Arundhati Roy - The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi

Contents

Preface

The Doctor and the Saint was originally written as an introduction for an annotated edition of Dr B.R. Ambedkars iconic 1936 text, Annihilation of Caste , first published by Navayana in India, in 2014, and then by Verso Books in the United States and United Kingdom.

Annihilation of Caste is the text of a speech that Dr Ambedkar, one of Indias greatest intellectuals, wrote but never delivered. Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, the Hindu reformist organization that had invited him to address its members, all of them upper-caste Hindus, disinvited him after they read an advance copy of the text and realised that it was a frontal assault on Hinduism itself. Ambedkar went on to publish Annihilation of Caste as a pamphlet, which has since then been published mostly by small Dalit publishing houses, distributed in informal networks, and has, to date, sold millions of copies. From all accounts, B.R. Ambedkar is far and away the best-selling and most beloved author in India.

Soon after Annihilation of Caste was published, none other than Mohandas Gandhi, the most well-known Indian in the world, took issue with it. There followed a great public debate between the two men on this, perhaps the most vital issue in India then as well as now.

Despite this, and for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who reads it, Annihilation of Caste is not a text that is included in school or university syllabi. It is not available in bookshops. Nor has it been annotated with the scholarship and attention that it deserves. In other words, the people whom Ambedkar meant to addressin particular the moderate, reformist, Hindu upper castes (although Ambedkar believed that moderate and Hindu are a contradiction in terms)have managed to keep a kind of publishing and distribution segregation in place, which helps, of course, to keep the very shameful practice of caste, Indias own form of social apartheid, off the international radar.

The Doctor and the Saint looks at the practice of caste in India, through the prism of the present as well as the past. In seeking to give context to Gandhis position on caste in his debate with Ambedkar I followed his story all the way back to his political awakening in South Africa, which is now the stuff of legend and folklore. I will confess to being disturbed and taken aback at the scale and dishonesty of the mythology and falsehood that have obscured the facts of that story. Not by Gandhi as much as by his myth-makers.

I have been faulted for paying an inordinate amount of attention to Gandhi in an introduction to what is essentially Ambedkars work. I am guilty as charged. However, given the exalted, almost divine status that Gandhi occupies in the imagination of the modern world, in particular the Western world, I felt that unless his hugely influential and, to my mind, inexcusable position on caste and race was looked at carefully, Ambedkars rage would not be fully understood. And the Project of Unseeing, the erasure of cruel, institutionalised social injustice at the heart of the country that likes to be known as the worlds greatest democracy, will continue smoothly and without a hitch.

For research in telling this story, I relied for the most part on Ambedkars and Gandhis own (copious) writings.

Arundhati Roy

January 2017

The Doctor and the Saint

Annihilation of Caste is the nearly eighty-year-old text of a speech that was never delivered. When I first read it I felt as though somebody had walked into a dim room and opened the windows. Reading Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar bridges the gap between what most Indians are schooled to believe in and the reality we experience every day of our lives.

My father was a Hindu, a Brahmo. I never met him until I was an adult. I grew up with my mother in a Syrian Christian family in Ayemenem, a small village in communist-ruled Kerala. And yet all around me were the fissures and cracks of caste. Ayemenem had its own separate Paraiyan church where Paraiyan priests preached to an Untouchable congregation. Caste was implied in peoples names, in the way people referred to each other, in the work they did, in the clothes they wore, in the marriages that were arranged, in the language they spoke. Even so, I never encountered the notion of caste in a single school textbook. Reading Ambedkar alerted me to a gaping hole in our pedagogical universe. Reading him also made it clear why that hole exists and why it will continue to exist until Indian society undergoes radical, revolutionary change.

Revolutions can begin, and often have begun, with reading.

If you have heard of Malala Yousafzai but not of Surekha Bhotmange, then do read Ambedkar.

Malala was only fifteen but had already committed several crimes. She was a girl, she lived in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, she was a BBC blogger, she was in a New York Times video, and she went to school. Malala wanted to be a doctor; her father wanted her to be a politician. She was a brave child. She (and her father) didnt take heed when the Taliban declared that schools were not meant for girls and threatened to kill her if she did not stop speaking out against them. On 9 October 2012, a gunman took her off her school bus and put a bullet through her head. Malala was flown to England, where, after receiving the best possible medical care, she survived. It was a miracle.

The US President and the Secretary of State sent messages of support and solidarity. Madonna dedicated a song to her. Angelina Jolie wrote an article about her. Malala was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; she was on the cover of Time . Within days of the attempted assassination, Gordon Brown, former British Prime Minister and the UN Special Envoy for Global Education, launched an I am Malala petition that called on the Government of Pakistan to deliver education to every girl child. The US drone strikes in Pakistan continue with their feminist mission to take out misogynist, Islamist terrorists.

Surekha Bhotmange was forty years old and had committed several crimes too. She was a womanan Untouchable, Dalit womanwho lived in India, and she wasnt dirt poor. She was more educated than her husband, so she functioned as the head of her family. Dr Ambedkar was her hero. Like him, her family had renounced Hinduism and converted to Buddhism. Surekhas children were educated. Her two sons Sudhir and Roshan had been to college. Her daughter Priyanka was seventeen and finishing high school. Surekha and her husband had bought a little plot of land in the village of Khairlanji in the state of Maharashtra. It was surrounded by farms belonging to castes that considered themselves superior to the Mahar caste that Surekha belonged to. Because she was Dalit and had no right to aspire to a good life, the village panchayat did not permit her to get an electricity connection, or turn her thatched mud hut into a brick house. The villagers would not allow her family to irrigate their fields with water from the canal, or draw water from the public well. They tried to build a public road through her land, and when she protested, they drove their bullock carts through her fields. They let their cattle loose to feed on her standing crop.

Still Surekha did not back down. She complained to the police, who paid no attention to her. Over the months, the tension in the village built to fever pitch. As a warning to her, the villagers attacked a relative of hers and left him for dead. She filed another police complaint. This time, the police made some arrests, but the accused were released on bail almost immediately. At about six in the evening of the day they were released (29 September 2006), about seventy incensed villagers, men and women, arrived in tractors and surrounded the Bhotmanges house. Her husband Bhaiyalal, who was out in the fields, heard the noise and ran home. He hid behind a bush and watched the mob attack his family. He ran to Dusala, the nearest town, and through a relative managed to call the police. (You need contacts to get the police to even pick up the phone.) They never came. The mob dragged Surekha, Priyanka and the two boys, one of them partially blind, out of the house. The boys were ordered to rape their mother and sister; when they refused, their genitals were mutilated, and eventually they were lynched. Surekha and Priyanka were gang-raped and beaten to death. The four bodies were dumped in a nearby canal, where they were found the next day.