The Journal of Hindu Studies 2009;2:97–122 Doi: 10.

1093/jhs/hip008
Advance Access Publication 13 March 2009

The Solidarities of Caste: The Metaphysical Basis

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of the ‘Organic’ Community
Ankur Barua

Abstract: This is a study of the different meanings of ‘caste’ according to

Radhakrishnan, Gandhi, and Ambedkar. In the course of this study, I also show
that these differences ultimately emerge from their diverging metaphysical
conceptions: while Radhakrishnan and Gandhi understood human life as a
project that can be fulfilled over several life-times, Ambedkar rejected the
karmic theory of transmigration and placed a greater emphasis on this-worldly
socio-economic reconstruction. By distinguishing between what I call ‘mythic
caste’ (the varṇic system based on the Puruṣa-Sukta of the Ṛg Veda) and
‘empirical caste’ (or jāti), I show that while Radhakrishnan and Gandhi argued
that the latter was a degeneration from the former which had to be upheld,
Ambedkar rejected this move as merely an attempt to maintain caste under a
different name. I try to locate these debates in the context of the socio-historical
transformations and electoral politics of late colonial India.

Identity and the discourse of modernity

The question of ‘identity’, especially concerning groups and communities in con-
temporary India, is enmeshed in a complex network of issues relating to certain
socio-cultural developments and political–juridical innovations that were set in
motion during colonial interventions, which, incidentally, also spawned a variety
of native responses. These responses have sometimes been analysed through the
imposition of a ‘tradition versus modernity’ grid, within whose neatly etched con-
tours a polarised antagonism is depicted between the unalloyed acceptance of wes-
tern ‘progressive’ institutions, concepts, and practices as against the vehement
denunciation of the former and the resuscitation of ‘reactionary’ or ‘revivalist’ indi-
genous forms of life. The native response is then viewed either as an awakening in
the colonial periphery to processes that were instigated and guided from on high
by the imperial metropolis, or as a blanket rejection and expulsion of all foreign
influences concurrently with a spirited self-assertion of a pristine identity. The the-
sis underlying this schematic outline, which is that there is an intrinsic ‘lack of fit’
between European modernity and (the ‘dead-weight’ of) Indian traditionalism, was
often made, both by colonial administrators and British commentators on ‘Indian

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For permissions, please email [email protected]
98 Ankur Barua

affairs’, on the one hand, and by native thinkers,1 exegetes,2 and jurists, on the
other.
This thesis, connected ultimately with the possibilities of the domestication or

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‘inculturation’ in Indian milieus of discourses of European origin, and whether
the impact of such ‘resident aliens’ has been benign or baneful, continues to be
highly contested even today in the political and cultural landscape. A theme that
appears, for example, in commentators on Indian culture such as Ashis Nandy
and some of the voices in the Subaltern History Collective is the violence, physical,
epistemological as well as psychological, perpetrated by the colonial state (and
later perpetuated by the Indian nation-state) through the attempts to impose in
another cultural ethos alien forms such as liberal representative institutions, objec-
tivist forms of historiography, modular approaches to industrialisation and urbani-
sation, and the like. In a critical summary of the views of some of these writers,
Joseph (2006:422) writes that ‘[t]hey maintain that the mediated and decentralised
relations which existed between state, religion and communities in the premodern
and early modern periods in India were relatively successful in managing social life,
and that they could provide a useful model for us even today’. This theme that the
Indian traditions possess home-grown resources to facilitate and support collective
living in the face of the onslaught of western individualistic3 (and anomic) life-
forms introduced by the colonial machinery is one that was often articulated by
various Indian thinkers under the shadow of empire, and that has now acquired
a new relevance and urgency both at the conceptual level of the ‘liberal contra com-
munitarian’ debate, and in the juridical scenario of the Uniform Civil Code and
reservations for the ‘Backward Classes’. Notwithstanding this valorisation of the
‘premodern’, however, there is also a parallel rejection in much of current histor-
ical scholarship of an uncritical nativist acceptance of ‘all things antiquarian’,4
especially given an increased awareness of the fact that it is more accurate to state
that most attempts at the recovery/discovery of an ‘authentic’ Indian self cannot
be so neatly located at two distinct ends of the tradition/modernity dichotomy.
The search for personal and collective identities was constituted, in fact, by a set
of volatile transactions characterised simultaneously, sometimes within the same
individual, by (enthusiastic or uneasy) alliances with as well as (passionate or reluc-
tant) oppositions to specific aspects of colonial modernity.

The individual in Indic contexts

One of the most fraught issues that surfaced in the ‘contact zone’5 sketched above,
which generated a series of intricate oppositional interrelationships between Eur-
opean and indigenous notions and practices, was that connected with arguments
about the organisation of social life and the role of the individual in civic activity.
These emerged at the shifting points of intersection between, on the one hand,
western conceptions of parliamentary democracy, citizen, the state, civic society
and rights-based identities, and, on the other, Indic notions about the metaphysical
 The Solidarities of Caste: The Metaphysical Basis of the ‘Organic’ Community 99

status of the individual and the individual’s vocation within social networks. The
view that the possibilities of translation between the two are minimal, given that
the former prizes individualistic values associated with liberalism and the latter

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emphasises the embeddedness of the individual in communitarian solidarities, also
often appears in some streams of Indological literature6 and in the writings of some
Christian missionaries7 who argued that a concern for social matters was lacking
among the Indians who were engrossed in transcendental speculations. A galaxy
of Indian figures, ranging from Vivekananda to Rajagopalachari to Gandhi to Rad-
hakrishnan, devoted themselves, among other things, to a rebuttal of this line of
criticism. Through a defence of socialistic forms of Hinduism they tried not only
to counter the charges of political authoritarianism and social indifference, but also
to project their vision of a conflict-free whole which was capable of accommodat-
ing the western ideals of equality and freedom while simultaneously containing the
divisive forces that they associated with the western ethic of competitiveness.8 A
more recent example comes from Saksena (1949:359) who, while drawing attention
to the charge that the Indian social ethos is an ‘anti-individualistic’ one where
individuals do not have ‘equal rights’, argues: ‘One fact about India stands out pro-
minently. It is this highest regard for … over-individual ends [directed towards
“social welfare” and away from “atomistic individualism”] through which alone
an individual is supposed to live his [sic] life in society and be a significant indivi-
dual. But this does not mean that the rights of an individual are thereby disre-
garded’. While admitting the presence of the underprivileged without the right
to improve their social status, Saksena (1949:372) stresses nevertheless that the
‘social theorists’, right from Vedic to contemporary times, have sought to provide
all individuals with opportunities to attain their social goals within a social struc-
ture that is based on ‘duties and obligations rather than on rights’.
In Saksena’s vigorous defence of the relative autonomy of the individual, we can
note, first, a valiant attempt to situate the notion of rights in Indian society within
the horizon of ‘caste duties’, and second, the assertion of a distinctively Indian form
of ‘individualism’ articulated in terms of the overarching nature of the social envir-
onment within which individual (transmundane) destinies are framed. However, it
is precisely around two issues that are usually not directly addressed in comments
of this nature – whether the machinery of legal rights has indeed been efficacious in
providing redress to certain groups (such as the Dalits in contemporary India who
are outside the ‘caste law’) and what forms of communitarian (or ‘socialistic’) living
are envisaged as furthering the removal of injustices against them – that some of
the most vociferous debates have revolved. A possible point of entry into these
dense thickets of controversy could be by way of considering three closely inter-
related questions: (a) an analysis of the language of rights, and its correspondences,
if any, with some traditional Indian views of ‘agency’ and ‘personality’; (b) the
articulation of the notion of community by figures such as S. Radhakrishnan and
M. Gandhi; and (c) B.R. Ambedkar’s rejection of the form of social stratification
marked by the ‘graded inequality’9 of caste.
100 Ankur Barua

The discourse of rights and Vedantic thought

To begin with the first of these, we may introduce the distinctions between the
‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ conceptions of ‘right’ sketched by the political phi-

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losopher Raymond Geuss who argues that while the former refers to a judgement
about what is right from an objective point of view distinct from and outside those
of social agents, the latter attributes to a subject certain entitlements which are
believed to be his/her own. Thus, objective conceptions of right are reflected in
statements of the form, ‘it is right to provide a social safety net for the poor’ or
‘it is right that people are not imprisoned without a proper trial’ (independently
of whether or not such a net or trial is, in fact, in place), while subjective concep-
tions are expressed through statements such as, ‘I have a right to express my opi-
nions’ or ‘I have a right to my property’. Geuss (2001:134) summarises these
distinctions in these words: ‘An “objective” right refers to a state of the world … a
“subjective” right to an entitlement, that is, to an action (or omission) that I (or
some other designated subject) can/should/ought to have the power or warrant
to perform or suffer. Built into the notion of a subjective right is that of a desig-
nated agency that is the centre, locus, and bearer of it’. Geuss (2001:135) further
argues that in contrast to the older objective conception (related to the nature
of reality, organisation of social existence and so on), the subjective conception of
a right, as a power or warrant ‘to do or refrain from doing or suffering’ such that
this right has some ‘reliable epistemic, moral, and political standing’, which is cen-
tral to the current rights-discourse, is comparatively much more recent.10
The notion that rights are articulated by a distinct subject who is the bearer of
these rights, and who can make claims about their rationality and moral validity,
raises certain curious problems within classical Hindu understandings of personal
identity which can be underscored through this question: ‘who is the bearer of
these rights or where is their centre to be located?’ According to one influential
mode of conceptualising the psychophysical constitution of the human person
developed by some of the schools of Vedanta, the embodied or contingent self
(jīvātman), characterised by phenomenal attributes such as gender, physical form
and so on, was an ‘expression’ of the essential self,11 and these attribute themselves
the products (or the ‘fruit’) of its kārmic residue accumulated over previous lives.
This theory of transmigration, whose ostensible purpose is to explain the presence
of inequalities in the empirical (and hierarchical) world, is based on an Upaniṣadic
dichotomy between ‘reality’ and ‘appearance’: the true self (ātman), which is essen-
tially blissful consciousness, gives being to all individuals, but is manifested, within
the round of rebirths (saṃsāra), in the distinctive persona (jīvātman) of individuals
in their discrete caste-roles. This composite understanding of the human person
has two important consequences: first, that the locus of ‘rights’ is not the ātman,
con-substantial with the eternal Brahman, for it is only contingently mired in
the cycle of rebirths, and, second, that the subjective rights (in Geuss’s sense) that
an individual (as jīvātman) possesses are circumscribed within the horizons of the
 The Solidarities of Caste: The Metaphysical Basis of the ‘Organic’ Community 101

duties and obligations laid upon him/her by the rules or moral codes of his/her
specific caste and/or gender (jāti-dharma, viśeṣa-dharma, strī-dharma). For instance,
on the basis of his survey of certain aspects of ancient Indian political theory as

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interpreted by some 20th-century Indian scholars such as B. Prasad and A.S. Alte-
kar, Weiner (1984:119) points out that according to classical Hindu theory, indivi-
duals are not the bearers of rights independent of the social functions that they are
supposed to perform with respect to their specific caste or community. Thus, while
it is an ‘objective’ right, according to some Vedantic schools (such as Advaita
Vedanta), that Brahman, the one without a second (ekamevādvītiyam), be realised
as present in the plurality of the empirical jīvātmans as their ontological substra-
tum, the ‘subjective’ rights of these jīvātmans vary in accordance with the duties
and responsibilities associated with their caste, and through the faithful perfor-
mance of these, they can rise upwards in the caste hierarchy. It is this conception
of an ascent accomplished through successive rebirths that Max Weber articulates
when he writes: ‘[T]he pious Hindu of low caste … can gain Heaven and become a
god – only not in this life, but in the life of the future after rebirth into the same
world pattern’.12 However, as B.K. Matilal has pointed out, the two notions of caste
and karma which have been brought together in this schematic manner are
mutually opposed for: while the latter, a form of ethical rationalism, emphasises
self-responsibility and freedom and is closer to a merit-based understanding of
social organisation, the former stresses a heredity-based system of social existence
since it closes off certain opportunities and instead lays down a set of preordained
duties. Though the two were sought to be combined through the karma theodicy
(delineated above), Matilal (2002:139) emphasises the paradoxicality of caste and
karma and writes that ‘the inner conflict [between the two] did not disappear
completely’.

Introducing ‘Mythic Caste’

These tensions and contradictions present in the traditional attempts to reconcile
hierarchy and inequality with an all-encompassing social order came to the fore in
a particularly acute mode during nationalist movements, and especially during the
mobilisations of Dalit identities in opposition to brahminical orthopraxy. In this
context, Andre Beteille has pointed out that while the British colonial administra-
tion was ostensibly based on the principle of individual merit, members of the
Indian elite aspiring to posts within it experienced discrimination on the basis of
race, and this raised the uneasy question of the domestic discriminations along
lines of caste. As Beteille (1986:125) notes: ‘It would hardly appear reasonable on
the part of these Indians to seek to repudiate the distinctions of race if at the same
time they sought to uphold the distinctions of caste’. It is therefore not surprising
that many influential Hindu figures of this time, notwithstanding their in-house
disagreements, were forced willy–nilly to distinguish between two notions of caste,
which we shall refer to as ‘mythic caste’ (varṇāśramadharma) and ‘empirical caste’
102 Ankur Barua

(jāti),13 and argue that the latter, a proliferating multiplicity, was a malignant
excrescence of the former which had to be defended.14
‘Mythic caste’ is based on the analogy of the well-functioning human body: just

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as the members of the body are neither superior nor inferior to one another, so too
the varṇas, compared to four parts of a (social) body, cannot be ranked but are
instead united in a harmonious whole.15 Its origins are usually traced back to a
hymn in the Ṛg Veda X, 90 which states that the four varṇas arose out of the dis-
memberment of the body of the cosmic Person (puruṣa) as a sacrifice by the gods ‘in
the beginning’. His mouth became the brāhmaṇas, his arms those who protect and
rule (rājanya, later referred to as the kṣatriya), his thighs those who trade (vaiṣya),
and his feet those who serve (śūdra).16 This verse became the template for much of
the later commentarial tradition’s attempts to explicate the individual’s role in
maintaining social and cosmic harmony: ‘Again and again in Hindu texts, which
seek to express normative socio-religious values or to preserve or reinstate Hindu
dharma, this ancient Vedic verse is invoked … It lies at the heart of the bitter
debates between modern social reformers and conservative revivalists’.17 On the
other hand, the jātis, which ‘may be grouped roughly, very roughly, into the varṇa
scheme …’, are endogamous groups which are usually associated with certain
myths, food practices and occupations.18 There are, however, no clear-cut associa-
tions between a specific jāti and one of the four varṇas: the brāhmaṇa varṇa itself
encompasses a great number of jātis, and for many jātis, their location in a particu-
lar varṇa remains matters of ambiguity and contestation. As Declan Quigley
(2003:504) has noted, ‘[O]ne should not assume that there is an automatic corre-
spondence between varṇa and jāti any more that one should assume there is any
inherent correspondence between English people called “Smith” and people who
are smiths by occupation’.

Radhakrishnan and Gandhi on ‘Mythic Caste’

As a general rule, Hindu apologists in the colonial period, however, were not pri-
marily seeking to offer their own ‘theory of caste’, based on detailed ethnographic
evidence in the manner of latter-day social anthropologists, but were attempting to
situate ‘caste’ within the religious beliefs of karma, dharma, and rebirth, and central
to their efforts was their contextualisations of the ‘Hymn to Puruṣa’ noted above.19
One of the most striking uses of this ‘holistic’ analogy comes from Sarvepalli Rad-
hakrishnan (1947:129–33) who writes that the perfection of one’s nature through
the performance of the tasks and duties associated with one’s caste is, in truth,
a spiritual endeavour, and claims that work or labour must therefore not be seen
as servitude but as the process of fulfilment of one’s inner being. Hinduism, which
is rooted in the belief that all human beings are equal at the spiritual level, has
been able to accomodate different races such as the Aryans, the Dravidians, the
Mongoloids, and the Huns, with their divergent customs, life-styles, deities, and
practices, into an organic whole through the fourfold classification system of the
 The Solidarities of Caste: The Metaphysical Basis of the ‘Organic’ Community 103

castes. These are to be understood in the manner of trade guilds with each caste
performing a specific function based on the individual temperaments of the indi-
viduals within it, the priestly Brahmins give voice to the social conscience, the

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Kshatriyas are the administrators, the Vaishyas are those who possess technical
skills, and the Shudras serve as the workers. The basis of this system of varṇa is
that every individual, on the basis of his/her aptitudes and abilities, must seek
to fulfil the law of his/her development, while co-existing with individuals in other
castes in bonds of economic, spiritual, cultural, and social unity.
Writing about the dangers that deep-sea fishermen undergo, Radhakrishnan
(1927:112) evokes a vivid picture of a social order, well integrated almost in the
manner of a Leibnizian system of ‘pre-established harmony’: ‘They go to sea not
for us and our breakfasts but for the satisfaction of their being. Our convenience
is an accident of their labours. Happily the world is so arranged that each man’s
good turns out to be the good of other’. Radhakrishnan (1927:107) therefore insists
that there is nothing mysterious about caste divisions for they are a form of social
organisation in which different groups, each with its distinctive functions, purposes,
and traditions, are bound together by fraternal relationships and co-operate with
one another in working towards a common end. The caste system is thus based
on the principle that social existence should be governed not by ruthless competi-
tion but by harmonious relationships between individuals who are allowed to
develop their specific nature (svabhāva) by pursuing his/her specific function (svad-
harma). Radhakrishnan (1940:366) further proposes a demythologised view of the
caste system in which the four varṇas can be mapped onto four stages of human
development: we are all born as śūdras, that is, at the unreflective, instinctual level,
and through successive transformation we pass first through the phase of creativity
(vaiṣyas), then rise to the vital plane (kṣatriyas), and finally arrive at the level of spiri-
tuality (brāhmaṇas).20 The different sections of society would therefore cohere with
interrelations of mutual support and form an organic totality in which ‘each part in
fulfilling its distinctive function conditions the fulfilment of function by the rest,
and is in turn conditioned by the fulfilment of its function by the rest. In this sense
the whole is present in each part, while each part is indispensable to the whole’.21
Therefore, in the context of harmonious social existence, Radhakrishnan (1940:365–
67) insists that if those whose dominant characteristics place them in, say, the third
class seek to jump to the second, this attempt to bypass the gradualism built into the
natural and spiritual realms would bring about disruptions in the social order.
This attempt to draw a clear line of demarcation between the ‘excrescences’ of
caste such as untouchability and a well-knit social collectivity free from inner frag-
mentation has clear resonances in the evolution of Gandhi’s thoughts on the ‘caste
question’.22 In the first decade after his return to India from South Africa (1916–26),
Gandhi adopted, partly in response to the orthodox (sanātanī) Hindu sections, a
relatively moderate stance towards caste based on the distinction between the pre-
sent realities of the caste system and the ideal of varṇāśramadharma; in the latter
decades of his life, however, he moved towards a more radical view of caste.23
104 Ankur Barua

For instance, Gandhi declared in 1920 that though the caste system had picked up
some dispensable accretions such as the multiplication of innumerable jātis, its
essential core was the four divisions which were not based on any notion of infer-

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iority or inequality. Affirming his belief in the eternal ‘law of heredity’, he claimed
that a Brahmin who did not live up to the moral principles of Brahminhood in this
life would be reincarnated in a lower varṇa in the next birth such that the overall
harmony of the system would not be disturbed. However, as for interdining and
intermarriage, these, he declared in December 1920, were not essential to the spirit
of democracy which could sustain a plurality of practices in such matters: ‘I decline
to consider it a sin for a man not to drink or eat with anybody and everybody’.24 A
year later, he went on to declare in stronger terms that the ‘[p]rohibition against
intermarriage and interdining is essential for a rapid evolution of the soul’.25 A par-
ticularly clear instance of the separation of caste, based on these prohibitions, from
varṇa appears in Young India in 1927: ‘Varna has nothing to do with caste. Down
with the monster of caste that masquerades in the guise of varna’.26 Nevertheless,
although Gandhi passionately denounced untouchability as a corruption that had
crept into the system of varṇāśrama, over the decades he was forced to concede that
even this institution was, in fact, nowhere in practice. In December 1920, he had
maintained in Young India that the fourfold division of the varṇas was what was fun-
damental and essential, while the innumerable caste divisions had to be removed
through fusion; but in November 1935, he admitted that this varṇāśramadharma sys-
tem was non-existent in the Harijan, and the caste system (jāti), its very antithesis,
was rampant in the country. Again, while in the 1920s he had given his approval to
the taboos against interdining and intermarriage, he wrote in November 1935 that
such matters should be left to the free choice of the individual.27
In other words, Gandhi himself and many of his followers viewed the ‘caste-pro-
blem’ ultimately from their religious perspective and believed that the solution was
to seek to retain the spiritual essence and excise the redundant outgrowths, the
sediment of the ages. Expanding on the simile of the four members of one body,
he wrote: ‘If they [the four varṇas] are members of one body, how can one be super-
ior or inferior to another?’28 Consequently, he believed that Hindus should realise
that the practice of untouchability was not sanctioned by the śāstras, and that they
must undergo a ‘change of heart’ and repent for this corruption that had crept into
the Hindu social system through service to the ‘harijans’. Thus, in a letter to Sir
Samuel Hoare, dated 11 March 1932, Gandhi wrote that the problem was fundamen-
tally a moral one, and ‘[t]he political aspect, important though it is, dwindles into
insignificance compared to the moral and religious issue’.29 Again, in the course of
a conversation with some reporters from the Times of India on 20 September 1932,
Gandhi declared: ‘In attacking untouchability I have gone to the very root of the
matter, and, therefore, it is an issue of transcendental value, far surpassing Swaraj
in terms of political constitutions ….’30
A crucial point in Gandhi’s debates with Ambedkar, as we shall soon discover,
was the former’s belief in transmigration,31 for this allowed him to view caste as
 The Solidarities of Caste: The Metaphysical Basis of the ‘Organic’ Community 105

an ideal of organic and holistic community which, though it had over time degen-
erated into multiple conflicting factions, held out possibilities for the perfection of
all individuals over successive life-times. Consequently, he associated the questions

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of caste-identity not with negotiations over electorates but with the Hindu view of
the universe as a moral order within which members of particular castes (varṇas),
while dwelling in harmony with one another, would also strive for personal moral
growth, both in this life and in the subsequent ones. Instead of attempting to alter
the eternal law of heredity, which would only lead to ‘utter confusion’, Hindus who
believe in transmigration know that this law would ensure that an immoral Brah-
min will be reincarnated in a lower varṇa, and reincarnate ‘one who lives the life of
a Brahmin in his present incarnation to Brahminhood in his next’.32 This is a view
that is reflected in some of the classical texts such as the Gautama Sūtra: ‘People
belonging to the different classes and orders of life [varṇāśrama] who are stead-
fastly devoted to the Laws proper to them enjoy the fruits of their deeds after
death; and they, with the residue of these fruits, take birth again in a prosperous
region, a high caste, and a distinguished family ….’33 In other words, every indivi-
dual, on the basis of his/her aptitudes and abilities, must seek to fulfil the law of
his/her development, while co-existing with individuals from the other varṇas in
bonds of social unity.34 This belief that an individual’s life is only one stage of
an unbroken journey towards perfection enabled Gandhi to stress that the ideal
of varṇāśramadharma is the antithesis of competition, for individuals, by adopting
their hereditary calling, would be integrated into a social order free from faction-
alism: ‘For it [the law of varṇa] ordains that every one shall fulfil the law of one’s
being by doing in a spirit of duty and service that to which one is born’.35 However,
it is precisely his acceptance of this law of varṇa that often turned out to be Gand-
hi’s greatest vulnerability in his debates against the traditionalists, for example, the
Brahmin priests of Travancore on 10 March 1925. A certain priest called Raman Pil-
lai extracted from the ‘Mahatmaji’ the confession that he accepted the law of karma
and believed in rebirth, and that the births of the untouchables are the conse-
quences of actions in prior life-times. He then asked Gandhi if he were permitted
to follow these religious beliefs and to stay away from the untouchables whose pre-
sence was, in his belief, polluting, and Gandhi replied that Pillai was entitled to
move away from anyone he chose to. Having gained these concessions, Pillai then
concluded somewhat triumphantly: ‘In the case of this temple, the facts were these.
We came away from them, removed ourselves to a certain corner … We have the
surroundings of this temple as our own place’.36

Ambedkar’s response to ‘Mythic Caste’

An examination of Ambedkar’s responses to this pattern of savarṇic defences of
caste reveals, firstly, his explicit dismissal of all vestiges of ‘mythic caste’ as a
cloak with which to hide the bitter realities of ‘empirical caste’, and, secondly
and more radically, his rejection of the very notion of rebirth which provides
106 Ankur Barua

the philosophical underpinnings to the conception of ‘mythic caste’ in figures such

as Radhakrishnan and Gandhi. A certain Arya Samajist, Sant Ram, invited
Ambedkar to Lahore in 1935 for a discussion concerning untouchability, but this

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move was challenged by other members of the Samaj on the grounds that
Ambedkar was an opponent of the Vedas whose absolute authority was central
to their reformist agenda. In the speech that Ambedkar delivered at Lahore, he
stated that though in order to defend caturvarṇya, that is, ‘the division of society
in four classes’,37 the members of the Arya Samaj ‘take great care to point out that
their Chaturvarnya is based not on birth but on guna (worth)’, ‘At the outset, I must
confess that notwithstanding the worth basis of this Chaturvarnya, it is an ideal to
which I cannot reconcile myself’.38 Ambedkar believed that this attempt to support
caturvarṇya (the system of the four orders) while denouncing the ‘excrescences’ of
the manifold jātis was simply a Brahminical ruse to maintain the hierarchical nat-
ure of the caste system under a different name, for under caturvarṇya the brahmins
would continue to monopolise intellectual labour while the śūdras would remain
servants of the upper strata.39 In a statement that would have caused much dismay
to the champions of ‘mythic caste’, Ambedkar therefore claimed that ‘Hindu society
as such does not exist. It is only a collection of castes, each conscious of its
existence and the survival of which is the be-all and end-all of its existence’.40
Ambedkar attributed the hold of ‘mythic caste’ over the minds of Hindus to their
belief in the authority and sanctity of the śāstras, which provided it with a divine
basis. Alluding to the Puruṣa-Sukta, he noted that it had two aspects: first, that all
individuals are created by God, and second, that different individuals proceed from
different parts of the divine body. The Hindu social order is based, he argued, on
the view that the second is more significant than the first, which legitimises the
vertical placing of the different classes on a chain of graded inequality.41 Therefore,
he pointed out, almost as if he were responding to a Radhakrishnan-style demytho-
logising of caste, that the caste system was not simply a division of labour, but more
crucially a division of labourers into hierarchical groups segmented from one
another, based on the hereditary occupation of their parents.42 More strongly, this
division, argued Ambedkar, was a negation of the freedom of choice since it did not
allow them to choose professions on the basis of their capacities and preferences,
and was in fact based on the ‘dogma of predestination’.43
This dark reference to ‘predestination’ brings us to a point which is particularly
relevant for our discussion here: Ambedkar rejected the Vedantic theory of karma
which presupposes the existence of a substantial self (ātman), and interpreted the
Buddhist notion of rebirth along the lines of quasi-physical causation that applies
only to this life-time and not across or over several life-times: ‘The Hindu Law of
Karma is based on the existence of a soul which is distinct from the body … This
is not true of the Buddhist Law of Karma [based on the theory of the no-soul] … It
is therefore simply foolish to talk about the Buddhist doctrine of Karma being the
same as the Brahminic doctrine of Karma … The Buddha’s Law of Karma applied
only to Karma and its effect on present life’.44 Further, the material body, Ambedkar
 The Solidarities of Caste: The Metaphysical Basis of the ‘Organic’ Community 107

argued, is a manifestation of energy, and when an individual dies the body returns
to the volume of energy which, according to scientific principles, remains constant.
Out of this volume, there emerges another individual at birth who is, however, not

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the same person as the one who had died but simply a different assemblage of var-
ious material constituents.45 He therefore distinguished between his Buddhist
understanding of rebirth (as outlined above) and the Brahminical view of the trans-
mission of the eternal soul (ātman), which he believed was formulated to ‘sap the
spirit of revolt’, since it taught human beings to accept an oppressive and iniqui-
tous social order as the consequence of past actions.46 His unequivocal rejection
of the conceptual baggage connected with the Brahminical understanding of karma
comes out clearly in his declaration after he became a Buddhist: ‘I have no faith in
the philosophy of reincarnation; and it is wrong and mischievous to say that Bud-
dha was an incarnation of Vishnu … I will not perform Shraddha’.47 This repudia-
tion of transmigration, a central keystone of the edifice of ‘mythic caste’, further
reveals Ambedkar’s opposition to its deployment in discussions related to caste
and untouchability and also the distinctiveness of the Buddhism that Ambedkar
fashioned for himself and his followers. This Buddhism was not any of the familiar
historical varieties such as Theravada, Mahayana, or Vajrayana, but was a new
path, a Nava-yana (Neo-Buddhism): its goals were more specifically material than
‘spiritual’ and in place of the traditional notions of individual liberation the empha-
sis falls instead on the establishment of social equality.48 When Ambedkar con-
verted to Buddhism, finding in it a set of egalitarian values which he believed
were essential to the establishment of social justice and the institutional liberation
of the untouchables from the system of ritual pollution, he either demythologised
or rejected certain crucial notions associated with classical Buddhism.
Distinguishing between Buddhist dharma and ‘religion’, he sought to align the
former with democracy, rationalism, and the principles of liberty, equality, and fra-
ternity.49 For Ambedkar, the Buddhist dharma rejects all supra-empirical entities
such as God and soul, and repudiates the other-wordly promises offered to human
beings by other religions in the form of palliatives for passively accepting suffering
in this existence. Rejecting all these expressions of adharma, the follower of dharma
works out his/her own liberation but this, not by isolating himself/herself from
his/her social contexts, but rather by immersing himself/herself more deeply in
the task of opposing all forms of discrimination, oppression, and exploitation.
Through the practice of dharma, such a Buddhist would grow in wisdom (prajñā),
compassion (karuṇa), and friendliness (maitrī) and would seek at the same time
to establish liberty, equality, fraternity, and social justice for all by breaking down
‘all barriers between man and man’.50 Timothy Fitzgerald has demonstrated that
Ambedkar was highly critical of certain aspects of traditional Buddhism such as
its ‘other-wordly asceticism’ as manifested in the Theravada Buddhism of southeast
Asia with its concern for the individual’s liberation. More sympathetic to the
Mahayana strand of classical Buddhism, he recontextualised certain key Buddhist
concepts in ways that reflect this affinity: wisdom (prajñā) is the ability to think
108 Ankur Barua

rationally without any demystification, compassion (karuṇa) becomes the love for
fellow-beings expressed through activities directed towards social justice, and
the monk (bhikshu) is simultaneously the social worker and the seeker after perso-

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nal freedom. Thus, Fitzgerald (1999:63) comments: ‘Buddhism is … intended both as
the fundamental basis of the new social order and as the most rational choice for
the individual. So his Buddhism is a highly rational blend of individualism with
socio-political commitment, a Buddhist modernism with a crucial element of lib-
eration theology, but intended to be the basis of a new social order’.
In the background of this ‘dialogue of the deaf’ between Ambedkar, on the one
hand, and proponents of ‘mythic caste’, on the other, with Ambedkar castigating pre-
cisely that conception of caste which the latter were putting forward as an image of cordial
social co-existence, we can understand why he continued to regard their ‘from-top-to-
bottom’ attempts at high-caste reformism,51 or their vocabulary couched in terms
such as ‘uplift’, ‘emancipation’, and even the crucial one of ‘harijan’ itself as pater-
nalistic.52 Radhakrishnan (1947:134–35), for example, argued that it is the upper
castes who had to undergo an individual metanoia and repentance for their past
and present crimes against the untouchables: ‘The sin of untouchability is degrad-
ing, and the prejudice should be removed … Even when we have done all that is
in our power, we shall not have atoned even for a small fraction of our guilt in this
matter’. Gandhi too often made statements expressing the view that the removal of
untouchability was primarily the responsibility of the Hindus, who by undergoing a
moral transformation through collective repentance must establish ‘heart-unity’
with those they had cast to the dark social peripheries.53 In 1932, he supported
the formation of the All-India Anti-Untouchability League, with Ambedkar himself
as one of the three untouchable members. However, when Ambedkar’s demand that
the League should target not only untouchability but also the taboos on interdining
and intermarriage was turned down, Ambedkar resigned. The League was now
reconstituted as the Harijan Sevak Sangh without any harijan members, and to jus-
tify this exclusion Gandhi stated that ‘[t]he welfare work for the untouchables is a
penance which the Hindus have to do for the sin of untouchability. The money that
has been collected was contributed by the Hindus. From both points of view the Hin-
dus alone must run the Sangh’.54 An even more notorious instance of such denial of
active agency and reflective powers to the Dalits as the dynamic subjects of their
own struggles comes from a conversation between Gandhi and the Christian mis-
sionary John R. Mott. Gandhi believed that the untouchables who were moving
towards Christianity were simply incapable of adjudicating the ‘relative merits’ of
Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity, and of judging the complexities of their situation
for themselves, such that in the process of their conversion they had been hood-
winked by the missionaries into accepting the Christian faith through enticing
‘baits’ that the latter had held out before them. Hence his question to Mott: ‘Would
you preach the Gospel to a cow? Well, some of the untouchables are worse than cows
in understanding. I mean they can no more distinguish between the relative merits
of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow’.55
 The Solidarities of Caste: The Metaphysical Basis of the ‘Organic’ Community 109

In short, then, from the ‘mythic caste’ or savarṇic perspective, what was essentially
required was not so much the dismantling of the system of varṇāśramadharma but an
attitudinal change on part of the Hindus who must now undertake a process of atone-

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ment for the oppression that the untouchables/Dalits were suffering.56 This notion
that it is the upper castes who must bring about structural transformation on behalf
of or in place of the Dalits, 57 since the Dalits themselves are allegedly incapable of
making any contributions in this regard, is one that is strongly criticised by many
contemporary Dalit writers. They have often viewed such upper-caste overtures as
disguised attempts to co-opt their struggles against discrimination by inserting them
into the caste hierarchy through the processes of Sanskritization.58 James Massey,
for instance, writes that though some high caste Hindus are aware of the manifold
brutalities and indignities suffered by the Dalits down the centuries, they do not have
sufficient faith in the abilities of the latter to bring about radical changes in the insti-
tutional contexts within which these have been legitimised. Massey argues, however,
that an act of true solidarity will be one where they reject the entire system which
perpetuates this violence and come forward to work not for but with the Dalits.59

The political contexts of ‘Mythic Caste’

Ambedkar’s insistence that the present-day untouchables had descended from the
Buddhists of classical India can be read against the backdrop of the electoral pol-
itics of late colonial India marked by the fervent mobilisation of identities around
the contours of caste and religion.60 This was a response to the perception that the
social body of the ‘Hindus’ was being dissipated through conversions to Christian-
ity, enervated by the activities of the ‘reformers’ and fragmented by lower-caste
assertions of political-religious distinctiveness. From the beginning years of the
20th century, the notion of a ‘religious community’ began to play a progressively
greater role on the socio-political terrain, and processes went apace of constructing
‘Hinduism’, ‘Islam’, and ‘Sikhism’ out of various classes and regional groups, each
involved in disparate struggles for status and self-expression. These fragile and
contested negotiations often emerged in response to a welter of political anxieties,
projected long-term goals, and social crises experienced differently across the spec-
trum of these proposed ‘imagined communities’.61 Members of the Hindu Maha-
sabha, fearing that the ‘tribals’ (Adivasis) and the untouchables would move
towards Islam or Christianity, thereby weakening the Hindu fold from within,
started massive movements towards bringing these groups to declaring their alle-
giances to the Hindu community.62 These trends were further bolstered after the
Government of India Act in 1935 enlarged the electorate to around 15% of the
population while retaining separate electorates for religious ‘communities’, for
the question of which sections of the population could be brought under the ambit
of ‘Hinduism’ became of paramount importance.63
A further impetus towards the restitution and revitalisation of a unified ‘Hindu’
community was provided by the researches of several German Indophiles and
110 Ankur Barua

Orientalists who had projected the image of a magnificent past when India, an inex-
haustible treasure of spirituality, languages, and myths, had been the land of an
unfragmented humanity.64 Largely as a consequence of their writings, ‘[w]estern

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students saw Hinduism as a unity. The Indians had no reason to contradict this;
to them, the religious and cultural unity discovered by western scholars was highly
welcome in their search for national identity in the period of struggle for national
union’.65 Thus a host of native writers, historians,66 and reformers such as Rammo-
hun Roy, Swami Vivekananda, and Swami Dayanand accepted, in their own ways,
the argument that the Hindu religious and social systems of their day had suffered
a gradual but massive degeneration from a primitive ‘golden age’. For some, this
deterioration could be traced back to the time of the smritis such as the Mahabhar-
ata and for others it was much nearer in time to the ‘dark ages’ of the Mughals, but
they were in broad agreement that a resurgent Hinduism must shake off its excres-
cences and drink again from the fonts of Vedic wisdom.
At this fateful conjuncture of the influences of Orientalist scholars and British
administrators, the growth of nationalistic sentiments and the perception of a Hin-
duism fallen from its past glories, the idealisation of a classical Hindu epoch when
Hindus had supposedly lived together in concord and unison helps us to appreciate
the strong attraction that the conception of ‘mythic caste’ must have held for fig-
ures such as Dayanand Saraswati, Radhakrishnan, and Gandhi. It also probably
explains why they so enthusiastically envisaged ‘mythic caste’ as a blueprint for
amicable co-dwelling even when it was clear to them that nothing but its debris
lay scattered around them. This nostalgic yearning for a ‘holistic’ community which
is believed to have existed in the (distant or not so distant) past is, of course, not
unique to the contexts of colonial India, and has been recorded elsewhere, espe-
cially in the longing expressed by some of the English Romantics for the Middle
Ages. In his discussion of the nostalgia for the Mediaeval past in figures such as
Thomas Carlyle, Robert Southey, and S.T. Coleridge, Stafford (1989:44) writes:
‘The myth of the happy and organic Middle Ages was constructed in order to oppose
another myth which was forming at the same time and which was destined to tri-
umph … namely the myth of a society of isolated, sovereign individuals, each a self-
contained centre of consciousness, desire and purpose … I say myth; because this
individualistic account of human being and society is just as selective and one-sided
[as the other]’.

Ambedkar’s move towards Buddhism

Be that as it may, the myth of an organic Hindu community, free of internal dis-
sensions unless these are instigated and fomented by malicious outsiders, con-
tinues to surface in certain criticisms of Ambedkar’s stance vis-à-vis the question
of caste as based on a self-centred approach to communitarian living. Commenta-
tors on the Gandhi–Ambedkar encounters sometimes set up a Manichaean polarity
between the two, casting one of the two in the position of the hero and the other in
 The Solidarities of Caste: The Metaphysical Basis of the ‘Organic’ Community 111

that of the villain, which obscures not only the complex issues and presuppositions
that structured their debates but also the possibility of viewing both figures as ‘her-
oes, albeit tragic ones’.67 For example, Shah (1977:78) argues that ‘Gandhi’s concern,

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unlike Ambedkar’s, is with the individual and social good as a whole and not only
with some aspects of an individual or only some sections of the community. One
might say that Gandhi’s approach is a comprehensive approach or a moral
approach, whereas Ambedkar’s approach is partial, it is selfish in relation to other
groups and it is concerned with one’s narrow material interests’. However, in the
light of our preceding discussion, we can see that the dividing line between Gandhi
and Ambedkar should be drawn not between considerations of ‘individuality’ ver-
sus ‘sociality’, nor between a ‘moral’ versus ‘egocentric’ approach, but between the
adherence to varṇāśramadharma, itself founded on the theory of transmigration,
and the criticism of this entire complex, which alleged that the Gandhian image
of harmonious varṇas did not conform to a reality where the untouchables were
cast off from their upper caste environments through stringent taboos against
commensality and intermarriage. A consequence of Gandhi’s acceptance of the
complex of notions associated with ‘mythic caste’ was that the untouchables could
at most become ‘touchables’, since now the four varṇas are regarded as equally
important, but the social order based on heredity did not necessarily improve their
socio-economic condition since it fixed them to their traditional occupations with
their associated lowly status. In this connection, Parekh (1999:271) has noted that
‘Gandhi’s campaign … gave the harijans dignity but not power; moral and, to some
extent, social but not political and economic equality; self-respect but not the self-
confidence to organize and fight their own battles’.
The story of Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism shows an individual who
grappled over a significant period of time with the question of the social dimension
of religion, and was searching for a faith in which he could ground his concerns
about the possibilities for the emancipation of the untouchables from their present
conditions. Eleanor Zelliot (1977:126) has drawn up a list of the ‘necessities’ which
Ambedkar believed any religion that the low caste Mahars in Maharashtra would
convert to should possess: ‘absolute equality, rationalism and intellectual creativ-
ity, the possibility of converts continuing their newly-won special privileges from
the government as Depressed Classes … a birthplace in India and a position of
respect there’. It was in the early 1930s, after his famous quarrel with Gandhi over
separate electorates for the untouchables,68 that Ambedkar began to take a greater
interest in religious issues. The young Ambedkar had not been very interested in
the question of temple-entry for untouchables, and had instead advocated the
use of legal means for furthering the cause of the untouchables. In 1935, however,
a defiant Ambedkar publicly announced that he would not die a Hindu, and inten-
sified his search for a religion which would, he hoped, lead to the emancipation of
the untouchables.69 Thus, for Ambedkar the move away from Hinduism with its
dehumanising practices associated with the institution of untouchability was
primarily a political act and not being involved with theological notions such as
112 Ankur Barua

personal transcendence or the nature of the deity he was unsure about the terminus
ad quem of this move.
In 1948 he republished P. Lakshmi Narasu’s The Essence of Buddhism, put forward

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the theory that the untouchables were the descendants of Buddhists in ancient
India,70 visited Burma and Ceylon, and wrote in an article in the Mahabodhi in
May 1950 where he called Buddhism the ‘only religion for the modern world’.
Finally, on 14 October 1956 (incidentally the day of the Hindu festival of Dusshera
that year), Ambedkar was initiated into the Buddhist way by Bhikku Chandramani,
and he asked the huge gathering to repeat the three refuges of the Buddha, the
Dharma, and the Sangha; the 5 precepts of the Pancasila; and 22 oaths in Marathi.
Some of these were declarations of the rejection of the worship of Hindu deities such
as Rama, Krishna, Ganapati, and Gauri or of any religious practice officiated by Brah-
mins; while others expressed the wish to try to establish equality and to live in
accordance with Buddhist preachings, and stated the conviction that the Buddhist
Dharma was the best religion. In her analysis of an address that Ambedkar made
to the new converts the next day, Zelliot (1977:129–33) writes that he praised Bud-
dhism during the course of it for possessing many of the ‘necessities’ mentioned
above: it emphasised absolute equality and had included śūdras in its Sanghas, it
was rational and encouraged intellectual creativity, it would provide them with
the self-respect that they craved for, the governmental privileges too, he assured
his audience, would continue to be enjoyed by them, and the Mahars themselves
had been descended from Buddhists who had lived in India in the distant past.

Ambedkar and ‘Religion’

As the nation-state, committed, at least in principle, to the principles of social ega-
litarianism and the equitable distribution of resources, grapples with the legacy of
the legislative policies bequeathed by empire, the leaders of Hindutva groups such
as the RSS and the VHP, often from the upper castes, have had to devise strategies
for absorbing the oppositional groups of lower castes, tribals, and women into their
fold. Though both the discourses of nationalism and Hindutva had to grapple with
the realities of caste discrimination, the issue of social reform was regarded within
both of them as one that could be temporarily bypassed or overlooked. Thus, while
through Gandhi’s denunciation of untouchability, the campaign for the ‘uplift’ of
the lower castes entered into the nationalist stream and the left-wing too launched
its attacks on caste divisions as feudal relics, the primary emphasis was usually
directed towards the immediate attainment of political liberation. In post-indepen-
dent India, the growing movements among the lower castes continue to be a source
of dismay and embarrassment to the proponents of Hindutva, given their commit-
ment to the notion of a civilisational unification of India, and they have alternately
responded to these social upheavals sometimes by initiating programmes of
Sanskritizing reform and at other times instead by reaffirming the traditional
hierarchies.71
 The Solidarities of Caste: The Metaphysical Basis of the ‘Organic’ Community 113

In other words, the invention of pasts and the envisioning of futures which will
knit together the multiple fragments of the nation and go beyond the heterogene-
ities of caste, region, gender, and class is a task common to various groups in con-

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temporary India, groups that may otherwise be at sharp variance with one another,
whether these are the Dalits and the Ambedkarites, the ‘critical traditionalists’ such
as Ashis Nandy referred to in the opening section of this paper, the (neo-)Gand-
hians, the proponents of neo-liberalism, the (Nehruvian) secularists and the mem-
bers of the Sangh Parivar. At the heart of these manifold attempts lie distinctive
(and often divergent) negotiations with the notions associated with the ‘individual’
– post-Enlightenment liberal institutions of representative democracy and rights-
discourse struggle for space along with invocations of holistic conceptions of
organic collectivities. In this connection, Heesterman (1985:23) has written that
the renunciatory strand of Hindu thought, which favours the ‘individual’ over
the ‘collectivity’, can be regarded as somewhat parallel to the axiomatic assump-
tion of ‘modernity’ that society is an aggregation of individuals who are brought
together by a set of impersonal codes. What is distinctively new, however, about
‘modernity’ is that it has to attempt to replace the ‘vertical’ bonds of hierarchical
interdependence through which individuals earlier lived out their social existence
with a ‘horizontal’ unity that cuts across ethnic, linguistic, and such other primor-
dial affiliations. Heesterman believes that Gandhi, who embodied the ideal of
renunciation, was successful in bringing about a significant degree of ‘horizontal’
solidarity during the freedom struggle by establishing this unity on the basis of
an appeal to an ultramundane ‘vertical’ moral authority.
In Ambedkar, as we have noted earlier, we find an attempt to ground ‘moder-
nity’ on the horizontal plane without any recourse to the conventional parapher-
nalia of religion such as belief in a personal God, ‘revelation’, ‘salvation’ (in the
Abrahamic faiths) or ‘liberation’ (mokṣa in the Indic religious streams). True reli-
gion, in Ambedkar’s conception, is instead the exemplification of a rationality that
cleanses the dross of sacerdotal ritualism and other-worldliness, and that underlies
a political commitment to the restructuring of asymmetrical power relations
between the different sections of the community. It neither requires any appeals
to a ‘vertical’ source for transcendental anchorage nor can it be consigned to
the privacy of the individual: ‘It is an error to look upon religion as a matter which
is individual, private and personal … Equally mistaken is the view that religion is
the flowering of special religious instinct inherent in the nature of the individual.
The correct view is that religion like language is social for the reason that either is
essential for social life and the individual has to have it because without it he can-
not participate in the life of the society’.72

Gandhi and Ambedkar reconsidered

In conclusion, Gandhi and Ambedkar approached the ‘caste question’ through their
own modes and conceptions of ‘world making’: the former through the perspective
114 Ankur Barua

of the classical Hindu belief that human existence is a ‘project’ that can be fulfilled
over the course of several rebirths in saṃsāra, the latter on the basis of a dismissal
of the entire architectonic Hindu views related to the complex of karma-saṃsāra.

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This rejection on Ambedkar’s part can also be seen in terms of the inner conflict
delineated by Matilal73 between the ethical/characterological emphasis of karma
and the biological/hereditary conception of caste-status. In Gandhi’s views on these
matters, ethical behaviour within one’s svadharma (which outlines the duties
appropriate to one’s station or varṇāśrama) dovetails with the ‘law of heredity’,
such that individuals within their specific varṇas should follow their hereditary
affiliations without intermingling (varṇasaṃkara). On a conception of this nature,
‘each person should prove himself according to his hereditary position. Thus, while
a “good” sudra may be ethically “better” than a “bad” brahmin, this ethical hier-
archy cannot change the fact that a brahmin will always remain a brahmin and a
sudra’.74 In Ambedkar, by contrast, this linkage between the biological and the ethi-
cal interpretations is dissolved, placing them in a sharp confrontation with each
other, and ultimately destabilising the very notion of caste distinctions.
It is now clearer, in the light of the foregoing discussion, that Ambedkar and
Gandhi understood untouchability in two distinctive ways, and this divergence ulti-
mately led to the emergence of a series of differences of opinion between them
concerning the ‘uplift’ of the untouchables.75 Firstly, whereas for Gandhi untouch-
ability was one of the many social evils that were rampant in Hindu society, this
issue was almost the sole concern of Ambedkar who made detailed historical inves-
tigations into the questions of the origins of the untouchables and their present
socio-economic degradation. In this connection, it must be pointed out that Gandhi
played a crucial role in highlighting the problem of untouchability through various
means such as engaging in hermeneutical debates with the orthodox sanātanists
who believed it to be based on the scriptures, adopting a harijan woman into his
ashram, undertaking an all-India harijan tour, living in harijan colonies, and so
on. As Christophe Jaffrelot has noted, Gandhi was the first, and the only, Indian
politician to place the campaign for the abolition of untouchability at the forefront
of the struggle for swaraj, and his single-mindedness in this matter aroused the ire
of the orthodox Hindus in the Congress. Consequently, ‘Gandhi had to make com-
promises with these people, who thought he was going too fast. For Ambedkar, the
Mahatma was going too slowly’.76 This tardiness is partly explained by the fact, as
Parekh (1999:270) has pointed out in his sympathetic though critical account of the
Gandhi–Ambedkar debates, that Gandhi was involved in battles on several fronts,
and the emphasis that he was able to give to the anti-untouchability movement
was governed by the political constraints of the day.
Secondly, in opposition to Gandhi who consistently maintained the untouchables
were ‘Hindus’, Ambedkar, who as an untouchable himself was arguing from an ‘insi-
der’s perspective’, believed that they were instead the descendants of Buddhists
who had experienced the hostility of the Brahminical orthodoxy from sometime
around the fourth century CE.77 Therefore in contrast to Gandhi who tried to
 The Solidarities of Caste: The Metaphysical Basis of the ‘Organic’ Community 115

shame the upper-caste Hindus into undergoing remorse for eradicating this blot
from their Hinduism, Ambedkar, who understood ‘spirituality’/‘religion’ almost
exhaustively in terms of the promotion of liberty and socio-economic equality,78

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believed that Gandhi’s campaign treated the untouchables not as agents of their
own emancipation, with corporate identities and collective memories, but as pas-
sive objects to be pitied. Gandhi’s central concern was to reintegrate the untouch-
ables around a centre that had failed to hold them, by placing them in a social
circle that would be devoid of the traditional varṇic hierarchies. As Nagaraj
(2006:377) has noted, Gandhi’s position was ‘a product of a firm belief in an organic
community’ and he believed that ‘contradictions of this society are not unreconci-
liable’. In contrast, Ambedkar believed that this appeal to ‘mythic caste’, through
which Gandhi sought to enlist the untouchables as members of an indivisible
family, did not go far enough in the direction of the removal of socio-economic
inequalities, in the establishment of an independent political identity for the
untouchables or in the empowering of the untouchables to become autonomous
agents. When Ambedkar came to disassociate himself from the temple-entry move-
ment, thereby refusing what Nicholas Dirks (2001:272) has termed the ‘incorpora-
tive strategy of the [Hindu] majority’,79 he declared that he had once supported it
not because he had believed that it would make untouchables ‘equal members in
and an integral part of the Hindu society’ but only because he had felt that it
was the ‘best way of energizing the Depressed Classes and making them conscious
of their position’.80

Conclusion
Discussions of the role of casteism in pre- and post-independent Indian history have
often been focussed on the issues of electoral dynamics, political mobilisation, sec-
tional allegiances and so on, but have neglected to highlight the religio-metaphysi-
cal beliefs of the individual actors involved in these processes. These beliefs
regarding the constitution of the self, its agential capacities, its relation to the other
and the proper ordering of the different ‘parts’ of the social ‘whole’ usually remain
hidden to the view of the historian interested primarily in the large-scale structural
formations mentioned above. However, it is imperative that we acquire a deeper
understanding of such metaphysical concepts because these have been the driving
forces of certain individuals in their practical engagements with the realities of cas-
teism. Our study of Gandhi and Ambedkar has amply demonstrated that it would be
mistaken to regard their negotiations simply as a scramble for (Hindu versus non-
Hindu) votes; their divergences can be traced back to their respective views about
the self and its agency, the significance of treating human existence as a project, and
the meaningfulness of the language of ‘rights’ within Indic worldviews. This study,
then, also highlights, in an indirect manner, the limitations of regarding individuals
or their viewpoints reductionistically as mere expressions, tools, or products of
their socio-historical-political contexts. In Gandhi and Ambedkar, there is an
116 Ankur Barua

integral connection between, on the one hand, their conceptions of the self and the
after-world and, on the other hand, their interventions in the heat and dust of poli-
tical battlefields, so that to attempt to investigate the latter without appreciating

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the importance of the former can lead to mistaken conclusions about the signifi-
cance of both.

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Notes
1 For instance, Har Dayal addressed the ‘Young Men of India’ in these words: ‘[Y]ou
should come and live with the world imbibing the modern spirit … Turn your
attention to sociological studies, and the sciences … Learn from Europe: do not rub
up old Hindu documents [from the Vedas] in this age’. See Har Dayal (1912:49).
2 See Mani (1989).
3 Here is Swami Vivekananda berating western individualism: ‘You Western people
are individualistic … I want my own satisfaction, so I marry this woman. Why?
Because I like her. This woman marries me. Why? Because she likes me. There it
ends. She and I are the only two persons in the whole, infinite world ….’ See Swami
Vivekananda (1991:61).
4 See Sarkar (2005).
5 Mary Louis Pratt defines the ‘contact zone’ as the interactive space of colonial
encounters where both the conqueror and the conquered are co-present in
interlocking chains of violence, alliance, and resistance. See Pratt (1992:6).
 The Solidarities of Caste: The Metaphysical Basis of the ‘Organic’ Community 119

6 A recurrent argument in some European representations of Indian thought was that

it was characterised by an ‘acosmic monism’ in which the ‘individual’ was but an
effervescent wave on a giant ocean of being, to whose depths it must return and

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with whose plenitude it must merge. Thus we have Hegel’s famous statement that in
Indian thought ‘man … has not been posited’ and the individual is only a ‘transitory
manifestation’ of the abstract absolute, so that it has no ‘value in itself’. Quoted in
Halbfass (1991:265).
7 See Hogg (1947). A more recent statement comes from L. Dumont, who argues that it
is only the renouncer who approximates to the ‘individual’ in the western sense; the
Hindu people-in-the-world, however, are collective beings and governed by social
bonds, and the dharma of their specific caste; their lives are an expression of a moral
commitment to certain ‘wholes’ within which they acquire their ranked significance
as their ‘parts’. See Dumont (1970).
8 A clear instance of this attempt to pit Indian ‘socialism’ against western
‘individualism’ can be found in Vivekananda’s statement: ‘Competition – cruel, cold
and heartless – is the law of Europe. Our law is caste – the breaking of competition,
checking its forces, mitigating its cruelties, smoothing the passage of the human soul
through this mystery of life’. Quoted in Dalton (1967:167).
9 This was a phrase that was often used by Ambedkar in his writings. See Rodrigues
(2006:49).
10 Geuss writes that is in the aftermath of the Second World War, with the formation of
institutions such as the UN, that rights-discourse began to gain an international
prominence.
11 The view that the human person is a composite of two ‘parts’, one the imperishable
spiritual principle (ātman) and the other its perishable body (prakṛti), is ultimately of
Upaniṣadic origins.
12 Quoted in Matilal (2002:141).
13 The term ‘caste’ comes from the Portuguese castas, which refers to breeds, tribes, or
lineages. There is an extensive literature on theories of the ‘origin of caste’; a useful
introduction to these is available in Gupta (1993).
14 For instance, Radhakrishnan argues that when the adoption of a certain profession
or the self-expression of certain qualities began to be enforced as a hereditary
matter, the four varṇas degenerated into the castes and indeed grew ‘out of
harmony’ with contemporary realities. See Radhakrishnan (1940:378).
15 Shrirama writes: ‘The occupations of the four ranks are related symbolically to the
parts of the body of the Purusha. Obviously, it is an organismic analogy between man
[sic] and society …’ See Shrirama (2007:57).
16 See Lipner (1994:87–8).
17 See Lipner (1994:88).
18 See Zelliot (2004:248). She estimates that there are around four thousand of these
jātis in India today.
19 There is the associated point, as Wilhelm Halbfass has noted, that ‘[u]nlike varṇa, the
term jāti does not play a noticeable and thematically relevant role in Vedic
literature’, that is, the literature on which the ‘mythic’ conception was usually
grounded. See Halbfass (1991:350).
120 Ankur Barua

20 Elsewhere, Radhakrishnan (1940:367–70) even says that the fourfold classification of

the social order is ‘democratic’ in that, firstly, it emphasises the spiritual equality of
all human beings; secondly, it affirms the true form of individuality which involves

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an acceptance of one’s social responsibilities and obligations; thirdly, it stresses the
socio-economic utility of all work; fourthly, it accords to the individual the
opportunity to develop his/her specific qualities without interference; fifthly, no
class can make absolute claims or demands on the other three for spiritual,
economic, and political power were finely adjusted; and lastly, the higher one rises
on the ladder of the classes the greater is the accumulation of one’s obligations, and
this prevents a mad rush to the apex of the social order.
21 See Radhakrishnan (1927:107).
22 Andre Beteille has noted that ‘Gandhi favoured varṇadharma to the extent that it
stressed the community rather than the individual, cooperation against conflict, and
duties rather than rights’. See Beteille (2005:167).
23 See Dalton (1967:159–81).
24 See Gandhi (1966:83–5).
25 Quoted in Dalton (1967:172).
26 M.K. Gandhi, Young India, 24 November 1927. Quoted in Dalton (1967:172).
27 See Nanda (1985:18–26).
28 M.K. Gandhi, Harijan, 28 September 1934. Quoted in Dalton (1967:175).
29 Quoted in Sitaramayya (1946:539–40).
30 Quoted in Sitaramayya (1946:551–2) (emphasis added).
31 See Gandhi (2004:4–5): ‘The great belief in transmigration is a direct consequence of
that belief [in the oneness of all life]’.
32 M.K. Gandhi, Young India, 8 December 1920. Quoted in Jaffrelot (2005:61–2).
33 See Olivelle (1999:97).
34 This complex of views was neatly summarised in an early work on the history of
caste by S.V. Ketkar who, in the process of arguing that the order of varṇa
established a just system in classical India since the śūdra was a servant because of
his accumulated karma inherited from previous life-times, raises the objection as to
whether this is not to condemn certain sections of the population to servility with
no hope of rising above this condition. To this, he replies that classical writers such
as Manu ‘did not hold that a man should not have a chance to better his condition.
They only denied him such a chance in that particular life which is after all a small
portion of the entire human existence’. See Ketkar (1909:114–5) (emphasis added).
35 M.K. Gandhi, Harijan, 28 September 1934. Quoted in Dalton (1967:175).
36 See Parekh (1999:245).
37 This refers to the four-tiered social division, ratified in the Dharma-Sūtras and the
Dharma-Sāstras, of the three ‘twice-born’ varṇas of the brāhmaṇas, the kṣatriyas, and
the vaiṣyas, and the fourth of the śūdras.
38 See Ambedkar (1990:67) and Ambedkar (1970:15–16).
39 See Deliege (1999:184). Jaffrelot (2005:73) writes that Ambedkar believed that both
Gandhi and the Arya Samajists were, in their own ways, trying to ‘preserve caste
under another name’.
40 Quoted in Aloysius (2007:175).
41 See Ambedkar (2002:84).
 The Solidarities of Caste: The Metaphysical Basis of the ‘Organic’ Community 121

42 Wadia (1952:773) has pointed out that Radhakrishnan’s reinterpretation overlooks

the existence of strict caste norms, based on heredity, relating to endogamy and
commensality relations, and presents an ‘idealised’ view of the actual historical

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relations of domination and subjugation between the castes. In connection with his
description of the śūdra caste, Wadia writes: ‘This implies a plain recognition of the
unfortunate fact that in the hierarchy of caste in India, the Sūdras do occupy an
inferior position. Nor can this inferiority be glossed over by glibly speaking of “the
dignity of labour”. The truth is that in the orthodox Hindu economy this dignity of
labour is not recognised’.
43 See Ambedkar (2002:92–3).
44 See Ambedkar (1992:338) (emphasis added).
45 See Ambedkar (1992:330–6).
46 See Rodrigues (1993:328).
47 See Keer (1981:500).
48 Tartakov (2003:194–5) writes that ‘[s]ome might, therefore, consider the conversion
to Navayana Buddhism somehow to be a pragmatic expedient, rather than an
authentic religious choice, but that would be naïve … Navayana Buddhism, as
Ambedkar conceived it, is a revolutionary transformation of Buddhism, most
striking for its materialist soteriology, and for its essential rejection of some crucial
elements of previous Buddhisms and its redefinition of others’.
49 See Yurlova (2004:79–94).
50 See Ambedkar (1992:281–309).
51 In this connection, Fitzgerald (1999:57) comments: ‘I have never seen a religious
studies book that has a proper account of why Untouchables generally despise the
paternalistic Gandhian word “Harijan”, or an account of Ambedkar’s detailed
critique of Gandhi’s high-caste reformism. Generally speaking, religion books give
the high-caste view of the ecumenical construct “Hinduism”, and it is a view that
facilitates a rapprochement between the elites of the colonizers and the colonized’.
52 The term ‘harijan’, or the child of Hari, a Vaishnavite appellation for God, is now
rarely used by members of the lower castes who claim that it enforces the self-
surrendering attitude of a bhakta, thereby depicting them as submissive beings who
need the helping hand of their upper-caste superiors.
53 As Nagaraj (2006:368) has pointed out: ‘Gandhiji’s take-off point was that the
problem of untouchability was a problem of the self, in this case the collective Hindu
self’.
54 Quoted in Parekh (1999:263).
55 Quoted in Webster (1992:107). To this rhetorical query, Ambedkar (1989:449–50)
replied spiritedly: ‘That Untouchables are no better than cow is a statement which
only an ignoramus, or an arrogant person, can venture to make. It is arrant
nonsense … Mr. Gandhi argues that services rendered by the Missionaries are baits
or temptations … Why is it not possible to believe that these services by Missionaries
indicate that service to suffering humanity is for Christians an essential requirement
of their religion?’
56 See Webster (1992:93–4).
122 Ankur Barua

57 The term ‘Dalit’ is the self-designation currently used by the people classified by the
British as ‘depressed classes’, and otherwise commonly referred to as the
untouchables.

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58 For Srinivas (1989:48), ‘Sanskritization’ refers to the set of processes through which a
lower caste adopts the beliefs and rituals of a higher, and usually twice-born, caste
with the gradual consequence that this caste begins to acquire a higher social status
in the caste hierarchy. The Gandhians associated with the Harijan Sevak Sangh
(noted above) were ‘pure’ caste Hindus who sought to ‘uplift’ the untouchables by
drawing them away from their drinking habits and their alleged immoralities and
make them vegetarian Hindus like themselves. This stance was actively condemned
by Ram (1980:45) who called their addresses to the untouchables as ‘give-up-meat-
and-develop-cleanliness lectures’, and claimed that having earlier reduced them to a
sub-human status these campaigners were now simply adding insult to their injury’.
59 See Massey (1997:82).
60 See Jaffrelot (2005:41).
61 See Pandey (1990).
62 For instance, the Gaikwar of Baroda, who was involved in work among the Depressed
Classes, declared in 1912: ‘Millions have in the past been driven … to desert Hinduism
for the Crescent and the Cross. Thousands are doing so every year. Can Hindus
contemplate without alarm this annually increasing dimunition in their number?’
Quoted in Webster (1992:68).
63 See Thapar (1989:229–30).
64 See Clarke (1997:60–7).
65 See von Stietencron (1991:14–15) (emphasis added).
66 For instance, Dutt (1899:334).
67 See Guha (2001:93).
68 When the British government announced in 1932 the ‘Communal Award’, according
to which the untouchables would have separate electorates, Gandhi resorted to a fast
unto death. In the wake of the nation-wide support that Gandhi received, in some
places from the untouchables themselves, Ambedkar met Gandhi at Yeravda prison
and finally arrived at the ‘Poona Act’: in return for a higher number of reserved seats
for the untouchables, the principle of separate electorates would be given up.
69 See Deliege (1999:175–87).
70 See Ambedkar (1948).
71 See Sarkar (2005:270–93).
72 Quoted in Rodrigues (2002:225).
73 See p. 8 above.
74 See Halbfass (1991:355).
75 See Mukherjee (1988:5–7).
76 See Jaffrelot (2005:71).
77 See Jaffrelot (2005:41).
78 In a speech delivered in Mumbai in 1955, Ambedkar declared: ‘That which promises
equal opportunity to all is the true religion. The rest are all false religions’. Quoted in
Jaffrelot (2005:119).
79 A contemporary critic of this ‘logic of inclusion’ is Ilaih (1996).
80 Quoted in Jaffrelot (2005:50).