Post-colonial caste, Ambedkar, and the politics of counter-narrative

ABSTRACT

This article examines the way caste is captured within the dominant and popular scholarly tradition of post-colonialism. It will also explore how Ambedkar’s anthropological emphasis on the centrality of sociocultural relations for understanding caste dynamics opens up the limitation of a post-colonial understanding of caste. In doing so, the paper is oriented to advance a Dalit-centric historical anthropology of caste. The focus on the relationship between competing discourses on the histories of caste will provide critical insights into how Dalit movements negotiate with various politics of knowledge to develop varied pathways of progress for Dalits and other marginalized communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonialism
• caste
• Ambedkar
• India
• Dalits

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In a similar vein, C. J. Fuller argued that the formal codifications of laws related to land and private property by the British radically altered the intercommunity relations in villages. This codifications on caste lines intensified the hierarchical relations of caste with severe consequences for how power, inequality and hierarchy manifested in villages during the colonial period (Fuller 1977, 1989; also see Mayer 1993).

2 While Bandyopadhyay does not explicitly identify with Dumont’s argument, he vouches for caste’s persisting dominance in the pre-colonial period.

3 As part of reclaiming Dalit history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars have invested in understanding casteless movement among Dalits particularly through embracing religions other than Hinduism. Such a history is also missing from the dominant narratives of colonial caste (see Ayyathurai 2020).

4 In a recent article, Cháirez-Garza (2018) argues that Ambedkar’s rejection of a racialized understanding of untouchability is inspired by Franz Boas. Ambedkar took two courses in Anthropology in 1915–1916 academic year, though he majored in Economics. Franz Boas was still at Columbia Anthropology when Ambedkar was a student there. John Dewey, whose ideas influenced Ambedkar to a great extent, co-taught a seminar between 1913 and 1915 with Boas in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University (Cháirez-Garza 2018). This partly explains the reason for Ambedkar’s emphasis on the socio-cultural practices in explaining the caste system.

5 In Kingsley Martin Memorial Lecture that he gave at the University of Cambridge in 1979, Béteille (1979, 546–548) discusses in length the anti-caste thoughts of Tagore, Gandhi, and as examples of egalitarian ideology in twentieth century India, but never mentions Ambedkar, whose radical egalitarian anti-caste vision was in conflict with that of Gandhi’s.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Research Council (ERC) [grant number: ERC-2013-ADG340673 Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons. PI – Bruce Kapferer].