Organic intellectuals from modern India: B. R. Ambedkar and R. M. Lohia on inequality, intersectionality, and justice

ABSTRACT

This article revisits the intellectual history of inequality in the thinking of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) and Dr Ram Manohar Lohia (1910–1967). Both were pivotal figures in the intellectual history of inequality in colonial and postcolonial India. Yet little work has been done to systematically juxtapose the two and their thinking on inequality. This article offers a first comparison, arguing that their ideas on inequality can be seen as the emergence of a unique, Indian version of what, in this article, we term “organic intersectionality.” We build this argument on four claims. First, both were organic intellectuals whose thinking was molded in the marginalized groups from which they arose, but whose ideas developed in unique and organic ways. Second, both had a unique eye to the intersectional and holistic character of Indian inequality, cutting across caste, class, race, and gender. Third, their thinking grew from a deep engagement with religion, which they saw as both legitimizing and delegitimizing inequality. Fourth, both these figures exemplify postcolonial hybridity and thus stand in contrast both to a diffusionist approach whereby ideas are simply diffused from the West to the East, and to a nationalized, self-contained, or decolonial history of ideas.

KEYWORDS:

• Caste
• global intellectual history
• India
• intersectionality
• organic intellectuals
• religion

I. Introduction

This article revisits the intellectual history of inequality in the thoughts of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) and Dr Ram Manohar Lohia (1910–1967). Ambedkar and Lohia were pivotal figures in the intellectual history of inequality in colonial and postcolonial India. In recognition of their influence, there is a rich and growing scholarship on both these intellectual figures and their histories.¹ Yet little work has been done to compare the two, specifically their thoughts on inequality and justice.² In this article we set out to do exactly this. We argue that the juxtaposition of these two thinkers helps illuminate the emergence of a unique, Indian version of what we will term organic intersectionality in the works of Ambedkar and Lohia. First, we propose to see both Ambedkar and Lohia as organic intellectuals, whose thoughts were not only molded in the marginalized groups from which they arose, but whose ideas of inequality, religion, socialism, constitutionalism, liberalism, and finding indigenous solutions developed in a unique and organic manner.³ Second, Ambedkar and Lohia both had a unique eye to the intersectional and holistic nature of Indian inequality, cutting across caste, class, race, gender, language, and identity with analysis that predates Western accounts.⁴ In so doing, they stood out from other ideological streams and traditions with advocates as diverse as Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jayaprakash Narayan, M. N. Roy, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.⁵ The uniqueness of Lohia and Ambedkar’s position on inequality can be seen in their intersectional understanding combined with their emancipatory projects. Third, their cases show that religion has played a dual role as a device both legitimizing and delegitimizing inequality.⁶ Fourth, we argue both Ambedkar and Lohia are cases which speak against the “diffusionist” approach to global intellectual history, whereby ideas are simply “diffused” from the West to the East, as well as against a nationalized, self-contained history of ideas.⁷ Instead, they illustrate how ideas – Western and non-Western, traditional and modern – were hybrid and “patched together” in unique ways, so that an emerging and consolidating Indian thought was “an exceptional synthesis of Western thought with Indian thought, rich and varied.”⁸

Ambedkar and Lohia can thus both be described as what Antonio Gramsci famously conceptualized as organic intellectuals – persons who, coming from lower classes and formed by their milieus, rise to higher levels of class and status but remain connected and loyal to the milieus in which they were formed.⁹ In addition to this distinct Gramscian meaning of the organic intellectual, however, we would like to suggest four additional meanings of the organic. First, organic can be understood in the sense of a living, flexible adaptation to circumstances and ideas (as opposed to mechanical adaptation). Organicism was a key metaphorical concept in nineteenth-century Europe, which was deeply preoccupied with historical thinking and various strands of historicism, ranging from Leopold von Ranke to Karl Marx. Second, by “organic” we thus also refer to how these two intellectuals addressed the importance of mitigating inequalities within the specific environment. For Ambedkar and Lohia, this involved engaging with the religious ideologies prevalent in their society, primarily Hinduism. Third, organic adaptation is closely linked to the concept of hybridity. Ambedkar and Lohia fused, mixed, and “patched together” ideas in a hybrid manner, creating unique ways of thinking about politics in India. Their thinking can neither be attributed solely to evident Western inspirations, nor associated exclusively with non-Western traditions of thought.¹⁰ Indeed, “hybridity” was specifically a term borrowed from biology, originally referring to a simple mixture of separate plants (and later races and cultures). Fourth, organicity implies holism, as illustrated by the attempts here to understand inequalities within much broader, intersecting dimensions. In a nutshell, Ambedkar and Lohia represent what we will term organic intersectionality, playing on these multiple meanings of affiliation (Gramsci), adaptation, embeddedness, hybridity, and holism.

This article, then, engages with two central figures in late colonial and postcolonial India. It highlights the distinctive ways in which their ideas on equality and justice in India emerged in a hybridity of indigeneity and of colonial modernity, in dialogue between diverse ideological streams and traditions.¹¹ The interlocutors they faced came from diverse regions and ideological standpoints that represented different traditions, leading to rich and vigorous debates on India and its future as a sovereign, secular, and democratic republic.¹² Some of the more prominent debates were between what may be termed liberal constitutional secularists (Jawaharlal Nehru, Ambedkar), socialists (Kamala Devi J. P. Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia, Minoo Masani, Asok Mehta), communists (M. N. Roy, S. A. Dange, Muzzafar Ahmed, Somnath Lahiri), Gandhians (Vinoba Bhave, J. C Kumarappa, Acharya Kriplani), conservatives (V. D. Savarkar, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, Madan Mohan Malviya), and feminists (Pandita Ramabai, Tarabai Shinde, Sarojini Naidu, and many others).¹³ These strands of thinking and traditions, however, were layered: there were crucial differences and diversities within these strands, and several of the key figures cannot be easily identified as belonging only to one strand (such as, for example, Nehru, widely credited as having launched a socialist development plan for India). These diverse positions engaged with one another on larger questions of colonialism, Indian nationalism, and critical debates and engagements with the British colonial administration, as well as on questions of normative ideals and the future of an Independent India. Indeed, the early and mid-twentieth century witnessed some of the richest debates negotiating the meanings of concepts such as liberty, equality, justice, socialism, and democracy in a unique Indian horizon of ideas and vernacular concepts such as Satyagraha (Hindi, “holding on to truth”), Swaraj (Hindi, “self-rule”), and Sarvōdaya (Hindi, “universal uplift” or “progress of all”).

In what follows, we trace the intellectual histories of Ambedkar and Lohia and their thinking on inequality and justice throughout three crucial historical moments in the history of modern India: the nationalist struggle for independence against British colonialism; the constituent assembly debates (1946–1949); and the post-independence period (the 1950s–1960s). These historical moments were transformative and radical, and both thinkers made new attempts to identify the sources that shaped India as a hierarchical and unequal society, hoping to significantly alter and transform the nature of that society. Ambedkar and Lohia both saw it as most urgent to confront the injustices of the caste system.¹⁴ Rooted in the distinct institution of the caste system, its ramifications permeating into all political, social, economic, and cultural aspects of life, inequalities were embedded in region, language, ethnicities, gender, and religion. Moreover, a key question concerned the role of two hundred years of British colonialism, which accentuated already existing gaps and divides within Indian society, cementing the caste system.

Within this universe of Indian thinking, Ambedkar (popularly known as Babasaheb) and Lohia were not just seminal thinkers in debates on an egalitarian and solely postcolonial India.¹⁵ They were both champions of what might be read as an intersectional understanding of inequality in India. To be sure, the concept of intersectionality is of newer date and has only recently emerged as part of popular parlance on inequality, discrimination, and feminism.¹⁶ The concept was, famously, introduced by the American black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in the late 1980s–1990s, writing just about the same time as another equally seminal contribution by Patricia Hill Collins.¹⁷ In Crenshaw’s terminology, intersectionality is differentiated from single-axis analysis of discrimination. In her analysis of discrimination against black women, intersectionality is a double-axis discrimination which cannot be understood as a simple sum of discrimination against women and discrimination against blacks, but as a distinct phenomenon. Crenshaw demonstrates this through a history of the American legal system and the horrific legal status of black women in rape cases, where these women were often discursively constructed as being especially “prone” to engage in sexual encounters. They were discriminated against based on being black women.

In the United States, thinking on intersectionality predates Crenshaw and Collins. As Ange-Marie Hancock has convincingly argued, a proper genealogy of the intellectual history of intersectionality must go beyond Crenshaw’s and Collins’s thinking (and also beyond the idea that their thinking is rooted solely in the works of Michel Foucault).¹⁸ Instead, Hancock has proposed to “lengthen the historical arc of intersectionality” and to trace what she terms “intersectionality-like thought.”¹⁹ This may seem somewhat surprising, as Hancock herself has expressed some skepticism about too much “semantic slippage” when it comes to using the analytical term intersectionality.²⁰ Yet, on closer examination, this conceptual shift is completely justified. It enables her to trace “intersectionality-like thought, like the acknowledgment of multiple axes or formations of difference,” back to black women in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, thus shedding new light on a longer history of related occurrences of intersectionality-like thinking.²¹

Seen from this perspective, what we are proposing in this article is two further shifts as compared to Hancock: toward India, and toward men. The first and less controversial shift is one in place rather than in time, as we propose to deploy the term “intersectionality thinking” in an Indian context. The other and perhaps more controversial shift is that we untether a gendered and racial identity (black women) from its position as the sole proponent of intersectionality thinking, focusing instead on two men. We argue that Ambedkar and Lohia are two examples of intersectionality thinking.²² To be sure, neither Ambedkar nor Lohia used the term intersectionality themselves, but both thought critically about inequalities that cut across caste, class, gender, race. Moreover, both singled out specific kinds of double-axis inequalities. Neither Ambedkar nor Lohia thought exclusively in terms of double-axis discrimination, but both of them understood that inequalities cut across several depressed or marginalized groups (women, the lowest castes, religious minorities of, for example, Muslims) and that they were amplified by the intersecting and interlocking inequalities of being, for example, an untouchable woman. Thus, in what follows, we trace the formation of intersectionality thinking in Ambedkar and Lohia.

This article, then, looks at these two voices and strands of thinking, representing what may be termed the “constitutional liberalism” of Ambedkar and the “democratic socialism” of Lohia (a term Lohia himself used, sometimes interchangeably with “Asian socialism”) – noting that these labels should be used with some caution, both because terms such as liberalism do not map too easily onto Indian thought, and because the thinking of these two intellectuals cannot be reduced to these labels.²³ Both these thinkers were prominent public intellectuals and authentic and legitimate political leaders. They were central in shaping politics for the most marginalized and the most depressed – Ambedkar as the leader of the Dalits (the untouchables or Ati Shudras) and the Shudras (the lowest of the four castes, i.e. the hereditary working class), Lohia as the socialist leader. The legacies they bequeathed – leading the Ambedkarite movement and the Samajwadi movement, respectively – were important and collectively shaped the Dalit-Bahujan discourse, a broader discourse on the liberation of the many.²⁴ Both were prominent voices of subversion and dissent. Both played a role in shaping discourses on egalitarianism and social justice – Ambedkar in one capacity as head of the committee drafting the constitution, in another as leader of the Dalits, Lohia as an activist politician who was successful in transforming the opposition’s role and eventually becoming the leader of the Socialist Party.²⁵

Our analysis of Ambedkar and Lohia is closer to a postcolonial than a decolonial reading. More specifically, our reading of Ambedkar and Lohia’s inequality thinking theoretically aligns with and empirically substantiates postcolonial historiography on the hybrid, organic nature of thought in Southeast Asian modernity. There is now a vast literature on global intellectual history, postcolonialism, and decolonialism. The sympathetic call of global intellectual history for a more “inclusive” intellectual history that brings in key figures from outside the West into scholarly journals is, fortunately, no longer new.²⁶ Postcolonial theory has taken a step further, calling not only for new inclusiveness, but both for a more fundamental reimagination of postcolonial nationhood as such and, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s famous phrase, for the “provincialization of Europe.”²⁷ Writing from the perspective of subaltern studies, Chakrabarty critiqued historicism and the idea of the political, arguing that both concepts, as developed in the history of European thought, were misplaced in their application to Southeast Asian modernity. Himself highly critical of both ideas, Chakrabarty pointed out that he himself was also writing from within the inheritance of European thought, acknowledging that European thought was both “indispensable” and “inadequate” for understanding modernity in non-Western nations.²⁸ Indeed, Chakrabarty argued that Ambedkar, “the most trenchant critic of the institution of ‘untouchability' in British India,” would “refer us back to some originally European ideas about liberty and human equality.”²⁹ In stressing what Warwick Anderson has summed up as “hybridity and mixture, conjugation and adaptation, exchange and interaction,” postcolonial historiography thus differs from yet another position, namely decolonialism.³⁰ The latter is a “decolonial historical binarism,” one that “echoes Indigenous politics of self-determination.”³¹ Decolonialism, spearheaded by intellectuals such as Walter Mignolo (and perhaps most relevant for the Americas), has called for a complete “delinking,” calling for a more far-reaching and radical epistemological shift.³² Yet, as Anderson rightly argues, the more critical and radical project of epistemological decolonization seems untenable, as “decolonial frames might blind us to many of the accommodations and transfers, the forced mixings and unequal exchanges, that have taken place.”³³ In line with postcolonial intellectual historiography, we argue that both the cases of Ambedkar and Lohia are cases of hybridity and of an organic patching together of European, Indian, and other ideas.

This article is methodologically grounded mainly in historical contextualism. It is organized around contextualizing the writings of Ambedkar and Lohia, situating them within their political projects and against their political adversaries and overall political contexts, their biographical, social, and educational background, and their positionings within larger intellectual and social contexts pertaining to religion, caste, and gender. As C. A. Bayly aptly noted, “intellectual history can clearly no longer construct itself as a separate sphere of higher thought standing above and outside social history.”³⁴ Aiming to demonstrate their organic and intersectional approach to inequality, however, also calls for some degree of rational reconstruction of their thinking.³⁵ We have thus found it most useful to structure the article in four main parts, which aim to strike this balance. The first two parts present the key ideas and positions of Ambedkar and Lohia on inequality and on justice. The third and fourth sections examine their key similarities and differences. The fifth section concludes by highlighting our concept of organic intersectionality, and its four underlying pillars of organicism, intersectionality, embeddedness, and hybridity.

II. Ambedkar: from analysis of “graded inequality” in the Hinduist-Brahmin caste system, over liberal constitutionalism, to Buddhist egalitarianism

Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar (1891–1956), himself a Dalit (untouchable), was a leading interlocutor in debates on equality and justice in India. Indeed, as Aishwary Kumar notes in a study of Ambedkar’s unfinished work on revolution in Ancient India, Ambedkar is “widely perceived as the most radical thinker and critic of caste in twentieth-century India.”³⁶ Ambedkar also became famous for his work as a key architect of the Indian constitution.³⁷ Drawing from his own experiences and those of many from his own group, who toiled and reeled under the systematic injustices they suffered as the untouchable Mahar community (Dalits), Ambedkar argued for dignity, human worth, and self-respect as foundational for a society entrenched in deep inequalities, structurally and also materially. Although he had been educated in economics and law at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, Ambedkar as a lawyer in India in the 1920s did not gain the kind of respect an upper caste would have had on returning from abroad, because of his status as Dalit. As the most important representative of the Dalits, Ambedkar successfully led struggles and negotiations with the British colonial administration concerning the special representation of lower social group members. Moreover, as chairman of the drafting committee of the Indian constitution and as the first law minister of independent India (1947–1951), serving under Nehru and his Indian National Congress party (I.N.C.), Ambedkar rigorously worked toward a rights-based approach to bettering the conditions of depressed communities.

Ambedkar is thus generally credited with being the key influence in introducing affirmative action into the Indian constitution – the so-called “reservation system,” which reserved a certain number of public and political offices and access to education to particular groups. Indeed, the 1950 Indian constitution was nothing short of the most systematic politics for positive special treatment the world had ever seen.³⁸ Among other things, it set out to remove all caste privileges, to eradicate the concept of “untouchability,” and to lift restrictions on access; in addition, it incorporated policies of reservation (quotas) for the “scheduled castes,” the “scheduled tribes,” and “other backward classes” (terms invented under the British colonial rule of the British Raj and a series of population censuses in India).³⁹ The constitution itself was based upon a strong secularism as championed by Nehru and the I.N.C., which would be the most dominant Indian political party until 1990. As Chakrabarty has pointed out, Ambedkar himself, early on in his writings on the annihilation of caste, deployed “European ideas about liberty and human equality” (more specifically, “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity”).⁴⁰ As C. A. Bayly notes, however, policies of positive discrimination were an example of how the very idea of democracy – central for equality – was not simply “diffused” from the West to the East, but instead “was infused with quite new meaning as consequence of the reservations policy” of Ambedkar.⁴¹ Ambedkar, himself rooted in a peculiar and hybrid mix of European, American, and Indian ideas and historicity, patched together different ideas and understandings in an intersectionality thinking that informed the new constitutional measures against caste.

For Ambedkar, the caste system in India was an institution that was legitimized as an economic and social organization and that functioned as the framework of society. Ambedkar famously contended that the caste system was legitimized on religious grounds by Hinduism. His active campaigns against untouchability began as early as 1927. He even publicly burned copies of the Manusmriti, the classic Hindu sacred text that defines the four theoretical varnas of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras (the four varnas are not simply to be equated with “castes”).⁴² Ambedkar thus found himself in strong opposition to M. K. Gandhi, who considered it very disrespectful to burn the Hindu sacred texts and who defended the idea of a functional solidarity between the different varnas.⁴³ Ambedkar problematized the caste system as “graded inequality,” a system distinct from other kinds of inequalities that existed in other parts of the world. He saw it as unique as an inequality-enhancing institution due to the extraordinary immobility of the caste system, which imposed watertight compartments between castes and was non-fluid, based on a fixity ascribed from birth. With caste, one’s birth and thus one’s location in the caste system thus determined the possibilities of one’s existence, merit, and mobility. It was a peculiar system, upheld partly by social misrecognition: I am more worthy because you are less worthy than me. As Ambedkar wrote in his Annihilation of Caste, originally published in 1936,

In one of its aspects, it divides men into separate communities. Its second aspect places these communities in a graded order, one above the other in social status. Each caste takes its pride and its consolation in the fact that in the scale of castes, it is above some other castes.⁴⁴

Although not always explicitly linked to a critique of double-axis discrimination (i.e. discrimination against Dalit women specifically), this was an intersectionality-like way of thinking.

In Ambedkar’s view, this graded inequality discriminated among humans, dividing them into high and low castes. Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas constituted the upper castes, the Shudras the lower caste. In addition to these four caste groups, Ambedkar also brought in another marginalized and suppressed community, the untouchables (Dalits) – his own group – referred to as Atishudras. The practices associated with untouchability caused these people to suffer extreme inhuman treatment. Ambedkar himself famously described such practices – from access to drinking water to access to medical help – in his Waiting for a Visa, written in 1935–1936.⁴⁵ He referred to the Shudras (the lowest caste, workers) and the Atishudhras (outside caste) collectively as the depressed communities of India. For him, this graded inequality was nothing short of slavery. Not only were the depressed communities bound to serve the upper castes, but the untouchables were deprived of fundamental rights. Among the many wrongs carried on historically for centuries, this was not simply a story of the denial of human worth and dignity, but of consolidation of power over the millions by the few. Location in the caste hierarchy systematically defined access to resources, opportunities, and partisanship. As Ambedkar, generally acknowledged as one of, if not the most profound critic of the caste system, went on to note in his 1936 book,

The higher the grade of a caste, the greater the number of these rights and the lower the grade, the lesser, their number. Now this gradation, this scaling of castes, makes it impossible to organize a common front against the caste system. All are slaves of the caste system. But all slaves are not equal in status.⁴⁶

Tracing the source of the caste system to the Chaturvarnya system (a fourfold division of society based on varna) as legitimized by Hindu scriptures, this division of labor fixed laborers tightly in hereditary vocational divisions. As Ambedkar succinctly pointed out,

It is defended on the ground that the caste system is but another for the division of labour and if division of labour is a necessary feature of every civilized society, then it is argued that nothing is wrong in the caste system. Now the first thing is to be urged against this view is that the caste system is not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers.⁴⁷

Or, as he went on to write, once again invoking his concept of “graduation”:

In no other country is the division of labour accompanied by the gradation of labourers.⁴⁸

To Ambedkar, caste and class were thus systematically linked in a systematic and hereditary manner, fixing some people to lower status and fewer rights, again pointing toward an intersectionality thinking about inequality in modern India.

Ambedkar emphasized the unique and peculiar nature of this inequality and how it was legitimized in India. “If your Chaturvarna [caste system or system of four castes, varnas] is an ideal society, why it is not universal,” he rhetorically asked in his posthumously published book from 1957, The Buddha and his Dhamma, written after he himself – “born an untouchable within the Hindu fold” – had converted to Buddhism in 1956.⁴⁹ The peculiarity stemmed from the fact that the caste system was deeply embedded and entrenched in the religion of Hinduism, drawing its sanctity from the ancient religious treatises of the Shastras (treatises) and the Vedas (religious texts), which were fundamental in the creation and establishment of societal rules and codes of conduct. Ambedkar argued that people followed the system not because they were wrong-headed or inhuman, but rather because they were deeply religious, blindly following the prescribed dictates without performing any serious examination. Eventually, Ambedkar began to refer to Hinduism as “Brahmanism,” arguing that Hinduism was in effect an elite ideology of the highest caste. While the Brahmins were not necessarily themselves wealthy in material terms, their cultural recognition as priests was high. They controlled the system of knowledge, as writers and translators of the various Shastras and textual sources that were the source of legitimacy of the caste system.

The social order and the caste system, then, was imbued with sacredness. To Ambedkar, the call for equality and for a break with the caste system thus entailed a criticism of its religious underpinnings. Social reform meant religious reform. Or, as Ambedkar wrote in his seminal 1936 Annihilation of Caste,

How do you expect to succeed, if you allow the Shastras to continue to mold the beliefs and opinions of the people? Not to question the authority of the Shastras, to permit the people to believe in sanctity and their sanction and blame them and criticize them for their acts as being irrational and inhuman is a incongruous ways of carrying on social reform.⁵⁰

As Ambedkar further wrote, calling for a major rebellion against an orthodox and traditionalist reading of religious scriptures,

What matters is how Shastras have been understood by the people. You must take the stand that Buddha took. You must take the stand which Guru Nanak took, You must not only discard the Shastras, you must deny their authority as did Buddha and Nanak. You must have courage to tell the Hindus, that what is wrong with them is their religion – the religion which has produced in them this notion of the sacredness of caste. Will you show that courage?⁵¹

The scriptural practices of Hinduism thus came under severe attack from Ambedkar. Scriptural references emphasizing prayers, pilgrimages, ceremonies, rituals, and sacrifices could alienate both women and men from the larger purposes of religion – righteousness and rationalism. For Ambedkar, religion was an integral part of human life. It instilled hope in humans, drove them to activity, and extended fraternity. Brahmanical Hinduism, on the other hand, was anti-rational, superstitious, and highly controlling: an ideology serving the higher classes.

Ambedkar challenged those who sought to legitimize the caste system on grounds of purity of blood and race, divine dispensation, division of labor, and society’s social and moral fabric. He was relentless in his critique and his activism in pursuit of dignified egalitarianism for the millions outside the fold. He critiqued the failure of the various social and political organizations and collectives that had been engaged with social reforms but had not paid enough attention to caste-based inequalities and discriminations. To Ambedkar, they did not go far enough in challenging Hinduism:

They did not stand up for the reform of the Hindu society. The battle that was fought centered around the question of the reform of the family. It did not relate to the social reform in the sense of the break up of the caste system. It was never put in issue by the reformers.⁵²

Moreover, Ambedkar’s criticism extended also to socialists and communists, who in his view too one-dimensionally emphasized the equalization of resources and of economic power. To Ambedkar, writing a decade before the founding of an independent Indian state and of Nehru’s program for statist developmentalism, it was naive to aim for economic reform without thorough reform of the social and moral order. As he wrote when addressing socialists and communists, “Can you have economic reform without first bringing about a reform of the social order.”⁵³ Ambedkar faulted the socialists and communists for having a too one-dimensional view of inequality as class – for not paying sufficient attention to the interlocking, intersecting relationships between class and caste. Ambedkar wanted to “annihilate” the caste system. Politically, however, he was critical of the element of violent revolution in Marxism, and of a strong communist state which would not wither away. On a theoretical and conceptual level, he believed that Marxism could not fully explain the peculiarity of caste and discrimination (somewhat akin to W. E. B. Du Bois in his otherwise Marxist analysis of American capitalism and racism).⁵⁴ While Ambedkar championed policies of reservations, however, he did not develop proposals for reforming property and land-ownership systems.⁵⁵

Over the years of his political activism and his writings, Ambedkar contended that, in the seminal task of uprooting the caste system, a reformist attitude was doomed to fail. Despite the remedies suggested in dining together and intermarriage across castes, the ultimate solution, in Ambedkar’s view, rested in the annihilation of caste. As he wrote,

The wall built around Caste is impregnable and the material, of which it is built, contains none of the combustible stuff of reason and morality. Add to this the fact that inside this wall stands the army of Brahmins, who form the intellectual class, Brahmins who are the natural leaders of the Hindus, Brahmins who are there not as mere mercenary soldiers but as an army fighting for its homeland and you will get an idea why I think that breaking-up of Caste amongst the Hindus is well-nigh impossible.⁵⁶

Or as he further pointed out,

You must destroy the religion, the religion of the shrutis and the smritis. Nothing else will avail.⁵⁷

To Ambedkar, the possibility of reform of caste was utopian.

On this question, he did not shy away from publicly challenging the position of Gandhi. Where Ambedkar vehemently rejected the caste system, Gandhi (himself belonging to the trading caste) argued for reform and for the moral transformative capacity of the individual within Hinduism. Indeed, this debate, taking shape in an interwar period which was characterized by a broad representation of different ideologies, became famously known as the “Gandhi–Ambedkar debate.”⁵⁸ As Ambedkar would write, “Gandhism is a paradox.” On the one hand,

it stands for freedom from foreign domination which means the destruction of the existing political structure of the economy.

But

at the same time it seeks to maintain intact a social structure which permits the domination of one class by another on a hereditary basis which means a perpetual domination of one class by another.⁵⁹

The caste system, for Ambedkar, was antithetical to public spirit, cooperation, and social ethics. In time, the long-frustrated journey of many years enthused Ambedkar to fully give up the religion of Hinduism. The Yeola statement that he gave in 1936 – that he had been born Hindu, but that he would not die Hindu – came full circle after two decades with his conversion to Buddhism in 1956, which soon inspired half a million people to do the same.⁶⁰ Himself the foremost advocate of inserting positive discrimination and reservation policy into the Indian constitution, Ambedkar over time famously grew skeptical of such measures. Indeed, as Faisal Devji notes, Ambedkar himself came to distrust

the transient political identity made possible by reservations and recommended the conversion of Dalits to Buddhism so that, like Muslims and Christians, they could form permanent communities rather than castes.⁶¹

Somewhat in contrast, in the same years as Ambedkar increasingly believed in Buddhism for social and moral revolution, during the last half of the 1950s, Lohia would vehemently advocate caste reservations, expanding the groups of people to include women, Muslims, and Indigenous peoples (Adivasis).⁶²

To Ambedkar, Buddhism was a project of emancipation – of social reconstruction, rationalism, egalitarianism.⁶³ It was a moral project which enthused righteousness in the lives of all. Ambedkar’s writings on religion thus had two important dimensions: first, his critical reading of Hinduism and his concept of “Brahmanical Hinduism” from 1936 and, second, his emancipatory reading of Buddhism, culminating in his book of 1957 and based upon his theorization of the Buddhist concepts of Dhamma and Sadhamma and the centrality of the life of Buddha. Similarly, his project of equality was based upon two major ideas. The first was the role of constitutional democracy in ensuring the rights for all: as chairman of the drafting committee of the Indian constitution, Ambedkar had given paramount importance to individual rights for all of the depressed communities; but to Ambedkar it was paramount that mere formal political liberty would be insufficient if not supplemented by real, greater social equality and social reform.⁶⁴ The second component was the role of Buddhism as a political, social, and moral project.

III. Lohia: Indian democratic socialism

Dr Ram Manohar Lohia was a founding member of the Congress Socialist Party, established in 1934, and a leading socialist intellectual in the post-independence years of the 1950s and 1960s. In many ways, he was a critical conscience keeper of the parliamentary democracy of independent India, forming an opposition that made the conditions of the common person the yardstick of the working of the nation. He was a frequent dissenter against the official party line of the Congress Socialist Party and against the Nehruvian state, continuously demanding the inclusion of the most neglected and marginalized masses. Over his lifetime, Lohia wrote extensively on aspects of the human condition that needed to be challenged, altered, and replaced by an equal and dignified life. His articles were published in Congress Socialist, Harijan, Jana, Mankind, and Janta; he wrote numerous letters, and gave important speeches. His key works include Wheel of History, Guilty Men of India’s Partition, Fragments of World Mind, Caste System in India, Economics after Marx, and Gandhi, Marx and Socialism.⁶⁵

Lohia’s thinking on inequality in India was mainly rooted in a socialist imagination of class-based economic thinking. But at the same time, it markedly departed from mainstream socialist thinking, which, like Ambedkar, he in many ways thought hinged too closely on a materialist interpretation.⁶⁶ Like Ambedkar, Lohia thought intersectionally about inequalities. He understood these in relation to caste, color, and gender – not just class – as when, in his 1950 book Wheel of History, he envisioned a new, “intelligent design” that would “try to achieve a multi-coloured harmony of human race.”⁶⁷ Politically, these views formed part of his exit from the Congress Socialist Party and his founding of the New Socialist Party in 1956. Ultimately, Lohia would have little political success, at least in comparison to another of the three great socialists of early independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru (the third being Jayaprakash Narayan), whose Indian National Congress party would reign almost sovereignly up until 1990.⁶⁸ As D. Kent-Carrasco notes, however, Lohia’s “poor political performance  …  as the leader of different socialist parties during the 1950s and early 1960s contrasts with the novelty and audacity of his thought.”⁶⁹ This novelty, we argue, was an intersectional understanding of inequalities. It set Lohia apart from other Samajwadis, or socialists.

Lohia’s thinking was intersectional in emphasizing caste, gender, class, and race. Indeed, as D. Kent-Carrasco rightfully argues, “more than any other socialist leader of his time, he [Lohia] reflected upon issues of caste, gender, language diversity and vernacular knowledge in the course of his intellectual development.”⁷⁰ Moreover, to Lohia, the radical reconstitution of Indian society would be incomplete if the non-economic sources of inequality and injustice were not addressed. Such a reconstitution could thus not be carried out simply through focusing upon economic conditions.⁷¹ To Lohia, a project of equality and justice would be a futile exercise as long as segregation existed among the masses, and as long as the caste system was upheld.

Like Ambedkar, then, Lohia was obviously well aware of the long history of the caste system that made it so difficult to overthrow.⁷² The problem was not limited to the existence of this unequal system in the material domain; its mental and psychological impacts on the nation and its people mattered too. With the routinization of caste-based hierarchies in the everyday acts of social life, the Indian way of life was shaped by caste practices and behavior. Or, as Lohia observed, “The great facts of life such as birth, death, marriage, feasts and other rituals move within the frame of caste. Men belonging to the same caste assist one another at these decisive acts.”⁷³ Referring to the upper caste consolidation as the “Brahmin–Bania alliance,” he wrote that the Brahmins (the priestly class) controlled the nation’s mind, while the Bania (the materially well-off class of bankers, traders, business-owners) controlled the belly. The existence of this alliance had severe consequences for the lower castes and for marginalized communities. The alliance manifested its power in almost all aspects of the nation’s political, social, economic, and cultural life. Inequalities rooted in the caste system – including its deep cultural and ideological embeddedness – intersected across all domains of life. To Lohia, one critical aspect of this was the inroads it ate into the social and hereditary determination of skills. This led to the categorization of certain skills as superior and others as inferior: the upper castes were construed as holding superior skills, the lower castes with skills that were inferior.

To a large degree, Lohia thus continued along the same lines as Ambedkar in his harsh criticism of the caste system. Indeed, there is resonance with Ambedkar’s thoughts in the latter’s argument that the problematic nature of the caste system and of graded inequality did not give credence to human worth but to birth – birth that (pre-)determined the life and vocational trajectories of the masses. Writing about skills, Lohia suggested something similar, namely that there was a predetermined set of skills one would possess – in the case of persons born of lower caste, a set of inferior skills.

Furthermore, Lohia noted that even if the high castes only constituted one-fifth of the population, they held on to four-fifths of the nation’s resources. Breaking with this high level of within-nation inequality, however, would require other means than following a typical socialist model. Due to the intersecting inequalities across gender, color, and labor and rooted in caste, a single-axis focus on class would be insufficient. In common with other Indian intellectuals, Lohia argued that India would need to find its own distinctive way of development, and that a Russian-modeled political and economic project was bound to fail.⁷⁴ For the greater part of his youth, Lohia had been deeply influenced by Marxism and its methods. Over time, however, he came to realize that each society needed its own set of solutions and frameworks, indigenous to its own needs. Lohia became highly critical of what he saw as Eurocentric Marxism, shifting instead toward his own distinct version of democratic socialism.⁷⁵ In and of itself, a socialist revolution would still keep alive the distinctions among the caste groups as they were divided into manual workers and those “with brains.” As Lohia wrote in his 1964 critique of the caste system,

In India of fixed castes, this distinction would spell ruin to the health of society. Workers with brains are fixed caste in Indian society, together with soldier caste, they are the high caste. Even after the completed economic and political revolution, they would continue to supply the managers of the state and industry. The mass of the people would be kept in a state of perpetual physical and mental lowliness at least comparatively.⁷⁶

The answer lay, instead, in acknowledging the intersectional nature of India’s challenges.

Lohia was deeply disturbed by the political milieu of his time. The various Indian political parties in his view never paid adequate attention to this framework of social, economic, and political inequities. He referred to all the parties as false advocates of the destruction of caste. As Lohia wrote in his fierce criticism of Indian elites,

This is what India’s political parties, Congress, Praja Socialist under Nehru’s leadership have in mind. They would want men and women of exceptional ability from the lower castes to join their rank. But they would want the structure as a whole to be kept intact. They are themselves drawn overwhelmingly from the higher castes. They have no hesitation in denouncing their caste or the distinction of high and low castes as long as their social group based on tradition, ability and manner is left unaffected.⁷⁷

To Lohia, in other words, the reservation system in its current state was by no means a sufficient politics for a more equal India.

Lohia recognized that the struggle to annihilate caste would be a lifelong mission. It would need to be combined with short-term reforms such as affirmative action, including political representation, participation, and leadership by the marginalized groups. In this latter category he included Dalits, women, and other of the backward castes, not only paying due attention to the intersectional attributes of their inequalities, but highlighting the need for representation in political leadership. As Lohia wrote, “It is essential for abolition of the caste system that such leaders should come from among the Shudras.”⁷⁸ In his fierce criticism of the caste system, then, Lohia was on a par with other key figures. It is certainly unsurprising that he communicated with Ambedkar, whom he invited to write and join a study group, about whom he gave speeches, and whom he welcomed into the Socialist Party.⁷⁹ Apart from exchanging his thoughts with Ambedkar, Lohia was also in communication with other key figures – for example E. V. Ramaswamy (also known as Periyar), leader of the Tamil-based party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the leader of the Self Respect Movement, one of the largest and most successful mass movements for dignified and equal selfhood in South India and for the original inhabitants.⁸⁰ In brief, on the question of how to eradicate caste-based inequalities, Lohia shared common ground with leaders of the depressed and backward communities. He embraced an organic and holistic intersectionality thinking on inequality.

In his radical advocacy of preferential treatment – like Ambedkar, who was the most influential figure in incorporating such measures into the 1950 Indian constitution – Lohia wanted to include many more who were discriminated against, including religious minorities such as Muslims. Indeed, Lohia was pushing the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in Indian society, advocating the inclusion of women, religious minorities, and lower castes. This was testimony to an intersectionality thinking which included a strong concern with religious minorities. Or, as Lohia wrote, “As far as possible the seed should be women, Harijans, Sudras and Muslims. They must be given the position of leadership. The Dvijas should be the manure which helps the seed to grow. Such a party has to be organised.”⁸¹ Again, Lohia called for immediate action. Like Ambedkar, who had a clear eye for how inequalities were legitimized and made to seem “natural” to the human condition in Hinduism, Lohia, writing some decades later, had a clear eye for this dimension too. As he wrote in his 1960 Marx, Gandhi and Socialism, “Inequality has thus come to be regarded as a part of human nature.”⁸²

Moreover, Lohia’s thinking on inequality was not confined to India. He had a deep understanding of global inequalities and an internationalist outlook, and he created ideas for a global parliament as well as for a world development agency.⁸³ Invoking global histories and extending the arguments of historical materialism, Lohia argued that the challenges of inequality plagued almost all societies. His preoccupation with inequality between nations obviously reflected a much deeper tendency at the time, when Indian leaders, not least Nehru, were central players in the Non-Aligned Movement. It was a movement not just defined by trying to defy the Cold War divide, but also by advocating more equality among nations and development “as an entitlement of the newly decolonized countries of Asia and Africa.”⁸⁴

To Lohia, greater equality for the people of India – within India and in its relations to other nations – was key in his politics and his thought. In “The Meaning of Equality” from his Marx, Gandhi and Socialism, for example, Lohia argued that the concept of equality was usually understood in terms of the two binaries of “Inward” and “Outward” and of “Spiritual” and “Material,” but that it instead needed to be understood holistically.⁸⁵ For him, equality had to be understood in four equally important dimensions: “inner material” (equality within a nation), “outer material” (equality among nations), “outer spiritual” (equality as kinship or fraternity), and “inner spiritual” (equality as equanimity, i.e. a religious, spiritual, and psychological state of evenness of temper or mind). It was along these lines that Lohia presented his distinct understanding of Samata or Samatva (terms that mean equanimity in Hindi). As Lohia wrote,

Equality is thus found to be inward and outward as well as spiritual and material. Equality must therefore be grasped in all its four meanings. Material equality must mean the outward approximation for nations well as inward approximation within the nation. Spiritual equality must mean outward kinship as much as it means inward equanimity. Only an integrated concept of these four meanings of equanimity, kinship, material equality within the nation and among nations is worthy to become a supreme aim of life and its purpose.⁸⁶

These egalitarian pursuits, designed to mitigate intersecting dimensions of inequality, were central to the human condition. They were not simply limited to a nation’s endeavors to provide equal access and opportunities, but also to ending or bridging the divide between nations.

Lohia’s holistic view of the so-called “seven revolutions” targeting inequality is a poignant example not only of a intersectional approach to inequality, but also of what C. A. Bayly has aptly termed a larger “amalgam” of different ideas and ideologies, an amalgam that became united under the term “democratic socialism,” which emerged during the political leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru (1947–1964).⁸⁷ Lohia fused together ideas of equality coming from very different traditions of thought. Key to Lohia was championing democratic socialism, forming an alternative to both the capitalist and the communist worlds – even if it was Ambedkar, not Lohia, who had been influenced by the thinking of John Dewey’s democratic socialism and pragmatism as he studied at Columbia University, New York, from 1913 to 1917.⁸⁸ A self-declared socialist as Lohia was, it can nonetheless be argued that several liberal principles ran through his works: declaring himself to be a “liberal in politics” (his own terms), he endorsed individual rights as well as limiting the role of the state in social life.⁸⁹ Indeed, as D. Kent-Carrasco notes in his fine account of how Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan were successful in reconceptualizing the meaning of “socialism” in the 1950s and 1960s, Lohia’s concept of “seven revolutions” (the “Sapt Kranti”) included a “revolution against the infringement of the individual by the collective.”⁹⁰ In a similar vein, Ambedkar was highly skeptical of a strong state.⁹¹ Moreover, Lohia was a champion of Third Worldism. He critiqued the post-war setup of neo-imperialism, and he thought Marxism was Eurocentric, suggesting that the newly independent societies should find their own ways and alternatives.⁹² Lohia advocated a distinct idea of Asian socialism, on the grounds that Indian socialists had extended their solidarities to other Asian countries with whom they shared similar historical and postcolonial trajectories. As Boris N. Tölle writes,

For the SPI [Socialist Party in India, founded in 1948], the new Asian orientation was an expression of its self confidence as an emancipated socialist party that rejected the instructive and dominant attitude of its European intellectual progenitors.⁹³

Lohia was at the forefront of this thinking as the Indian Socialist Party reached out to Burma, China, Ceylon, Indonesia, and socialist parties in Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and East Pakistan (Bangladesh).⁹⁴ Conceptually, Lohia developed his “Theory of equal irrelevance,” arguing against the two dominant blocs of capitalism and communism.⁹⁵

Lohia supported the central role of the state in a radical recalibration of Indian society. His ideal notion of the state was as a “Chaukhmaba State” – that is, a “four pillar state” of center, state, district, and village levels (grassroots levels). Moreover, key in his thinking on how to move toward a more equal society was his conception of the Sapt Kranti. These focused on the seven dimensions of social life that required transformation with revolutionary zeal. As Yadav explains,

In Lohia’s famous formulation, these seven dimensions included revolutions to end five kinds of inequalities-gender inequality, caste inequality (which for him was a generic name for any immobile stratification), class (which for him was the generic name for economic division that permitted mobility) inequality, racial inequality and inequality among nations.⁹⁶

In the larger scheme of Lohia’s ideas, the seven revolutions are arguably one of the most holistic suggestions for remedying the problems of inequality in India, rooted as they are in an intersectional approach to inequality avant la lettre, and with an extension to the global condition. To Lohia – who had witnessed racial and ethnic inequalities firsthand in his travels to the United States and Germany – global racial inequality was a deep-rooted condition that required immediate action, just like the caste problem in India.⁹⁷ To overcome inequalities, Lohia opted for the democratic tools of Spade (symbolizing constructive activity), Vote (political activity), and Prison (peaceful struggle against injustice), not supporting violent struggle but rather civil disobedience.⁹⁸ Indeed, Lohia was an ardent supporter of civil disobedience: this was a key Gandhian influence on his life and politics, even if he disagreed with Gandhi on many other issues. Another key means was parliamentary politics. The struggle against inequalities and injustices had to be waged both inside and outside parliament. As Lohia wrote, “It is futile to talk of revolutionary politics unaccompanied by efforts for social change.”⁹⁹ For Lohia, as for Ambedkar, the full-scale battle against inequalities was a moral and social battle, as well as a one to be channeled through party politics.

IV. Ambedkar and Lohia as organic intellectuals advancing the causes of the marginalized and oppressed

Though Ambedkar and Lohia to some extent were active in the same period, they never met. They did, however, exchange letters.¹⁰⁰ They both worked toward the emancipation of millions. Ambedkar was twenty years older than Lohia, who in many ways can be seen as the heir to Ambedkar’s legacy.¹⁰¹ Ambedkar and Lohia were both profoundly affected by realities and conditions on the ground, something of which they never lost sight. Both were thinkers, as well as political actors. “Unlike in the West,” as Sunil Purushotham notes in continuation of Shruti Kapila, “many of the important ideological innovators in the colonial and postcolonial world were more often than not also political practitioners concerned with changing the world rather than merely interpreting it.”¹⁰²

Both can be described as organic intellectuals who came from lower classes and were formed by their milieus, and who rose to higher levels of class and status but remained connected to the milieus in which they were formed.¹⁰³ As outlined in the introduction, we have suggested adding four additional meanings of the organic: first, as a living, flexible adaptation to circumstances and ideas (as opposed to mechanical adaptation); second, to capture how these two intellectuals addressed the importance of mitigating inequalities within their specific (religious) environment; third, organic adaptation is closely linked to the concept of hybridity, a term borrowed from biology and originally referring to a simple mixture of separate plants; fourth, organicity implies holism, as illustrated by the attempts here to understand inequalities within much broader, intersecting dimensions. We have argued that Ambedkar and Lohia represent what we have termed organic intersectionality, playing on these multiple meanings of affiliation (Gramsci), adaptation, embeddedness, hybridity, and holism.

Both of these thinkers approached inequality and social justice intersectionally in their thought. In their understanding of unequal Indian subjectivities, the caste system was, as we have seen, an all-important target for them both. Their concern for an existence in dignity and for human rights was defended alongside additional aspects besides caste, namely class, race, and gender. While Ambedkar did not use the term “human rights,” notions of political, civil, social, economic, and religious rights and “fundamental freedoms” are scattered across all of his work and liberal philosophy, in which rights played an all-important role.¹⁰⁴As Vidhu Verma has succinctly pointed out, Ambedkar’s

adaption of western concepts is reflected in the way he used to justify political rights of the Dalits based on democracy, fraternity and liberty  …  he conveyed the implication of these concepts in a single word, Manuski which means ‘humanness’.¹⁰⁵

On the questions of labor and the condition of workers, Ambedkar and Lohia were equally vocal. This became manifest in their writings in journals, newspapers, and pamphlets concerned with their party agendas. Ambedkar was deeply concerned with workers and their rights, rather than the agrarian question and the question of agricultural laborers. By contrast, Lohia based his activism on agrarian reforms and policies and was central in supporting, strengthening, and to some degree founding collectives for the rights of workers and farmers (Kisan Sabhas and Majdoor Sangh).¹⁰⁶

Another central similarity between the two was their concern with gender inequality.¹⁰⁷ In this they were exceptional among thinkers and leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi (with very few exceptions, such as Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy) in a general climate in which any serious engagement with gender inequality was absent.¹⁰⁸ Again, as in the question of caste, Ambedkar and Lohia shared a similar reading of how inequality structures had been formed in the past, tracing historical kinds of subjugation and oppression and critically reading the Hindu scriptures and texts. Their criticism, then, did not only concern Hinduism’s embodiment in – and justification of – the caste system, but also of its role in supporting patriarchal rule. Both Ambedkar and Lohia thus challenged the traditional mindset and systems of control, advancing the cause of radical womanhood.¹⁰⁹ Indeed, Sharmila Rege and Shailja Paik have proposed reading Ambedkar as a Dalit feminist – writing on women in many texts, such as Buddha and his Dhamma, and championing their cause in this work on the Hindu Code Bill.¹¹⁰ They emphasize his role and his contribution to the emancipation of women across all castes and communities in modern India.

A further property they had in common was a cosmopolitan outlook. In addition to their deep concern with the national, local, and immediate context, both shared a deep awareness of global inequalities. In this respect, “race” as a source of inequality in the United States, South Africa, and other parts of the world was a shared point of engagement.¹¹¹ While Ambedkar did not understand caste as a race category, he drew parallels between slavery and caste.¹¹² He also corresponded with W. E. B. Du Bois, one of America’s leading anti-racism activists and sociologists. Similarly, during Lohia’s travels to the United States in 1951 and in 1964, race and inequality were central to the many speeches he gave, campaigning against race-based discrimination.¹¹³

Arguably, this outlook toward other parts of the world can be seen in the light of how they both received their training in their early lives outside India. Ambedkar studied at Columbia University in the U.S. and the London School of Economics in England. Lohia originally set out for London in 1929, but moved to Humboldt University in Berlin – then a “relevant” center “of anticolonial activity” – where he studied until 1933, writing his 1932 doctoral dissertation in economics and political science on the (very Gandhian) issue of salt taxation in British India.¹¹⁴ In all likelihood, these years abroad made them aware of larger world dynamics and shaped their thinking, politics, and activism. Their experiences, research, and studies enabled them to view inequality in India from various perspectives. They engaged with various strands of intellectual, social, political, and economic traditions in British and European thinking, trained under minds like John Dewey (in the case of Ambedkar) and the German sociologist Werner Sombart (in the case of Lohia). These thinkers were key proponents of important political, social, and economic philosophies in their respective countries.¹¹⁵ Several scholars have even identified some form of Fabian socialism in the advocacy of Ambedkar and Lohia – something that has also has been suggested in the case of Jawaharlal Nehru, the most important politician and thinker of the time.¹¹⁶ Certainly, Ambedkar and Lohia’s awareness of other countries and cultures, their societal conditions, and other traditions of thought gave them a broad range of perspectives on their own national reality.

However, it is important to realize that when it came to creating more equality in India, both these thinkers argued that specific forms of exploitation required specific solutions. To both, the idea of simply imitating others was bound to fail in the long run. Or, as Rodrigues notes on Ambedkar, “He felt that the ideological articulation expressed in a specific society cannot offer blueprints for others.”¹¹⁷As we have seen, Lohia was a strong proponent of Third Worldism, Asian socialism, and democratic socialism, invoking these as alternatives to American capitalism as well as to the communism of Soviet Russia. Neither Ambedkar nor Lohia, then, simply “diffused” ideas from the West to India. They fused, merged and “patched together” different sets of ideas and ideologies, creating new and distinct hybrid modes of thinking about inequalities in India and how to diminish them.

Both stressed the state’s role in social transformation; but both strongly emphasized that the state had to be democratic and decentralized. Ambedkar supported constitutional democracy, placing utmost faith in the rule of law and constitutional morality; yet to him it was key that progressive ideas flowed throughout the entire society, through a process he metaphorically described with the biological term “endosmosis.” As he explained,

In an ideal society, there should be many interests consciously communicated and shared. There should be varied and free points of contact and other modes of association. In other words, there must be social endosmosis.¹¹⁸

To Lohia, similarly, democratic socialism was a framework for decentralized development – for freedom of the individual, a multi-party system, and for industrial, agrarian, and food reforms. Lohia’s unique contribution was in his suggestion of the Land Army and the Food Army, reclaiming wastelands and transforming them for agricultural purposes. This was one area where Lohia was more radical (and socialist) than Ambedkar, who had little to say about land and property rights. In terms of preferential treatment (as in the reservations policy), both supported affirmative action as something to be carried out by the state. As we have seen, however, Ambedkar came, in time, to dissent from the belief that constitutional liberalism was in itself sufficient. He opted instead for a social and moral revolution, himself turning to Buddhism as a force for moral and political change.¹¹⁹

Ambedkar and Lohia were public intellectuals shaping public discourse. Their critiques of the traditional holds on power shaped public imagination on various contemporary concerns. Invoked as the icons of the Dalit-Bahujan discourse – “Bahujan” meaning “the majority of the people” – their legacies came to shape the “silent revolution”: the rise of the lower castes and other marginalized groups since the 1960s.

V. Differing views on Hinduism, British colonialism, and villages

Ambedkar and Lohia both explained how the caste system was an all-important source and system of inequality. But in their reading and assessment of the feudal structure of Indian society, they differed. Where Ambedkar was a champion of liberal constitutionalism and of social justice, even if he turned toward Buddhism in the end, Lohia’s thinking was more socialist. In terms of strategy, Ambedkar was an “annihilationist,” famously using the phrase “annihilation of caste” from the mid-1930s onwards, and prompting Gandhi to go to quite some lengths in critiquing his uncompromising critique of Hinduism. Lohia was more of a reformist, influenced by Gandhian views on reform and believing in the possibility of reforming the segregative nature of the caste system. This difference also needs to be understood in the context of their reading of religion and scriptural sources. Where Ambedkar opted for a more radical, “external” critique of Hinduism-Brahmanism, Lohia’s was more of an internal criticism. Ambedkar attacked the high textual tradition of the Hindu Shastras through the lens of rationalism and his scientific temper. By contrast, as Yadav notes,

Lohia offers a radically different path of internal critique. He was simply not interested in the high textual tradition of Vedas or Dharamashastras. His favorite site was Hindu Mythology and epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata. His critique did not operate from outside: he picked up his counter symbols and counter-narratives from within these mythologies.¹²⁰

As they differed in their readings of Hinduism, so the two were on different sides of the political divide during the nationalist struggle. Lohia was an anti-imperialist like the other socialists, who saw imperialism as deeply connected with capitalism. By contrast, Ambedkar’s engagement with colonialism was, in some respects, not that critical. He saw colonialism as an opportunity to lift the lives and living standards of the many who never gained enough opportunities in life. Indeed, several scholars have argued that Ambedkar was ambivalent concerning the colonial question. By contrast, Lohia participated in the nationalist struggle for independence and was arrested numerous times. His disdain for imperialism was a significant motivation for his articulation of deep solidarities between the newly independent nations, a view that shaped his views on Third Worldism and solidarities across Asia. Central in his thinking was the shaping of Asian socialism as a path for postcolonial countries in their struggles against the capitalist and communist blocs.

Another difference was the emphasis Lohia placed on the villages in his politics of social transformation. Influenced in this respect by Gandhian views, Lohia supported village republics in the framework of decentralization, as well as the revival of the Panchayati Raj system for local self-government of villages. Yet Lohia was not a champion of “village self-sufficiency” in the Gandhian sense;¹²¹ nor did he share Gandhi’s negative views on technology and modernity. Instead, Lohia believed in the transformative potentials of technology. He was an advocate of small-unit, machine-based industrialization, developing the notion of a “small machine.” This was an alternative to the standard industrial model, a “brand of decentralized industrial production aimed at the attainment of village autonomy.”¹²²

Where Lohia thus brought to bear his own original thinking on technology to flatten out hierarchy in combination with village autonomy, Ambedkar, by contrast, mainly saw the Indian villages as spaces of backwardness and of the worst kind of discrimination. This disjuncture was significant for their politics of egalitarianism and social justice. Moreover, Ambedkar placed most weight upon the Dalits and the untouchables as the key social groups from which to fight the battle for egalitarian transformation, whereas Lohia’s key social group included all the marginalized and oppressed communities, including the Adivasis (tribes, Indigenous peoples) and Muslims. Though both spoke about marginalized and subjugated peoples, Ambedkar was thus more significantly a leader for the Dalits and the untouchables, whereas Lohia was a leader for the Bahujan – a broader term meaning the “majority of peoples,” encompassing a broader range of lower-placed social groups.

VI. Conclusions: Ambedkar and Lohia and the emergence of organic intersectionality

Like other societies, Indian society has historically been inherently unequal. Any discussion of the normative concerns of equality and justice would be incomplete without attention to the peculiar institution of caste, also because of its deep ramifications within all dimensions of the political, social, and economic fabrics of society. Indeed, the caste system continues to shape the social workings of India.

This article has revisited the intellectual history of inequality in the work of two key Indian intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century: B. R. Ambedkar and Ram Manohar Lohia. It is a contribution across research literatures on inequality in India, global intellectual history, and the intellectual history of inequality more broadly. To conclude, our main argument can be summed up with the claim that Ambedkar and Lohia can be seen as representatives of a unique Indian version of what we have proposed calling organic intersectionality. This main argument, in turn, hinges upon four subthemes: original affiliation and organicism; intersectionality and holism; religion, embeddedness, and adaptation; and hybridity.

First, we have argued that both Ambedkar and Lohia can be understood as “organic intellectuals.” Both came from suppressed social groups, and the ideas of both were organically influenced by their material and cultural roots. Both then rose to higher status, but continued to represent and stay in contact with the groups from which they came – the Dalits in Ambedkar’s case, a broader range of suppressed groups in Lohia’s. However, we have suggested that extra dimensions of “organicism” were in play which cannot be captured in this original Gramscian sense alone.

Second, we have argued that Ambedkar and Lohia, pivotal figures in the intellectual history of inequality in colonial and postcolonial India, both had a unique eye to the intersectional nature of Indian inequality, which cut across caste, class, race, and gender. Both thus offered a holistic view of inequality: the caste system was all-important in both their critiques of within-nation inequality, where their views on Hinduism played a seminal role. Both placed a great emphasis upon equality and justice; both pointed out that attempts at transformation would be futile if they did not address the deep and embedded nature of social, caste-based distinctions. Both were supporters of democracy, constitutionalism, and the rule of law. Yet they differed in key respects, such as the groups on whose behalf they mainly spoke, as well as questions of colonialism and imperialism. Lohia was gravely concerned not only with within-nation inequality, but also with between-nation inequality, as reflected in his writings and commitments to Third Worldism and Asian socialism during the Cold War – a context which had greater significance for Lohia than for Ambedkar, who died in 1957.

Third, our study of Ambedkar and Lohia shows that religion was a major factor in which their thinking was embedded and toward which it adapted. More specifically, we show that religion has played a dual role, as both an inequality-legitimizing and a delegitimizing device. This insight sheds new light on the intellectual history of inequality in India, and the role played by religion in it. In similar fashion, Thomas Piketty has taken up the Indian case of inequality at some length in his Capital and Ideology, attempting a more global history of inequality.¹²³ But whereas Piketty mainly studies the material levels of inequality in India as well as how it was legitimized, we have traced in more detail how the structures of inequality were critiqued, focusing upon the works of Ambedkar and Lohia. Where Piketty points to Hinduism and Brahmanism as religious ideologies legitimizing the inequality-producing caste system, our readings show that key figures in Indian intellectual history had very different views on Hinduism, pointing to the relevance of older religious traditions of thought in India, such as the shamanic traditions of Buddhism and Jainism. The critique of Brahmanism and the social order date far back in time. Our study shows that religion has also historically served as an inequality-delegitimizing device – for Ambedkar, through his Buddhism, and for Lohia, through his “internal critique” of Hinduism.

Fourth, in company with other scholars, we have argued not only against a diffusionist approach to global intellectual history whereby ideas are simply diffused from West to East, but also against a decolonial standpoint whereby Eurocentrism is simply replaced by its negative “other” of national or cultural purity and authenticity.¹²⁴ Instead, we have opted for the postcolonial notion of hybridity. The cases of Ambedkar and of Lohia exemplify how ideas merge and develop in hybrid, unique manners. Understanding this requires an attention to several contexts – to their training in Europe; to India under British rule; to Indian vernacular, religious, intellectual, and cultural traditions; and, crucially, to the material and institutional conditions of Indian society. Whereas many intellectual histories of inequality within Europe and its canonical figures exist, our study contributes to a more global (or transnational and transcultural) understanding of the intellectual histories of inequality. Revisiting these ideas is thus also informative for discussion in recent decades about decentering, “decanonizing,” and decolonizing thought. The ideas of Ambedkar and Lohia on equality and social justice provide an array of “patched together,” indigenous as well as Western concepts and ideas, an array that is usually missing from the larger lexicon of intellectual history. Both thinkers’ ideas developed in hybrid, unique manners, reflecting the influences of several ideational and material contexts. In all of these different ways, their thinking marked an emergence of organic intersectionality.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond: [Grant Number 8047-00068B].

Notes on contributors

Priyanka Jha

Priyanka Jha teaches in the Department of Political Science, Banaras Hindu University. She is interested in History of Political Thought in Modern India and Global Gendered Intellectual History.

Christian Olaf Christiansen

Christian Olaf Christiansen is an Intellectual Historian of Twentieth Century Political and Economic Ideas. From 2019-2024, he was the Principal Investigator of a project on the Global Intellectual History of Inequality.

Notes

1 On Ambedkar, see Begari, B. R. Ambedkar; Chakrabarty, Socio-Political Ideas of Ambedkar; Kumar, “Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar”; Kumar, “Ambedkar’s Inheritances”; Cháirez-Garza, “Touching Space”; Cháirez-Garza, “B. R. Ambedkar, Franz Boas”; Cháirez-Garza, “B. R. Ambedkar, Partition”; Cháirez-Garza, “Moving Untouched”. On Lohia, see Pathak and Jha, “Ram Manohar Lohia”; Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle over Meanings”; Yadav, “What is dead”; Yadav, “On Remembering Lohia”. For works on Indian intellectual history, see Chakrabarty and Pandey, Modern Indian Political Thought; Malik and Tomar, Revisiting.

2 See, however, Bhaskar, “Ambedkar, Lohia”; Yadav, “Ambedkar and Lohia”; Patnaik, “Lohia’s Immanent Critique”.

3 For the classic statement, see Gramsci, Prison Notebooks. To be sure, we are not the first to draw a link between Ambedkar and Gramsci’s notion of organic intellectuals. See Zene, Political Philosophies.

4 The classical formulation remains Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing”.

5 On Savarkar, see Visana “Glory and Humiliation”; Sabastian, “Women, Violence, Sovereignty”.

6 For a recent work which focuses only on religion as an inequality-legitimizing device, see Piketty, Capital et Idéologie, 361–427, 1067–74.

7 Christiansen, Guichon, and Mercader, “Towards a Global Intellectual History”.

8 Boele van Hensbroek, Political Discourses in African Thought, 4; also see Bhattacharya, “Introduction”, 18, who also writes of the “synthesisation of the modern with the traditional” and the “combination of exogenous ideas with indigenous reality”, 15.

9 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.

10 Boele van Hensbroek, Political Discourses, 4.

11 Key texts to understand these traditions are Guha, Makers of Modern India; Sen, The Argumentative Indian; Khilnani, The Idea of India; Zachariah, Developing India.

12 Bayly, “Ends of Liberalism”; Bose, “Cannibalized Career”; Chatterjee; “Curious Career”; Chakrabarty and Pandey, Modern Indian Political Thought; Malik and Tomar, Revisiting.

13 In somewhat similar vein, a recent book on twentieth-century Indian political intellectual history is divided into three sections of “liberal-reformist, moderate-Gandhian, and leftist-socialist,” placing Ambedkar in the first and Lohia in the latter category. Bhattacharya, “Introduction”, 12. For an interesting history of Indian political thought and action making the question of violence central, see Kapila, Violent Fraternity; also see Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic.

14 Yadav, “Ambedkar and Lohia”.

15 Pathak and Jha, “Ram Manohar Lohia”, 291.

16 Hancock, Intersectionality, 2–8.

17 Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Crenshaw,“Demarginalizing”; Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”.

18 Hancock, Intersectionality, 9.

19 Hancock, Intersectionality, 24.

20 Hancock, “Intersectionality as a Normative”, 249.

21 Hancock, Intersectionality, 24.

22 In the remainder of this article, when referring to their thinking, we deploy the terms intersectionality thinking (or simply intersectionality), even if intersectionality-like thinking is somewhat more precise.

23 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 2; Rodrigues, “Introduction”; Rodrigues, “Ambedkar as a Political Philosopher”; Verma, “Colonialism and Liberation”.

24 Rodrigues, “Dalit-Bahujan Discourse”.

25 Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle over Meanings”.

26 Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History.

27 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.

28 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 16.

29 Ibid., 4–5; also see 245–9.

30 Anderson, “Finding Decolonial Metaphors”; on hybridity also see Bhabha, The Location of Culture.

31 Anderson, “Finding Decolonial Metaphors”, 430.

32 Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity”.

33 Anderson, “Finding Decolonial Metaphors”, 438.

34 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 24.

35 Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy”.

36 Kumar, “Ambedkar’s Inheritances”, 391; also see Omvedt, Ambedkar: Towards and Enlightened India; Jaffrelot, Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability.

37 The government of India has compiled all his writings as Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches (BAWS) in 22 volumes so far, of which 17 are digitized and available at online government website (also see Rao, “Ambedkar in America”, 353). Crucial texts for understanding Ambedkar’s thinking are Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development (1916), Annihilation of Caste (1936), Who Were the Shudras? (1946), The Untouchables: Who were They and Why They Became Untouchables? (1948), The Buddha and his Dhamma (1957), Buddha or Karl Marx, Thoughts on Pakistan (1945), What Congress and Gandhi did to the Untouchables (1945), and States and Minorities: What are their Rights and How to Secure Them in the Constitution of India (1946). Apart from these, some of the edited works include Rodrigues’s The Essential Writings of B R Ambedkar and Sharmila Rege’s Against the Madness of Manu. In a growing literature on Ambedkar, see Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit; Omvedt, Ambedkar; Rathore, B. R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar also left behind some works which were published posthumously; see Kumar, “Ambedkar’s Inheritances.”.

38 Piketty, Capital et Idéologie, 410.

39 Ibid., 411.

40 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 5. Chakrabarty refers to Ambedkar, “Annihilation of Caste”.

41 Bayly, “The Ends of Liberalism”, 606. While mainly on Nehru, Bayly’s article also offers an analysis of Ambedkar’s position in the Constituent Assembly debates of 1946–1949.

42 As Lohia pointed out, India was divided up into “hundreds if not thousands of castes”. Lohia, “Caste”, 29.

43 Piketty, Capital et Idéologie, 408.

44 Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 67.

45 Ambedkar, Waiting for a Visa.

46 Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 67.

47 Ibid., 35.

48 Ibid., 35.

49 Kumar, “Ambedkar’s Inheritances”, 391; Ambedkar, The Buddha, 303.

50 Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 63.

51 Ibid., 63.

52 Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 28.

53 Ibid., 33.

54 Ambedkar, Buddha or Karl Marx.

55 Piketty, Capital et Idéologie, 421–2.

56 Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 71.

57 Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 71.

58 The Gandhi–Ambedkar debate on the caste question and issues like untouchability, its abolition, reform of the Hindu order, etc., have been among the biggest debates in modern India. See Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste; Ahir, Gandhi and Ambedkar; Puri, The Ambedkar–Gandhi Debate; Rodrigues, “Reading Texts and Traditions”; Roy, Doctor and Saint.

59 Ambedkar, “Gandhism”, 165.

60 Kumar, “Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar”, 111.

61 Devji, “An impossible founding”, 4. Also see Ambedkar, “What Way Emancipation?”, 142–4; Omvedt, Buddhism in India.

62 Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle over Meanings”, 13.

63 The so-called “Navayana Buddhism”, or “New Vehicle of Buddhism”, was based on Ambedkar’s interpretation of Buddhism. See Jha, “The Gaze on Justice”.

64 Devji, “An impossible founding”, 2.

65 Kapoor’s Collected Works of Dr Ram Manohar Lohia are central to understanding Lohia’s ideas; also see the EPW special issue edited by Yadav in 2010. For a biography, see Kelkar, Dr Ram Manohar Lohia; Prasad, Lohia: A Political Biography.

66 Chakrabarty and Pandey, “Ram Manohar Lohia”.

67 Quoted from Gupta, “Dr Lohia: Toward ‘New Socialism’”, 3.

68 Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle over Meanings”, 8.

69 Ibid., 8.

70 Ibid., 8.

71 This framework was emphasized with his taking over the General Secretaryship of the Socialist Party, which resulted in caste finding a larger place in the party’s program and manifestoes.

72 Lohia, The Caste System, 81.

73 Ibid., 81.

74 Bayly, “The Ends of Liberalism”; Chakrabarty and Pandey, Modern Indian Political Thought; Pathak and Jha, “Ram Manohar Lohia”.

75 See Lohia, Marx, Gandhi and Socialism; Lohia, Economics after Marx; Pathak and Jha, “Ram Manohar Lohia”, 281–3; Bhattacharya, “Introduction”, 14; Tolpadi, “Context, Discourse and Vision”.

76 Lohia, The Caste System, 97.

77 Ibid., 97.

78 Ibid., 17.

79 Lohia, “To Dr B R Ambedkar”, 70–1.

80 Lohia had met with Ramaswamy on 23 January 1958. Though he disapproved of D.M.K.’s specific mode of agitation and struggle, they shared similar concerns in the larger fight against the caste system.

81 Lohia, The Caste System, 65.

82 Lohia, Marx, Gandhi and Socialism, 222; Chakrabarty and Pandey, “Ram Manohar Lohia”.

83 Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle over Meanings”, 8; Pathak and Jha, “Ram Manohar Lohia”, 287–8; Chakrabarty and Pandey, Modern Indian Political Thought, ch. 10.

84 Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle over Meanings”, 2.

85 Lohia, Gandhi and Socialism, 222–41.

86 Ibid., 241.

87 Bayly, “The Ends of Liberalism”, 606. Bayly draws upon the theoretical concept of “amalgam” developed in Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics.

88 There were other influences upon him too. For excellent new archival work, see Anupama, “Ambedkar in America”; also see Bayly, “The Ends of Liberalism”, 607; Kumar, “Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar”, 119.

89 Bayly, “The Ends of Liberalism”, 607. Quote from Lohia in Lohia, “Marx, Gandhi and Socialism” (1963), in Kapoor, Collected Works of Rammanohar Lohia, 130–5.

90 Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle over Meanings”, 14.

91 Ambedkar, Karl Marx or Buddha.

92 Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle over Meanings”, 8.

93 Tölle, The Socialist Opposition, 123.

94 Socialist Party became Praja Socialist Party (P.S.P.); some Asian nations established the Asian Socialist Conference, with its first meeting in Rangoon, Burma, in 1953.

95 Thinking beyond the conceptual traditions of the first and second worlds was not something which was unique to Lohia. Compare Nehru, who wrote in his “The Basic Approach” that Western (liberal) as well as Marxist economics were outdated, and did not apply to the Indian case. See Purushotham, “World History”, 845; Nehru, “The Basic Approach”, 2–6. Lohia, however, thought that Nehruvian socialism was too reliant upon the Western model. See Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle over Meanings”, 10.

96 Yadav, “What is dead”, 99.

97 During his trip to the U.S. in 1961, Lohia lectured extensively on questions of racial equality at many academic and non-academic platforms.

98 Lohia, Marx, Gandhi and Socialism, is an important text that highlights his views and position on civil disobedience.

99 Lohia, Marx, Gandhi and Socialism, 16.

100 Some scholars have written about the Ambedkar–Lohia exchanges in debate and conversation and offered interpretations of what possible outcomes if they had worked more closely together. See Yadav, “Ambedkar and Lohia”; Patnaik, “Lohia’s Immanent Critique”.

101 See Yadav, “Ambedkar and Lohia”; Zene, Political Philosophies.

102 Purushotham, “World History”, 838; also see Kapila, “Global Intellectual History”.

103 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.

104 Kumar, “Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar”, 116. To the best of our knowledge, neither did Lohia use the exact term “human rights”.

105 Verma, “Colonialism and Liberation”, 2807; Verma refers to Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable to Dalit, 159. Ambedkar frequently invoked the terms liberty, equality, and fraternity – key terms in the French revolution; also see Chakrabarty and Pandey, Modern Indian Political Thought, ch. 10.

106 Robb, Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour in India; https://lohiatoday.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/socialistorganisation.pdf (accessed 9 February 2023).

107 See Reddy, “The rights of women”; Rajak, “Women’s question”; Chakrabarty, Socio-political Ideas; Pathak and Jha, “Ram Manohar Lohia”, 289f.

108 To be sure, Gandhi also expressed progressive views concerning women’s suffrage, juridical equality, and intellectual equality, but as feminist accounts have critically pointed out, Gandhi relegated the natural role for the female gender to home life, domestic affair, and chastity. Mookerjea-Leonard, “To be Pure or not to Be”. On Periyar and his idea of radical (sexual) freedom for women, see Manoharan, “Radical freedom”; on how Periyar appropriated Ambedkar’s ideas, see Manoharan, “In the Path of Ambedkar”.

109 On Lohia and women, also see Shrivastava, “Locating Lohia”.

110 See Rege, Against the Madness. Both Yadav and Kumar have read Lohia’s writings from a feminist standpoint. Also see Bhaskar, “Ambedkar, Lohia”; on Ambedkar’s legal work for women’s rights, see Kumar, “Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar”, 110, 117–18; Shrivastava, “Locating Lohia in Feminist Theory”, 69–74.

111 Ambedkar did see caste as a race category but drew parallels between slavery and caste in “Roots of the Problem”, “Parallel Cases”’ in Vol 5 of BAWS.

112 Ibid.

113 Wofford, Lohia and America Meet.

114 Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle over Meanings”, 7; Oesterheld, “Lohia as a Doctoral Student”; Pathak and Jha, “Ram Manohar Lohia”, 281.

115 Oesterheid, “Lohia as a Doctoral Student”; Kelkar, Dr Ram Manohar Lohia; Prasad, Lohia: A Political Biography.

116 Bayly, “The Ends of Liberalism”, 616.

117 Rodrigues, “Introduction”, 42.

118 Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste.

119 Devji, “An Impossible Founding”, 5.

120 Yadav, “Ambedkar and Lohia”, 7.

121 Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle over Meanings”, 10.

122 Ibid., 11; Pathak and Jha, “Ram Manohar Lohia”.

123 Piketty, Capital et Idéologie, 361–427, 1067–74.

124 Bayly, “The Ends of Liberalism”, 606; Kapila, “Global Intellectual History”; Christiansen, Guichon, and Mercader, “Towards a Global Intellectual History”.