Gail Omvedt - Ambedkar: Towards An Enlightened India

There are undoubtedly more statues of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar in India than of any other historical person of the last millennium. They have been raised in every village, on crossroads, in every Dalit urban residential area and in front of educational and governmental institutions throughout the country. They show a stocky man, usually dressed in a western suit and tie, holding a book under his arm. The book represents the Constitution of India. Following the overthrow of the socialist regime in Russia, which brought with it the upsetting of statues of Lenin, and the downgrading of Mao in China, the number of these statues throughout India and elsewhere represents the major monumental memorial today to a leader of the downtrodden.

Such statues have played a major role in political assertion in recent India. Their raising has represented a claim to pride and public space. Their opponents also take them as such and express their hostility to Dalit assertion by putting garlands of chappals around such statuesactions which have often led to severe rioting and police firing. With all of this, it is clear that in the politics of flags and statues, Dalits have placed Ambedkar at the top of the world.

At the same time, the depiction of the Indian Constitution symbolizes the fact that Ambedkar was not simply a Dalit leader, not even a leader only of all caste-oppressed. He was a national leaderin a different sense from the well-known elite nationalists who led the struggle for freedom from British colonial rule. Ambedkars nationalism was expressed in all his lifes work, in the programmes of his various political parties, in his political decisions, in the many books and essays he wrote on problems of caste, of Muslims and minorities, of Pakistan and of women and in his role in the construction of a democratic independent India. He played a major role in the construction of Indian planning, in the formation of irrigation and energy policies, and his work in setting up colleges and educational institutions represented the efforts of all anti-caste leaders to win education as a tool of liberation. Following his work in chairing the committee to draft the Indian Constitution, he became law minister in the first cabinet after independence whose most famous activity was guiding the Hindu Code Bill as a charter of womens rights in free India. All this represented a nationalism that was not simply the winning of political independence but of nation-building, the creation of social equality and cultural integration in a society held enslaved for so long by the unique tyrannies of caste and varna ideology.

Today the name of Gandhi still resounds through the world as a force of peace and non-violence. Yet what Ambedkar represents, the rising of Indias oppressed and exploited and the herald of a new age of equality and rationalism, is beginning to catch the imagination of African-Americans and other racially oppressed groups, Japanese ex-untouchable Burakumin, Buddhists in Asian societies building a liberation theology within the framework of their traditional religion and seekers everywhere looking for a new model of liberation.

Within India, Ambedkar is often contrasted to Gandhi, an opposition that is symbolized in their sculptural depiction. Gandhi, in loincloth and often with a spinning wheel, represented an identification with Indias poor that romanticized the traditional Indian village and its spiritual stagnation. Ambedkars western image symbolizes a claim by Dalits to the heritage of the ages, a rejection of Brahmanic and other forms of narrow cultural nationalism and a modernism that even today represents the height of Indias Enlightenment tradition. If Gandhi was Bapu, the father of a society in which he tried to inject equality while maintaining the Hindu framework, Ambedkar was Baba to his people and the great liberator from that framework. But Dalits rightfully protest against a comparison that links Ambedkar only to Gandhi; they see him as a world figure, one best compared to Marx. While Gandhi fought for freedom from colonial rule, Ambedkar fought for a broader liberation from exploitation and oppression. In his own words, like Marx he was not simply a philosopher reinterpreting the world but a leader of those who wanted to reconstruct the world by abolishing exploitative social structures. This orientation to social transformation is expressed in a famous song by Annabhau Sathe, a Dalit writer who was a lifelong member of the Communist Party of India: Strike a blow to change the world, so Ambedkar told as he left Where Ambedkar differed from Marx was in his emphasis on the role of non-class, non-economic structures in the process of exploitation, in posing the importance of spirituality, ideology and consciousness both in maintaining slavery and winning freedom. For him the answer was found in Buddhism, but whether or not one agrees with this, the issues remain central to all liberation movements.

The story of how this man rose from the poorest of Indias untouchable, downtrodden masses to become an acknowledged shaper of independent India and a symbol of rationalist liberation in a new millennium is one that we will try to tell in the following pages.