From untouchable to dalit : essays on the Ambedkar movement

My use of the title From Untouchable to Dalit was to indicate the idea that the Untouchables of India had themselves chosen a new identity, that of "dalit"-ground down, oppressed-to indicate their lack of belief in being polluting, their sense that their condition was the fault of the caste system, and their inclusion in the Ambedkar movement of all those subordinated by their religious, social and economic status. The word is now current among all those who subscribe to these beliefs, although "harijan" is still current among Gandhians and many high castes and "Scheduled Castes" is the legal term for Untouchables. I have used the term, aware that not all Dalits are comfortable with it, to indicate the vitality and innovation of the Ambedkar movement.

In the short space of time since this book was published in 1992 there have been some new developments in the Ambedkar movement and a great many new publications. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar continues to be ever more important, although almost forty years have passed since his death in 1956. What is even more interesting, however, is that there continue to be innovations in the religious, social, political, educational worlds that he attempted to change.

For the first time, the Dalit movement of western India has been thoroughly analyzed. Gail Omvedt has taken the upper Deccan Maharashtra, Andhra and Karnataka, the Marathi, Telugu and Kannada speaking areas as her field, and brought into play geographic and pre historic factors as well as history and sociological analysis. In my mind, it is the most creative Marxism since D.D. Kosambi. Omvedt explains why the Phule-Ambedkar movement has been omitted or marginalized in most histories of modern India: caste was seen as subsumed in class by Marxist and leftist historians (who dominate the field); the nationalist movement was idealized as inclusive of all India by nationalist historians, who saw pre Independence history "only in terms of political opposition to a foreign power" (Omvedt 1994:16). She analyzes Ambedkarism with a keen sense of Ambedkar's own total grounding in Indian reality. Her title, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution, indicates her understanding of the democratic vision of Dr. Ambedkar, even as he struggled with varied economic and political ideologies. While there are many biographies of Dr. Ambedkar, none (including my own unpublished 1969 Ph.D. thesis) have probed Ambedkar's writings as thoroughly or analyzed Ambedkar's political and economic choices and his responses as carefully or docu-mented his rejection of caste and Brahmanism and "Nehruvian secularism" (Omvedt 1994:242) as well. Her work has been facilitation by the series of Writings and Speeches of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, edited by Vasant Moon and published by the Government of Maharashtra. These volumes, soon to number seventeen, allow a close study of all Ambedkar's thought.

Another new sociological analysis by M.S. Gore (1993) has been made possible by the accessibility of the Ambedkar volumes and the republication of Ambedkar's Marathi editorials by Ratnakar Ganvir. Using Robert K. Merton's theory of the sociology of knowledge, Gore first sets Ambedkar's thought in a universal paradigm and then sets that ideology in a chronological historic perspective. Gore's note on his late consciousness of the importance of Ambedkar is touching, and his study is set both in the context of his earlier devotion to Nehru and Gandhi and his more recent studies of the non-Brahman movement (1989) and Maharshi Shinde (1990) and in his policy of using Ambedkar's own writings rather than involvement with the movement and its participants.