), a political comparison is not possible. That is because the numerical intervention of converting the major magnitude (the third estate) into a sovereign ‘quality’ (new regime) is

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not on the agenda on any Indian ‘National Assembly’. Remember one of the leading slogans of the revolutionary conjuncture in France was “The Nation is the People Assembled”! See the rest of Ambedkar’s speech extracted in Aloysius, 2009, 64–6. 29 “The thing to bear in mind is there is great similarity between the French National Assembly that met on 5 May 1789 at Versailles and our meeting today. The similarity is not only in the circumstances… but also in their ideals. That Assembly of the French people was convened to reorganize French society. Our meeting today too has been convened to reorganize Hindu society” (65). 30 “[L]ike the Hindu Society, the French had a class of Brahmins and another of Kshatriyas. But instead of three different castes of Vaishya, Shudra and Atishudras, there was one class [the third estate] that comprehended these. This is a minor [emphasis mine] difference” (65). 31 Very cryptically put, it is this polemical culture that is nearly wiped out in our times. Is it ironic, or is there a logical explanation, that in times of habitual and neurotic sensitivity to the ‘hurt’ that we threaten each other with, the “we” is itself a matter of consensus rather than a function of real separation? I think the essential thing lacking is the promise of a new truth born out of separation, a truth of which as yet we know nothing… Instead we live and rage in the consensus that we know everything. 32 For this extraordinary and continuous modulation of minimal difference into dense graded hierarchy in the age of Meister Eckhart and Latin Christianity, see Schürmann 2003, 298–318. It is to be noted that here is a model of ontological hierarchy of being subject to God in the mode of ontological loans/credit distributed from a hegemonic/ sovereign source to every being of the hierarchy. If the sovereign turns away, the entire hierarchy collapses and the world of beings is annihilated. So debt is necessary, productive and empowering in the structure of graded sovereignty with clearly two articulations of the sovereign: the Singular Sov-

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ereign-Creditor-Hegemon and the plural system of Social Sovereignty of all debtors. Subtract the Christian God from the system and you get Hindu caste-society at a pinch! 33 For a complex historical account of these forces, see Sonenscher, 2007, 22–94. 34 See Arundhati Roy’s interview in Outlook magazine (Naqvi, 2014) in the wake of her introduction to a new annotated edition of Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (2014) 35 See BAWS 9, 1991c. Also the speeches to the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948 and 25 November 1949—where Ambedkar, unhappily, insisted that the Constitution must impose a code of necessity on an area which was intrinsically contingent, that is, “administration” (instead of legislature) (BAWS 13, 1994a, 60–1). 36 See Ambedkar’s speech to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949 (977–81). He ends with a threnody where he clearly laments the utter absence of equality in Indian society against which the axiom of political equality must be constituted, nay, forced. Actually even this formulation must be modified because the point was to force generic equality through a political constitution. 37 For an alternative path of history which wouldn’t end up with the impasse Ambedkar lamented on the eve of the new republic, the latter had attempted, from the days of the first Round Table Conference and the Communal Award of separate electorates to the 1947 document States and Minorities, to develop an emancipatory political arithmetic instead of depending on an analog of the exceptional ‘event’ which reservations was in the Constitution. In an improvised discussion at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata on a different paper by me on a connected issue in 2014, Partha Chatterjee strikingly suggested that seen in this light, reservations was analogous to something like dictatorship of the proletariat on the way to true communist equality.

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6 Ambedkar Contra Aristotle: On a Possible Contention about who is Capable of Politics

I At the outset, I would like to place side by side two documents greatly removed from each other with regard to their time and location of origin. The first: upon the transfer of power from British rule to independent India in 1947, the Constituent Assembly debated anew the question of constitutional safeguards for minorities. The section of opinion arguing for such safeguards expressed itself thus: The reservation of seats has benefited us in many ways…it has created an awakening among the Scheduled Castes; it has brought among them a spirit of self-progress; it has made others realize that the members of Scheduled Castes are citizens, equal to them, and they too should be entitled to all the rights that a citizen should have. It has also developed amongst us a habit to sit together and decide the future of the country and to discuss the important and grave problems of the country mutually…1

The second text now: Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, Athens, devotes Book VIII of his Politics to the role of such activities as music, painting, and gymnastics in the education of the young such that they can become good

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citizens. With particular reference to music Aristotle says: Since we accept the division of melodies proposed by certain philosophers into (1) ethical, (2) practical and (3) enthusiastic, with distinct modes corresponding to each, and [since] we maintain that music should be used not for the sake of one benefit only but for several (for it should be used for education and for katharsis as well—what I mean by katharsis I will indicate generally now but more clearly in the work of poetics—and thirdly for employment in cultivated leisure [diagôgê] both for amusement and relaxation from toiling), it is clear that one must make use of all the musical modes but not use them all in the same way: for education the most ethical modes are to be employed; but for listening to others perform we must also use the practical and the enthusiastic. For any affection that occurs strongly in some souls occurs in a lesser or greater degree in all, such as pity, fear or again religious ecstasy [enthusiasmos]. There are some people who are particularly susceptible to this latter form of excitement and we see them once they have availed themselves of melodies that thoroughly excite the soul, put back on their feet again as a result of the sacred melodies just as if they had obtained medical treatment and katharsis… In a similar way [to the sacred melodies], the kathartic melodies offer a harmless pleasure to all. Hence the use of such modes and melodies must be permitted for those whose business is providing music for the theatre; the audience after all is double, partly free and educated but partly vulgar too, composed of laborers and farmers and other such, and these people too must be granted their spectacle as a relaxation…It is appropriate thus to permit those who perform publicly to make use of this sort of music but for education, as has been said, one must employ ethical melodies and modes (in Ford, 1995, 118–9).

Without any vain, ill-advised attempt to make commensurate the vast difference of provenance between

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the two documents, let us pick out an apparent point of contact, which is also a point of repulsion, between them: which could be identified as the evaluation of something like “habit” in the two texts. Though Aristotle doesn’t use the word it seems he is saying that kathartic modes and melodies correspond to a low level pleasurable habit of the soul, its most degraded, if harmless, potentiality. In contrast, the citation from the Constituent Assembly Debates puts a positive value on habit which is a new and relational possibility with the coming of the Scheduled Castes, with reservation, up to the level of a general citizenship. But this point of contact—and repulsion—must be immediately qualified. It is not as if Aristotle does not recommend the positive uses of habit. Quite the contrary. In Politics, Aristotle urges the ethical habituation of the youth in their conduct towards virtue and citizenship. Such habituation, with specific modalizations, pertains as much to the body as to the soul (psyche). In fact without habituation and practice, it is impossible to mould conduct in the requisite form(s) of virtue (areté). Is it the case then that in the above texts from Politics, Aristotle is concerned only with the habits of those who are a priori excluded from the rights—and obligations—of citizenship, just as in inverted symmetry, the Constituent Assembly’s prominority view seems to foreground the emancipated habits of the hitherto excluded Scheduled Castes? I think it will be useful at this point to take a second look at the two tabled documents—and it is possible that they will reveal a symmetry, an inverted one at that, but answer the question

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“whose habits are at stake here?” somewhat differently in the light of this second symmetry. Clearly the Constituent Assembly view says, “it has developed amongst us [emphasis mine] a habit to sit together and decide…” In fact, throughout the passage the pronominative subject travels between “them” and “us”, and “us”, in two compositions, one without them and one with “them” such that the habit of participating in citizen-politics, of deciding the future of the country, is mutually conducted by a re-composed “us”. Now read the Aristotle passage again. Without equivocation it is said that the kathartic pleasure is meant “for all”. Everyone is susceptible to this pleasure, to a greater or lesser degree. The kathartic modes and melodies appeal and have access to the simpler and least composed (or organized, if you will) part of the soul, which is an essential component of the universal constitution of the soul as such. At this level, everything is automatism, a cycle of equilibrium and disequilibrium—and Aristotle’s medicinal analogy to the incidence of kathartic music emphasizes that by the introduction of the melodic medicine in the system, nothing is fundamentally transformed. The automatism is restored, the universal animalism of the soul is put back on its feet— nothing, in other words, is composed or re-composed at the level…at the level of what, or who? I think Aristotle provides the answer in the first book of Politics much before he has questioned the effects of music on the souls of potential citizens. The answer lies in his definition of the zoon politikon, “the political animal”, and the relation of that definition with what he calls the

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“outcast”.2 This nexus of definition and exception, postulate (or prescription) and intransigence provides the fundamental grid of judgment on political constitution and capacity that from its ancient Greek provenance travels afar and seems to arrive at the doorstep of the new Indian republic whose ‘melodic line’, as it were, was being created by the Constituent Assembly before 1950. The grid in Book I of Politics, lays out the following parameters: when Aristotle says that “man is by nature a political animal” (250), zoon politikon, this utterance starts off as a postulate or axiomatic declaration. At one level, everything either follows from this axiom or everything henceforth is mobilized to save this axiom. At another level, Aristotle does provide a defining parameter for the declaration—by which parameter and others, he will distinguish the political animal from the “outcast” (250). The parameter by which the being-political of man is decided— which further coincides with man’s being-human—is the capacity of logos that is not only more than but is also an overcoming of the voice (phone) of the animal which expresses mere pleasure and pain (Aristotle, 1943). Thus the definition of being-political of the animal that is man involves not only a predicate or positive capacity of reasoned speech (logos) but is the grid of the overcoming, a cross-over and transformation vis-à-vis a threshold of animalism. Which means, according to Aristotle, the generic capacity for politics is both existent and in-existent for man, an actual capacity and constitutive possibility as well as a hazard and exposure to the risk of failing to overcome the defining threshold, falling back into animal automatism of pleasure and pain. Interestingly,

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Aristotle’s distinction between the zoon politikon and the “outcast” maintains the first parameter but articulates it with the second one, which gives it a paradoxical evaluation. According to Aristotle, the outcast is the negative of the political animal. The outcast, who Aristotle says has no need of society like a beast or a god, lives outside the state and by that virtue, is a kind of ‘fundamental being’, an un-composed or non-constituted entity who is marked by a paradoxical sovereignty without capacity. The strangeness, or should one say, grotesquerie, intensifies when we see that outside of divine entities, the consistent examples of outcasts, these sovereigns without capacity, in Aristotle’s text, are women, slaves, labourers, children, foreigners— in short, every category which is excluded from the full capacities of the political animal and yet is ruled by them.3 How is this unsavory paradox to be explained? By going back to Book VIII and its kathartic expedient: which is that the fundamental, non-constituted, factical outcast nature, which is a cold sovereign indifferent to the joys of political constitution(s), is a universal nature. Fundamentally—and musically—according to Aristotle, we are all outcasts and we are all sovereigns and even for such cold sovereigns there is the musical stimulation of the de-graded, kathartic type. Upon this kathartic incidence arrives the threshold or moment of political differentiation that must differentiate the universal nature or substance from its outcast sovereignty into a divided structure of inclusion and exclusion. Which is to say, a structure self-divided into the ‘natural’ and ‘political’ animal, where the trace of one beast is always carried by the

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other. So every further expedient of ethical habituation of the bodies and souls of citizens—whether through forms of music other than kathartic or not—will always carry the trace of the fundamental automatism and the sovereign animal habit. Aristotle is keenly aware of the presence of the trace of difference in the paradigmatic dyad of inclusion and exclusion that constitutes the grid of the political animal in its graded distribution of sovereignties and capacities, governments and freedoms. Before relating this structure to Ambedkar’s thesis on ‘graded sovereignties’ of the caste system, a parenthesis: At the threshold where man is sovereign and subject to the pure automatism of katharsis, sovereignty is the same as absolute incapacity. We explain this by the speculation that this threshold in Aristotle is abyssally split between the greater schema of genus and differentia, potentiality and actuality, and the ‘fundamental’ non-constituted hither side, which is sovereign by dint of being non-constituted and factical. The kathartic facticity of certain classes—for this is how some classes are—exists in the great constitutional project of Aristotle as a kind of intrinsic law of entropy of all constitution. Which is the same thing as saying that all ‘definition’ of man as a political animal is a theoretical effort to attenuate this entropic return to a fundamental state, which is factical and dissipative through and through. Despite this effort, the factical givenness of outcast sovereignty will always correspond to the entropic potential of constituted humanity—this is what we might all become, mere kathartic animals!

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Now by the above speculative construction, it can be readily admitted that the use of terms/concepts such as “sovereignty”, “soul”, and “habit” is not strictly Aristotelian. But this use is only a reflection of a ‘repressed’ presupposition of Aristotle’s system and is of the nature of an untimely trace of this presupposition. Hence for instance there is a trace of this automatic animal sense of habit of repetition in the formal cultivation of habit (hexis) as the proper infrastructure of potentiality supporting all actual virtuous conduct (areté). One might summarize the clarification by introducing a term for this ‘trace’ betwixt potentiality and actuality: im-potentiality. As impotential, ‘entropic’ vitality or habit, secretly persists in the formal structure and pedagogy of Aristotelian habit as virtue. Natural life haunts constituted form in the history and destiny of Western constitutional politics from its Aristotelian beginnings. And this spectrality veils and separates Aristotle’s politicalphilosophical concepts from themselves and from each other. That is the point of this long parenthesis. Now to return to the main comparison: Is the above Aristotle’s Ambedkar-moment, the homologue of an Ambedkar threshold of graded sovereignties of the caste system in India? 4 The stakes of such a theoretical comparison lie in the constitution of a congregation or assembly, which both articulates and mobilizes the dyadic structure of society with its spaces of inclusion and exclusion. When Aristotle points out the simple fact that the kinds of theatre audience, which listens to musical performances, is always two—the labouring

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classes, women, slaves and such. and the educated elite—he is already setting up the task of articulating, overcoming and re-articulating the danger of falling back into this doubleness. In the constitution of the political assembly the trace of difference of one class is carried by the other. A certain ontological inclusion of the fundamental degradation of the universal sovereign ‘animal’ and ‘kathartic’ nature must carry on in every higher ethical and political habituation— and the habituation of every higher level of congregational existence is a kind of rule or government of the outcasthabit rather than its total exclusion. For Ambedkar, the primary, irreducible question is, does the caste system in India, historically petrified over two thousand years and with a claim to immemorial existence beyond historical time, present a trace of its systematic, structural or relational reality? Is there any space of mobility and mobilization of structural difference and historical contingency, in the political constitution of a congregation that includes in its formation traces of its own exclusions? Indeed Ambedkar will ask this question explicitly in his comparative discussion of brahminical caste system with the treatment of plebeians under the provisions of Roman law in his 1946 work Who were the Shudras? (BAWS 7, 1990a). I would like to summarize the sequence that follows from Aristotle’s equivocal or di-aporetic axiom that man is a political animal (zoon politikon)—equivocal because it contains and presupposes the opposite axiom that man’s nature remains subject to ecstasies that are cold to politics. First, exclusion is not separation; the subject of politics

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includes its exclusions, its incapacities, and its inexistences. In that sense the subject of politics is always also im-political. The second link of the sequence is that by the im-political logic of political capacity, everyone is political; or rather everything can be, and must be, politicized. The third link is that in its operational economy, everyone, instead of living the life of a multiplicity, is always reducible and divisible into the figure of the two: Included and Excluded, Master and Slave, Human and Animal. Thus the sequence closes in on itself and forms a circular chain or grid that Aristotle onwards distributes the classical principles of Western political philosophy. II It is a reasonable supposition that Ambedkar belonged to the opinion that praised in the Constituent Assembly the new “habit” of participation in collective decision on the nation’s future, a habit made possible by the policy of reservation. Indeed this admirable opinion addressed a subject which, as I pointed out earlier, was re-composed from the initial separation of “them” and “us” and yielded a new and egalitarian indiscernibility in place of hierarchies of society. Yet we also know that Ambedkar in his day was a critic of any ‘natural’ constitutional reflex or habit that flowed smoothly from ‘liberal’ constitutionalism of the West. In his “A Plea to the Foreigner”, a crucial chapter in his 1945 work What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables, Ambedkar was at pains to point out that all constitutional projects, indeed, all sovereignism, must take into account the irreducibility of “historical circumstances” (BAWS 9, 1991c, 203) and the demands of contingency (199–238). According

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to this critique, the theory of constitutional habit—which, following Aristotle’s grid, leads to constitutional morality as a habituation—promotes the form, not the actuality of the constitution of self-government (202–3). Though I will not attempt a historical analysis here, the context of “A Plea to the Foreigner” which was the tremulous eve of Indian self-government, demanded that the stakes be clearly expressed as to who would rule whom in the actuality of self-government, not only in its constitutional form. This was a demand placed vis-à-vis the imminent ruling party of an imminently independent India, that is, the Congress. But Ambedkar addressed this demand to the so-called generic “foreigner” to campaign for a kind of cosmopolitan rallying around the exigency of this demand. There was an effort to penetrate the general bloc of sympathy for the Congress in Britain—including from liberals and socialists—but it was as much an attempt to draw out liberal-constitutional political philosophy, with its subjective infrastructure of habits and reflexes considered “democratic”. Ambedkar wanted to draw the liberal foreigner out on the exigency of radical social separation, which was irreducible in its structure and topology and was a point of resistance to, and not a threshold of, a transformation into the constitution of the ‘political’ subject. The entire criticism of the Congress rested on its majoritarian as well as Gandhian covering over of the separative structure by an appearance of social totality or one society whose Hindu and secular modes of existence were fused together in this majoritarian Gandhian logic of mass organization and mass ideology that the Congress represented.

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Ambedkar’s criticism in “A Plea to the Foreigner” unfolded on two levels. The criticism of the potential ally in the figure of the cosmopolitical ‘foreign’ partisan— an internationalist who aligns herself with a universal sphere beyond national sovereignty—was that she took the Aristotelian thesis on ‘natural-political’ totality as emancipated from the fundamental animal life of universal humanity. So we could read Ambedkar’s opposition against the nationalist conception of the state as opposition to the natural polity instead of a conscious one. For him it had to be a conscious cultivation, based on a wish to become a polity, and thus he poses a great challenge to the logic of nationalism at several levels. According to Ambedkar, the liberal—and the socialist as well—democratic partisan must become aware of the actuality of the ‘Hindu exception’, an exception which didn’t admit of the index of intelligibility of the ‘animal’, who is generically asocial in habit, pleasure, suffering and is the generalized equivalent of all life processes that is automatic and kathartic. The ‘Hindu’ outcaste, the untouchable, is intensely socialized, thus dense with the human habits of following rules, prescriptions, proscriptions and commands as no animal is—and exactly by virtue of this total human-social habituation is entirely separate such that no notion of caste and outcastes exists, no trace of the untouchable exists in thought.5 The second level of criticism is directed toward the Congress party and particularly Gandhi. Here the accusation, not merely exhortation, is the following: the Congress maintains the separation of the lower castes by

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excluding them from the logic and technique of mass— and militant—organization, of which Gandhi is the undisputed master. Ambedkar had been the first to admit that it was the Mahatma’s arrival on the scene from South Africa that was singularly responsible for the conversion of the Congress from a campaign for political reform to an organization which henceforth would impose militant sanctions which the ‘masses’ would enforce (BAWS 9, 1991a, 20). This extraordinary act of ‘conversion’ was carried out by Gandhi through a singular intervention into Hindu society, which was not a society, with no real stakes in ‘totality’, which was a non-totality of corporations hanging together through shared negative injunctions against who and what was impure, unseeable, unspeakable within that system. Indeed, Hindu society was separate from itself which lived out a collective life as sheer habit that erased all traces of its systematicity and ‘mad’ rationality.6 Now Gandhi didn’t intervene in Hindu society as such—at least to begin with he wasn’t pushing for social reforms and neither was the Congress since the end of the nineteenth century. What he did was give a militant and mass programme to the ‘Hindu’ so as to convert the Hindu corporatism and separatism not into but as a secular and political congregation. This formulation requires a parenthesis before one goes on to Ambedkar’s critique of Gandhi. “Conversion as…” instead of “conversion into…” is a clear case of linguistic infelicity. Strangely, it is a meaningful— and productive—infelicity when understood in the light of a Gandhian strategy of individual-to-national debt. The

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function of this strategy of debt is to induce the conversion of a multitude into a congregation in its own place. Instead of converting ‘into’ another form or denomination, a scatter or multiplicity of individuals become a homogeneous collective without any conscious movement of such homogenization when they fulfill a minimal obligation as individuals as if it were a ‘pure’ (and ‘free’) exercise of self-discipline. In his or her own place, each individual, selfishly practices ‘Gandhian’ selflessness in such acts as that of spinning cloth and paying the minimal four-anna fee to the Congress as a token of ‘selfish’ participation. Gandhi’s genius of inducing the minimal selfish debt/obligation in any individual with a ‘Hindu’ identity converted Hindu individuality into secularpolitical discipline without the slightest disorientation of that individual status or being towards ‘another’ form of life, whether political or religious. Interestingly, in perfecting this technology of ‘conversion as…’, Gandhi proved himself as one of the greatest exponents of the same Christian technology of inducing a modern, ‘free’ debt that so marks the constitution of the Western individual as a political being.7 So there is no contradiction, seen from this angle of debt induction, between modern, secular-Western Congressist individualism and the ‘Hindu’ Gandhian practices of the self. The above is the crux of Ambedkar’s accusation—nay indictment. According to Ambedkar, the lower castes in general, the untouchable in particular, are exempted from the superb Gandhian technique and logic of inducing in the individual Hindu a unified national debt, for the Hindu otherwise always leads a fragmented and minority existence.

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A real measure of being minority is existential and not numerical; so a Hindu is an existential minority while being a numerical majority. This debt is expressed in the ‘minor’ subscription of a few annas that every individual pays to become a member of one political party so as to be totalized into a mass action of repayment of national debt. Gandhi will eventually go further and offer the alternative mode of individualized as well as totalized debt-payment through the labour of two thousand yards of hand-spun cloth.8 Ambedkar accuses this extraordinarily sophisticated technique that it exempts the untouchable from this debt of the new congregation.9 How so, when Gandhi was eventually campaigning for the abolition of untouchability and urged non-Hindus as well to join this ‘Hindu’ secular process? The answer is that the Mahatma didn’t apply his personal authority and his strategic genius to the task of organizing the Hindus in support of the cause of untouchables as untouchables (BAWS 9, 1991a, 20)10 —for who could doubt the need to convert the ‘problem’ of untouchability into a locus of political transformation and congregation. The untouchable could never simply be the generalized Hindu in the process of Gandhian and Congressist conversion to nationalist debt until the excluded castes’ debt to itself as excluded was expressed as a congregation and political assembly. The untouchables owed a debt to their own suffering past and to that extent a debt to their identity which was both historical and irreducible. At the same time, the Untouchables must learn to default on their old debts, and in Ambedkar’s words learn not to be grateful. Until then the untouchable was

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only abandoned to Hinduism, and in Ambedkar’s criticisms of the Harijan Sevak Sangh, such an abandonment, in the midst of all the exaltation into divinity of the untouchable and the penance of the Hindu, was vividly felt, accused and denounced.11 In Annihilation of Caste, where Ambedkar decides to withdraw from the system of Hindu habits, he takes issue with Mahatma Gandhi (in the letters following the publication of the address) on the very principle of equality. For Ambedkar, as opposed to both Gandhi and the Arya Samajis, the concern was equality not in God’s eyes but in the real unequal world (BAWS 1, 1979b, 87–8). Equality in the here and now of inequality. Forced by the actuality of different kinds of inequalities—socio-historical and physical—will we treat unequals unequally? This is Ambedkar’s founding question to any egalitarian thought (58). Here, Ambedkar enunciates a founding principle of equality, which bases itself neither on God’s sanction and grace nor on the Aristotelian threshold of potential equality (which is the threshold of overcoming and politicization of animal life; and a later generation of biologistic and economistic philosophies will speak of “animal spirits”). Whereupon the question arises, doesn’t such ‘axiomatic’ equality go against the insistence on thinking the caste system as a trace of its differentiated structure? Doesn’t the ‘axiom’ of equality militate against the separation of the untouchable in thought as much as in the electorate? In such chapters as “Aren’t the Untouchables a Separate Element?” and “A Plea to the Foreigner” (BAWS 9, 1991a),

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we find an urgent campaign for reservation and separation of electorates which is somewhat impatient with the expected ‘reasonable’ justification of capacity-correction of a historical wrong. In Ambedkar’s view, if one works with the axiom of equality—he says that thought is nobody’s monopoly—and if under British rule, some form of civil rights are available to the Scheduled Castes, then the urgent issue is not capacityequalization through reservations. In the both legislative and administrative spaces, protection and reservation are the direct legal-constitutional propulsions to the exercise of right and capacity, given the absolute obstruction of Hindu (non) society to such exercise.12 It is, even more fundamentally, the demonstration of the untouchable’s separation in a vivid alienation of the truth that not only is the untouchable excluded and abandoned but also that Hindu society is separated from itself; it is an anathema to itself. Hence, Hindu society is not a society at all. For Ambedkar, what Gandhi could never take upon himself was the thought of caste as Hinduism’s self-anathemization even while he deployed a complex logic of debt and love vis-à-vis the reformist conduct towards what he considered as the untouchable’s ‘hereditary function’ of scavenging.13 Ambedkar wants to show that in this comprehensive regimen and prescriptions of reformist— even loving—conduct, the Mahatma is still not thinking as far as caste is concerned (BAWS 1, 1979a, 19). But what is Ambedkar’s analysis of Gandhi’s logic of conduct in the social reform programme for the abolition of untouchability? After all, this was a programme in great

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advance of the days of Annie Besant’s prognosis that social integration was doomed because the lower classes/castes are incorrigible, and they are not to be blamed since they carry in their unclean, inassimilable habits no trace of reflection of their degradation?14 The analysis yields the following features, which, taken together, reveal a masterful, if secret and perverse, Gandhian logic of conservation of the hereditary caste system. In the chapter “Gandhism”, Ambedkar extracts a simple model of sociability underlying Gandhism which could be almost called “animal”. Gandhi promotes the animal as a repetitive and self-sufficient locus of work, whereas Aristotle speaks of the animal as a model of kathartic and homeostasic leisure. Even with the expansion of the model to make intelligible wider networks of human community, the locus of productive self-sufficiency, the animal, remains the same—and the simple repetitive principle is the basis for all further strivings towards spiritual self-sufficiency, which surely is creative and not repetitive or habitual. In fact, in the early Hind Swaraj and several other contexts, Gandhi will repudiate and not cease launching tirades against what he sees as a ‘culture of leisure’ that comes with modern technological civilization and breaks open and infiltrates the principle of self-sufficiency. According to Ambedkar’s analysis, this repudiation of leisure and love of labour is precisely the affection (from affectio in Latin meaning sentiment)—and affectation—of the leisured classes (BAWS 9, 1991e, 291). Perhaps the precise formulation should be that Gandhi’s love of labour—as true as that of Ruskin’s—is an affection that serves the interests of the leisured classes. In

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caste propelled Hindu (non)society, Gandhi’s transvaluation of labour as virtue re-induces labour and work, the limit manifestation of which is scavenging, as a ‘privilege’ in society. This general re-induction is accompanied simultaneously with social reforms and the campaign to abolish untouchability by a prescription and tactic to re-induce the ‘privilege’ of labour, including scavenging, in the same functional distribution (varna) that the caste system articulates. In the existent functional distribution, it is then the shudra’s and the untouchable’s ‘privilege’ whose fruits the leisured classes enjoy. But we must understand this tortured logic that ends up as a shudra’s curse being her privilege, is not a peculiarly ‘Hindu’ logic; it is formal and—if one may call it that—Aristotelian. Gandhi prescribes the privilege to be so because it is an act of repaying a general debt of humanity (the debt of all to scavenge). Or, even better, the prescription of debt is inflated into a love of debt (“I love scavenging”, says Gandhi) (292). These prescriptions and inflations—Gandhian, whether or not ‘Hindu’—lead to the logical deduction of scavenging as the untouchable’s ‘privilege’. This is because the untouchable can legitimately and habitually do as a matter of birthright what general humanity is indebted to do and loves being so indebted… In the chapter “Gandhism” and in the letter of reply to Gandhi’s objections to Annihilation of Caste in Harijan, Ambedkar carries out a kind of scientific polemic against Gandhism which is as much an axiomatic struggle, a struggle to depose the axiom of eternal and virtuous scavenging that determines Gandhian reformist conduct.

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Does Ambedkar lay the groundwork for a ‘dalit’ theory of future sociability which will be a theory of universal, unconditional and fundamental leisure? Does he obliquely prophesize a dalit snobbism as a catachrestic riposte that the future will provide to the laceration and love of hereditary occupation, and its deep, monotonous “ancestral calling”?15 A theory of leisure that is non-Aristotelian and does not require this leisure to be produced by the labour of slaves, women and labourers (including professional musicians whom the citizens must enjoy and judge but never emulate)? (Ford, 1995, 117). I will not even begin to check the subtle prophecy against hard historical reality Ambedkar onwards and after the early 1950s—except to risk the hypothesis that reservation is not just an entitlement but as much an entitlement to leisure. Only this might be proposed, at the risk of over-generalization, that the ‘real’ of Ambedkar’s historical threshold was one when all past habits must be broken and revoked and new habits must start to be formed. Not just habits as habituation but habits as experiments with a new purposiveness.16 III It is true that the opinion from the Constituent Assembly Debates cited at the beginning signals a re-composed horizon of political and collective participation. Such a collective already begins to ‘impurify’ the subject of politics of its pure caste-bound separations. Such an ongoing impurification was indeed the main constitutional task, the new experiment with a republican purposiveness. And Ambedkar couldn’t but be galvanized by this emergent republican horizon of unity

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and indiscernibility of erstwhile separate and hierarchical categories. At the same time, it seems to me, Ambedkar’s singular preoccupation with creating the trace of separation as separation in thought that would be the key critical step towards solving the “mystery of caste” was not fully exhausted. Given the incompletion of the task, all projects of constituting political self-government would be subject to a social and ontological blind spot which erases all traces of the systematicity of the caste system. How could a political (and juridical) constitution be actualized, which is an eminently rational and purposive orientation, when the social space was saturated by the living absurdity of the caste system! This was the basis for Ambedkar’s foreboding that independent, republican India was entering a life of contradictions in which the egalitarian constitutional principles and inegalitarian social structure would contradict each other to catastrophe.17 It was also the source of his wry advice to the dominant interests to be grateful that the minorities in India, unlike in Ireland, had accepted the constitutional compromise of reservation and not indulged in direct action (BAWS 1, 1979b, 42–3). So within the constitutional horizon we do see an ambivalent subjective figure emerge who is both certain and uncertain, reassuringly certain about the truth of liberty, equality, fraternity as the generic ideals and values to be accomplished; almost tragically uncertain as to the possibility of realizing these values faced with the immemorial impasse of the caste system. Indeed if Ambedkar is always writing with both hands, with one the draft of the Constitution with a kind of

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patient, almost ironic energy, with the other, the critique of immemorial habit with a nearly tragic lucidity and urgency, I would like, at the end, to imagine a third organ in action; an incorporeal organ of thought with which Ambedkar intellectually chooses to default on both the debt of Hindu shastras and of liberal political knowledge, though never with the same intensity and amplitude. But since his repudiation of and conversion from Hinduism is well known, I will make a statement about his intellectual resistance to, if not default of, the givenness of the political subject in Western liberal democracy and its donative condescension, which is to say, its sovereignty. To wit, as Ambedkar says: Do they not realize that for the reasons for which the Sultan could not abolish Islam or the Pope could not repudiate Catholicism, the governing class in India will not decree the destruction of Brahmanism and that so long as the governing class remains what it is, Brahmanism which preaches the supremacy of Brahmans and the allied castes and which recognises the suppression and degradation of the Shudras and the Untouchables as the sacred duty of the State will continue to be the philosophy of the State even if India became free? (BAWS 9, 1991c, 235)

I tried to show earlier the equivocal axiomatic core of Aristotelian constitutions of the political subject formed of a certain complicity and vacillation between generic sovereignty and predicative capacity—constitutions of which liberal democracy is one. I also specified the Aristotelian sequence to be an equivocation, utilization and recuperation of a fundamental dyad, which is also a continuum, whose constitutive terms are “human” and “animal”. In that unfolding in Aristotle, the becoming-human of man and

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being-political of the animal are the same. Though he was a physiological researcher and not a political philosopher, Xavier Bichat, during the time of the French Revolution, drew up a ‘modern’ cognitive physiology of human consciousness that roughly replicated Aristotle’s criterion of possession of logos for the political animal; only this time logos encompassed an expressive and cognitive consciousness emancipated from the habitual life of “assimilation and excretion”. To such a habitual monotony was opposed the differentiated and emancipated “life of relation”. In fact, Bichat writes of an organic life which is “vegetal”, an animal life of relation which feels, perceives, reflects on its sensations and “is frequently enabled to communicate by its voice its desires and its fears, its pleasures and its pains” (Starobinski, 2003, 129–130). The gradation of vitalist transformation—which as much as a political schema of transformation, I have proposed—leads to the properly cerebral life of human will but it is still in differentiated continuity with passion, whose roots lie in organic life. Thus roughly to the measure that everything and everyone is politicized, and every exclusion is included, the trace of which lingers, appeals and dismays, everything including the highest cerebral will is physiologized even while every physiological stage is vitalized by a kind of infinite virtuality. The above homology between a ‘science’ of life and the ‘life’ of politics is formally subtended by two couples: ‘limitation–transformation’, ‘externality–subjectivation’. The couples separate and intertwine such that every transformation takes place under a constellation of external limitations and

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every limit is transformed into a force of ‘becoming’. This is the ‘becoming-human’ of life, the ‘becoming-political’ of the living individual such that the limitation or externality of life becomes or transforms into a subject of a capacity or a sovereignty with infinitely graded potentialities. With this schema the consistency of classical Aristotelianism with modern bio-politics is demonstrated and it seems that the political field is totally saturated with this ‘Western’ logic.18 Despite the obvious parallel between the differential model above and Ambedkar’s thesis on the graded sovereignty of the Hindu caste system, the thesis itself insists on the exceptional status of the Hindu system. So, in conclusion, what might be the nature of this exception and what universal, generic stakes might be involved in that separation? In the book Who were the Shudras? —a title obscurely resonant with Emmanuel Sieyès’ 1789 text, “What is the Third Estate?”19 —Ambedkar develops the Greek axiom on man’s nature as political animal and shows its differential and potentializing truth in Roman law. He shows how the codes of Roman law retain the principle of mobility within the hierarchy of patrician–plebeians such that there can be a differentiation of the hierarchy of legal and social personae. Roman law allows degrees of legal capacity—juris sui and juris alieni among other categories— to subjectivate the personae of society to the extent that the plebeians and slaves with hardly a persona through the contingency of acts, have a chance of crossing the threshold Aristotle called kathartic.20 Analogously, through the chance of reprehensible public acts, the full, patrician persona of law

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and society was liable to be struck with sanctions and fall below the threshold of subjectivation.21 Then for Ambedkar, as for the history after him, was a plebeianization of lower castes possible within the caste system in India?22 According to Ambedkar, it was not within the rigours of brahminical law. These were rigours—like the akribeia of iconoclast Christians, where rigour meant absolute adherence to rules of conduct, including ritual conduct 23—that were fabricated to foreclose the chance of actions and events, foreclose anything from happening. The technique of this rigidification/rigour is the law of hereditary, immemorial transmission of caste status unlike the severely limited but strikingly effective topology of legal personality in ancient Rome. But it is at this point that an observation from Ambedkar’s work The Untouchables reveals an extraordinary modality of the rigid brahminical hierarchy. In this work, Ambedkar cites the list of Scheduled Castes in all the provinces from a 1935 survey by the Government of India and calls it a “terrifying” list.24 Why? Because below the immobile, rigid threshold—hence not a threshold but a hellish abyss—according to the survey, there exist four hundred and twenty-nine communities! This “terrifying” number is the real of an utterly exposed mass of existences and at the same time it is a neutral number as if in pure play of numericality conveying no more the corporeal simplicity or degradation of ‘being-animal’ as opposed to ‘becoming-human’. Rather, it is the decisive count of existence itself which doesn’t add up to or express a total sum because this is an existence dispossessed of what

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Ambedkar calls “the title-deeds to humanity”.25 Which means, this is a state of ‘being-human’ and nothing but ‘being-human’—yet without a trace of any consistent, formal humanity, thus, ‘being-human’ inconsistently. So instead of the simple bi- or tri-partite division of vegetal, animal and human differentials of ‘life’ that is the framework of a ‘Western’ typology, the case of ‘immemorial’ brahminical law sits rigid and massive. This law also distills itself into an economy of three high dvija (twice-born) castes, and at the same time sits over the nether, and according to Ambedkar’s prophecy, potentially tectonic playground of the lower castes’ existence. This play of difference of castes, sub-castes and outcaste, is a play of stratification in one place (and apparently in one immemorial time). While this ‘play’ is not the natural material for ‘Western’ politics’ programme of limitation, transformation and constitution, every constitution must, according to Ambedkar, reflect the actual play of forces of a given society. To make his case, in Annihilation of Caste Ambedkar invokes Ferdinand Lassalle saying “that the makers of political constitutions must take account of social forces” as they exist and not simply their ideal resolution.26 So “reservation for backward classes/ castes” will be the general name for the brief reflection of society in a constitution, which even if, to all appearance is liberal-Western, is also an index of resistance to that very constitutional philosophy and habit. But at that late stage in Ambedkar’s life and work, things had assumed an ambivalence which was in turn, and together sometimes, delicate and discordant. However in his

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earliest presentation at Columbia University, Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development (1916), Ambedkar had a firm diagnostic thesis: the caste system, with its massive and immemorial saturation of the social field, being a system, was also a historical contingency. It was an act, a plot—and a chance—of such enormous proportions that it became axiom, law and habit fused into one. From that early stage onwards, Ambedkar, based on his pioneering thesis, never ceased to make the most open and unqualified appeal (which also had the insistence of a demand): the caste system being a historical contingency must be recognized, analyzed and overcome; its annihilation must become the stakes of not only Indian history, in search of independence and equality but the concern and stakes of any definition, model and prescription of politics. The historical contingency of the caste system in India, which has, for whatever reasons, assumed this shape of an immemorial mystery and monster, appeals to and demands the attention of any politics that decides to default on sovereignty and capacity and is ready, in Marx’s words, “to weave its intrigue with the world” with thought and chance.27

NOTES 1 This is a comment made by Mahavir Tyagi in the Constituent Assembly debate on 24 August 1949 (Government of India, 1999). 2 See Aristotle, 1943, 250. Here Aristotle quotes Homer on the “outcast” as the one who is “tribeless, lawless, heartless”. 3 In Aristotle’s scenario the outcast is a figure of separation and

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injustice—hence both for the principle of justice and that of the administration of this principle, “rule” or “government” is necessary (251). 4 This is a reference to Ambedkar’s comprehensive thesis on the structure of caste system in India, its static multiplicity of parts and its totally ‘habituated’ and invisible articulation in time. See, for the entire construction of the thesis, BAWS 1, 1979a. 5 This is the crucial point of contention between Ambedkar’s understanding of caste and the Western tendency at the time to make what Ambedkar consistently considered a question of notion, structure and relations of multiple elements, into a ‘substance’, whether rendered impure, animalized and degraded in the putting down of lower castes or redeemed through social reform. For Ambedkar, as for someone like Frantz Fanon on race, caste was a question of thinking against its habit. Thus the untouchable, once thought, was not defined by ‘being impure’ but by a structure of separation between the categories of “purity” and “impurity”. 6 The characterization of the caste system as a case of madness is found many times in Ambedkar. The defenders of the system are indeed mad, its greatest upholder, Manu, must have been overcome with madness to have enunciated the law he did (see BAWS 4, 1987c). Ambedkar doesn’t exempt Gandhi of a certain madness for explaining injunctions against inter-dining on the grounds that eating was as disgusting as defecating and thus best done alone. Again, it seems to me, the issue of madness is really an issue of the erasure of all marks or signs of a system so pervasive as caste, from the objects and dispositions (habits?) of a society’s thinking. The real madness of caste, its absurdity, was that it was not thought to be mad. 7 By the second millennium Christianity had made it possible for one to become Christian by simply paying tithes, a ‘minor’ tax to God collected by the Church. Converts didn’t necessarily have to go to church, perform Mass, or change their earlier social habits.

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The paying of tithes was an act of paying a debt to God which paralleled the other mode of paying the Christic debt with labour. Clearly, this structure prepared the ground for the modern political subject as the laboring and taxpaying citizen, whose obligation to the totality of society and the state was fulfilled by these two individual, minor modes (Choudhury, 2013). 8 Ambedkar quotes Gandhi as writing: “[T]he Congress franchise instead of being 4 annas per annum should be a tender of 2,000 yards of hand-spun and self-spun yarn with the penalty clause attached to it by which any default in this behalf would automatically disqualify a person from being a member of the Congress and that…” Clearly, the Gandhian strategy is to convert a franchise condition into an unconditional existential, moral and, ultimately, physical obligation. See BAWS 9, 1991d, 246. 9 This paradoxical thesis on debt as a form of political and social power has been discussed in a more elaborate theoretical and comparatist formulation in the fourth chapter “Caste and Debt: The case of Ancient Greek Liturgy”. 10 This support, in Ambedkar’s projection of Gandhi’s method of debt-induction, could be expressed by the Hindu’s employing in his household at least one untouchable—and defaulting on this would exclude the Hindu from the franchise and membership of a nationalist party and ‘congregation’ such as the Congress. 11 This criticism also involves Gandhi’s campaign for the untouchables’ right to temple entry. Given Gandhi’s vacillations with regard to such a Bill—and the same regarding his decision to fast or not on that question—Ambedkar’s statement is that the real stakes are not in the permission to enter a Hindu temple or not but in untouchables’ experience of Gandhi’s actions, their judgment based on that experience about Gandhi and the consequent decision to separate or not from Gandhism. 12 There is enough evidence for this insistence on Ambedkar’s part on “exercise”. Yet we mustn’t limit such exercise to that of

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constitutional and juridical rights that vindicate a fundamental ‘human’ capacity thus giving the lower castes their legitimate dignity. I think, Ambedkar’s arrow pierces deeper into the real of existence, however excluded and disabled, and the exercise of dignity is sought even in that weakest real of existence—a kind of generic dignity. It is probably with post-Ambedkar history that the ‘symbolic turn’ comes and dignity becomes the affect of a symbolized dalit existence, whether through reservations or through other iconized, even idolatrous means. 13 See BAWS 9, 1991e, 297. For Gandhi, caste evil is anachronism, not anathema. Moreover, not every untouchable is a scavenger in reality; it is not every untouchable’s hereditary occupation; it was a Gandhi twist (a trick?), wherein by romanticising and abjectifying the scavenger-untouchable, he reduced the issue of untouchability to the issue of scavenging while at the same time upholding scavenging as a noble duty and a selfless art for which the “bhangi” must expect nothing in return. Hence he often made statements like, “I like the path of service; therefore, I like the Bhangi” (Gandhi, 1999, 71). I owe this observation to S. Anand. 14 See the long and appalling quote from Annie Besant’s article in BAWS 9, 1991b, 3–7. 15 This phrase in Gandhi’s reply to Annihilation of Caste is used by Ambedkar in his riposte repeatedly—and reversed in tone and value, refuting and mocking against affirming and obligating. 16 For an extraordinary reading of David Hume which puts into assemblage habits, custom, imagination and truth, an assemblage whose purposive orientation doesn’t contradict habit, in fact needs it, but also vigilantly regulates it according to a criterion of consonance of imagination (which builds on habit) with truth, see Deleuze, 1991. 17 See this prophetic remark as cited by Perry Anderson (2012) in his recent essays in the London Review of Books launched in the cause of blowing up the contemporary triumphalist (nuclear?) establish-

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ment of an ‘ideology of India’ masking itself as the (ancestral?) “idea of India”. Right after quoting Ambedkar, Anderson says the champion of unconditional equality was wrong; caste inequality, among others, became a resource of the democracy-to-come in India since Ambedkar. 18 This is not to deny the tremendous value of a thesis like Giorgio Agamben’s that the field of ‘Western’ political logic is inaugurated by a fundamental abandonment of all logic of sovereignty and capacity and that moment of re-vocation must forever accompany every stage of the political vocation of ‘empowerment’ and ‘constitution’ of sovereignty. One could say that in a historically and socially ‘alien’ case of caste in India such a revocation and an abandonment is utterly exposed—a kind of bewildering ‘play’ of sovereign abandonment is exposed to the eyes of ‘others’ (other than Hindus, who according to Ambedkar, see, hear, feel, think nothing). 19 I have dealt briefly with this compelling speculation in the fifth chapter “Ambedkar and Other Immortals: A Note on Comparative Politics and Incomparable Events”. 20 For reasons of brevity, I will not expand Ambedkar’s comparison of Roman law and brahminical law. The details are crucial though—the reader is advised to go to Ambedkar’s full text—but this much can be said, that the author brings out the differentiator as “contingency” which Roman law takes account of. But this contingency, precisely because it is law, Roman law must constitute as a flexible but firm code. Is this then the ideal for Ambedkar’s vision of politics? I suggest that it is not, and for Ambedkar the chance of history must be understood as a challenge to any constitution (BAWS 7, 1990a, 57–64). 21 This is called the fall from existimatio, or reputation in the eyes of law. This could be incurred by committing certain proscribed acts, one of which was for the persona with existimatio to appear on the public stage! (61)

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22 I will not—and I can’t—conduct any serious investigation into such so-called “plebeianization” in post-independence India, particularly in electoral terms. But for an expert analysis on “plebianization” (and “ethnicization”) of the lower-castes and related studies, see Jaffrelot (2010). 23 For the contrast between akribeia and oikonomia (a kind of flexible “economy” of power) in the war of doctrines of the icon between the iconoclasts and iconophiles in Christian Middle Ages, see Mondzain, 2005. 24 See BAWS 7, 1990b, 265. What terrifies Ambedkar in this list prepared by the Government of India in 1935 is its teeming isolation. The imagination of the slave against the master, the animal against human, foreigner against citizen retains a classical economy—and dramaturgy—of the two. This is a “terrifying” play of human isolation. 25 See BAWS 9, 1991d, 269. Again in the context of Gandhi’s efforts of social reform, what is at stake, in Ambedkar’s view, is not just an abstract right but the habit of not feeling grateful which must be practiced. I will call this the project of a new conduct of defaulting rather than induction into the old brahminical habit of ‘being-indebt’. 26 In Annihilation of Caste, the pertinent quote of Lassalle that Ambedkar cites is: “The constitutional questions are in the first instance not questions of right but questions of might. The actual constitution of a country has its existence only in the actual condition of force which exists in the country: hence political constitutions have value and permanence only when they accurately express those conditions of forces which exist in practice within a society” (BAWS 1, 1979b, 42). 27 The phrase “weaves its intrigue with the world” is borrowed from Marx (Osborne 2012). I will not elaborate a theory of chance or events here. But such a task, undertaken by philosophers like Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux, is essential for under-

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standing the consequences of contingency that convert the latter into forms of necessity and destiny. A theory of events is as essential for our opening up to historically unprogrammable acts. I think there is sufficient cue to think these possibilities in Ambedkar’s example of the railways in India as a contingent moment of decision on the immemorial caste segregation. As Ambedkar says, “Railway journeys and foreign travels are really occasions of crisis in the life of a Hindu and it is natural to expect a Hindu to ask himself why he should maintain Caste at all, if he cannot maintain it at all times. But he does not” (BAWS 1, 1979b, 73). Which is also when Hinduism will try to pre-empt true decision by a theory of prayaschitta, which ‘pays back’ the ‘debt’ of the crisis or contingency through expiation of the decision of the event. Such a prayaschitta is equivalent to the kathartic purgation/purification of the Greeks. Moreover we need a theory of opportunity to grasp the possible revolutionary appropriation of the oppressed classes, including the dalits today, of situations of crisis that the oppressor would either disavow or tactically “manage” out of existence.

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7 Ambedkar and Pericles: A Concluding Exercise in the Immortalist Method of Comparative Politics

I In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides presents Pericles’ famous funeral oration to the Athenian citizens and others gathered to honour the soldiers who died fighting the Spartans (Thucydides, 1972, 143–51). Surprisingly, the greater part of the speech is not devoted to praising the courage and sacrifice of these Athenian soldiers; instead Pericles, in the middle of the fifth century BCE, speaks in glowing terms of how exceptionally noble the constitution and way of life of Athens are. Hence it is only reasonable, according to Pericles, that the brave soldier chooses a noble death for the sake of his unique city, whose society and politics, over time, have reached an acme of perfection. The name of this perfection, according to Pericles—and Thucydides—is “democracy”.1 The institution of this genre of speech—the funeral oration—is the institution of a kind of ‘immortality’. However, it is essential to keep in mind that Pericles doesn’t say that the sacrifice of the soldiers creates the immortal ground of Athenian democracy. He says,

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rather, that their great courage in death at battle honours the ‘natural’ immortality of Athens. To my mind, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, in his speeches and writings, his militant interventions and philosophy of politics, was also concerned with the question of immortality but of a somewhat different type. I will call this Ambedkar’s deep commitment to a type of historical immortality in contrast to the Periclean image of a city with a permanent constitution and an autochthonous ‘nature’. It might be objected that Pericles is not interested in any heavenly immortality for the noble dead, his purpose is to promote a sort of civic immortality for Athens which itself is a historical project with a hegemonic design (Loraux, 2006, 164). The autochthony that is claimed is part of Athens’ current democratic hegemony—between 450 BCE and 430 BCE, roughly—such that it is popularly accepted that the long line of Athenian ancestors, in their way of life, were already, as if, giving birth to democracy. The present constitution was only testimony and expression of the fact that the birth was completed. Even if hegemonic, the self-assurance of Pericles’ funeral speech—and its extreme modesty—must be resolved into its two great identificatory operations that secure this hegemony. First, the speech produces an effect of identity between the immortal glory of the individual soldier who dies for Athens with the city’s ‘natural-civic’ immortality. Second, it identifies natality with history, the organic process of giving birth with the historical result of a political form or constitution.2 Upon performing these two precise operations, Pericles’ funeral oration to the

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assembly surely leaves the latter with the enchanted—and cogent—assurance that there was no reason for the Athenian condition to ever change—an immortal condition, indeed, of perpetual democratic existence. Ambedkar’s 25 November 1949 speech before the Constituent Assembly (BAWS 13, 1994b) was no less significant than Pericles’ address to the Athenian assembly with respect to the relation between social hegemony and political democracy. Equally significant, but crucially different, is that Ambedkar laments the accursed immortality of Indian society, such as it is, that confronts the so-called birth of democracy in India. Ambedkar says that India, divided between political democracy and social inequality, was about to enter a “life of contradictions” (BAWS 13, 1994b, 1217). The latent part of this often cited phrase might, as it were, contain the division of two intensities of time at the republican cusp—the naturalized time of age-old society encoded in caste and the new, callow, natal time of a ‘constitution’. But unlike Pericles’ funerary identification of history and natality, Ambedkar’s moment is crucially divisive. Here history is not the culminating figure of an essential nature, resulting in a democratic constitution. History is not the birth of a fully mature child of autochthonous time in the form of a politeia, the Greek word for “constitution”; it is a history that abolishes all past because the past as natality and potentiality has done its job, and it abolishes all future since the perpetual immortal present is here and now forever (Loraux, 2006, 174–75). Does Ambedkar’s lament then express an unbridgeable

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gap between the Athenian condition and the Indian one, despite their formal constitutional parallel? Does it express the value of this gap in terms of an insuperable inferiority of Indian democracy with respect to Athens in mid-fifth century BCE? Well, there is a factual basis to replying to these questions, which might well appear arbitrary, and even gratuitous, exercises of comparison. There is a scholarly thread that runs from the modern European interpretations of Pericles’ oration in their political contexts through the conjuncture when Ambedkar was addressing the Constituent Assembly with shattering effect. In his speech on 4 November 1948, Ambedkar refers to the English Hellenist George Grote on the question of “constitutional morality” (BAWS 9, 1991a, 202). Ambedkar cites Grote’s authority to make the point how rare actively lived out constitutional morality is despite the existence of fine formal constitutions of different societies in different epochs.3 One example of such rare instances of constitutional morality is Athenian society of the fifth-century BCE, in democracy. Historians have pointed out that Grote represents, in the modern age, the English ‘liberal’ interpretation of Pericles’ speech to make it a paradigm of actual constitutional-moral practice in ancient society (Loraux, 2006, 31–3). To this extent, it seems Ambedkar, in his 4 November 1948 address, allies himself to this ‘liberal’ heritage going back to Pericles. The difficulty is that there is enough argumentative evidence in Ambedkar’s speech to the Assembly and elsewhere to also ally him to a strong, almost Germanist, philosophy of the state, that would see in Pericles a

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panegyric to the absolute reign of Athenian law (nomos). Grote’s interpretation that leans in the direction of the sovereignty of individual liberty and the antinomy of such individualism with Pericles’s corporatist image of an archecivil society in Athens, when applied to Ambedkar, has to be balanced with a philosophy of the state that wants to save society from the particularity of all corporations, including the most granulated and particularized corporation which is the “individual”.4 Then can Ambedkar be imagined to ally with someone like Hegel who heard in Pericles’ speech the testament to a “political work of art”, to the “beauty” of Athenian “spirit”, not either praise of the formal constitution or epitaphs (epitaphios logos) solely dedicated to military courage? (32) In my view, it is possible to throw a somewhat different Ambedkarite light on Pericles’ funeral oration, a greater light that illuminates the limits of the Periclean discourse (logos). The wager is that such a light, by delimiting the field of ancient Greek politics, will open a wider area of reflection which the old politics was incapable of. To that extent the position from where Ambedkar addresses the Constituent Assembly between 1948–50, promises a future of democratic and egalitarian politics that Pericles both felt no need for and was incapable of conceiving because such was his extreme assurance, his utter limitation. Interestingly, there is a crucial military dimension to this comparative exercise. Let us recall Pericles’ apportionment of military immortality for Athenian soldiers dead in battle as a part of the larger civic immortality of the city itself. So while

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Pericles, the strategos (military general) chosen to deliver the funeral oration, honours the valiant dead, says it is their valour which in the first place, honours the perfection of Athens. Athens is a perfect harmony of its parts, one of which is the courage and sacrifice of its citizen-soldiers. First of all, Pericles’ axiom is that the city is already, constitutively, so noble, so great that it is only reasonable for the courageous soldier to lay down his life for its sake. In actually doing so, the perfect Athenian circle closes in on itself and the civic immortality of the city honours itself through the individual military glory of the noble dead, who earn a kind of mediate immortality. Having pointed out the above logic, one must differentiate the Athenian soldier’s death in battle in the age of democracy from the earlier Homeric idea of a heroic death (18). Unlike the individualized experience of the hero’s ‘fine death’ immortalized every time in his name—a gallery of such names to be found in Homer—the Athenian soldiers’ immortal glory in democracy of fifth century BCE is anonymous and egalitarian. What does this mean? It means that the capacity for military virtue for the courage of dying for Athens is not the peculiar adventurer’s spirit the hero is gifted with. It is a capacity encoded in the historicoautochthonous being—in the sense that I have indicated— of the citizen. In fact, Pericles praises the generalized and natural adventuring spirit of the Athenian—hence Athenian ‘nature’ is the code from which the particular citizen-soldier draws his capacity for immortality (Thucydides, 1972, 148). Pericles also says that apart from citizens, foreigners too are

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free to gather at the funeral of the war-dead and celebrate their nobility. Nevertheless it is clear that the foreigners are not free to enter the enchanted circle of either the civic or military immortality of Athens. That is to say they are free to praise the capacity for immortality, not participate in it. This marks the absolute limits of Athens’ conditional democratic possibilities—not just in practice, which some will argue is inevitable in all exercise of democratic government, but in principle and code. Under the acid eye of this political and ontological condition, the vision of Athenian democracy culminates in an assertion of perpetual, harmonious, immortal presence to itself with no need and permission for a future. To play my wager, I will, for my part, assert that Ambedkar breaks the strange enchantment of this circle which is both egalitarian and exclusionary. One way out of the enchanted circle is to render it banal. Indeed, that is a ‘modern’ reduction of claims to civic immortality to the productive banality of hegemonic politics. Everything that Pericles says can be attributed to establishing democratic hegemony in an actual historical milieu of oligarchic and tyrannical subversion. Hence what is axiomatically asserted as Athenian autochthony and immortality, is actually the hegemonic universalisation of a particular body of Athens called the polis or ‘city’. And this body is constituted in relation both to what it includes and excludes. On the domestic front, the body appears as composed of all those citizen-elements who qualify to that status by a certain formal capacity—military glory is one such capacity of this ‘citizen-caste’—that is equally shared,

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irrespective of individualised identity reflected in the prestige of names, so essential to heroes of ancient epics. However, really speaking, the constitution of the citizenelements in relation to the composition of the totality or body called “Athens” takes place as much by excluding those who don’t qualify for the egalitarian democratic capacity (immortality?)—that is, slaves, women and foreigners. Thus the Periclean circle is summarily disenchanted and we are confronted with a new ‘modern’ condition of political finitude, which extends to even the exalted universal principles of democracy with their immortal capture of all historical and mortal contingency. However there is a flipside to the powerful hegemonic reduction, a side that re-invokes the presence of an absolute, perpetual force or rationality that cannot afford to die in the face of the very condition of finitude which produces this equally modern need. The paradox is most clearly visible in the situation of international politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After the age of ancient empires— whether the democratic imperialism of an exceptionalist Athens or the Roman Empire—with the Treaty of Westphalia in the seventeenth century, European nations recognized themselves and each other in the contradictory figures of being limited and absolute. As territorial sovereigns, they were limited; as states, they were absolute. The empire had turned inward and re-carved its figure in the void at the heart of its contingent and finite existence as the infinite government of contingency, the immortal police of the state (whether policestate or not). This exemplary lesson about what was called

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in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries raison d’état is also what Michel Foucault (2007) talks about in his work. And the bitter humour contained in this lesson is that with the eclipse of the immortal civic state to whose ‘natural’ perfection the valiant citizen does honour by laying down his life, and the conjuration of an absolute modern state along the hollow of that disappearance, we now need a constant supplement of military blood to nourish this void. I write this during the days when political leaders, including prime minister Modi, are honouring the 1999 ‘martyrs of Kargil’, the Indian soldiers who died fighting Pakistani forces on the border posts in Kashmir; and so they should because unlike the ‘natural’ constitution of Athenian democracy claimed by Pericles, our own ‘modern’ political, self-reflexive condition of enjoying finite freedom subject to infinite government (or police, if you will) can be only vicariously redeemed by periodic flow of sacrificial blood. We are constituted sacrificially by the blood of martyrs—‘martyrologically’. So the choice, on this level, is the following: either play a politics of vicarious immortality beholden to a calculus of violence, an economy of blood, or reject all immortalist politics and reduce the latter to a rigorously banal affair of practical ‘problems’, to a pragmatics of ‘working life’ debunking the Myth of the State.5 I would like to pay some attention to Ambedkar’s key phrase when he says in 1949 that the country is about to enter a “life of contradictions” (BAWS 13, 1994b, 1217) with the constitution of political democracy (Ambedkar actually says “political equality”) and the continuing existence of social

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inequality. Apparently in the phrase “life of contradictions” the two implicit terms contradicting each other must exist on the same logical level. But political equality and social equality (and its lack) do not belong to the same structure of being and temporality. Ambedkar in effect says that while political democracy can—and must—be constituted as historically finite norm and law, equality cannot be constituted as a ‘body’ and is fundamentally axiomatic in nature.6 It is simply an immortal ‘idea’ which can—and must—be asserted but cannot be proven or constituted at the level of this axiomatic being. And exactly for this reason, Pericles’s epochal funeral oration is a contradiction in terms because he wants the axiomatic immortality of his great democratic principles of “equality” and “freedom” to be also the exclusive and ‘natural’ emanation of the particular ‘body of Athens’ or particular Athenian ‘citizen-bodies’. To be truly consistent and finally exit the enchanted Periclean circle, Ambedkar must render the axiom or principle of something like equality infinite—neither particularly, finitely Athenian, nor Indian. Ambedkar is a consistent universalist and for him equality is a principle before it is applied to particular situations. In fact, without equality being a principle no intelligibility about really existing equality can be built. My hypothesis is that Ambedkar’s speeches before the Assembly were the historical occasions for a latent idea of infinite equality to distribute its ‘immortal’ intensity on both sides of the surface of the contradictions between constitutional forms of political equality and extant social inequalities. Unless there is already an idea of equality, in the

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fundamental axiomatic sense, the “life of contradictions” Ambedkar speaks of would not be a really vital, formative and destructive life it threatens to be in 1949–50. The contradiction borrows its intensity from the immortal ‘life of equality’ and so finite normative political democracy requires an effective egalitarian axiom in the same way that we can lament and rage over social inequalities because of the axiom: “Equality exists!” I think one constitutional manifestation of the intensity of the latent idea of a kind of infinite ‘generic equality’7 is the social measure of “reservation”. The intensity that accompanies the constitutional provision of reservation comes from an unprovable, unconstitutable equality whose genericity no law or norm can capture—yet as “reservation” for real historical unequals, equality must be reflected and enforced within law. In the last six decades or more, it is the anonymous intensity of equality—the title-deeds of whose immortality no ‘hero’ or ‘martyr’ holds—that has expressed itself in the contradicting intensities of upper-caste reaction and dalit enthusiasm. The point remains—there is only one intensity, the intensity of equality. As Ambedkar once said, every reaction or counter-revolution owes a debt to an original revolution for its existence—and it will never accept the debt (BAWS 3, 1987a, 371). So the final question: what is the ‘original’ egalitarian revolution of Indian history? The historical upsurge of the axiomatic immortal? There are empirical assertions about this matter on Ambedkar’s part. I will not analyse these assertions here; suffice it to say they concern Ambedkar’s

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complex relationship with Buddhism as well as his militant participation in an event such as the Mahad Conference and Satyagraha in March and December 1927. Here I would like to state the overall stakes of any ‘revolutionary’ hypothesis with respect to such a delicate moment as the constitutional one between 1948 and 1950. First of all, it seems Ambedkar neither wishes to abide by the aristocratic ‘immortality’ of caste society—with an accursed reactionary heroism at the head of which stands “Krishna and His Gita”8—nor is he willing to sacrifice an immortalist method of politics to the pragmatic political finitude of the modern times. So the method must let the intensity of an infinite idea (such as that of “equality”) envelop a finite historical moment (such as the constitutional one) and yet the idea must not be purely transcendental to history. Ambedkar, in saying what he does to the Constituent Assembly, shatters history by both lamenting the prospective reality of a terrible “life of contradictions” and hypothesising a greater ‘life of equality’ from which the contradictions will have borrowed their historical life. And for equality to be living, it must be historically incorporated in real bodies and discourses. But insofar as it is equality, it must be immortal, irreducible to this “life of contradictions”. In this way Ambedkar creates a hypothesis of ‘historical immortality’ the measure of which Indian history is yet to adequately take. II The chapters in this book add up, then, to make for a book of praise—in honour of certain ‘historical immortals’. Exactly in this sense, it is not a book about ‘founding fathers’9 nor

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is it about what founding fathers are supposed to found— great constitutions, cities, corporations and nations. Yet it is nothing if not a book about greatness. Let me explain what I mean by “greatness” straightaway. An inelegant definition would be the following: greatness is something that happens in and to a situation, rigorously banal, as a result of which the situation is seized by a kind of perfection that promises to emancipate its banality without the perfection being any less intrinsic to the initial situation. In this view, greatness is not, primarily, a personal quality but an event that befalls and divides given “situations”. A situation can be understood as any constituted form, whether that be a national form, form(s) of community or everyday ‘forms of life’. “Perfection” signifies not the maximal productivity, efficiency or potentiality of a situation but a minimal trace that hitherto was indiscernible within the situational language or fabric and which, upon the event of greatness that shatters the situation, is exposed as a trace. One might say the trace is the singular creation of the essential violence of all greatness. We call the trace a minimal advent of perfection because it promises the first new thought of a situation in the throes of division and crisis. This thought promises to pass on to a new situation when the old one is incinerated, pass on a new generic power of thought. In this sense, the trace is of an ‘idea’ that is minimal and indestructible, subaltern and immortal. One might raise the objection: what stops an idealist maximisation of a “situation” in the image of a utopian horizon, which is not merely an instrumental ‘resource-

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optimisation’? Isn’t it possible to purify the elements of a situation of the present state of corruption and recombine them in a new and perfectly adjusted totality? The objection to this is that an idealist vision that sees a horizon of perfection to banal situations actually reduces the structural, if banal, open-endedness of a constituted ‘situation’—a kind of propensity of constitution to being amended—to the perfect totality that is closed in on itself. Hence we don’t cease to praise the ideals of society in the image of a perfectly adjusted family and family in the image of a perfectly fraternal gang. In Ambedkar’s terms, the accursed heritage of ‘perfect’ Hindu society is the heritage of caste(s) as gangs (BAWS 9, 1991a, 285). The prescription is crystalline, shining with its brutal consistency: you must constitute a perfect gang, which is finite and absolute—and the only way you can do this is by periodically sacrificing some of the finite members to the deity of the absolute. The pseudo-immortality of the absolute gang/caste/state is drenched in the blood of its martyrs—and terrorists. I write this two days after the execution of Yakub Memon, who was found guilty of taking part in the 1993 serial bomb blasts that killed nearly 300 people in Mumbai. For certain last-minute doubts about Memon’s level of involvement and for the fact that the death penalty is a subject of dissensus, there raged controversy, opposition and enthusiasm over of the execution of Yakub Memon. For several enthusiasts it was enough to keep alive the fraternal connection in people’s minds between Yakub Memon and his brother, Tiger Memon, who is accused of—and no one doubts this—

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masterminding the blasts. It is as if whether factually guilty or not to the full measure, Yakub, by contagion of the logic of gangs that families are, must shed some family blood. For what? For the sake of the absolute family that is the perfect nation.10 Those who see their social and vital constitutions in the image(s) of perfect fraternity, perfect blood, perfect endogamous caste have no difficulty envisaging the existence of perfectly degraded and adjusted gangs that as entire families, entire races, entire castes only kill, corrupt and defile. This book addresses greatness that takes place rather than commemorating personages who are great. Pericles, Gandhi… Ambedkar, always Ambedkar—are effects of division, emancipation, sometimes degradation vis-à-vis the presupposition of a perfect time of eternal heroes, martyrs and founding fathers. In this sense of divisive events, these names of history happen to time rather than being in time; in this sense they are ‘historical immortals’. In March 1927, at the town of Mahad in Maharashtra, Ambedkar along with a few thousand delegates of the Depressed Classes Conference, most of whom were untouchables and some upper-caste, assembled to discuss the exercise of their civic rights guaranteed under the law. In his new history of the events at Mahad, Anand Teltumbde tells us that after Ambedkar’s presidential speech at the conference on 20 March 1927, one of the organizers of the conference, Anant Vinayak ‘Bhai’ Chitre proposed something momentous in an impromptu fashion—that the untouchables walk towards the Chavadar Tank, maintained

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with public funds, and assert their civic and legal right to drink water. “If this conference helped them establish this practice today, we would be able to say that it has accomplished a very important task” (Teltumbde, 2016a). The assembly decided to transgress the social proscription and drink water from the tank. It was a social revolt and a kind of ritual transgression against customary law that had oppressed the outcaste and lower caste people for centuries. It was an incandescent symbolic message that it was possible for the oppressed elsewhere and everywhere in society to rise up. Exactly at that moment, Ambedkar made a speech to the assembly, saying: It is not as if drinking the water of the Chavadar Tank will make us immortal. We’ve survived well enough all these days without drinking it. We are not going to the Chavadar Tank to merely drink its water. We are going to the Tank to assert that we too are human beings like others. It must be clear that this meeting has been called to set up the norm of equality. I am certain that no one who thinks of this meeting in this light will doubt that it is unprecedented. I feel that no parallel to it can be found in the history of India (in Ambedkar, 1992a, 225).

This book is wagered on the hypothesis—and conviction—that someone, for the first time, is made immortal, when a declaration such as the one in Mahad on 19 March 1927 takes place.

NOTES 1 Pericles says, in Thucydides’ presentation, “[L]et me say that our

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system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbours. It is more the case of our being a model to others, than of our imitating anyone else. Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole 2

3

4

5

people” (145). In this context it is interesting to note Pericles’s contrasting portraits of Athens and Sparta. Pericles says that Athenian civic virtue is a natural gift or quality—whereas the Spartan has to laboriously train to attain virtue. In addition, Pericles says, “In this land of ours there have always been the same people living from generation to generation up till now, and they, by their courage and their virtue, have handed it on to us, a free country” (Thucydides, 1972, 144). See (BAWS 13, 1994a, 60–61). One should clarify that Ambedkar quotes George Grote on constitutional morality to admit its lack in the situation of Indian democracy. Hence he is “unhappy” that in the absence of the constitutional-moral “habit”, the new Constitution has to include the administration and bureaucratic governance in its provisions; which means including in a document of ‘necessity’ what is essentially the government of ‘contingency’. It is in this light that one must understand Ambedkar’s Hobbesian assertion in his 25 November 1949 speech that the fundamental rights are a “gift of the State” (BAWS 13, 1994b, 91). These rights are not rights of ‘estates’ or ‘corporations’ but result out of a social pact between all extant particular estates to give up their individuality—which in the Indian case is clearly caste-individuality—in return for which the new, neutral state gifts society with a correlatively new liberal form of individuality—the individuality of the non-corporate individual. But it is not a natural form but a new historically constituted one. So even by this logic, Ambedkar is not a ‘natural’ liberal. “Working life” is a simplified invocation of Hannah Arendt’s phrase “working reality” as the worldly fabric of politics that is

Soumyabrata Choudhury  249

the highest faculty of the vita active (active life) of human beings. It seems to me that a political philosophy based on the worldly distillation of a realm of ‘action’ to correspond to the faculty of ‘politics’ without the risk of the singular immortal ‘idea’—the

6

7

8 9

risk being that one will be deluded into thinking that there is an Archimedean point outside the world from where politics can be determined—can very quickly corrode into a politics of “problem-solving”, a pragmatic conservatism. Here I would like to mention a doctoral thesis which I am currently reading and which presents the best version of Arendt’s philosophy, not the corrosive one I am wary of. See Shukla, 2016. See the following citation from Ambedkar in Dhananjay Keer’s biography (2009, 109) pertaining to the issue of equality and its ground in such reformist religious imaginations as that of Bhakti and in Ambedkar’s own thought, “the value of man is axiomatic, self-evident; it does not come to him as the result of the gilding of Bhakti.” Are axiomatic equality and generic equality the same thing? They are closely allied notions but their distinction lies in the following point: while axiomatic equality, both in form and force, is the expression of the axiom “equality exists” before the particular types of equality—types of predicative equality—are drawn from the axiom, generic equality is the event of the thought of equality as it happens in particular histories. The generic thought of equality, while not to be identified with particular historical versions of equality, will risk enforcing its genericity through particular historical signifiers by universalising them. Can “reservation” in the constitutional context be thought of as an enforcement rather than being an ‘exceptional’ administrative measure? In BAWS 3, 1987a, 357–80. See also note 6 above, citing Keer. Apart from all the scholarly niceties involved in recounting the fables of “founding fathers”—Pericles’s ancestral-autochthonous invocation, Roman authority (or auctoritas) investing the City,

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scriptural edification of Brahma as founding father so vulnerable to Jotiba Phule’s scalpel, Gandhi’s recourse to “ancestral calling” in moments of crisis and decision in the present of history—it can be simply said that the “founding fathers” by the very phrase, organises a patriarchal (from patria referring both to the head of the family, the father and the father’s land, which can be called both “fatherland” and “motherland”) consensus on who and what govern our political imaginary. At least such a consensus is the general aim of what is called ‘mainstream politics’. However, to create a “founding father”, a real historical figure in all her singularity and contradictoriness must be annexed to the generalised form of the “founding father”, the ‘average-great man’, which all founding fathers must be if they are to fit the form. Clearly such an attempt at annexing Babasaheb Ambedkar is taking place in our times. It is particularly interesting when persons with scholarly (and professional) reputation for critical non-partisan analysis of people and events promote the cult of “founding fathers”. Recently, Rajmohan Gandhi (2015, 44), in an apparent critique of Arundhati Roy’s alleged misrepresentation of the Gandhi– Ambedkar relationship in history, at the end of the article, uses strangely lurid imagery to portray Roy’s intransigence with regard to all the founding fathers of the nation. In this attempt, Rajmohan Gandhi pictures Roy as someone—a little girl?—who “hops, skips and jumps” on what she mistakenly considers historical ground. No one is good enough for her—not Gandhi, not even Ambedkar. What on earth does she (the little girl?) want? I think Rajmohan Gandhi, even by the choice of his verbal imagery, is implicated in a derisive patriarchal consensus. 10 When prime minister Narendra Modi spoke at the UN General Assembly in September 2014, he used the platitude of India being a great hospitable “world family” of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (Lakshman, 2014).

Soumyabrata Choudhury  251

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank my students Soumick De, Rakesh Mehar, Vibhuti Sharma and Anubhuti Sharma for their invaluable help without which this manuscript would have been impossible to prepare. I am grateful to the editors and interns at Navayana who over a couple of years not only read and edited the text but also provided me with substantive insights. Thanks to S. Anand, my publisher for being an uninhibited partisan of Ambedkar. He showed unflinching commitment to my work even in the face of apparent discouragement. I am deeply honoured by Slavoj Žižek and Aishwary Kumar’s generous and exact assessment of my work. The seeds of the Ambedkar work were sown several years back in the rarefied environs of Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. The director of IIAS then, Peter Ronald deSouza, in a discussion on my last book which involved some study of the French Revolution, said, “Now that you have studied the constitutional moment in French history, why don’t you do the same thing for India?” It was this search for the constitutional moment in Indian history that led me to read Ambedkar with a specific focus. However, I am not claiming to have discovered that object of my initial search but the collateral rewards owe to that first moment. I’d also like to thank Ghanshyam Shah, one of my colleagues in Shimla, for having inspired me to think of justice with exemplary integrity.

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A substantial part of the manuscript was written while I was fortunate to be a fellow first at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, and then at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, between 2012 and 2014. The other debts that I owe have been woven into the fabric of the text of this study. And if some are missing from this one, surely they have been or are being woven with another thread into another fabric. Earlier versions of some of the chapters were published in the following: “Ambedkar Contra Aristotle”. 2013. In Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences (Vol. 20, No 1). Shimla: IIAS.  “Ambedkar on Conversion”. 2015. In Politics and Religion. Ed. Saitya Brata Das. New Delhi: Aakar “Anathema and Anachronism”. 2015. In Sentiment, Politics, Censorship: The State of Hurt. Ed. Rina Ramdev, Sandhya D. Nambiar, Debaditya Bhattacharya. New Delhi: Sage. “Ambedkar’s Words”. 2017. In Social Scientist (Vol. 45, 1/2, Jan/Feb). “Caste and Debt”. 2012. In Journal of Polity and Society (Vol. 4, 2). 

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INDEX

Aam Aadmi Party, 150 actual, 46, 53n13, 59, 61, 75, 79, 84n3, 85n4, 92, 95, 175, 203, 230n26; actuality, 95–6, 170, 205, 206, 209, 210, 214; actualize(d), 132, 143, 219 affect, 46, 102, 109n10, 151, 177, 200, 216, 228n12 Agamben, Giorgio, 51n7, 158n5, 176–5, 229n18; re-vocation, 91–92 Ambedkar, B.R.: on ‘anachronism’, 110n14, 130–1; antiAristotelianism, 76, 199–208; at the Chavadar Tank, 162–3, 165, 246–7; on citizenship, 132–5; critique of debt to the Congress, 213–8, 228n15; and the Constituent Assembly, 39, 234–6, 240–3; on constitutional morality, 241–3, 248n3; as a Europeanist, 39, 55n25; and the French Revolution, 39, 47, 162, 164–5, 180, 190n3; reply to Gandhi’s critique of Annihilation of Caste, 91, 191n4; on Gandhism, 37, 48, 94, 110n14, 114–35; on the asociality of the Hindu, 124–5, 155; ‘madness’ of Hindu Society, 85n5; in the dominant institutions, 22–7, 50n3; abandonment of Hinduism,

36–8, 74, 79, 83, 91; use of language, 36–7, 52n10, 58–84, 87; at the Mahad Conference 1927, 32, 39; and Manusmriti, 54n15, 159, 194n19; as a militant, 168–73; and religion, 45–6, 51n7, 54n16, 86n13, 103–4, 106, 112n19; methodological separatism, 33–6; resistance to Western liberal democracy, 224–5 Ambedkar, B.R.: writings: Annihilation of Caste, 36, 37, 39, 43, 49n1, 51n6, 58, 71, 72–82, 83, 86n8, 91, 126, 129, 136n3, 136n7, 191n4, 198n34, 214, 217, 224, 230n26; “Away from the Hindus”, 36, 80, 88, 90–106; The Buddha and his Dhamma, 32, 36–7, 49, 59, 78, 83, 86n9, 92, 103, 112n19; “Buddha or Karl Marx”, 54n17, 108n6; Castes in India, 23, 36, 50n2, 51n6, 58, 62–72, 76, 86n8, 136n6, 225, 226n4; “Christianizing the Untouchable”, 109n13; What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables, 37, 47, 114, 208–12; “Gandhism”, 37, 110n14, 114–24, 216, 217; “Krishna and His Gita”, 54n16, 126, 181, 243; “A Plea to the Foreigner”, 47, 116, 189, 208–10, 214; “Aren’t the Untouchables a Separate Element?” 214; “What do the Untouchables Say?” 116;

Index  263

Who were the Shudras? 23, 185, 207, 222; Untouchables or the Children of India’s Ghetto, 90; The Untouchables, 54n16, 138n13, 223 Ambedkar-thought, 17–8 Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle (APSC), 25, 26 Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle, 25 Ambedkar Students Association (ASA), 25, 26, 27, 28 Ambedkarite: Buddhism, 51n7; Kantianism, 105; method, 26; orthodoxy, 27; phenomenology, 135n2; politics, 35; student politics, 22–8; radicalness, 45; universalism, 50n3; wound, 29, 112n18 anachronism, 37, 110n14, 114–35, 228n13; permanent anachronism, 134–5 (see also anathema); Mahad Satyagraha and the French Revolution, 39, 47, 85n6, 172–5, 181, 186, 190n2, 196n28 anathema, 37, 98, 110n14, 114–35, 139n18, 190, 215, 228n13 (see also anachronism) Anderson, Perry, 135n3, 228n17 Antigone (Sophocles), 137n11 association, associations, associational, 27–9, 51n6, 53n13, 81 areté, 76, 142, 150, 201, 206 aristocracy/aristocratic,

19, 82–4, 94, 243 Aristotle, 39, 199–225: idea of citizenship, 76, 203–4; katharsis(/ic), 94n1, 142, 147–9, 200–25, 231n27; Politics, 141–4, 157n1, 201, 203; role of music, 142, 147, 200; on zoon politikon and the outcast, 202–8 Aristotelian(ism), 84n2, 201, 206, 214, 217–8; consistency with modern bio-politics, 221–2 axiom, 18–9, 36, 42–6, 61, 98, 129, 150, 191n5, 198n36, 203, 207, 222, 225, 237, 241–2; axiomatic(s), 18–9, 31, 33, 36, 42–7, 59, 89, 120, 149, 152, 155, 157, 190n3, 203, 217, 220, 238, 241–2, 249n6, 249n7; axiom of equality, 214, 215; axiomatic equality, 32, 33, 191n5, 214, 249n7; axiomatician, 120 Badiou, Alain, 18, 40–9, 57n33, 138n15, 230n27; The Concept of Model, 42; fidelity, 49, 52n11, 168–9, 191n6; mathematics, 42, 44, 56n27, 113n22, 191n7; on obscurantism, 40–1 become/ing, 12, 22, 31, 34, 59, 61, 96, 99, 101, 112n18, 127, 128, 145, 149, 152, 160n13, 174, 178, 184, 186, 210, 212, 220, 222, 223; becoming dalit, 34, 138 being, 26, 30, 48, 57, 59, 60, 63, 66, 70, 71, 76, 82, 92, 93, 96, 99, 101–4, 129, 131, 139n17,

264  Ambedkar and Other Immortals

147, 149, 154, 156, 179, 197n32, 203, 204, 212, 221, 223, 224, 226n5, 230n25, 241, 246 Benjamin, Walter, 21, 111n16, 175, 193n15 Besant, Annie, 216, 228n14 Bhakti, 42, 43, 249n6 Bible, 109n9, 113n19, 130 Bichat, Xavier, 221 Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students Association (BAPSA), 25, 26 brahmin(s): Ambedkar on, 66–9, 71; body of, 83; as convert, 110n13; and debt, 38, 55n22, 230n25; as minority, 86; and Parshuram, 183; Phule on, 192–3n2; and untouchable, 155–6, 161n14 brahminic/al, 12, 17, 50, 53, 56, 84, 98, 109n12, 123, 137, 154, 160n13, 165, 207, 223–4, 229n20; elite and Ambedkar, 23–9; sovereignty, 140, 143, 155 brahminism, 14, 26, 155, 160n13, 183 Buddhism, 32, 46, 49, 51n7, 54n16, 57n29, 59, 86n9, 86n13, 92, 103, 108n6, 113n19, 129–30, 137–8n13, 181, 193n13, 243 capacity, 92, 123, 146–7, 152, 203–4, 208, 215, 220, 222, 225, 228n12, 229n18, 237–9; to think, 91; receive wound, 29; incapacity, 205 citizen-caste, 38–9, 141–4,

149–51, 155, 161n14, 238 Chatterjee, Partha, 137n12, 178, 198n37 Chavadar Tank, 85n6, 162–3, 165, 172, 246–7 Chilean politics, 158n4 Christ, 109n9, 130–1 Christian, 37, 84, 96–7, 99, 100, 144, 198, 212, 230n23 Christianity, 97, 99, 109n13, 130, 188, 197n32, 226n7; akribeia, 223, 230n23; tithes, 226n7, 195n21 collectivity, 22, 25, 101 Columbia University, 62, 225 common, 28, 62, 68, 70, 71, 72, 77–9, 80–4, 86n13, 95, 101, 118, 145, 147, 151, 163 communication, 71, 72–3, 75, 76, 79–82, 86n13, 221 (see also excommunication) comparitivity, 183–5, 196n23n24 conceptual/ity, 34, 35, 36, 47, 57n13, 58, 61, 62–3, 65–6, 68–70, 72, 74–5, 79–81, 97, 115, 146, 166, 174, 206 Congress (INC), congressism, congressist, 29, 34, 117–9, 135, 209–14, 227n8n10 Constituent Assembly, 33, 39, 189, 203, 208, 218, 243; Drafting Committee of the, 33; speeches, 132, 139n16, 198n35n36, 234, 235, 236; pro-minority view in, 199, 201–2; Mahavir Tyagi, 199, 225n1 constitution(al), 31, 36, 37–9,

Index  265

76–7, 79, 107n2, 109n10, 128, 132–4, 139n16n18, 141, 145, 147, 148, 157, 178, 185–90, 195n22, 198n35n36, 203, 205, 206–7, 209, 212, 215, 218–20, 224, 228n12, 229n18n20, 230n26, 232–6, 239, 240–4, 245, 246, 248n1n3, 249n7 contingency, 45, 57n29, 138n15, 207, 208, 222, 225, 229n20, 231n27, 239, 248n3; contingent, 18, 28, 37, 46, 103, 139n17, 145, 155, 157, 193n12, 198n35, 239 counter-revolution(ary), 31, 52n12, 138n13, 181–2, 188–90, 194n20, 195n22, 242 conversion(al), convert, 27, 36, 58, 80, 81, 83, 87–106, 107n3, 108n5n8, 109n9, 110n13, 112n19, 113n20, 113n22, 128, 129, 137n13, 193n13, 211–3, 220 corporate, corporation(s), 121–3, 124–30, 132–33, 136n6, 195n21, 196n28, 211, 236, 248n4 culture, 24–5, 77, 144, 172, 187, 195n22, 196n23, 197n31, 216 dalit: its use in the book, 19, 82–3; and anathema, 134–5; aristocracy, 82; Badiou and disorder, 56n27; becoming, 34, 137–8n13; and brahmin, 71; Buddhist, 103; and the BJP, 29; effect of language, 37; and equality, 31, 242; intellectuality, 113n19; liturgy, 144; and

mahar, 191–2n8; philosophy, 35; ‘pure’, 28; revolution, 44; rigour, 15, 61; subject, 109n10, 127–8; snobbism, 196n26; theory and Ambedkar, 218; wound and arrow, 40, 112; and Yakub Memon, 51n8 De Maistre, Joseph, 195n20n22, 215, 217 debt, 38–9, 81, 111n15, 136n7, 140– 57, 158n7, 190, 195n21, 227n7n9; of the student, 22, ontological, 55n22n23, 156; of the dalit, 156, 160n13; of the upper-castes, 138n14, 143, 153–4, 158n2, 189, 211–3, 217, 227n10, 230n25, 231; and eternity, 181–2; logic of, 55n22n24, 111n15, 119, 121–2, 143–4, 148–9, 149–53, 157, 190, 197n32, 211–3; revolutionary, 52n12, 182, 189, 190, 195n22, 242 decision, 22, 27, 32, 34, 36–7, 38, 42–3, 46, 49, 49n1, 51n6, 74–5, 78, 79, 83, 85n6, 88–9, 91–2, 97, 100, 102–5, 112n18, 117, 138n15, 168, 170–1, 173, 178, 179, 195n20, 199, 202, 208, 225, 227n11, 231n27, 247, 250n9 Deleuze, Gilles, 48–9, 57n33, 127, 154, 158n8, 228n16 democracy, 38–9, 41, 141, 150–2, 155, 159n9, 161n14, 189, 220, 229n17, 232–42, 248n1, Dewey, John, 59 dialectic(al), 34, 57n34,

266  Ambedkar and Other Immortals

74, 75, 116, 166 difference, 48–9, 57n34, 82, 110n13, 186, 187, 188, 197n32, 205, 207: graded, 49 division, divide, 25–6, 36, 50n3, 124, 154, 186, 190n2, 200, 204, 224, 234, 244, 246 Dumézil, Georges, 111n15, 196n23 effect, 25, 30, 37, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 56n28, 67–70, 73–4, 75, 77, 81, 83, 87, 94, 117, 119, 122–3, 127, 129, 132, 141, 159n10, 171, 173, 174, 175, 181–2, 195n21, 223, 233, 246 egalitarianism, 19, 27, 28, 30–2, 35, 42–3, 45–6, 48–9, 51n6, 53n13, 61, 82, 83, 104, 121, 131, 138n13, 143, 149, 152, 155, 165, 171, 174–6, 179, 184–8, 193n13, 208, 214, 219, 236–9, 242 Eklavya, 55n23 entangle(ment), 41, 56n27, 101–2 essence, 31, 33, 51n8, 53n13, 94 eternity, 19, 27, 31, 117–8, 139n17, 169, 179, 181–5, 195n22, 217, 246 ethics, ethical, 113, 153, 154, 159n12, 187, 200, 201, 205, 207 event, 30–1, 34, 39, 48, 52n11, 57n33, 65, 70–1, 78, 81, 92, 99, 99–106, 109n8, 113, 128–30, 131, 132–3, 138n13, 154, 164–90, 192n8n9, 193n14, 194n19, 196n24, 198n37, 223, 230n27, 243, 244, 246, 249n7 equality, 18, 30–3, 36, 38, 46, 49,

51n7, 52n10, 53n13n14, 54n16, 61, 75, 83, 85n6, 104, 121, 128, 133–4, 141–2, 150, 157, 169, 173–5, 179, 180, 185, 186, 189, 191n7, 193n13, 198n36, 214–5, 219, 225, 229n17, 240–3, 249n6: axiomatic (see axiom); axiom of (see axiom); norm of, 153, 168, 170–3, 176, 179, 247 equalization, 30–3, 85n5, 93; generic, 191n5, 198n36, 249n7 excommunication, 62, 64, 65, 66, 70, 70–2, 79, 84n1, 85n4 factional, 24–9, 50n3 Fanon, Frantz, 226n5 Foucault, Michel, 159n11, 160n12, 170, 240 founding fathers, 243–6, 249n9 fraternity, 28, 51n7, 75, 78, 80, 85, 180, 219, 245–6 French history, 163, 180, 196; post-revolutionary, 17–8, 150 French revolution, 43, 47, 75, 78, 80, 85n6, 152, 163–5, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 180–1, 184–5, 190n2n3, 192n10, 195n21n22, 221; pre-1789 society, 107n2 French National Assembly, 17, 39, 89, 186, 197n29; and the Terror, 188 Gandhi, 18, 24, 29, 50, 54n19, 81, 91, 94, 98, 109n9, 110n14, 111n15, 114–35, 136n5n6, 137n8n10,

Index  267

138n15, 139n16, 154, 190n2, 191n4, 211, 212, 217, 228n15, 246; the elvishness of, 119–24; and “caste ideology”, 37, 48, 85n5, 107n5, 120–2, 214–6, 228n12, 230n25; on manual scavengers, 215–7, 228n13; on work and leisure, 216–8 Gandhi, Rajmohan, 250n9 Gandhian, 38, 119, 120–2, 130, 133, 135, 136n3n7, 139n16, 209, 217; nativism, 35; Congressists, 34; selfishness/selflessness, 212–4; Gandhism, 48, 111n15, 114–35, 216, 217, 227n11 gangs, 23, 125, 128, 194n18, 246: spiritual, 124; fraternal, 245–6 generic(ity), 19, 28, 31, 33, 39, 45, 51n6, 53n13, 54n14, 61, 83, 94–100, 104–6, 110n13, 134, 135n2, 152, 167, 168, 169, 173, 191n5, 196n24, 198n36, 203, 209–10, 219, 220, 222, 228, 242, 244, 249n7 globalisation, 41, 184 Gramsci, Antonio, 192n11 graded, 80, 84n2, 188, 204: debt, 38; difference, 49; (social/system of) sovereignty, 67, 77, 86n8, 140, 142–3, 155–7, 187, 191n4, 197n32, 205, 206, 222; intensity of, 152–3; and subalternities, 179, 193n16; and equality, 185; and slavery, 191n4, 193n16; and hierarchy, 197n32; potentialities, 222

Greek society, 38, 74, 84n1, 127, 137, 140–57; Athens 55n24, 141, 153, 158n3n6, 233–41, 248n2; permanent constitution and autochthony, 233; Athenian law, 146, 154, 236; conditions of democracy, 38, 141, 152, 160n14, 232, 234; polis, 146; debt in, 142– 4, 149–53; birth of democracy, 38, 141; ancient liturgies, 140–57; kathartic music, 142, 202; drama/dramaturgy, 111n16, 155; public service, 145–7, 158n3; theoric, 146; koinonia, 147, 151; citizen and non-citizen, 38–9, 55n24, 141–2, 146–57, 158n3n6, paideia, 142, 150; Dionysia, 151–2, 159n10; theatrokratia, 151; egakratia, 153; Sparta(n), 232, 248n2 Grote, George, 235–6, 248n3 Guru, Afzal, 28 Guru, Gopal, 54n20 habit, 35, 64, 72, 76–8, 80–2, 100, 131, 179, 197n31, 199, 208–11, 214, 216–8, 220–1, 224–5, 226n4n5n6n7, 228n16, 230n25, 248n3: and katharsis, 201–2, 205–7 Harijan Sevak Sangh, 131, 138n14, 214 Hegel, G.W.F., 57n34, 159n11, 236 Hellenist Stoic philosophy of language, 127–8

268  Ambedkar and Other Immortals

hermeneutic, 106, 176–7 heterodox, 27, 28, 171; heterogeneity, 40, 153, 159n12, 178; heterogenous, 41, 47, 80, 152, 155 Hinduism: and caste 34, 74, 231n27; Ambedkar abandoning, 36, 79–80, 89, 91, 98–100, 214, 220; Gandhi and 120, 122, 215; and reform, 166 historicity, 26, 34, 36, 40, 47, 52n12, 60, 63, 70–1, 75, 79, 80, 82, 164, 169, 171, 175–6, 178, 181, 183, 184, 193n14 Hobbesian, 145, 248n4 Hölderlin, 160n13 Homer, Homeric, 225n2, 237 Hyderabad Central University, 25, 27 idea, 15, 25–6, 30, 31, 33, 53n13, 55n25, 57n34, 71, 76, 78, 84n4, 107n2n4, 111n15, 113n22, 121, 139n18, 146, 158n7, 167–8, 171, 174, 191n5n7, 194n19, 196n24, 229n17, 237, 241–2, 243, 244, 249n5 identity, 24, 50n5, 137n13, 174, 195n21, 212, 213, 233, 239: dalit, 19, 35, 61, 82, 112n18 ideology(/ical), 35, 43, 48, 53n13n14, 55n22, 56n28, 58, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 148, 149, 209, 229n17 imitation: and caste, 62, 64, 65, 66, 66–8, 70, 75, 77; and

Sanskritisation, 84n3, 143 immemorial, 37, 41, 52n12, 61, 67, 70, 71, 76, 80, 95, 122, 124–5, 129, 130, 132, 141, 157, 167, 190n3, 207, 219, 220, 223, 224, 225, 231n27 immortality, 17, 166, 167, 168, 169, 182, 188, 232–4, 236–9, 241–3, 245; immortal(s), 18, 19, 39–40, 162, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 178, 179, 182, 185, 189, 190, 191n7, 233–4, 238–43, 244, 246, 247, 249n5; immortalist, 166, 240, 243 incorporeal, 105, 128–30, 150, 157, 159n8n10, 170, 220: body, 94, 109n10, 127, 134; debt, 121; locality, 100; transformation, 127, 128, 131, 132, 150, 156, 160n13; wound, 131 Indian, 30, 32, 44, 54n16, 166–74, 229n17; society, 26, 35, 37, 38, 111, 141, 155, 157, 158n6, 187, 198n36, 234; nation, 35, 38; Left, 52n9 independence, 133–4, 157, 203, 209, 219–20, 230; transfer of power to independent India, 199, 203 individual(ity), 30, 33, 53n14, 89, 95, 97, 122, 123, 126, 131, 145, 149, 150, 151, 211, 212, 213, 227n7, 233, 236, 237, 239, 248n4 Indological(/ist), 55n23, 183 infinite, infinity, 39, 42, 45–6, 72, 80, 83, 91, 92, 100, 112n17, 153, 154, 156, 221, 222, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243

Index  269

innovation, 37, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 68–70, 79, 84n1 intensity(/ies), 47, 101, 109n9, 114, 132, 133, 145, 152–3, 159n12, 186, 220, 234, 241, 242–3 Islam/ic, 41, 86n10, 220 Jacobin, 188, 189, 195n22 Jaffrelot, Christophe, 50n2, 187, 230n22 Jat-Pat Todak Mandal, 73, 74, 75, 79, 91 Jawaharlal Nehru University, 25, 138n15 Kabir, 45–6 Kant, Immanuel, 169–70, 177, 192n9, 194n17; Kantian(ism), 105, 113n21, 171, 174 Keer, Dhananjay, 42–3, 45, 54n16, 149n6n8, 194n18 kinship and citizenship, 95–5, 101–5, 108n7n8 knowledge, 23, 24, 34, 62, 74, 81, 86n13, 112n17, 113n19, 183–4, 193n13, 196n24, 220 Kumar, Aishwary, 51n5, 57n29 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 184 language and society, 36–7, 52n10, 58–84 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 224 lekhton (Greek), 127–8 liberal, 25, 26, 104, 208, 209, 210, 220, 224, 235, 248n4:

democracy, 41, 220 limit (position), 17, 75, 126, 130, 163, 217, 221–2 liturgy(/ies/ical), 143–50, 152, 154, 157, 158n3n4n5n7, 227n9 Mahad: Conference, Satyagraha 1927, 32, 39, 47, 54n15, 85n6, 162–8, 170–3, 175–6, 180–1, 184–5, 186, 190n2n3, 194n18n19,196n28, 243, 246–7 Mahar Conference 1936, 36, 80, 90 Maharashtra, 22, 56n28, 246 Malamoud, Charles, 55n23, 156 Mallarmé, Stéphane 50n5 Manuski, 85n6, 180 Marx, Karl, 29, 33, 45, 56n28, 225, 230n27: Marxism, 52n9, 57n34, 108n6, 112n17, 155, 196n25 Memon, Yakub, 28, 51n8, 245 methodology, 40–9 militant, 52n11, 74, 144, 168–73, 176, 177,178, 190n2, 196n26, 211, 233, 243 minoritarian(ism), 119, 130, 154, 173 modern, 32, 71, 104, 122, 125, 137n13, 138n15, 155, 160n12n13, 165–8, 174, 190n3, 212, 216, 221, 222, 227n7, 235, 238, 239, 240, 243 Modi, Narendra, 240, 250n10 Muktibodh’s Brahmarakshas, 160 multiplicity, 76, 77, 120, 136n6, 145, 155, 208, 212, 226n4 Mumbai blasts (1993), 245

270  Ambedkar and Other Immortals

Nagaraj, D.R., 50n4, 98, 111 name(s), 24, 25, 27, 36, 37, 41–4, 99–106, 109n12, 118, 125, 138n13, 144, 152, 171–3, 180, 192n8, 193n13, 195n22, 224, 239, 246; change of, 36, 95–9: of the untouchable, 83, 92–9; theory of, 36, 87–8, 92, 113n22; generic anonym, 106 Napoleon, 188 nationalism(/ist), 154, 210, 213, 227n10: Ambedkarite, 35; and meritocracy, 53n13, 189 notion, 30, 32, 34, 42, 57n34, 54, 108n6, 109n8n11, 127, 139n17, 160n12, 196n23, 210, 226n5 ontology(/ical), 26, 35, 36, 38, 43, 46, 55n22n23, 57n29, 65, 67, 69, 79, 82, 89, 93, 102–5, 109n12, 131, 142, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152, 156, 157, 158n2, 160n13, 161n14, 171, 192n8, 194n19, 195n20, 197n32, 207, 219, 238 Orientalist, 34, 183, 196n23n24 Paine, Thomas, 187 paleonymy, 193 Pericles, 18, 146, 246, 247n1, 249n9: funeral oration, 39, 147, 232–6, 241, 248n2; on democracy, 141, 160n14, 238, 240 phantasm(atic/tication), 26, 67–9, 70, 71, 77, 78, 80 philology, philological, 48,

55n25, 81, 84, 106, 114, 125, 127, 144, 145, 184 philosophy, 24, 30, 33, 35, 38, 40, 48, 49, 103, 107n1, 108n5n6, 114–5, 120–3, 127, 129, 135n3, 157n1, 164, 166, 171, 184, 208, 209, 220, 224, 235, 236, 249n5 Phule, Jotiba, 45, 110n13, 172, 183– 4, 192n12, 250n9; Gulamgiri, 183 Plato, 151 postcolonial, 57n34, 178, 192n11, 196n25: cultural research, 24 potentiality, 26, 77, 105, 126, 201, 205–6, 222, 234, 244: impotential(ity), 206 pragmatics, 47, 48, 59, 60, 63, 73, 87, 95, 144, 240, 243, 249n5: of language, 59; pragmatism, 106 predication, predicative, 31–3, 38, 46, 53n14, 110n13, 164, 191n5, 203, 220, 249n7 protective discoloration, 87–106 passim Ram rajya, 125, 129 raison d’état, 159n12, 240 real (psychoanalytic), 60, 94, 135, 172, 175, 191n7, 194n19, 218, 223, 228n12, 239 reason, 49n1, 55n21, 74, 75, 81, 85n5 religion, 41–4, 51n7, 81, 83, 85n7, 86n13, 89, 91, 93, 97,102–6, 108n5, 110n13, 113n20, 119, 129, 144–5, 157, 159n10, 179, 183 repetition, 76, 140, 164, 206

Index  271

reservation, 33, 35, 71, 133, 139n16, 189, 198n37, 199, 201, 208, 215, 218, 219, 224, 228n12, 242, 249n7 retrospectivity, 54n14, 56n28, 128 reverse discrimination, 71 revolutionary, 31–3, 44, 48–9, 53n13, 57n33n34, 68, 71–2, 81, 92, 100, 112n18, 137n8, 138n13, 165, 167, 169–70, 181–2, 185, 189, 192n10, 194n18, 195n20n22, 231n27, 242–3: hypothesis, 30, 44, 54n16 ritual transgression, 166, 247 Roman: Empire, 239; patrician and plebeian, 222; law, 84n1, 110n15, 207, 222, 229n20, 249–50n9; society, 110–1n15 Round Table Conference, 54n19, 198n37 Roy, Arundhati, 110n13, 135n3, 198n34, 250n9 Schmitt, Carl, 41, 195n20 separate electorates, 198n37 Shakespeare, William, 56n25, 94, 103, 106 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph/Abbé, 18, 39, 185–9, 222; What is the Third Estate?  185–6, 222 similarity, 38, 72, 75, 75–7, 78, 82, 163, 197n29 Singh, Bhagat, 29, 45 singular(ity), 24, 25, 29, 39, 47, 56, 60, 64, 65, 82, 83, 94, 95, 101, 105, 106, 123, 126, 152, 184, 197n32,

211, 219, 244, 249n5, 250n9 sovereign/sovereignty/ies, 13, 15, 122, 140–3, 154–7, 160n12, 182, 186–7, 195n22, 196n28, 197n32, 229n18, 236, 239; and Ambedkar, 220, 222; in Aristotle 204–8, 210; and caste society, 39, 67, 72, 80, 225: and imitation, 69–70; colonial, 57n34, 116–7; graded, 77–78; of the master, 22; (see also capacity, graded) speculative, 17–9, 38, 46, 47, 48, 53n13, 56n26, 58, 60, 63, 71, 89, 98, 107n2, 111n15, 112n17, 115, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 128, 130, 132, 135n1, 141, 174, 205, 206: philology, 17, 48, 114, 125, 127; eternity, 118 Spinoza, Baruch, 139n17; Spinozist, 139n17 Srinivas, M.N., 84n3 St Paul, 130–1, 191n6 Subaltern School, 178, 192n11 subaltern, 97, 109n12, 154, 171, 178, 179, 184, 192n11, 244: graded subalternity, 179, 193n16 subjectivity, subjective, 22, 29–31, 38, 39, 42, 43, 51n7, 56n27, 61, 77, 81–2, 86n10, 95, 97, 98, 103, 105, 109n10, 115–8, 122–3, 125, 126–8, 138, 141–2, 144, 146, 148–9, 150–7, 159n10, 166–9, 171, 174, 177, 178, 182, 191n5, 192n10, 193n16, 197n32, 209, 210, 221–3 Swarajya, 129

272  Ambedkar and Other Immortals

systematic, 18, 46, 59, 69, 83, 207, 211, 219 Teltumbde, Anand, 25, 54n15, 246, 247 temporal(ity), 70, 72, 117, 118, 125, 133, 140–1, 165, 176, 177, 180–2, 184, 241 temple-entry (of untouchables), 98, 107n5, 131, 165, 190n2, 227n11 Thucydides 232, 237, 247, 248n2: History of the Peloponnesian War, 232 Tilak, B.G., 181, 195n20 totality, 26, 35, 37, 38, 44, 54n19, 58, 67, 98, 115–6, 122–3, 124–5, 128, 129–30, 132, 134, 137n10, 166, 186, 209, 210, 211, 227n7, 239, 245 trace, 34, 37, 83, 169, 171, 194n19, 204, 205, 206, 207, 210, 211, 214, 216, 221, 224, 244 truth-effect, 122, 123, 171, 173 United Dalit Students Forum (UDSF), 25, 26 universal, 19, 24, 27, 35, 39, 42, 43, 47, 59, 73, 93, 104, 105, 108n6, 116, 118, 132–3, 147, 148, 153, 154, 170–4, 176, 187, 202, 204, 207, 210, 218, 222, 238, 239, 241, 249n7 university, 23–6, 50n3 untouchable: research programme, 15, 19, 81, untouchables: and Mahad, 32,

166–73 passim, 246; Ambedkar and, 33–37, 47, 54n16, 60–1, 80, 83, 85n7, 90–105 passim, 107n5, 108n7, 109n13, 116, 118, 126, 130– 3, 155–7, 208, 210, 212–7 passim, 220, 223, 226n5; and brahmins, 161; and Buddhism, 86n13, 137–8n13; as exceptional, 184; and Gandhi/sm, 123, 227n10, 228n13, and happiness, 110n13; mahar as, 191–2n8; as militant, 173, 190n2; an Phule,136–7n8; wound of identity, 112n18 Vemula, Rohith, 27, 31, 50n5 Varghese, George, 138n15 virtual(ity), 92, 100, 146, 150, 151, 152, 159n10, 170, 174–5, 177, 178, 221 vitality, vitalist, 27, 28, 29, 40, 46, 77, 88, 104, 117, 206, 221, 242, 246 void, 46, 49, 80, 83, 112n18, 138n15, 156, 159, 169, 172, 175, 177, 182, 186, 189, 191n4, 192n12, 239, 240: shunnyata, 46, 57n29 wound, 29, 40, 87, 88, 112n18, 125, 129, 131, 133, 182 Yeola Conference 1935, 91, 107n2, 107n5 Zelliot, Eleanor, 85n7, 91, 107n1n2, 108n5, 110n13, 190n2, 193n13, 194n19