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ABSTRACT
This paper will argue that B.R. Ambedkar attacked the social law of Hindu dharma for legalizing and legitimizing Brahminical sovereignty in the form of a birth-based caste order centred around the ambivalent sacrality of untouchability. Although Ambedkar inaugurated postcolonial India’s transformative constitutional project, its juridical language of secular legality was not powerful enough an antidote against the social customs of caste and untouchability. Since these practices were ultimately grounded in a Hindu theology imputing responsibility for action to a fixed immutable being, Ambedkar sought to unsettle and destabilize it by proffering a counter-theology of Buddhism that delinked action from any substantial being, and thereby opened up sovereignty as an empty place of political power. His Buddhism though, was less a religion of selfless renunciation, and more a religion of rupture mediated by the political law of fraternal freedom, actualized in the excessive subjectivity of the Dalit community of converted Buddhists.
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Robert Yelle and Salmoli Choudhuri for their generative comments on previous drafts of this paper. Further, I would like to thank the participants in the Deprovincializing Political Theology Workshop at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, and the Faculty Seminar at Azim Premji University Bengaluru, where these ideas were first presented. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer for their helpful feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 On the breaking open of the 'waiting room' of colonial historicism, see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
2 Schmitt, Political Theology.
3 For a more elaborate argument about the contradiction between social law and political law in the intellectual career of constituent power in modern India, see Tundawala, “In the shadow of swaraj: constituent power and the Indian political”. PhD diss.
4 On Ambedkar as a modern constitutionalist, see Mehta, Pratap Bhanu, “What is Constitutional Morality?”. India Seminar, November 2010 (https://www.india-seminar.com/2010/615/615_pratap_bhanu_mehta.htm last accessed on November 3, 2020); Bajpai, Debating Difference, 53–76; Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 297–307.
5 For the three meanings of fundamental law or nomos as land appropriation and taking, division and distribution, and pastorage and production, see Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth.
6 Ambedkar, “Triumph of Brahminism”, 267–74.
7 Ibid., 268.
8 Ibid., 269.
9 On the French Revolution and the inauguration of political modernity, see Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-political?” 213–35.
10 Ambedkar, “Triumph of Brahminism”, 276–7.
11 Ibid., 278–85.
12 Ibid., 286–304.
13 Ibid., 304.
14 See the essays collected in Olivelle and Davis, Hindu Law; see also Olivelle, The Asrama System; Olivelle, Ascetics and Brahmins.
15 For a general jurisprudential treatment of law as a spatio-temporal unity, see Lindahl, Fault lines of Globalization.
16 Ambedkar, “Riddles of Hinduism”, 205–14.
17 For a phenomenological interpretation of untouchability, see Sarukkai, “Phenomenology of Untouchability”, 39–48; see also Guru and Sarukkai, The Cracked Mirror.
18 On ambivalent sacrality in political theology, see Yelle, Sovereignty and the Sacred, 74–-97.
19 On the Brahmin as an 'immortal sovereign', see Kapila, “Ambedkar's Agonism”, 184–95; on the Brahmin as a notionally 'dead being', see Ramanujam, Renunciation and Untouchability.
20 Ambedkar, B. R. “Who were the Shudras? How they came to be the Fourth Varna in the Indo-Aryan Society” (1946) and “The Untouchables. Who were They and Why they became Untouchables” (1948) in BAWS Vol 7. This appears to resonate with the ancient Roman figure of homo sacer who was banned and could be killed without being sacrificed. But what distinguished Ambedkar's untouchables from homo sacer was that they could both be killed as well as sacrificed, without ever being recognized as the subjects of their own sacrifice. On homo sacer, see Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer.
21 Ambedkar, “Triumph of Brahminism”; Ambedkar, “Their Wishes are Laws Unto Us” in BAWS Vol 5.
22 Ambedkar, “Their Wishes are Laws Unto Us”, 283–6.
23 On Ambedkar as a thinker of agonistic politics, see Kapila, “Ambedkar's Agonism”, 184–95.
24 Ambedkar, “Annihilation of Caste” (1936) in BAWS Vol 1, 74–5.
25 On destituent power, see Agamben, “What is a Destituent Power?” 65–74.
26 Ambedkar, “Riddles of Hinduism”, 281–7.
27 On Raja Rammohan Roy’s constitutional liberalism, see Bayly, “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30”, 25–41.
28 Rao and Subrahmanyam, “An Elegy for Niti”, 396–423; Rao and Subrahmanyam, “Notes on Political Thought”, 175–210.
29 Ambedkar, “Because of Divine Law of Manu” (April 10, 1948), 363.
30 Ambedkar, “Speech in the Constituent Assembly" (November 25, 1949) in Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol 11 (http://loksabhaph.nic.in/writereaddata/cadebatefiles/C25111949.html accessed on November 4, 2020).
31 Mehta, Uday Singh, “The Social Question and the Absolutism of Politics.” In India Seminar, November 2010 (retrieved from https://www.india-seminar.com/2010/615/615_uday_s_mehta.htm last accessed on November 3, 2020); on the politicization of the caste question, see Rao, The Caste Question.
32 On Ambedkar’s legacy of emancipatory justice and the Indian Constitution, see Baxi, "Emancipation and Justice”, 112-149.
33 The speech is discussed in Keer, Ambedkar: Life and Mission, 446.
34 Ambedkar, “Speech in the Lok Sabha” (1955) in BAWS Vol 15, 949.
35 Ambedkar, “Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah” (1943) in BAWS Vol 1, 222.
36 Ambedkar, “My philosophy of Life”, All India Radio Broadcast (October 3, 1954) in BAWS Vol 12, 503.
37 Ambedkar, “Buddha or Karl Marx” (1955) in BAWS Vol 3, 441-464, at 444.
38 Ibid., 450.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 451, 459.
41 Ibid., 450–2, 459.
42 Ibid., 461–2.
43 For a rich collection of essays on the Bhagavad Gita and the modern Indian political, see Kapila and Devji, Political Thought in Action; on the modernist reception of Gita verse 2.47, see Bandopadhyay, Three Essays on the Mahabharata.
44 Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita” in BAWS Vol 3, 357–80.
45 Ibid., 361–5.
46 Ibid., 364.
47 Ambedkar's arch antagonist M.K. Gandhi also departed from this nationalist problematic and took the question of sole and absolute responsibility seriously. But Gandhi was not as trenchantly critical of the social law of the Hindu caste order as Ambedkar was. See generally, Devji, The Impossible Indian; Skaria, Ajay. Unconditional Equality.
48 Ambedkar, “The Buddha and His Dhamma” (1957) in BAWS Vol 11, at 233–8. For a different take on Buddhism and collective suffering in Ambedkar's thought, see Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic, 208–42.
49 Ambedkar, Ibid., 240–1. On Ambedkar's reinterpretation of Sunyata in Madhyamika Buddhism, see also Kumar, Radical equality, 289–336.
50 On the ruptural subject in modern European philosophy, see McGowan, “Subject of the event”, 7–30. Buddhism is usually received in the light of Humean scepticism as a religion of the non-self. But for a convincing contrary philosophical position, see Ganeri, The Concealed Art of the Soul.
51 For a critique of the connection between action and the immutable subject in Indo-European intellectual tradition, see Agamben, Karman. Agamben's recent work on karman resonates with Ambedkar’s project, but with two crucial exceptions: first, unlike Ambedkar, Agamben is not uncomfortable with notions of rebirth and transmigration; second, unlike Agamben, Ambedkar’s critique of the nexus between action and the permanent being did not lead him to abandon sovereignty and subjectivity altogether.
52 Ambedkar, “The Buddha and His Dhamma”, 241–5.
53 Ibid., 323–5.
54 Ibid., 214–22.
55 Ibid., 26.
56 Ibid., 287–300.
57 Ambedkar, “Why was Nagpur Chosen?" Speech Delivered on 14th October 1956, http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_ambedkar_conversion.html last visited on 5th November 2021; Ambedkar, “What Path to Salvation?", Speech Delivered to Bombay Presidency Mahar Conference, 31st May 1936, http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_ambedkar_salvation.html last visited on 5th November 2021.
58 The right to have rights was most famously articulated by Hannah Arendt, and later reformulated as the right to partless participation in the critical response of Jacques Rancière. Implicit in Ambedkar though, is a fusing together of these two accounts, with a view to rethink the contours of sovereignty from the margins of political society. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 290–302; Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” 297–310. For a different reading of Ambedkarite parivraja as a partless participation without sovereignty, see Skaria, “Ambedkar, Marx and the Buddhist Question”, 450–65.
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Moiz Tundawala
Moiz Tundawala is an Associate Professor of Law, Jindal Global Law School, Delhi NCR, India. He completed his PhD on constituent power and Indian political thought from London School of Economics and Political Science in 2019; Masters in South Asian and Islamic Law and Politics from School of Oriental and African Studies in 2012; Bachelors in Law and Humanities from West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata in 2010.