Annihilation of Caste - 1

If one were to choose what would be the most suitable book to start understanding Dr Ambedkar’s life and works, it would certainly be “Annihilation of Caste”. There is a reason for this. Of course, Dr Ambedkar’s work is all encompassing. He has written about such diverse topics as economy, money, caste, religion, swaraj, politics that one becomes over awed by his scholarship. But Annihilation of Caste is the most direct book. The title itself evokes passion. Dr Ambedkar does not mince any word when he is analyzing the current situation of nation and Hindu society. Let us go through the points in details and try to get a handle on his thinking. He is most certainly not thinking only about the treatment of depressed classes over the centuries. He has a vision in his mind. The vision is that of a strong nation. What kind of nation is a strong nation? The kind where the feeling of collective whole is greater than that any narrow sectarian group. Then is the Hindu society geared up for this tough national ask? It is not enough to be patriotic or nationalistic. When the constituents of the society view themselves as a collective whole and drown their narrow identities in the national consciousness is when the nation becomes strong. The end state is nationalism, but the first stage is society. He is clear when he says – “There is no use of having swaraj, if you cannot defend it”. Hence if caste is the main obstacle to reach the ideal, it must be annihilated. Any effort to perpetuate it by ascribing noble means is essentially counter-productive. This theorem comes with a corollary. Any act of perpetuation of a caste system, as per Dr Ambedkar, amounts to undermining nationalism. He confronts the Hindus with this question – “Have not Hindus committed treason against their country in the interests of their caste?”

So Dr Ambedkar was not talking about an abstract concept which may or may not touch the real lives of people. He was talking about how a society intends to operate? What are the levers of strength of a society? What is the basis of daily compassion, daily interaction and indeed daily dialogue of a society that has divided itself into varnas, castes and further sub-castes? In almost all these fundamentals, he found hindu society to be totally lacking. So he goes deeper into the basis of why is it so difficult for the Hindu society to shed caste system. In the process he delves into whether there is a society which can be termed Hindu society at all. He says – “Men do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any more than a man ceases to be member of his society by living so many miles away from other men.”  He continues – “To have similar things is totally different from possessing things in common”.

It is important to understand annihilation of caste with the idea of nationalism in mind. End of caste is an end in itself, but it is also the basis on which swaraj can be held. A weak divided hindu society is a weak society which would turn against itself and consume the very ideal for which all right-thinking Indians are fighting. With his classical sense of dispassionate study Dr Ambedkar gets into some very pertinent questions. Why castes are important for Hindus? Why is it so difficult even for those Hindus who understand the problems associated with it to shed it completely? We’ll have to get into each of these arguments carefully and with an open mind of a shishya yearning for knowledge