The dalit in India - caste and social class

Social Research, Spring, 2003 by Sagarika Ghose

Even though the overwhelming majority of dalits in the colonial period remained railway workers, landless migrant laborers, urban sweepers, stone cutters, and servants, some became soldiers in the army of the East India Company and others, such as the mahars, were able to achieve the status of a wealthy and assertive elite (Zelliot, 1970: 43).

After Phule, the other social reformer who can be seen as precursor of Ambedkar was E. V. Ramaswami Naicker (1879-1973). Naicker founded the Self-Respect Movement, which advocated a vigorous attack on caste, especially "Aryan Brahmins." He campaigned for forcible temple entry, burning of the Manusmriti, and atheism. Ironically, modern-day political parties like the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, which are the descendants of the Self-Respect Movement, have veered away from the rationalism and atheism of Naicker and instead lapsed into various forms of Hindu obscurantism. (15)

Both Phule and Naicker, however, positioned themselves as not just anti-brahmin but implacably anticaste and pro-poor, thus preparing the ground for the emergence of Ambedkar's leadership style.

Ambedkar and Gandhi: The Untouchable and the Patriot-Saint.

   There have been many mahatmas in India whose sole
   object was to remove Untouchability and to elevate and
   absorb the depressed classes, but every one of them has
   failed in his mission. Mahatmas have come and mahatmas
   have gone. But the Untouchables have remained
   Untouchables.

   B. R. Ambedkar (Moon, 1987, Vol. 3: 67)

   Examine the Gandhian attitude to strikes, the Gandhian
   reverence for caste and the Gandhian doctrine of Trusteeship
   of the rich ... Gandhism is the philosophy of the
   well-to-do and leisured class.

   B. R. Ambedkar (Moon, 1991, Vol. 9: 291)

   The taint of Untouchability is an intolerable burden on
   Hinduism. Let us not deny God by denying to a fifth of
   our race the right of association on an equal footing.

   Gandhi (1958: 317)

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956), a dalit who became one of the drafters of the Indian constitution, is regarded as the father of the modern dalit movement. He was a contemporary of Gandhi, the leader of India's freedom movement. Ambedkar was one of Gandhi's harshest critics, a bitter opponent of the manner in which Gandhi drew a gauze of unity over what for him was India's warring social landscape. For Ambedkar, the Gandhian movement was conservative, upper caste, and bourgeois, a movement resisting the full-scale socioeconomic transformation of Indian society (Sarkar, 1983: 345).

Ambedkar's argument that political democracy was meaningless without social transformation was far too radical for the nationalist upper castes. That Gandhi himself was an upper-caste Hindu--as were most of his key lieutenants--definitely gave, for Ambedkar, a certain caste color to the entire nationalist movement. His own energetic leadership, the series of imaginative protests he launched--including drinking water from prohibited temple tanks, burning the Manusmriti, and his conversion in 1956 to Buddhism as a repudiation of the Hindu religion--galvanized the dalit community, taking off from where Jotirao Phule had stopped.