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Journal of Hindu Studies
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable
Differences?
Aakash Singh
I know Gandhi better than his disciples. They came to him as devotees
and saw only the Mahatma. I was an opponent, and I saw the bare man
in him. He showed me his fangs.
-B.R. Ambedkar1
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414 / Aakash Singh
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 415
that it was not just the ignorant masses that needed training in proper
citizenship but the upper-caste elite as well....But Ambedkar refused to
join Gandhi in performing that homogeneity in constitutional negotiations
over citizenship....Homogeneity breaks down on one plane....Hetero
geneity, unstoppable at one point, is forcibly suppressed at another.
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416 / Aakash Singh
While I appreciate the efforts and condone the motive behind attemp
ting to resolve the conflict between these two giants of Indian history, I
am in fact quite skeptical about the validity of such attempts of recon
ciliation. After presenting the positions of Pantham, Guha, and Chatterjee,
I shall attempt to fully lay out the reasons that ground my skepticism.
These grounds—or at the great risk of being pedantic, the grounds for the
grounds—are primarily two. First, in spite of Gandhi's indisputable abhor
rence of the practice of untouchability, he nevertheless seemed to remain
attached to an idealized version of the varna system, a system to which
Ambedkar was inalterably and profoundly opposed and which indeec: he
was intent on completely "annihilating." This immediately throws into
question the homogeneity of aim defended by Pantham. Second, in starkest
possible contrast to Gandhi's romanticist nostalgia for a pre-modern orga
nization of human society and economy (which some regard as post
modern rather than pre-modern8), Ambedkar was through and through a
pro-enlightenment modernist. The fusion of these two fundamentally
contradictory outlooks—exemplified through the metonym of the Indian
village and Gandhi's and Ambedkar's radically opposing estimations of
it—has proved well-nigh impossible, as I shall discuss and illustrate
further in the conclusion of the paper.
While it is true to say that Gandhi and Ambedkar were united in their
fundamentally emancipatory aim for the untouchables, reconciliation on
that ground is thin. The real questions are: emancipation from what and
into what? In light of these crucial issues, discussed below in further
detail, attempts to reconcile Gandhi and Ambedkar ring false in several
decisive respects. Homogeneity of aim, such as Pantham presents, breaks
down if one chooses not to peg emancipation simply to the Gandhian aim
of abolition of untouchability, but instead to the Ambedkarian aim of the
total annihilation of caste.
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 417
against Arun Shourie is itself evidence that the historian's view is privi
leged only insofar as it is retrospective, but this does not make it a view
from nowhere—the historian is himself very much immersed in space
and time, in politics and history. Certainly, as Guha may rebut, we now
live in the Republic of India, a sovereign nation-state guided by the great
Indian (Ambedkarian, but also Gandhian) Constitution, and it is from this
vantage point that we look back upon these two men and reconcile them.
But all these names and notions are not fundamentally uncontested.
Indeed, it is the burden of Chatterjee's writings to show that the smooth
and seamless historical discourse—transparent, rational, progressivist—
is masking what is arguably the nature of real political practices in India.
If Pantham's homogenizing reconciliation is thrown into doubt by the
first of my above-mentioned two grounds for skepticism and Guha's
historical reconciliation is thrown into doubt by Chatteijee's work itself,
what of Chatterjee's dialectical reconciliation? This is where the second
of my two grounds for skepticism comes into play. As I shall argue,
Chatterjee's dialectical reconciliation of Gandhi and Ambedkar smacks
of an appropriation of the latter to revitalize and legitimize a scholarly
movement—namely, subaltern studies—that had strangely turned its back
on Ambedkar for years. The post-modernist influence of post-colonial
theory, allied with the pre-modemist Gandhians, found the ultra-modernist
Ambedkar impossible to digest. But the exclusion of this subaltern par
excellence from the concern of post-colonial theory was an irony too
cynical even for post-modernists to cope with. Chatteijee's reconciliation
seems, therefore, too instrumental to be fully convincing.
As mentioned already, these thoughts and arguments shall be further
clarified in the concluding section. We begin, however, with a prelimi
nary groundwork: observing first-hand the nature and magnitude of the
quarrel between Gandhi and Ambedkar, such that the heroic efforts of
those scholars who have expended so much energy attempting to reconcile
them may be brought out into fullest possible relief.
deserve that title. Not even from the point of view of his morality.
—B.R. Ambedkar9
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418 / Aakash Singh
These harsh judgments of Ambedkar occur within the context of his recol
lection of Gandhi's hunger fast in the lead-up to the Poona Pact, where
Ambedkar was more or less presented with the impossible alternatives
of, on the one hand, permitting Gandhi to starve to death in order that the
untouchable communities be granted special voting privileges within
democratic elections or, on the other hand, giving in to Gandhi's demand
for normal, undivided general elections for the untouchables, thereby
radically decreasing their political influence but saving Gandhi's life.
Ambedkar gave in to Gandhi, and Gandhi broke his fast. After this event,
Ambedkar became increasingly bitter toward Gandhi's movement and
his biopolitical methods.10
On the eve of Gandhi's fast, Ambedkar enjoined him in these words
addressed publicly:
I hope that the Mahatma will desist from carrying out the extreme step
contemplated by him. We mean no harm to the Hindu society when we
demand separate electorates. If we choose separate electorates, we do
so in order to avoid the total dependence on the sweet will of the Caste
Hindus in matters affecting our destiny....The Mahatma is...fostering
the spirit of hatred between the Hindu Community and the Depressed
Classes by resorting to this method and thereby widening the existing
gulf between the two.11
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 419
12
that he had any motive of uplift....
[Gandhi] was very much afraid that the scheduled castes would be sort
of as independent a body as the Sikhs and the Muslims were. And that
the Hindus would be left alone, to fight a battle against a combination
of these three sections. That was what was at the back of his mind, and
he didn't want the Hindus to be left without any allies.13
For his part, in contrast, Gandhi did not speak harshly of Ambedkar in
any known public forum, nor did he communicate enmity openly against
Ambedkar even though he was well aware of the harsh critiques both
stated and published by Ambedkar against Gandhi. In a letter to Ambedkar
(dated August 6, 1944), Gandhi wrote:
reconciled in any subsequent events. The politics of the era pitted Gandhi
and Ambedkar as antagonists on too many issues and on issues so crucial
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420 / Aakash Singh
to their persons and personalities that the bridging of their divide would
have been nearly impossible. As mentioned, until recent efforts at recon
ciliation, the Gandhi camp has often had a blind spot vis-à-vis Ambedkar
and the Ambedkar camp has often been dismissive of or even hostile to
the legacy of Gandhi. Interestingly, however, a pioneering Dalit-Gandhian
literary historian and writer, D.R. Nagaraj, foreshadowed much of these
efforts through dramatized scenes of Gandhi and Ambedkar musing on
the fate and developments of India in the fifty years post-independence.
In his collection of essays on the Dalit movement in India, The Flaming
Feet, Nagaraj imagines Ambedkar and Gandhi occupying adjoining cham
bers in heaven, looking down on India in 1997, the fiftieth anniversary of
India's independence. Ambedkar, displeased with the stubborn persistence
of religious superstition, notes that his "intimate enemy, that Gujarati
Bania Mr Gandhi, also does not like these things." In the other room, we
find Gandhi wondering, "how Hind Swaraj would be if my nextdoor
neighbour, the learned Baba-saheb, had written it?"15 Gandhi humorously
concedes that the rationalistic economist Ambedkar would have improved
the argumentation of the work by appending all the relevant statistics.
Nagaraj was certainly unique in the 1980s and early 1990s for admiring
both Gandhi and Ambedkar; and by explaining with insight and sympathy
the constraints faced by each of them, he paved the way for a broad rec
onciliation between their respective camps. Further, Nagaraj showed that
Gandhi and Ambedkar mutually influenced each other in the course of
their debates and argumentation. By learning of the discrimination per
sonally faced by Ambedkar even at the height of his prominence, Gandhi
became more sensitive to the structural roots of caste discrimination. At
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences ? / 421
Along this line, Pantham attempts to sketch and underscore the ways in
which Gandhi and Ambedkar had "interlocked and arguably comple
mentary/compatible discursive approaches to the eradication of untouch
ability."21
And indeed, Pantham adduces numerous eloquent and moving appeals
made by Gandhi against untouchability, about which he spoke in the
most uncompromising of terms:
The advice I receive from one and all is that if I do not exclude the
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422 / Aakash Singh
It also seems that the 1920s held out some promise for closer and more
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 423
Although by the early 1930s the differences between Gandhi and Ambed
kar, especially (though not exclusively) over the separate electorates for
the untouchables, began to forge an unbridgeable divide between their
positions, still there were some noteworthy cooperative achievements to
arise out of the very disagreements themselves. Pantham points to the
salient resolution passed in those very days, on September 25, 1932, by a
committee of leaders of caste Hindus and depressed classes in Bombay,
who drafted the resolution with the endorsement of Gandhi (from his
prison in Yerwada) and passed it in the presence of Ambedkar. The reso
lution read in part:
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424 / Aakash Singh
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 425
ability, is only one way of reconciling Gandhi and Ambedkar. The pro
lific historian Ramachandra Guha has attempted to work out a recon
ciliation that functions only from the vantage point of hindsight. For
Guha, Gandhi and Ambedkar acted out their parts within the crucible of
that testing historical moment, and whereas tragic drama cannot accom
modate two heroic personae of such power and charisma on the very
same stage, fortunately for us history can:
Here then is the stuff of epic drama, the argument between the Hindu
who did most to reform caste and the ex-Hindu who did most to do away
with caste altogether. Recent accounts represent it as a fight between a
hero and a villain, the writer's caste position generally determining who
gets cast as hero, who as villain. In truth both figures should be seen as
heroes....32
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426 / Aakash Singh
all the Hindus, but only the upper castes. This assertion deeply affected
Gandhi, and he took it upon himself to act as representative for the untouch
ables within the Congress. In some respects, obviously, the struggle
between Gandhi and Ambedkar played out in terms of which man more
adequately and fully represented the best interests of the untouchables.
While, on the one hand, Gandhi made some dubious remarks about suf
fering more as an untouchable since he was a convert to untouchabüity
and not born into it, on the other hand, he remained sensitive to the pal
pable suffering that Ambedkar himself experienced at the hands of his
own colleagues. Guha taps into this as a primary source for his recon
figuration of the Gandhi-Ambedkar conflict:
Guha also points out the many occasions on which Gandhi attempted to
defend the attitude and actions of Ambedkar and in large degree even to
assent to the validity of the charges that Ambedkar accused the Congress
Party of, if not Gandhi himself. As Guha notes, towards the end of his life
Gandhi spoke with remorse about the indifference of his fellow Hindus
to uplifting the untouchables: "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 [untouchable] brethren feel
suspicious, and show opposition and bitterness."35
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 427
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428 / Aakash Singh
Seldom has been the tension between Utopian homogeneity and real
heterogeneity played out more dramatically than in the intellectual and
political career of B.R. Ambedkar. My focus here will be on certain
moments in Ambedkar's life, in order to highlight the contradictions
posed for a modern politics by the rival demands of universal citizenship
on the one hand and the protection of particularist rights on the other.
My burden will be to show that there is no available historical narrative
of the nation that can resolve those contradictions.40
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 429
digm of historical development and relies upon the prevalence and even
universality of "homogenous" time, by which he means the Utopian dimen
sion wherein imaginaries such as the "nation" get configured. Chatteijee
also argues—following Walter Benjamin—that homogenous time is also
the temporality upon which capital relies. In contrast, Chatteijee develops
the notion of "heterogenous" time: this is the real, lived dimension of most
popular politics, of governmentality, and of the Foucauldian "heteroto
pia." As apparent in the above citation from Chatterjee, the example of
Ambedkar (as also the fictional character of Satinath Bhaduri's novel,
Dhorai Charitmanas, which I leave aside here) is brought in by Chatteijee
in order to show the continuing tension within efforts to narrativize the
nation between the Utopian dimension of homogeneous time and the real
space constituted by the heterogeneous time of actual practices. These
actual practices may occur in what Chatterjee had earlier called "political
society" (in contrast to "civil society") and through the colorful and
diverse politics spawned by governmentality.
Interestingly, Chatterjee unfolds a normative injunction, to the effect
that it is not merely bad political theory, but in fact morally illegitimate
to uphold the universalist ideals of nationalism without simultaneously
demanding that heterogeneity be recognized as an equally integral part of
the real time-space of the modern political life of the nation. And it is
precisely here—where Chatteijee's own discourse evolves into an eman
cipatory one—that we realize that homogeneity and heterogeneity are
reconciled in Chatterjee's own dialectics of emancipation, which he has
inherited from his participation in the founding of the Subaltern Studies
group and has exhibited through his writings over decades. Chatteijee
frames this in terms of the quest and demand for "political justice," the
words which close his study of Ambedkar.
Within Chatterjee's writing on Ambedkar, Gandhi assumes the role of
homogeneity or representative and stand-in for the (imaginary, homoge
nous) nation. In this way the stand-off between Ambedkar and Gandhi
gets reconfigured as illustrative of Chatteijee's abundant alternative politi
cal theoretical concepts, such as "political society" versus "civil society"
or "heterogeneous" versus "homogenous" time. These dyads, however,
pit fundamentally corrective supplementary notions against mainstream
hegemonic ideas with the explicit aim not merely to improve upon posi
tive social science research, but to normatively influence it: in short,
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430 / Aakash Singh
operating under Thesis 11, in the effort to change the world and not just
to interpret it.42
Indeed, it must be noted that Ambedkar is brought in by Chatterjee to
exemplify and illustrate an earlier constructed thesis; it is not the case
that Chatterjee's thesis is inductively churned out as a result of his study
of the life and work of Ambedkar. It is, I believe, a thesis that arose two
decades earlier in Chatterjee's monumental work, Nationalist Thought
and the Colonial World. In that text of some two hundred pages, where
the name Ambedkar does not appear even once, it is Gandhi who repre
sents heterogeneity, the critique of civil society, and the real politics of
fringe hybridities and—as we may expect—it is Jawaharlal Nehru who
takes on the role of homogeneity (here called "rational monism"):
Chatterjee ends his 1986 study of Gandhi with expressions rather similar
to those that he will subsequently use in his study of Ambedkar twenty
years later. With the help of the Congress elite, Gandhian heterogeneity
had been assimilated into the rationalist, progressive nation-building pro
ject: "it has now found its place within that universal scheme of things."44
But is it fixed there stably and seamlessly? Not at all:
For hardly anywhere in the post-colonial world has it been possible for
the nation-state to fully appropriate the life of the nation into its own.
Everywhere the intellectual-moral leadership of the ruling classes is
based on a spurious ideological unity. The fissures are clearly marked
on its surface.45
While in Nationalist Thought the leadership of the ruling classes with its
spurious ideological unity was a role played by Nehru in opposition to
Gandhi, in The Politics of the Governed it becomes the role played by
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences ? / 431
Irreconcilable Differences?
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432 / Aakash Singh
efforts of scholars such as Thomas Pantham, Ranajit Guha, and (in his
own way) Partha Chatterjee. For, in spite of how convincingly Pantham
has established Gandhi's abhorrence of the practice of untouchability,
Ambedkar himself believed that Gandhi remained attached to an idealized
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 433
Neither Chatterjee nor Guha attempt to take this deep and lasting diver
gence into account, and they elide over it completely in their writings. For
them, as for numerous others who have touched on the debate in newspa
per articles and blogs, the key factor dividing Gandhi and Ambedkar
appears to be the history of the Poona Pact episode. Were that so, the task
of reconciliation would be ever so simple, given that both Ambedkar and
Gandhi spoke in mollifying and reconciliatory terms in the period follow
ing it.51 However, as Ambedkar's remarks from 1945 and 1955 illustrate,
the divide was far deeper than such words even began to address. Pantham,
though, spends several pages discussing the differences between Gandhi
and Ambedkar on caste and Hinduism, the topics that were as divisive
between them as untouchability may be seen as unifying them. Pantham,
true to his thoroughly reconciliatory position, argues that Gandhi contin
ued to adapt and make his position on varna more and more egalitarian
in reaction to Ambedkar's writings such as What Congress and Gandhi
Have Done to the Untouchables:
The problem with the passages to which Pantham refers is that there are
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434 / Aakash Singh
The law of varna prescribes that a person should, for his living, follow
the lawful occupation of his forefathers. I hold this to be a universal
law governing the human family....No one is precluded from rendering
multitudinous acts of voluntary service and qualifying [educating, train
ing] oneself for it. Thus.. .[a person] bom of Brahmin parents and I bom
of Vaisya parents may consistently...serve as honorary national volun
teers or honorary nurses or honorary scavengers in times of need, though
in obedience to that law...I as a Vaisya would be earning my bread by
selling drugs or groceries. Everyone is free to render any useful service
so long as he does not claim reward for it.53
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 435
The real village and the village of Gandhi's imagination differed analo
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436 / Aakash Singh
gously to the way that caste as it was practiced and Gandhi's ideal of
varnashrama did. Obviously, Ambedkar was not convinced by either one
of them. For Ambedkar—and Nehru shared many of Ambedkar's ideas
here—the Indian village is "a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow
mindedness, and communalism."60 As Ambedkar poignantly characterized
Gandhi's "so-called republic," Indian villages represent...
Clearly, the urban modernist Ambedkar portrayed "in the pink skin and
blue suit that has become almost canonical of his iconography among his
followers, the skin a challenge to the 'Aryan' upper castes, the suit an
insistence on the modernity of his enterprise,"63 is in deepest contrast to
Gandhi, the romantic anti-modernist, the spinner and wearer of khadi.
Ambedkar's statues portray him always with a book, the Constitution of
India; Gandhi's, by contrast, occasionally with a very different book: the
Bhagavad Gita. Does this Indian version of Raphael's "School of Athens"
not present us with two characters, each great, each worthy of utmost
respect, but both looking in totally different directions, with clearly irrec
oncilable differences?
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 437
You should become like Ambedkar. You should work for the removal
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438 / Aakash Singh
It is rather the sheer difficulty of assimilating the thought and work of this
ultra-modernist. Even the political theology of Ambedkar has been ignored
in the vast and vibrant "secularism debates" in India, so influenced by
Gandhian thought, and in the writings of Ashis Nandy and other pre
modern/post-modern scholars. I imagine that much of the reason for this
may be pinned down to Ambedkar's ambiguous use of the term "enlight
enment."
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 439
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440 / Aakash Singh
I follow Péter Losonczi, who has borrowed the term from Hent de Vries'
Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas.
De Vries, speaking of Emmanuel Levinas' agenda, writes:
Notes
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? t 441
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442 / Aakash Singh
15. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement
in India (2011), pp. 82, 87. Nagaraj characterizes the approach of the two
to differ in this essential concern: for Gandhi it was self-purification; for
Ambedkar, self-respect.
16. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement
in India (2011), p.21.
17. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement
in India (2011), p.57.
18. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement
in India (2011), p. 161.
19. Palshikar, "Gandhi-Ambedkar Interface: When Shall the Twain
Meet?" (1996), p.2072, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The
Discourses of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 180.
20. Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses of Gandhi and
Ambedkar" (2009), p. 180.
21. Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses of Gandhi and
Ambedkar" (2009), p.181.
22. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1958-94), vol
ume 19, p.73, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses
of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 183.
23. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1958-94), vol
ume 24, p.227, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses
of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 184.
24. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1958-94), vol
ume 57, p. 147, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses
of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 184.
25. Ambedkar, cited in Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability:
Fighting the Indian Caste System (2005), p.63, which in turn is cited
(slightly edited) in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses of
Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), pp. 186-87.
26. Ambedkar, cited in Keer, Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission (1991),
p.71, which in turn is cited (slightly edited) in Pantham, "Against Untouch
ability: The Discourses of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 187.
27. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1958-94), vol
ume 57, p.l 18, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses
of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 193.
28. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1958-94), vol
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 443
ume 57, pp. 123-25, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Dis
courses of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 194.
29. Gandhi, cited in Pyarelal, The Epic Fast (1932), p. 188, which in turn
is cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses of Gandhi
and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 194.
30. Gandhi, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses
of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p.205.
31. Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses of Gandhi and
Ambedkar" (2009), p.206.
32. Guha, "Gandhi's Ambedkar" (2010), p.33.
33. Guha has in mind especially Arun Shourie, against whom his own
essay functions as a polemic: "That is of course the burden of Shourie's
critique [of Ambedkar] but curiously, the very week his book [Worshipping
False Gods: Ambedkar and the Facts Which Have Been Erased [1997])
was published, at a political rally in Lucknow the Samajvadi Party's Beni
Prasad Verma likewise dismissed Ambedkar as one who 'did nothing
else except create trouble for Gandhiji.' This line, that Ambedkar had no
business to criticise, challenge or argue with Gandhi, was of course used
with much vigour and malice during the national movement as well"
("Gandhi's Ambedkar" [2010], p.36).
34. Guha, "Gandhi's Ambedkar" (2010), p.36.
35. Gandhi, cited in Guha, "Gandhi's Ambedkar" (2010), p.37.
36. See, for example, Harris' Gandhians in Contemporary India: The
Vision and the Visionaries (1998), where the author superfluously argues
that Gandhi fought "more against the evil of untouchability" even than
Ambedkar (p.40). In another needlessly dismissive assessment, Plotkin,
in his article "Resistance to the Soul: Gandhi and His Critics" (n.d.),
suggests that Ambedkar's "lack of comprehension" and "lack of vision"
gave rise to his critique of Gandhi.
37. Rajagopalachari, cited in Guha, "Gandhi's Ambedkar" (2010), p.37.
38. Guha, "Gandhi's Ambedkar" (2010), p.38.
39. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular
Politics in Most of the World (2004); see especially Chapter 1, "The
Nation in Heterogeneous Time."
40. Chatteijee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular
Politics in Most of the World (2004), p.8.
41. Chatterjee's only study of Ambedkar has had at least four major
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444 / Aakash Singh
47. It may be worthwhile to note that these two passages were selected
by Ambedkar himself to make his case. Lindley, "Changes in Mahatma
Gandhi's Views on Caste and Intermarriage" (n.d.), on the contrary,
adduces several of Gandhi's statements from 1945 onwards tending closer
toward Ambedkar's own view.
48. Gandhi, Young India (November 24, 1927), volume 9, number 46,
p.393.
49. Gandhi, Harijan (February 11, 1933), volume 1, number 1, p.3.
50. Ambedkar, "Gandhism: The Doom of the Untouchables," in What
Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1946), pp. 303
4; emphasis added.
51. See the passages cited in section 2 of this paper, "Thomas Pantham:
Reconciliation Through Homogenization."
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 445
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446 / Aakash Singh
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asingh@luiss.it
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