Heroes in their own right — Gandhi and Ambedkar

The tragedy, from Gandhi’s point of view, was that his colleagues in the national movement either did not understand his concern with untouchability or even actively deplored it. Priests and Shankaracharyas thought he was going too fast in his challenge to caste — and why did he not first take their permission? Communists wondered why he wanted everyone to clean their own latrines when he could be speaking of class struggle. And Congressmen in general thought Harijan work came in the way of an all-out effort for national freedom. Thus Stanley Reid, a former editor of the Times of India, quotes a Indian patriot who complained (in the late thirties) that “Gandhi is wrapped up in the Harijan movement. He does not care a jot whether we live or die; whether we are bond or free”.

The tragedy, from Ambedkar’s point of view, was that to fight for his people he had to make common cause with the British. In his new book, Worshipping False Gods, Arun Shourie has made much of this. As always, Shourie writes as if there is a singular truth, with him as its repository and guarantor. Time and again, he equates Ambedkar with Jinnah as an “accomplice of Imperial politics”. He dismisses all that Ambedkar wrote about Hinduism as `caricature’ and `calumnies’. Not once does he acknowledge that there was much truth to the criticisms. There is not one admission here of the horrendous and continuing sufferings of Dalits at the hands of caste Hindus, that might explain (and justify) Ambedkar’s rhetoric and political choices. For Shourie the fact that Ambedkar disagreed long and often with Gandhi is proof enough that he was anti-national. He even insinuates that Ambedkar “pushed Gandhi to the edge of death” by not interfering with the Mahatma’s decision to fast in captivity.

I think, however, that for Ambedkar to stand up to the uncrowned king and anointed Mahatma of the Indian people required extraordinary courage and will-power. Gandhi thought so too. Speaking at a meeting in Oxford in October 1931, Gandhi said he had “the highest regard for Dr Ambedkar. He has every right to be bitter. That he does not break our heads is an act of self-restraint on his part”. Writing to an English friend two years later, he said he found “nothing unnatural” in Ambedkar’s hostility to the Congress and its supporters. “He has not only witnessed the inhuman wrongs done to the social pariahs of Hinduism”, reflected this Hindu, “but in spite of all his culture, all the honours that he has received, he has, when he is in India, still to suffer many insults to which untouchables are exposed”. In June 1936, Gandhi pointed out once again that Dr Ambedkar “has had to suffer humiliations and insults which should make anyone of us bitter and resentful. Had I been in his place,” he remarked, “I would have been as angry”.

Gandhi’s latter-day admirers might question Ambedkar’s patriotism and probity, but the Mahatma had no such suspicion himself. Addressing a bunch of Karachi students in June 1934, he told them that “the magnitude of (Dr Ambedkar’s) sacrifice is great. He is absorbed in his own work. He leads a simple life. He is capable of earning one to two thousand rupees a month. He is also in a position to settle down in Europe if he so desires. But he doesn’t want to stay there. He is only concerned about the welfare of the Harijans”.

To Gandhi, Ambedkar’s protest held out a lesson to the upper castes. In March 1936, he said that if Ambedkar and his followers were to embrace another religion, “We deserve such treatment and our task (now) is to wake up to the situation and purify ourselves”. Now many heeded the warning, for towards the end of his life Gandhi spoke with some bitterness about the indifference to Harijan work among his fellow Hindus: “The tragedy is that those who should have especially devoted themselves to the work of (caste) reform did not put their hearts into it. What wonder that Harijan brethren feel suspicious, and show opposition and bitterness”.

Upper caste Hindus thought that Gandhi moved too fast, but the Dalits of today feel that he was much too slow. The politician Mayawati has, more than once, spoken of the Mahatma as a shallow paternalist who sought only to smooth the path for more effective long-term domination by the Suvarna. Likewise, in his book Why I am Not a Hindu? Kancha Illiah writes of Gandhi as wanting to “build a modern consent system for the continued maintenance of brahminical hegemony” — a judgment as unfair as that of Shourie’s on Ambedkar.

The Kannada critic D.R. Nagaraj once noted that in the narrative of Indian nationalism the “heroic stature of the caste-Hindu reformer”, Gandhi, `further dwarfed the Harijan personality’ of Ambedkar. In the Ramayana there is but one hero but, as Nagaraj points out, Ambedkar was too proud, intelligent and self-respecting a man to settle for the role of Hanuman or Sugreeva. For playwright or mythmaker there can only be one heroic figure, but the historian is bound by no such constraint. The history of Dalit emancipation is unfinished, and for the most part unwritten. It should, and will, find space for many heroes. Ambedkar and Gandhi will do nicely for a start.

The writer is a historian and sociologist