Rethinking Ambedkar

Rupture or Radical Continuity?

Ambedkar’s life and work are easy to interpret as a rupture in Indian worldview, due to his unrelenting and total critique of the caste system and his eventual conversion. This line of thinking on Ambedkar frames him as a dissident with subversive undertones, which is not incorrect since he indeed wanted to subvert the normative order which normalized inequality and degradation equated with the structure of caste. But a new understanding of Ambedkar emerges when we expand our understanding of civilization from a mere faithful preservation of norms to something much more active and dynamic - a system capable of engaging with its internal tensions and critiques, capable of renewal through self-correction and regeneration, not just obsessed with the past but seeking to project passionate moral visions into the future. In this view, an explosive internal dissent of Ambedkar’s type is not a rupture but a source of ‘radical continuity’.

So, Ambedkar not as a rupture but as an inheritor and transformer of Indian civilization. There are at least two points worth discussing here:

Rethinking Ambedkar’s Dharma

The idea of ‘conversion’ is deeply wounding to the Hindu psyche, it conveys deep rejection and inversion, and a kind of spiritual violence. Ambedkar made it clear in so many words what exactly was he rejecting. The ‘radical’ part of the act is obvious. But where is the ‘continuity’?

Buddhism and Jainism are Indian in their inception. And I do not mean ‘Indian’ in the bare territorial sense either. These religion-philosophies are Indian in cultural and spiritual sense too, since their presuppositions, the raw philosophical material of aatma, dharma, dukkha, the texture of their thinking about the human life, all Indian philosophies share the same base matter. Judaism, Christianity, both atheism and secularism of the Western variety, and even the hippy spiritualism, all of these phenomenon even with all of their fundamental differences still spring from and find their fulfillment in the fount of ‘Western’ Civilization.

Plato, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Hegel, Nietzsche, Martin Luther King, all ‘Western’ in the deep sense of the term. This should help us appreciate the deep ‘Indianness’ of Ambedkar. What is the best way to live? How should an individual order his life in a society? What system provides the best framework for an ethical life? Buddha and Mahavira in their times were concerned with a similar set of questions and the process did not end there. All Hindu sects that privilege different social norms were born out of this same dialogue in the past. Ambedkar, through his Buddhism, adds another act in this continuous dialogue on ethics within Indian civilization. His Buddhism is an extension of a deeply civilizational ethical quest. I disagree completely with his essentialist reading of Hindu social order and the lack of potential therein, and even this disagreement is part of the same dialogue and moves it forward.

The Perfection of Society

Why is Indian historically characterized as ‘strong society, weak state’? What are all of our Smritis so obsessed with adjudicating the social behaviour of individuals? Why does Dharma in its this-worldly sense emphasize social context over the political?

The answer to all of this is in ‘social’ realm being the most foundational, society becoming the locus of moral and ethical regulation, and a civilization seeking its ultimate end in the perfection of its society. In its social sense, Dharma is an internal moral compass leading to a self-regulating society. When Dharma is perfect in Satyuga, the state does not exist. In Mahabharata, the epic set literally in the thick of political life, we find that the conflicts are all relational and social in nature. When the epic decries the decay in Dharma, it is not concerned with state capacity but in moral order as it relates to social decay. The social fabric is the seed while the state is the fruit that grows out of it. Political structures are ephemeral and can be disrupted (Indians experienced this frequently) and therefore civilization endures through self-regulation even in the absence of strong political structures.

Ambedkar privileges the social realm with the same intensity.

Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy… a way of life which recognizes… fraternity as the principle of life…. Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things.

Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellow men.

Ambedkar longs for the perfection of social dharma and for him this dharma takes the form of social democracy. This is literally true because even his conception of nirvana is not supernatural or psychological but socio-political in nature, he believed nirvana was a society based on peace, justice, and freedom from poverty and social discrimination.

Ambedkar does not desire a weak state, but for him too the ultimate perfection of life is in a strong society enabling individuals through liberty and equality, and binding them together through fraternity. This social-seeking is an Indian impulse in Ambedkar and as a source of continuity hides in plain sight behind Ambedkar’s radicalism.