Untouchability, Amdebdkar and related tensions in Indias

independence struggle
By Arturo Desimone
Introduction
In this essay I will discuss the phenomenon of Untouchability in India. We will
examine the social and class position and status of Untouchables in Hindu
society. I will explore these topics to the background of the ideas of Dr. Bhimrao
Ambedkar, one of the leading figures of the Indian independence movement
against British colonialism. This paper will touch upon the implications of the
strife and rivalry that arose between Ambedkar and Gandhi, showing what
Gandhis struggle with Ambedkar meant for Indian society and for the plight of
the Untouchables, and the Dalit movements rejection of Hinduism, even the
pacifist neo-Hinduism of Gandhi.
I will argue that Gandhis achievements are not the whole story of Indias
independence struggle. The liberation-effort encompassed elements that were
not aligned with Gandhi and that were striving to achieve a much more
profound and thorough upheaval and lasting change in the power structure of
India. Elites such as the Brahmans dominated this power structure. Their
exploitation of immense under-classes persisted after the departure of the
British and the successes of the national liberation movement. These
inequalities remained, even though many activists and movements at one
point seemed likely to be successful in their struggle to change their country
more dramatically than stopping at the ousting of British colonialism.
I will also examine the use and abuse of the Aryan invasion theory by
Brahman elites. The Aryan invasion theory is a hypothesis which Orientalist
scholars championed in the 18th and 19th centuries about an Aryan race
invading ancient India. Brahman upper class groups used this theory, which
colonialism brought to them, to justify what Ambedkar called the ideology of
Brahmanic Supremacy, by imagining they were of different ethnic and racial
stock than the excluded lower classes and Dalits.
To the background of this expos of the Aryan invasion theory, which
Ambedkar was among the first to contest, I will try to say something about the
relationship between class and racism This essay will also deal with the Dalits
mass conversions to Buddhism, and the social and political connotations of this
Dalit endorsement of Buddhist teachings or Neo-Buddhism.
Gandhi, among others, compared the position and function Untouchables of
India to that of the Jews in Christian Europe. I will compare the plight, status
and experience of Jews and other minorities in Christian Europe to
Untouchability in India, summing up by showing how the National Socialist
movement finally invoked the Aryan Invasion theory to justify their destruction
of Europes Untouchables.
Untouchables or Crushed
Untouchables are the outcastes of the Hindu Chaturvarna or Caste system in
India. They comprise a wide variety of groups from the lowest social strata of

Hindu society. The Indian National Congress Constitution of 1950, which B.R.
Ambedkar coauthored, outlawed the practice of Untouchability. At that time, of
the 300 million Hindus then in India, roughly 60 million were untouchables.
Untouchability is a class phenomenon rather than an ethnic group. In his book
The Untouchables, Who Were They and Why they became Untouchables?
Ambedkar compares the plight of the untouchables to certain other neglected
classes in Indias social fabric, namely the so-called Criminal Tribes, who
numbered then 20 million, and the aboriginal tribes, who numbered 15
million. The criminal tribes were tribes that, like untouchables and aboriginal
tribes, faced exclusion from mainstream Hindu society. The criminal tribes
were apparently prohibited from practicing any trade that was not illegal or
relating to the criminal underworld. This created a kind of clandestine market
or shadow economy for these tribes to subside on. One could perhaps compare
their situation to how Christian societies more or less forced European Jews to
practice usury and interest rates, business which ecclesiastical authorities
prohibited Christians from doing.
Untouchables faced exclusion from the system of Hindu worship. They were not
allowed to recite or read sacred texts or attend Yajna rituals. Famously,
Untouchables breath, the sound of their voice, their shadow were all allegedly
polluting to Caste Hindus, like an imagined leprosy which Caste Hindus
quarantined through systematic social isolation and discrimination. Dalits
traditionally must perform lowly occupations, such as sanitation work, janitorial
labor, butchering and fishing. They have typically lived in impoverished ghettos
on the outskirts of Hindu villages. Even up to the present, Caste Hindus such as
landlords, subject untouchables to violence. There are many cases of rapes,
assaults, mass-murder and pogroms. There is also much structural violence in
how untouchable communities are marginalized into socio-economic misery.
Recent decades have seen the emergence of a Dalit movement. Dalit, a
word popularized in the seventies, is Sanskrit for Crushed or Oppressed,
an affirmation of the social and historical reality Untouchables have endured
for centuries. India has seen the rise of such groups as the Dalit Black Panthers
, a militant organization which clearly differentiated, like most Ambedkarites,
from the pacifist politics of Gandhi who sought to create an illusion of unity,
harmony and cohesion among the whole of Hindu society. The Dalit Black
Panthers, like other militant organizations around the world
borrowed their name and drew inspiration from the efforts of black nationalists
in the sixties-era United States. Thanks partly to educational efforts that
originate largely in Ambedkars attempts to uplift untouchables, a canon of
Dalit literature, including influential Indian poets, has developed.

Aryan Invasion
The Aryan Invasion theory is the claim that an invasion of Indo-Aryan warriors
from outside of Indiaaccording to B.G. Tilak, for example, they originated in
the Arctic circle
, whereas others suggest somewhere between Western Europe and Central
Asiaswept into India, colonizing and conquering the more darker skinned
races that inhabited such places as Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. This
hypothesis has come under fire in recent decades in scholarly debate. The

Indian right wing also now condemns the Aryan Invasion Theory as conjecture,
because that theory suggests a foreign, non-nationally-rooted source for
Hinduism and Indian Culture,
which believers of Hindutva and Hindu fundamentalist superiority find
threatening. According to Klostermaier in his book A Survey of Hinduism, the
scholarly debate has largely degenerated into an ideological battle. The
defenders of the Aryan invasion theory call everyone not on their side
fundamentalist Hindu, revisionist, fascist, and worse, whereas the
defenders of the indigenous origin of the Veda accuse their opponents of
entertaining colonialist missionary and racist hegemonial prejudices.
Ambedkar was one of the first authors to contest the theory. His arguments
against it, as early as the 1940s, went unnoticed in a time when most scholars
took its veracity for granted. The political function of his opposition was to
resist the Brahmanical vision of the Hindu nation, represented for him not only
by the Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) but the
Gandhian Congress as well.
Many present-day Indian scholars claim the purpose of theory was to legitimize
the colonial and missionary project of Britain in India by imagining that Indian
civilizations cultural heritage had come from an invading force that conquered
dark indigenous inhabitants.
Scholarship now points to a much older date for Vedic culture in India.
Ambedkar in his book Who Were the Shudras, according to scholar Arvind
Sharma, cites nineteenth century Indologist Max Muller, who had been the
main proponent and champion of the Aryan race theory but went on to recant
and say that there was no such thing as an Aryan race, that by Aryan he
understood a linguistic reality, nothing other than language. Muller later
insisted I have declared again and again that if I say Aryas I mean neither
blood nor bones, hair nor skull. I mean simply those who speak an Aryan
language.
Muller went on to denounce advocates of such a category as Aryan race to be
guilty of downright theft.
Mullers attempts to reverse this wrong went largely ignored throughout much
of his lifetime, according to such scholars as Romila Thapar who wrote half a
century after Ambedkar. To further argue for his conviction that Arya denotes
the speakers of the Sanskrit language and not a race, he point to 31 places in
the Rig Veda wherein the word Arya is used, saying in none of these is the
word used in the sense of race.
Ambedkar goes on to attempt disproving the Invasion theory in his The
Untouchables, in Chapter VII, Racial Difference as the Origin of
Untouchability. He cites an Orientalist, Stanley Rice, who in his book Hindu
Customs and their Origins divides the origins of Untouchability into two factors:
race and occupation. The race aspect entails a theory that the Untouchables
descend from the pre-Dravidian aborigines, who inhabited parts of India and
who an invasion of Dravidians conquered and enslaved. According to Rice the
noble Aryan race around 1500 BC then invaded, in turn conquering the
Dravidians who they made Shudras.
Ambedkar exposes such theories as speculation and contrived, going into a
study of the real meaning of such names as Aryans, Dravidians, Dasas and
Nagas.
The advocates of the Aryan race theory pointed to a Rig Veda verse

mentioning a defeated people who were anasas. These scholars translated

anasa as without noses, thereby inferring that these were a flat-nosed
people. Ambedkar and more recent scholars interpreted anasas as meaning
speechless, a more figurative, literary term that is not a racial category.
Ambedkar describes an ancient Aryan culture that, rather than being static,
homogenous and monolithic like Aryan Race theorists imagined, was diverse,
and complex, including a spectrum of cultures, customs, mythologies, etc. that
differed across time. Ambedkar differentiates between Rig Vedic Aryans and
Atharva Vedic Aryans. He also proves had many Aryans practiced unclean
occupations, and that Aryans often had Aryan slaves, thereby discrediting
beliefs in ethnic origins of an occupational slave-class, of Shudras and
untouchables.
Brahman elites, according to Ambedkar, used the Aryan-invasion-theory of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which they encountered through contact
with British colonialism to mythologize their origins and justify what Ambedkar
called Brahmanical supremacy. They imagined themselves to be of another,
superior race than the Atishudras, closer to the British colonists. Indian elites
such as Brahman landlords used this belief to justify their maltreatment of their
lower class subjects.
The untouchables, however, were not the only group to suffer at the hands of
powers invoking the myth of an Aryan race: during the most intense period of
Indias social upheaval, the Nazi movement in Germany also imagined
themselves to be an Aryan race. These self-described Aryans would invade
many countries, subduing Untermenschen or lesser humans such as the
inhabitants of Slavic countries, the way the Aryan invaders supposedly
subjugated Dravidians. They waged pogroms, massacres and atrocities against
what could be considered Europes Untouchables, the European Jews and
gypsies, who the Nazis imagined as the exact opposite of Aryans. The Aryan
invasion theory was partly modeled on European Orientalists trying to reimagine Europeans as a Chosen People replacing the Jews: whereas there is
little proof of an ancient blue-eyed European invasion of India around 1500
BCE, the Old Testament speaks of the ancient Israelites entering Canaan and
conquering it from the Canaanites to seize the Promised Land.
Proponents of the Aryan Invasion theory initially referred to Biblical belief and
estimated that 4005 years before Christ the God of Genesis had created the
world, which is why they claimed the Aryans invaded India at 1500 BC when in
fact the Vedas presence in India is far older.

From Time Immemorial: Ambedkars demystifying of Untouchability

Ambedkar in his 1948 book The Untouchables aims to systematically
deconstruct the claims and misconceptions that surround the issue of the
Untouchables, their origins, the source of their inferior status. Some
misconceptions tackled are based on the Aryan invasion theory, which we
previously looked at. A general belief about Untouchability was that it was
decreed by the Manu smriti, a book of Hindu religious law, which Hindus
attribute to Manu, the first man, the Indian Adam. A general misconception is
that untoucability begins with the Vedas. Ambedkar finds Untouchability to be,
rather than an ancient phenomenon, a medieval one, which consolidated and

took form around the year 400 AD, when the Hindu Gupta Emperors outlawed
the eating of beef and killing of cows and oxen in their legal code.
This took place after a bloody seizure of power by Brahmans, headed by
Pushya Mitra, who committed regicide, murdering Buddhist king Brihadratha
Maurya who Brahmans conspired against and killed. The Manu Smriti was
written at that time and justified this new order. The Manu Smriti legitimized
regicide, Chaturvarna, animal sacrifice and Brahmans resorting to arms.
According to Ambedkar, the origins of Untouchability are twofold: they find root
in Indias Buddhist past, which had until Ambedkars time been largely
forgotten and resigned to oblivion; and in the dietary conventions and laws of
Brahmins towards beef-eating and the killing of cows, but this second point
originates in the preceding one: Indias buried Buddhist past.
There are numerous explanations as to why Buddhism at some point virtually
disappeared from the Indian subcontinent while it flourished in other Asian
countries. Scholars have attributed it to various factors, one being an economic
crisis caused by the demise of the Roman empire. This financial crash affected
the Indian subcontinentthen dependent on trade with Roman provincesto
such an extent that sanghas, Buddhist monasteries, could no longer subside or
find economic support and had to close.
Another theory is that the similarities between Buddhism and Hinduism made
Buddhism so indistinguishable from Hinduism that there was no longer any
point in being Buddhist as it was not that different from or adding anything
novel to the pre-existing religious tradition. Though this argument has some
validity, Hinduism probably began to resemble Buddhism more and differences
began to erode because the formers adherents, proponents and authorities
were under immense pressure from Buddhists and Buddhism. According to
Ambedkar, Buddhistswho, he claims, were at one point the majority in India
as many Indians had converted to the religion of the Rebel Saint, Siddartha
Gautama Buddhaamong the laboring classes in India objected to the waste
and cruelty of Brahman priestly elites Yajna sacrifices of cows. To poor peasant
masses in an agricultural society who subscribed to Buddhist ethics, the
sacrificial killing of cows which could otherwise provide sustenance and
livelihood was an act of excess, outrageous. Buddhists had less qualms
objecting to Brahman behavior as Buddhism does not recognize the
Chaturvarna or Caste division of Hindu society. Ambedkar argues, by citing laws
from Hindu sacred texts including the Vedas, the Brahmans originally practiced
beef-eating and frequently made Yajna sacrifices of cattle.
Buddhist outrage against the Brahmans ritual slaughter of cows, and Buddhist
animosity to Caste privilege, seemed to be a premonition of class upheaval
threatening Brahman power in the Indian power structure, which impelled
these elites to make a compromise. They outlawed the sacrifice of cows and
eating of beef, reinterpreting Rig Veda verses about the cows being sacred
animals as meaning that one could not kill a cow. This injunction is
retrospectively imagined as the Vedas, like many ancient religions, do not see a
contradiction between sacrificing an animal and that creature being sacred,
worthy of veneration etc.
Moreover, Brahmin elites saw a need to compete with rising Buddhism.
Therefore, in a reactionary gesture, they adopted vegetarianismwhich was
then not a widespread Buddhist or Hindu practiceto go one step further than
the Buddhists who advocated abolition of animal sacrifices.

It is possible that Ambedkars book also reflects the political reality of his day.
The Brahman elites trying to appease and pacify Buddhist lower classes, in
order to not be overthrown, bears similarities to how Indian elites were
attempting to pacify social and class upheaval in early twentieth century India,
such as the various peasant revolts and the unrest created by the untouchables
who later joined Ambedkars movement representing them.
Ambedkar saw Gandhis attempt at appeasing the Untouchables by naming
them Harijan, People of God, or Folk of Krishna, and thereby trying to artificially
include them in Hinduism, as ignoring centuries of Brahman oppression and
Hindu exclusion and discrimination as well as denying the alleged Buddhist
past of the Dalits. Gandhi, a champion of a new version of Hinduismone
influenced by the thought of Christian anarchist writer Tolstoy and the esoteric
Theosophical Society, as well as Gandhis own ideas concerning the doctrine of
Ahimsawas seen by the Ambedkarites and Indian Communists as a friend of
the Indian ruling elites and Brahmans. Ambedkar referred to Gandhis
esteemed friend President Nehru as just another Brahman and said of the
Indian National Congress, which became Gandhis party, Congress is the kept
whore of the Brahmans and the merchants.

Ambedkars Buddhism as a form of Dalit resistance

Ambedkars mass conversion of 3 million Dalits to Buddhism was an attempt to
recover the lost dignity of the outcastes, who, according to Ambedkar, were
originally Buddhists. Ambedkars efforts single-handedly restored the once lost,
dormant Buddhist tradition to Indian religious life.
Ambedkar claimed Buddhisms decline originated in Brahman conspiracies, in
the medieval power grab and destruction of Indian Buddhism that according to
him the Brahmans had carried out in Indian Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
As mentioned earlier, Ambedkar thought that Buddhism was once a contender
for dominance in Indian religious life, threatening to become Indias major
religion. Ambedkar and his colleagues saw Buddhism as a revolution, a
revolutionary movement opposed to caste and to Chaturvarna, and which had
threatened to topple the Brahmins from power. It is likely that Ambedkars
interest in reviving Buddhism was related to this history, to this view of
Buddhism being a revolutionary force threatening and overthrowing a
decadent, reactionary Hinduism and the power of the Brahmins whom
Ambedkar despised.
Ambedkar saw religion as a social force and source of power.
Contrary to popular views on religion, Ambedkar stressed that religion should
not aggrandize or ennoble poverty. He did not interpret the Buddhist and
Christian messages of non-attachment to material possessions as an
exhortation to tolerate social and economic inequalities, that pious people
living in misery should accept the wealthy exploiting them. Instead, Ambedkar
claimed that Buddha and Marx both agreed on the need to abolish private
property. He stated these beliefs in his speeches on Buddha and Marx at the
Buddhist conference in Kathmandu in 1956. He thought Buddha to be more
radical and severe in his teachings on relinquishing property, pointing to the

lack of possessions among monks in sangha orders. He also thought the

Buddhas methodology of fighting social injustice, through pedagogical efforts,
teaching, and action rooted in love, was more effective that Marxs alleged
strategy of power and violent revolution.
Ambedkar was a new kind of Buddhist, and an Indian nationalist with ideas of
a kind of radical social democracy influenced by John Dewey (who Noam
Chomsky often refers to in his critiques of corporate power in the United
States) and not a communist, despite that his later followers in the Dalit
movement, who see Ambedkar as their father and liberator, are often of a
socialist or leftist bent.
Ambedkar thought that Marxism emphasized industrial labor and industrial
workers, rather than agricultural labor and peasants. Much of the untouchable
community comprised peasants involved in agricultural work. Part of Indias
population still lived under feudal conditions, in serfdom. Marxists during and
after the Russian revolution have commented on how Leninism contradicted
basic Marxist theory, by organizing a so-called communist revolution in Russia,
a country still living under feudalism and aristocracy. According to Marxist
dogma, a country must first pass from feudalism to the capitalist order and
mode of production, in order to create the superfluity of goods that will make a
communist society possible after the workers revolution.
The fact that Marx largely neglected the plight of peasants, favoring industrial
laborers, might have been a factor in Ambedkars rejection of communism,
along with Ambedkars loathing of violence and his espousal of and firm faith in
democratic institutions. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1936, and
according to his biographer Keer he was the first legislator in Indian history to
introduce a bill abolishing serfdom of agricultural tenants.
Ambedkar had formerly said that the identity of a minority disappears once
that minority no longer faces exclusion, oppression and discrimination from the
majority. But he turned 3 million of the Dalits, from a socioeconomic class of
oppressed people, into a religious minority, thus further articulating and
defining a Dalit identity different from the Hindu majority in ways other than
class. He hoped his revival of anti-Casteist, democratic and socially conscious
Buddhism among the Dalits would spread to the rest of India, thereby unifying
India across class and sectarian lines despite that the Untouchables would
initially differentiate themselves from the rest of their countrymen by adopting
another religion that had become near-obsolete there. This political take on
Buddhism as a rational, democratic movement of liberation prepared large
segments of the Dalit community who did not choose Buddhism to later adopt
ideas of Liberation Theology, a Christian movement typically associated with
Latin America and South Africa. The intellectuals who developed the Liberation
Theology movement tailored it to the needs of the politically oppressed and
economically impoverished,
making post-independence Indian Dalit communities fertile soil for their ideas.
I think that the Buddhist belief in liberation from Samsara, the chain of rebirths,
was in this case a metaphor for liberation from a repressive hierarchical and
class-based society. The Ambedkarite Buddhists certainly identify the dukkha or
suffering they experience as being largely rooted in their socio-economic
misery.
Many Christians, such as the rebel peasants in the Rhineland and Germany

during the time of the Reformation in Europe, who rose up against feudal
authorities and landed nobility in the 16th century, saw the message of
Christian redemption and salvation as a metaphor for their building a classless,
egalitarian society where they would not be hungry, humiliated serfs living
under feudalism. They imagined salvation in the form of such a classless New
Jerusalem.
Similarly the Nirodha (or cessation of suffering) and Nibbana of Buddhist
salvation for Dalit Buddhist converts must have been a metaphor for not
merely transcending and abolishing Samsara but of hoping to transcend
harshly stratified class-society.
Untouchables West and East: Parallels between Indian Untouchability
and Europes Minorities
Gandhi is an essay touching on Palestine and his criticism of Zionism in 1938
wrote My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in
South Africa. Some of them became lifelong companions. Through these friends
I came to learn much of their age-long persecution. They have been the
untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians
and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Religious sanction
has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment
meted out to them.
Gandhi said of Indian Untouchability: The nearest approach to it found in the
West is the untouchability of the Jews who were confined to the ghettoes.
This comparison is, I think, not at all far-fetched, even though there are
significant differences between Jews in the Middle Ages and Indian
Untouchables. Untouchability is more a class denomination whereas Jews are
typically identified as an ethno-cultural and religious minority, even though
class did play an extremely important role in the treatment of Jews.
Not only the European Jewish experience resembles Untouchability. There is
also the position and status of the gypsy or Romani communities in Europe
since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. During the Holocaust, Nazis
massacred gypsies.
The Romani word for the genocide they endured, Porrajmos, means the great
Devouring.
Ironically, many contemporary scholars believe that the gypsy ghetto
populations of Europe possibly originated in migrations from Northwest India.
The Romani language bears close similarities to Sanskrit. Some Hungarian
gypsies have, like Indian Dalits, even converted to Buddhism with the help of
an Ambedkar-inspired pedagogical institution that has a Hungarian division to
educate Romanis.
European Jews for centuries inhabited ghettoes and faced exclusion and
discrimination from most institutions that were open to Christians. Medieval
society, what we typically understand under the word feudalismwhich is a
modern word
--was arguably organized according to the class division of the Pre-Christian
Indo-European society. This society was divided into what the medieval AngloSaxon monk Aelfric called the bellatores, oratores and laboratores, translatable

as the fighting class (bellatores), the praying class (oratores) and the toiling,
laboring classes (laboratores).
There are also studies indicating that the ancient Latin word for priest, Flahen,
is directly etymologically related to the word Brahmin.
The medieval aristocracy and landed nobility descended from the warrior or
fighting class. The priesthood and monks of the middle ages inherited the
status of the praying class and the serfs underneath them were the laboring
class. Jews, who were forbidden to carry weapons or farm land and for obvious
reasons were not in the Christian priesthood, seemed excluded from this
hierarchical threefold division of feudal society. In this sense we could perceive
them as similar to outcastes, who, like the Indian untouchables, also gained the
status of despised outsiders because of reasons related to faith. In the
Untouchables case it was their past Buddhism; in the case of European Jews,
their religion and related power struggles with ruling elites and religious
orthodoxy who had adopted different versions of Christianity as the official
state religion. The oppressive policies of Christian clerical officials towards Jews
were also important in strengthening and defining a particular version of
Christianity that was different from other Christianities that were prevalent
and popular in Late Antiquity.
Both populations lived in ghettoes and originated as economic immigrants and
migrant populations. According to Ambedkar, the ancestors of untouchables
were originally Broken Men from defeated and economically bankrupted
tribes who emigrated into quarters on the outskirts of prosperous agricultural
villages to gain subsistence from the agricultural based economy. The Broken
Men had been formerly from nomadic cattle-herding, pre-farming societies.
In the case of Jewish groups, Jews were often migrants and immigrants who
lived in special, marginal quarters. This immigrant aspect of Jewish life has
persisted into the twentieth and twenty first centuries: Jews have consistently
been economic immigrants to places like the United States, Palestinenow
Israel, a recently established immigrant countryArgentina etc. The Russian
Tsar before the Russian revolution banished Jews from Eastern European urban
centers condemning them to live in an elaborate system of migrant slums
called the Pale of Settlement.
European elites reinterpreted Christian scripture and theology to justify a
traditional, Pre-Christian, Indo-European structure of society, the feudal socioeconomic order, and cast the Jews as an accursed race guilty of being a
polluting force. (Medieval beliefs attributed the Jews with poisoning of wells and
defiling the sacred Host
) They used the inferior position and persecution of Jewish and other lower
strata populations to consolidate power, and probably to direct the aggressive
energies of the laboratores or toiling serf class away from the oratores and
bellatores onto a seemingly external enemy, allegedly foreign to this social
fabric. This history bears strong similarities to how Brahman elites
reinterpreted and reworked the texts of the Mahabharata and the Manusmrti to
justify their power; changed their religious practices of Yajna cattle sacrifice
and re-imagined their history, while mobilizing popular aggression of lower
castes like the Shudras away from them and onto the inhabitants of
Untouchable ghettos. This agitating propaganda probably gave Shudras the
satisfaction of having a caste ranked beneath them, inferior to them. The
untouchables and their misery in the Indian case were probably useful for the
rulers consolidation of power and of this class system, a system which Gandhi
would, more than a millennium later, come to uphold and sentimentally defend,

much to the horror of the Untouchables and Ambedkar.

Gandhi chose to defend the righteousness and sanctity of Chaturvarna despite
that his pacifism and philosophy of Satyagraha
largely developed through his discipleship and influence under Leo Tolstoy, a
nobleman turned Christian anarchist who sympathized with the suffering of
Russian and European serfs and oppressed peasantry, and who believed in
striving towards a stateless and classless future society.
As earlier mentioned, the perpetrators of violence against Europes Jews and
gypsies, like the assailants of Indias Untouchables, would justify their
oppressive measures by referring to the Aryan Invasion theory as scientific
fact.
Ambedkar supported the formation of Pakistan when Gandhi and many Indians
opposed it, saying that if Indian Muslims had the will to live as a nation, then
their claims of nationhood were legitimate and so was Pakistan. (To support his
arguments he referred, ironically, to writings of the notoriously racist
Orientalist, Renan, on the nature of nationhood.
) This is similar to the case of the Zionist movement in Palestine, who formed
the state of Israel around the same date as the creation of Pakistan, 1948, also
in the aftermath of a partition resolution.
Gandhi, Ambedkar, Congress and the pacification of class upheaval
Ambedkar in his book What Congress and Gandhi have done to the
Untouchables called Gandhi a mad man
with the genius of an elf
who can never grow up and grow out of caste ideology.
The reason for this harsh language towards Gandhiwho is the subject of
many modern-day hagiographies and who much of Western popular culture
holds to be a saint of the twentieth centurywas that he, in the eyes of the
untouchable movement upheld Chaturvarna and strongly opposed the
untouchables battle for self-determination and dignity.
Ambedkar accused Gandhi of harboring hatred towards machinery, Western
civilization and technology. Gandhi legitimized and defended this belief system
by referring to Western thinkers like Jean Jacques Rousseau, Ruskin and Tolstoy.
Gandhi allegedly thought mankind should do away with machines and
advanced technology, even though it would be impossible, according to
Ambedkar, to have such things as leisure and culture without them. Gandhi did
not, however, reject class society or condemn the hierarchies of Indian
civilization. Gandhi went to great lengths to justify the Brahmans privilege. His
coining the term Harijan for the Untouchables in order to emancipate them
was, in Ambedkars view, more evidence that Gandhi believed the
Untouchables had to remain an isolated, separate population that could never
integrate and unite with the rest of Hindu society or hope to obtain equal rights
and dignity.
Gandhi is famous for his habits of peaceful protesting and making suicide
threats of fasting to death in order to achieve political ends without violently
assaulting the persons and property of others. Many would find it hard to
believe that even pacifism can be at times a violent, oppressive political force
that can serve ends which are not necessarily for humanitys betterment.
In the early 1930s, Ambedkar, against the background of the Untouchables
campaign of satyagraha to gain access to public wells in the village of Nasik, at

the Round Table Conference demanded that the Depressed Classes (the
Untouchables) receive constitutional safeguards through separate electorates,
prior to devolving a measure of sovereignity to India, whether within or outside
the British Commonwealth. Temporary separate voting constituencies for the
Depressed Classes would have awarded them a degree of self-determination
they had never previously attained. Gandhi fiercely rejected this proposal.
Though he had conceded to special electoral constituencies for Muslims
perhaps hoping this concession would satisfy the Muslims and thereby prevent
the emergence of Pakistanhe maintained that untouchables were Hindus,
insisting I cannot possibly tolerate what is in store for the Hindus if these two
divisions (caste and untouchables) set forth in the villages and therefore I want
to say with all the emphasis that I can command that if I was the only person to
resist this thing I would resist it with my life. According to B.A.M Paradkars
study The Religious Quest of Ambedkar, when British Prime Minister Ramsay
MacDonald announced the Communal Award which conceded separate
electorates to the Untouchables, Gandhi immediately declared a fast unto
death to protest it, threatening suicide, the object of which was to deprive the
Untouchables of the benefit of the Communal Award by this extreme form of
coercion, according to Ambedkars 1945 jaccuse-like text.
This quarrel and subsequent negotiations between Gandhi and Ambedkar
resulted in a compromise, damaging to the Untouchables, called the Poona
Pact. Paradkar suggests that the closure of a political outletthe thwarted
dream of separate electoratesfor the Depressed Classes frustrations, might
have led to their mass conversions to Buddhism, a religious answer to replace
the political one.
Furthermore, Gandhi condemned the 1929 Satyagraha of Untouchables against
Hindus for admission to wells and temples. Gandhi at one point became
president of the Indian National Congress. Ambedkar accused the Congress of
acting in the interests of Indian and Brahman elites and upholding
Untouchability. Former congress member Annie Besant, founder of the
Theosophical Society and instrumental in proclaiming a Brahmin child, J.
Krishnamurti, as Theosophys messiah, in her argument for maintaining the
institution of untouchability, claimed every society has naturally as the basis
of the social Pyramid, a large class of people, ignorant, degraded, unclean ()
who perform many tasks necessary for Society. It springs from the aboriginal
inhabitants () conquered and enslaved by the Aryan invaders. She went on
to elaborately describe how untouchables in their filth are as disgusting as
British slum-dwellers, and defended the religious righteousness of Caste
society and Untouchability.

Conclusion
Untouchability did not originate in a social order that an Aryan invasion
created. It is not ancient, but stems from medieval India. Its origins are not
racial or ethnic. If Ambedkars thesis is correct, Untouchability arose due to an
attempt of medieval Indian elites to consolidate their power after the threat of
social upheaval and after Brahmans organized political coups dtat. More than
a millennium later, Gandhi, to whom many attribute the liberation of India from
colonialism, seemed to fear the social chaos that Untouchables, later to be

known as Dalits, might create if they succeeded in their power struggle.

Gandhi, though radical in his philosophy, championed adherence to Caste
society, at least according to Ambedkar and authors whom the latter
influenced.
Ambedkars Buddhism bore some similarities to the approach to Christianity
that the Liberation Theology movement advocated and was a medium for
expression of Dalit ambitions for liberation from class oppression.
During the time India was struggling for independence, minorities in Europe,
namely the Jewish population, became victims of the same Aryan invasion
theory that Brahmans, influenced by colonialism, invoked to justify
maltreatment of Untouchables. It appears European Jews were not alone in the
darkest hour of their suffering.

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