b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy

B. R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of Democracy

Arun P. Mukherjee

New Literary History, Volume 40, Number 2, Spring 2009, pp.345-370 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0083

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New Literary History, 2009, 40: 345–370

B. R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of Democracy

Arun P. Mukherjee

India’s encounter with the West happened in a discursive frame-work that has come to be known as orientalism, thanks to Edward Said’s vastly influential book. To give a thumbnail sketch of a sub-

stantial body of research, British and German scholars, such as William Jones and Max Müller, were greatly fascinated by the ancient texts of Sanskrit and propagated the glories of an ancient civilization which, unfortunately, had lost its vitality through old age and such misfortunes as the invasions of the Islamic armies and one thousand years of Muslim rule. They claimed that India needed to be revitalized by the vigour of the newer and more masculine civilization of the Anglo-Saxons.

High caste Indians eagerly absorbed this discourse, whose most famous example perhaps is Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s 1882 novel, Anandmath, which provides a blueprint of a reinvigorated Hindu nation that will arrive after the Hindus have learned modern sciences from the Brit-ish.1 Few Indians besides B. R. Ambedkar challenged this discourse that glorifies a Brahminic corpus of ancient texts while totally ignoring its hierarchization of human beings into touchables and untouchables. He saw the world through a different lens, the one provided by his famous teacher, the American pragmatic philosopher John Dewey. This paper looks at the influence of Dewey on Ambedkar and Ambedkar’s refashion-ing of Deweyan thought into a tool for his own investigations of Indian history and culture. I suggest that studying this unique relationship can help us abandon the old racist and hierarchist ideologies, an absolute necessity in this era of globalization. As the tourism advertisements of the Government of India that use slogans such as “Incredible India!” and “five thousand years of unbroken civilization” demonstrate, the orientalist discourse of the glorious India is alive and well, just like the “manifest destiny” discourse of the United States of America. If living together in the global village has to be harmonious and peaceful, then such discourses of national uniqueness will have to be abandoned as so much dead wood. This was the project that both Dewey and Ambedkar embarked on, and studying their work together can help us learn about how to live as equals in this global village.

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Despite seven decades of marginalization by India’s political and intel-lectual elite, B. R. Ambedkar is now a major presence in the pantheon of Indian heroes. His statues now dot almost every Indian town and city, erected by his dalit 2 followers, for whom he is Babasaheb, the revered father. Most of his writings and speeches, publication of which was stalled for decades due to virulent opposition from some quarters, are now available, thanks to the Government of Maharashtra. However, to a large extent, Ambedkar the scholar remains unexplored. In a paper presented at a conference to celebrate Ambedkar’s birth centenary, Upendra Baxi remarked on this woeful lack:

I should begin this oration by a testimonial to a lack, an absence. The Indian social science landscape has disarticulated Babasaheb Ambedkar by studious theoretical silence. Even on the eve of his birth centenary, we do not have a complete corpus of his writings. Comparisons are odious, but we have organized corpus of texts of Mahatma, Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, and Patel (to mention a few examples). But Ambedkar’s corpus has just begun to emerge and that too, on the initiative of the Government of Maharashtra. If the market for knowledge is also operated on the laws of supply and demand, we have to ruefully conclude that Ambedkar’s construction of the Hindu society, nationalist movement, and resurgent postcolonial India, are cognitive commodities for which there is no organized demand either from epistemic entrepreneurs or by cognitive consum-ers in India.3

In his recent book, entitled Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System, Christophe Jaffrelot makes a similar observation: “Ambedkar began investigating the origins of the caste system more than a decade before Govind Sadashiv Ghurye—the first Indian anthropolo-gist to do so, whose Caste and Race in India was published in 1932. Yet his contribution to Indian sociology was overlooked for many years, as Olivier Herrenschmidt emphasises as a prelude to his own effort to redress this imbalance. The founding fathers of Indian anthropology, such as M. N. Srinivas and Louis Dumont, and most of their heirs, have ignored Ambedkar, even though he anticipated many of their arguments.”4 Jaf-frelot reveals that no university in India wished to be associated with the project of publishing the collected works of Ambedkar despite the millions of rupees reserved by the central government for the project.5 Suresh Mane says: “The communities of knowledge and communities of power, in their united silent conspiracy have tried their best to marginalize Baba-saheb, yet his presence is felt whenever the Rule of Law or Constitution is in jeopardy.”6 Ambedkar, with his iconoclastic critique of the Indian ruling class and its heroes, remains a sticking nail, an uncomfortable guest at the nationalist celebrations of India’s might. Some, like Arun Shourie, question his patriotism and accuse him of collaborating with

347b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy

the British.7 On the other hand, he has been hailed as the father of the Indian Constitution, the new “Manu”8 an analogy he would have found repugnant. Some have criticized him for narrowly focusing on collective rights and ignoring the individual.9 And the nativists have found him “too Western.”10 Ambedkar thus refuses to be encapsulated in a single story line, demanding that we pay attention to India’s heterogeneity and hierarchies of power.

A cosmopolitan spirit who had imbibed deeply of the Western scholar-ship of his time, Ambedkar is a global citizen in the realm of knowledge who saw the various societies around the world as exemplars of the different stages of humanity’s progress from barbarism to civilization. While the same categories were often tinged with the notions of racial superiority in the early twentieth century, Ambedkar’s sociological and anthropological analyses, beginning with his very first piece of scholarly writing, the paper entitled “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development,” delivered at the anthropology seminar of Dr. A. A. Goldenweizer at Columbia University in 1916, categorically rejected race in favor of explanatory constructs such as status and kinship. In making this choice, Ambedkar withstood, and in fact criticized, a trend that was widely popular among many academic, political, and religious quarters in the United States as well as Britain, Canada, and India. Instead, as I propose to argue in this paper, he opted for a theory of the human that is suffused with democratic ideals, namely, the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey, his teacher at Columbia University where Ambedkar studied from 1913 to 1916.

In an essay entitled, “Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s Philosophy of Emancipation and the Impact of John Dewey,” which is the only sustained treatment of the topic thus far, K. N. Kadam claims that Ambedkar was planning to write a book on Dewey and believes that his preliminary work on it has been lost.11 According to a frequently cited newspaper article by Clarke Blake, Ambedkar “took down every word that the great teacher uttered in his teaching. Ambedkar used to tell his friends that ‘[i]f Dewey died, I could reproduce every lecture verbatim.’”12 Kadam feels that “unless we understand something of John Dewey, . . . it would be impossible to understand Dr. Ambedkar.”13 I have tried to examine the intimate threads of influence and confluence that bind Ambedkar’s conceptualization of democracy to Dewey’s, particularly as detailed in the latter’s Democracy and Education.

Ambedkar’s writings mark his affiliation with Dewey through extensive quotations from Dewey’s work. So deeply embedded is Dewey’s thought in Ambedkar’s consciousness that quite often his words flow through Ambed-kar’s discourse without quotation marks. Ambedkar not only borrowed concepts and ideas from Dewey, his methodological approach and ways


of argumentation also show Dewey’s influence. The two thinkers share a predilection for examining the past to reflect upon its traces on the concerns and problems of the present and to determine how beneficial or detrimental these residues of the past are to the present moment. Both believe that change is fundamental to life and that the thought of any age is often circumscribed by the conditions of life operant at the time. Both therefore are suspicious of tradition worship and eternal truths. Thus, they both challenge the dominant teleological ideas of “providence” or “manifest destiny” as well as the determinist strands of Marxism. The human being, to them, is unique, incommensurate, and continuously unfolding, making and remaking its world through education and com-munication. Their human is not the atomistic, isolated individual of Enlightenment thought, but the individual always already embedded in the social. And, finally, for both, democracy is the ideal social order for the sustenance and growth of the socialized individual.

But democracy for them is not just a particular form of government. It is, they both claimed, “associated life,” a term that some of Dewey’s critics have found misty and vague.14 As I intend to demonstrate, the term and its various elaborations in Dewey’s work became major conceptual tools for Ambedkar to decode Indian society and to organize a plan of action to change it. It is important to insist that Ambedkar is not an armchair philosopher but a man of action, a political leader who fought a battle for the rights of the most marginalized people in India, a battle that is comparable, in many ways, to those fought by leaders like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. It is my contention that American neoprag-matists like Stanley Fish, were they to pay attention to this student of Dewey’s, would need to revise their contention that “if pragmatism is true it has nothing to say to us; no politics follows from it or is blocked by it; no morality attaches to it or is enjoined by it.”15

Ambedkar acknowledges his debt to Dewey in the final section of An-nihilation of Caste, a speech that was to be delivered at the 1936 Annual Conference of the Jat Pat Todak Mandal (Organization for the Destruction of Caste) of Lahore. The event was canceled because the organizers, who belonged to the reformist Hindu sect called Arya Samaj, and who wished to reform Hinduism by going back to the teachings and ritual practices inscribed in the Vedas, could not accept Ambedkar’s challenging of the Vedas. Ambedkar then published the speech at his own cost. After having demonstrated to his reform-minded listeners the absurdities and inequities propagated in ancient Sanskrit texts of Hindu law, the Vedas and the Shastras, and how inadequate they were as a guide to life in the present, the present, that is, of India’s independence struggle under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress party, Ambedkar uses Dewey’s words to contend that the Hindus need to discard a great deal

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of their heritage before they can suitably govern themselves: “the Hindus must consider whether they should conserve the whole of their social heritage or select what is helpful and transmit to future generations only that much and no more. Prof. John Dewey, who was my teacher and to whom I owe so much, has said: ‘Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse. . . As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to conserve and transmit the whole of its existing achieve-ments, but only such as make for a better future society.’”16

Dewey’s quotation in the above passage is from his Democracy and Educa-tion.17 This work had a lasting impact on Ambedkar and he quoted from it repeatedly, although not always with quotation marks. Dewey here is speaking about the education of the young and the type of education needed to build a democratic society. The issues that Ambedkar and Dewey raise in this passage have still not been settled: Will our society be governed by creationist or evolutionist principles? Shall we teach our young to question everything in the light of accumulated knowledge gained through what Dewey called “cooperative intelligence,” or tell them, for instance, that “Vedic science” and “Vedic mathematics” are the epitome of eternal truth? However, for Dewey as well as for Ambed-kar, these are not questions to be discussed in the abstract, as language games of philosophers. For Dewey, it is about schooling and what shall be taught to the children. Ambedkar applies Dewey to a concrete situa-tion to ask whether the high caste Hindu society can discriminate against some of its members and treat them as untouchables simply because the scriptures sanction such practice? In 1937, Ambedkar burned a copy of the Manusmriti at a rally in Mahad, Maharashtra, where over five thou-sand people had gathered under his leadership to protest against the denial by high caste Hindus of their basic right to take water from Lake Chavdar. Ambedkar, I would suggest, drags Dewey to the edge. Dewey only played with the matches when he reflected in subjunctives about the pernicious effect of idealizing the past. Ambedkar actually set the “dead wood” afire.

A few sentences later, Ambedkar goes on to quote another, somewhat lengthy passage from Dewey while exhorting Hindus to ask themselves “whether they must not cease to worship the past as supplying its [sic] ideals”:

The baneful effect of this worship of the past are [sic] best summed up by Prof. Dewey when he says: “An individual can live only in the present. The present is not just something which comes after the past; much less something produced by it. It is what life is in leaving the past behind it. The study of past products will not help us to understand the present. A knowledge of the past and its heritage

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Sticky Note

Creationism is the religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the"universe are the creation of a supernatural being. However, the term is more commonly used to refer to religiously motivated rejection of certain biological processes, in particular much of evolution, as an explanation accounting for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth


is of great significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise. And the mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main material of education is that it tends to make the past a rival of the present and the present a more or less futile imitation of the past.” The principle, which makes little of the present act of living and growing, naturally looks upon the present as empty and upon the future as remote. Such a principle is inimical to progress and is an hindrance to a strong and a steady current of life. (AC 79)

It is important to note that Ambedkar drops about half of one of the sentences from Dewey’s actual comment. The full sentence is as follows: “The study of past products will not help us understand the present, because the present is not due to the products, but to the life of which they were the products” (DE 88). By deleting part of the sentence and dropping the italicization, Ambedkar makes an important change in Dewey’s meaning. In the Indian context, Ambedkar can be read as say-ing that “the present is due to the products.” The past is, he suggests, what is written in the texts, and it is this textual past that is being used to shore up the present system of inequality to prevent people from making progress. Perhaps he was poking his Arya Samajist inviters in the eye for their pedagogical practice of starting the school day with ritual recitation of the Vedic mantras around the sacred fire. The difference between Dewey’s original and Ambedkar’s revision draws attention to the fact that while the former was expressing his opinions in a somewhat general and “safe” context, the latter was condemning his audience’s sacred and canonical texts.

As to his own role as critic and reviser, Ambedkar establishes his right to speak by using an argument similar to Dewey’s. According to Ambed-kar, “the assertion by the individual of his own opinions and beliefs, his own independence and interest as over against group standards, group authority and group interests is the beginning of all reform. But whether the reform will continue depends upon what scope the group affords for such individual assertion. If the group is tolerant and fair-minded in dealing with such individuals, they will continue to assert and in the end succeed in converting their fellows” (AC 56). In Dewey’s words, “Every new idea, every conception of things differing from that authorized by current belief, must have its origin in an individual.” It is not an easy process. Ideas “had to be fought for; many suffered for their intellectual independence” (DE 346). In Ambedkar’s case, after he published the undelivered speech, Gandhi criticized him for questioning the Vedas and their injunctions about following the calling proper to one’s caste.

However, in his review, Gandhi did not say anything about Ambedkar’s envisioning of an ideal society based on the democratic ideals of the French Revolution. While Gandhi had looked to the past, and invoked the ideal rule of the mythical King Ram as the model for the govern-

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ment of free India,18 that is, Ram Rajya, Ambedkar drew on Dewey to describe his ideal society:

If you ask me, my ideal would be a society based on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. And why not? What objection can there be to Fraternity? I cannot imagine any. An ideal society should be mobile, should be full of channels for conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts. In an ideal society there should be many interests consciously communicated and shared. There should be var-ied and free points of contact with other modes of association. In other words there must be social endosmosis. This is fraternity, which is only another name for democracy. Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellowmen. (AC 57)

A comparison of this passage by Ambedkar with the following comments by Dewey clearly demonstrates how Ambedkar culled sentences from Democracy and Education to describe his version of the ideal society.

A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. (DE 102)

In short, there are many interests consciously communicated and shared; and there are varied and free points of contact with other modes of association. (DE 97)

There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educate others into slaves. . . . A separation into a privileged and a subject-class prevents social endosmosis. The evils thereby affecting the superior class are less material and less perceptible, but equally real. (DE 97–98)

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of asso-ciated living, of conjoint communicated experience. . . . These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond. (DE 101)

Ambedkar condenses several pages of Dewey’s meandering, leisured prose to come up with his description of a democratic order. He begins with liberty, equality, and fraternity, terms that Dewey generally avoided as he felt that “isolated from communal life [they] are hopeless abstrac-tions,” and their “separate assertion leads to mushy sentimentalism.”19 Nonetheless, according to Dewey’s biographer, Robert B. Westbrook, he used them in his class: “The democratic ideal, Dewey told his class in political ethics, was embodied in the slogan of the French Revolution:

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liberty, equality and fraternity. By combining liberty and fraternity, one arrived at a positive conception of freedom: ‘individuality operating in and for the end of the common interest.’”20

What interests me most in Ambedkar’s borrowings from Dewey is the term “endosmosis,” which is used in the third passage quoted above. Ambedkar employed it frequently in his writing as a metaphor for com-munication in a democratic society. The term was used originally by Henri Bergson and, after him, by William James to describe the interaction of the mind with nature. Dewey appropriated it as a descriptor for interac-tion between social groups. In science, “endosmosis,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the passage of a fluid ‘inward’ through a porous septum, to mix with another fluid on the inside of it.” I suggest that it is a very vibrant metaphor for Ambedkarist and Deweyan think-ing on democracy. It conveys fluidity, channels through which groups and individuals in a democracy are linked and are, so to say, irrigated or suffused with the nutrient of each other’s creative intelligence. The “porous septum” is a separator, a membrane that provides for the privacy of the individuals but does not enclose them within impermeable walls. Thus the metaphor allows Dewey and Ambedkar to hold simultaneously the two apparently contradictory ideas of separateness and conjointness. A democratic social order is one in which there are “channels for the distribution of change occurring anywhere” as well as “varied and free points of contact.” Dewey reiterates his point in the summary of the chapter: “The two points selected by which to measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. . . . A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic” (DE 115). Ambedkar used these criteria to assess the caste-based Indian society as well as the actions of the Congress party’s leadership.

Dewey used the term to describe a present lack. “Social endosmosis” is blocked because society is divided into “a privileged and a subject-class.” Instead of fluidity and movement through channels, the “barriers of social stratification . . . make individuals impervious to the interests of others” (DE 141). Their “isolation and exclusiveness” and their “antiso-cial spirit” result in “distortion of emotional life” and “static and selfish ideals within the group” (DE 99). Such a situation occurs “wherever one group has interests ‘of its own’ which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the protection of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress through wider relationships” (DE 99). Ambedkar cites this last statement repeatedly

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to describe the exclusiveness of India’s high caste groups and how that prevents social endosmosis.

My investigation into Dewey’s extensive writings suggests that the term “social endosmosis” was used by him only once, in the excerpt quoted above. It has not been remarked on either by any of his numerous com-mentators. For Ambedkar, however, it becomes a major heuristic tool that he used repeatedly in his writings. When a society has groups that are separated into “a privileged and a subject class,” social endosmosis— free circulation of individuals, with various points of contact—cannot take place. A sort of atherosclerosis of the social body sets in. Ambed-kar’s frequent use of metaphors of disease and pathology to describe Indian society is thus an extension of the metaphorical possibilities of endosmosis.

While Annihilation of Caste was written in 1936, Ambedkar first used this metaphor, along with several unidentified quotations from Democracy and Education, in his presentation to the Southborough Committee on Franchise in 1919,21 soon after his return from the United States. In his presentation, Ambedkar uses a set of ideas from Dewey that he would continue to use again and again. However, Ambedkar inserts them in a political and historical context that needs to be understood first in order that the full import of his use of Dewey can be appreciated. “English-men,” he says, “have all along insisted that India is unfit for representa-tive Government because of the division of her population into castes and creeds. This does not carry conviction with the advanced wing of Indian politicians. When they say that there are also social divisions in Europe as there are in India they are amply supported by facts. The social divisions of India are equalled, if not outdone, in a country like the United States of America.” Ambedkar uses Dewey’s description of society in this argument between the British colonial power and the high caste Indian elite to insert himself and his community in the political debate that had entirely excluded them. He concedes the Indian politi-cians’ contention that there are social divisions in Europe. Indeed, he adds that they exist in the United States as well. Then, he proceeds to answer his Indian opponents’ question: “if with all the social division, the United States of America is fit for representative Government why not India?” Ambedkar gives the following reasons, weaving Dewey’s words into a new pattern:

How they [social divisions] matter can be best shown by understanding when they don’t matter. Men live in a community by virtue of the things they have in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge, a common understanding; or to use the language of the Sociologists, they must be like-minded. But how do they come to have these things in common or how do they become like-minded? Certainly

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not by sharing with another as one would do in the case of a piece of cake. To cultivate an attitude similar to others or to be like-minded with others is to be in communication with them or to participate in their activity. Persons do not become like-minded by merely living in physical proximity, any more than they cease to be like-minded by being distant from each other. Participation in a group is the only way of being like-minded with the group. Each group tends to create its own distinctive type of like-mindedness, but where there are more groups than one to be brought into political union, there would be conflict among the differently like-minded. And so long as the groups remain isolated the conflict is bound to continue and prevent the harmony of action. It is the isolation of the groups that is the chief evil. Where the groups allow of endosmosis, they cease to be evil. For endosmosis among the groups makes possible a resocialization of once socialized attitudes. In place of the old, it creates a new like-mindedness, . . . essential for an harmonious life, social or political and, as has just been shown, it depends upon the extent of communication, participation or endosmosis.22

The unidentified Dewey quotations in this passage are from page five of Democracy and Education, modified to fit into Ambedkar’s own argument. As Ambedkar used them in Annihilation of Caste, as well (AC 51), it is clear that Dewey’s formulation of democracy was very important for Ambedkar. It would, therefore, be useful to quote the passage from Dewey:

Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge—a common understanding—like-mindedness as the sociologists say. Such things cannot be passed physically from one to another, like bricks; they cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it into physical pieces. The communication which insures participation in a com-mon understanding is one which secures similar emotional and intellectual dispositions—like ways of responding to expectations and requirements.

Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles removed from others. (DE 5)

Ambedkar utilizes Dewey’s metaphor of sharing a “pie,” but modifies it slightly as a “piece of cake.” He had appropriately omitted it in Annihilation of Caste, observing the dietary rules of high caste Hindus, while retaining the analogy of the passing of “bricks.” Now that he is addressing a group of Englishmen, “piece of cake” is an effective and appropriate illustra-tion. And he adds another sentence from Dewey, slightly modified, to the excerpt that he was to use later in Annihilation of Caste: “Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles removed from others” (DE 5). The addition is significant because of the high caste


Hindu politicians’ insistence that untouchables were part of the Hindu community as they lived so close together. Ambedkar needed to explain why the untouchables needed separate electorates, that is, the right to choose their own representatives, when they lived in such close proxim-ity with high caste Hindus. It is because there is no “like-mindedness” among them, only likemindedness within the narrow confines of a caste. “But there is a real difference and consequent conflict between the like-mindedness of the touchables and the untouchables. Untouchability is the strongest ban on the endosmosis between them” (SCF 250).

Ambedkar continued to use “endosmosis” as a grounding concept, or concept-metaphor, to use Gayatri Spivak’s felicitous phrase,23 throughout his life. As I have tried to show, it expresses a cluster of ideas, not separately from, but in contestation with other ideas. “Endosmosis” is used not as a metaphor for one-to-one communication at the individual level, but for communication between groups, and, by extension, between socialized individuals representing their group identities. Ambedkar, using Dewey, speaks about the oppression of one group by another, about group rights and wrongs. Society, he says, does not only oppress individuals as individuals, but also for their group belonging.

Both Dewey and Ambedkar insisted upon the reality of social groups. To reiterate, for Dewey, the “two points selected by which to measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups” (DE 115). Thus, an individual is always already a member of a group, whether family or school or re-ligion, and is nurtured or harmed by this membership. The next level is the group-to-group interaction in the social constellation made of a multiplicity of groups. The issue at stake here is whether the group is permeable or exclusive. That Ambedkar returns to the Deweyan itera-tion of these ideas in his 1936 text, Annihilation of Caste, sixteen years after his representation to the Southborough Committee on Franchise, demonstrates how important this formulation was for him. I have already quoted the passage from this text, where Ambedkar speaks of his ideal vision of society, crisscrossed with “channels for conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts,” with “varied and free points of contact with other modes of association” (AC 57). But, Ambedkar, bor-rowing Dewey’s words, tells his audience that hierarchically arranged caste groups prevented the free movement of people and ideas precisely because there are no channels: “An anti-social spirit is found wherever one group has ‘interests of its own’ which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is protection of what it has got. This anti-social spirit, this spirit of protecting its own interests is as much a marked feature of the different castes in their isolation from

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one another as it is of nations in their isolation” (AC 52). By rephrasing Dewey here, Ambedkar was actually being less severe on his audience. Here is how Dewey says it: “The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its anti-social spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever one group has interests ‘of its own’ which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the protec-tion of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress through wider relationships. It marks nations in their isolation from one another; . . . schools when separated from the interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned and unlearned” (DE 99).

Ambedkar deployed Dewey’s notion of the antisocial group with “in-terests of its own” several times in his extensive writings. The problem, according to both Ambedkar and Dewey, is not that human beings create groups, but rather that some of these groups go on to become exclusive and shut others out. “It may be conceded that everywhere de facto society whether in the past or in the present is not a single whole but a collection of small groups devoted to diverse purposes as their immediate and particular objectives.” However, “although every society consists of groups there are societies in which the groups are only non-social while there are societies in which the groups are anti-social.”24 The antisocial groups’ purpose becomes the “protection of what [they] have got” and they refuse to share with others. This, according to Dewey and Ambedkar, destroys democracy. Thus, the two thinkers’ idea of de-mocracy is thought through not with the isolated individual with some abstract rights as the starting point, but with the individual as member of a social group. Group membership, that is to say, is an individual’s destiny: she is born in a certain family that belongs to a certain caste or class, that then leads to her membership in several other social groups. When there is free social interaction among these various groups and people can move through them easily, we have a democratic society. But the fact of the matter is that most present societies have groups that have “interests of their own” which leads to social conflict and the flouting of the democratic principles. Democracy, then, is an idea that we have to work for, and fight for.

Dewey felt that the American public school was an institution where children of parents belonging to antagonistic social groups came into con-tact. “Only in this way can the centrifugal forces set up by juxtaposition of different groups within one and the same political unit be counteracted” (DE 25). Ambedkar, too, demanded the inclusion of students from the lower strata of society in publicly funded institutions like Bombay Uni-versity. Speaking on the Amendment Bill for the Bombay University Act in 1927, Ambedkar protested the Bill’s assumption that the university’s job was simply to hold examinations and pass regulations. He demanded

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that members of poor and low caste communities be appointed to the senate so that they could ensure that children from these sections of society will not be deprived of education:

Sir, I think that that is a very narrow view of the University. One of the fundamental functions of the University, as I understand it, is to provide facilities for bringing the highest education to the doors of the needy and the poor. I do not think that any University in any civilised country can justify its existence if it merely deals with the problems of examinations and the granting of degrees. Now, if it is the duty of a modern university to provide facilities for the highest education to the backward communities, I think it will be accepted as a corollary that the backward communities should have some control in the University affairs. Sir, I look upon the University primarily as a machinery, whereby educational facilities are provided to all those who are intellectually capable of using those facilities to the best advantage, but who cannot avail themselves of those facilities for want of funds or for other handicaps in life. Now, Sir, it is said that the University is primarily a concern of the intelligentsia and of the educated classes, and that as the University is to function properly it is necessary that it should be controlled by what are called the educated classes. I would accept that principle, if the edu-cated classes who are going to control the University possessed what we called social virtues. If they, for instance, sympathised with the aspirations of the lower classes, if they recognised that the lower classes had rights, if they recognised that those rights must be respected, then probably we, coming from the backward communities, might well entrust our destinies to what are called the advance communities. But, Sir, for centuries we have had the bitterest experience of the rule of what are called the higher and the educated classes.25

Both Ambedkar and Dewey considered education essential for a demo-cratic society. However, the other members of the Bombay legislature, where Ambedkar gave the above speech, demonstrated remarkably hierar-chical attitudes that Ambedkar countered in his speeches. He demanded inclusion of the lower strata of society in every area of public life.

An analysis of Ambedkar’s representations to various commissions and committees, speeches in the legislature, and scholarly writings demonstrates not only how seriously Ambedkar took Dewey’s notion of “associated life,” but how he made it into a political weapon, the basis of his demand for representation. In What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, published in 1945, Ambedkar claims that the high caste Hindus and the untouchables live as total strangers: “Factu-ally the Hindus and the Untouchables are divided by a fence made of barbed wire. Notionally it is cordon sanitaire which the Untouchables have never been allowed to cross and can never hope to cross.”26 Ambedkar claims that under such conditions, “this Congress fight for liberty, if it succeeds, will mean liberty to the strong and the powerful to suppress the weak and the down-trodden unless they are protected by constitu-


tional safeguards” (WCG 236). He argues that the British government should not hand over power to the Congress and other organizations of the privileged until the claims of the untouchables were recognized. In reply to those who insisted that the institution of caste was just like the institution of class in the European society, and hence no barrier to political freedom, Ambedkar uses the Deweyan terminology that he had used in Annihilation of Caste in 1936:

There are other floating arguments against the claim of the Untouchables for political safeguards which must also be examined. One such argument is that there are social divisions everywhere, not merely in India but also in Europe; but they are not taken into account by the people of Europe in forming their constitutions. Why should they be taken into account in India? . . . In so far as it alleges that every society consists of groups it cannot be challenged. For even in European or American society there are groups associated together in various ways and for various purposes. . . . But when the statement goes beyond and says that the castes in India are not different from groups and classes in Europe and America it is nothing but an arrant nonsense. . . . In Europe the possibility of counteracting mischief arising from a group seeking to maintain “its own interest” does exist. It exists because of the absence of isolation and exclusiveness among the various groups which allows free scope for interaction with the result that the dominant purpose of a group to stand out for its own interests and always seek to protect them as something violate [sic] and sacred gives way to a broadening and socialization of its aims and purposes. This endosmosis between groups in Europe affects dispositions and produces a society which can be depended upon for community of thought, harmony of purposes and unity of action. But the case of India is totally different. The caste in India is exclusive and isolated. There is no interaction and no modification of aims and objects. What a caste or a combination of castes regard “as their own interest” as against other castes remains as sacred and inviolate as ever. (WCG 191–93)

In chapter nine, “A Plea to the Foreigner: Let Not Tyranny Have Free-dom to Enslave,” he tries to explain to left-wing foreigners, convinced by the Congress party’s claim to represent all sections of the Indian popula-tion, why they should not support the Congress’s claim to power unless it agreed to honor the claims of the untouchables. Here, too, the twin concepts of social groups and endosmosis are deployed:

In other countries, there is, at the most, a hyphen between the governing class and the rest. In India, there is a bar between the two. A hyphen is only separa-tion; but a bar is a severance with interests and sympathies completely divided. In other countries, there is a continuous replenishment of the governing class by the incorporation of others who do not belong to it but who have reached the same elevation as the governing class. In India, the governing class is a close corporation in which nobody, not born in it, is admitted. This distinction is very


important. In the case where the governing class is a close corporation, tradi-tion, social philosophy and social outlook remain unbroken and the distinction between masters and slaves, between privileged and unprivileged continues hard in substance and fast in colour. On the other hand, where the governing class is not a close preserve, where there is social endosmosis between it and the rest, there is a mental assimilation which makes the governing class more flexible, its philosophy less anti-social. (WCG 232–33)

That Ambedkar was beginning to despair of the high caste leadership doing anything to remove the barbed wire separating the untouchables from the touchables is evident in his 1936 warning to the audience of Annihilation of Caste that he had decided to leave Hinduism for a religion that was equalitarian. A manuscript entitled “Away from the Hindus” explores the reasons and ramifications of religious conversion for the untouchables. Ambedkar asks, “How can they end their social isolation? The one and the only way to end their social isolation is for the Un-touchables to establish kinship with and get themselves incorporated into another community which is free from the spirit of caste. The answer is quite simple and yet not many will readily accept its validity. The reason is, very few people realize the value and significance of kinship.”27 Ambed-kar goes on to quote an excerpt from Introduction to Social Psychology, a widely used textbook that was written jointly by Dewey and J. H. Tufts. Although Part I of the book, where the excerpt is from, was written by Tufts, the authors state in the preface that “each has contributed sug-gestions and criticisms to the work of the other in sufficient degree to make the book throughout a joint work.”28 The excerpt reflects on how an exclusive social group based on kinship provides special privileges to its members but denies them to those outside it. It provided a useful analogy for Ambedkar to describe the situation of the untouchables:

Inside the community there is no discrimination among those who are recognized as kindred bound by kinship. The community recognizes that every one within it is entitled to all the rights equally with others. As Professors Dewey and Tufts have pointed out: “A State may allow a citizen of another country to own land, to sue in its courts, and will usually give him a certain amount of protection, but the first-named rights are apt to be limited, and it is only a few years since Chief Justice Taney’s dictum stated the existing legal theory of the United States to be that the Negro ‘had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’ Even where legal theory does not recognize race or other distinctions, it is often hard in practice for an alien to get justice. In primitive clan or family groups this principle is in full force. Justice is a privilege which falls to a man as belonging to some group—not otherwise. The member of the clan or the household or the village community has a claim, but the Stranger has nothing [sic] standing. It may be treated kindly, as a guest, but he cannot demand ‘justice’ at the hands of any group but his own. In this conception of rights within the group we have


the prototype of modern civil law. The dealing of clan with clan is a matter of war or negotiation, not of law; and the clanless man is an ‘outlaw’ in fact as well as in name.” (AH 414; quoting a passage from ISP 32)

Except for the typographical error (“nothing” should be “no”), the substitution of “It” for he, and the capitalizations of “stranger” and “ne-gro,” the passage is correctly quoted. Dewey and Tufts deconstruct the notion that law is blind and suggest that justice is a “privilege which falls to a man belonging to some group—not otherwise.” The Negro, I assume Dewey and Tufts to be implying, will not get justice until he belongs to a group that can stand with him to demand justice. Ambedkar’s line of reasoning seems similar: “Kinship is the antithesis of isolation. For the Untouchables to establish kinship with another community is merely another name for ending their present state of isolation. Their isolation will never end so long as they remain Hindus” (AH 415).

This juxtaposition forces the reader to compare the situation of un-touchables to that of African Americans under the Jim Crow regime. And by extension, the high caste Hindus are comparable to the American white Southerners. Elsewhere, Ambedkar quotes Herbert Aptheker to show how the African Americans, despite all their contributions during the Civil War, were cheated out of their rights. Ambedkar speaks many times of the betrayal of African Americans’ rights. After demonstrating how the U. S. Supreme Court did not overturn their disenfranchisement and did not rule against the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan, Ambedkar comments: “The Untouchable cannot forget the fate of the Negroes. It is to prevent such treachery that the Untouchables have taken the attitude they have with regard to this ‘Fight for Freedom’” (WCG 176). Ambedkar compares Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln to draw an analogy between the fates of the black people and the untouchables: “Obviously the author of the famous Gettysberg [sic] oration about Government of the people, by the people and for the people would not have minded if his statement had taken the shape of government of the black people by the white people and for the white people provided there was union. Mr. Gandhi’s attitude towards Swaraj [Self Rule] and the Untouchables resembles very much the attitude of President Lincoln towards the two questions of the Negroes and the Union” (WCG 271).

Both Ambedkar and Dewey knew that merely passing laws was not enough to uphold democracy. In “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” a paper read by Dewey at the conference to celebrate his eightieth birthday, Dewey said: “Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, expe-riences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred.”29


Ambedkar expresses his lack of confidence in the efficacy of the law for excluded groups many times in his writings. In a statement presented to the Indian Statutory Commission of the British colonial government on May 29, 1928, he complained about how the administration, the police, and the justice system treated the untouchables. They were refused em-ployment in the police and the army, denied admission to schools, and their civil rights were violated with impunity: “They cannot live a cleaner and higher life, because to live above their prescribed station is opposed to the religious notions of the majority (item Nos. 1 and 6). So rigor-ous is the enforcement of the Social Code against the Depressed classes that any attempt on the part of the Depressed classes to exercise their elementary rights of citizenship only ends in provoking the majority to practice the worst form of social tyranny known to history. . . . Protection against such tyranny is usually to be found in the Police power of the state. But unfortunately in any struggle in which the Depressed classes are on the one side and the upper class of Hindus on the other, the Police power is always in league with the tyrant majority (item No. 11), for the simple reason that the Depressed classes have no footing whatsoever in the Police or in the Magistracy of the country.”30 At the Round Table Conference, convened by British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1930 to discuss the future of India, he again registered his frustration with “paper rights”: “What I am saying is this, that the constitution may give me certain rights, but I know that 99 percent of the people in India are not going to allow me to exercise those rights. What is the use of those paper rights to me unless the constitution provides that if anyone infringes my rights he is liable to certain penalties?”31

It is clear that for Ambedkar and Dewey, justice will be denied to those who are excluded from full participation in society. In a manuscript entitled “India and the Pre-Requisites of Communism,” of which only two chapters have been found, Ambedkar returns to the problem of the lack of social endosmosis in Hindu society:

Not so much the existence of classes as the spirit of isolation and exclusiveness which is inimical with a free social order. What a free social order endeavours to do is to maintain all channels of social endosmosis. This is possible only when the classes are free to share in an extensive number of common interests, undertakings and expenses, have a large number of values in common, when there is a free play back and forth, when they have an equable opportunity to receive and to take from others. Such social contacts [sic] must and does dissolve custom, makes for an alert and expanding mental life and not only occasion but demand reconstruction of mental attitudes. What is striking about the Hindu social order is its ban on free inter-change and inter-course between different classes of Hindu society. There is a bar against inter-dining and inter-marriage. But Manu goes to the length of interdicting ordinary social intercourse.32


Ambedkar’s demand of the British Government that the Indian Consti-tution mandate reservations in administration, in the legislature, and in the executive can be read as his attempts to promote social endosmosis through the use of government power. In an interesting extension of Dewey’s concept of “associated life,” Ambedkar demanded at the Round Table Conference that the propertied classes and the lower castes be treated equally when it came to the franchise: “If I understand the fran-chise, I understand it to be the right to regulate the terms of what one might call associated life in society” (ART 559). In his presentation to the Southborough Committee on Franchise that toured India during 1918–19, Ambedkar applied a similar Deweyan analysis and described government as another associative mode of life and therefore educa-tional. Borrowing liberally from Dewey, Ambedkar wove his words into a new combination to reach a new conclusion about the necessity for all Indians to participate in the task of governing:

It will be granted that each kind of association, as it is an educative environ-ment, exercises a formative influence on the active dispositions of its members. Consequently, what one is as a person is what one is as associated with others. A Government for the people, but not by the people, is sure to educate some into masters and others into subjects; because it is by the reflex effects of association that one can feel and measure the growth of personality. The growth of personal-ity is the highest aim of society. Social arrangement must secure free initiative and opportunity to every individual to assume any role he is capable of assuming provided it is socially desirable. A new role is a renewal and growth of personality. But when an association—and a Government is after all an association—is such that in it every role cannot be assumed by all, it tends to develop the personality of the few at the cost of the many—a result scrupulously to be avoided in the interest of Democracy. To be specific, it is not enough to be electors only. It is necessary to be law-makers; otherwise who can be law-makers will be masters of those who can only be electors. (SCF 251)

Dewey, too, spoke of the need for citizens “to take a determining part in making as well as obeying laws” (DE 140). However, Dewey felt that democracy in its current form in the United States, where powerful groups with “interests of their own” blocked others from participating, was far from ideal. John Patrick Diggins suggests that “Dewey’s going back and forth between the inadequacies of actual democracy and the promises of ideal community leaves unsolved the problem of how to move from democracy to community by an act of intelligent choice alone.” Diggins also feels that “Dewey rarely dealt with the question of human motiva-tion.”33 It seems to me that what Dewey does not offer is how to change the exclusionary and isolationist group so that it will either see the folly of its ways or, conversely, be defeated so that the power it controlled


can be shared more equitably. Perhaps the conservative climate of the American academy forced Dewey to abstain from tackling those issues directly, although he frequently speaks of them in a roundabout way. In his book, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth, Westbrook suggests that Dewey chose to be “circumspect” in his writings as the American universities often fired professors who had radical views.34

Ambedkar, however, did not have the luxury of circumspection, given that it was his community that was excluded from all forms of social participation. Ambedkar’s philosophical writings and political activism were fired by the desire to bring about change in society, both through persuasion and through direct action. One could say that his goal un-til 1936, the year he published his undelivered speech, Annihilation of Caste, was to persuade the exclusionist group to mend its ways, both in the name of the inherent dignity of the human being and in the name of social efficiency. Earlier in the paper, I have dealt with his Deweyan reconceptualization of democracy as “associated life,” as something more than a franchise-based election of representatives at regular intervals. Now I would like to turn to his argument about social efficiency, which is also heavily inflected with Deweyan vocabulary.

For both Ambedkar and Dewey, all we have is human effort and its product, society. Society, or social environment, is the ultimate horizon and human beings are capable of building a social environment that will nurture and protect its members. Both have faith in the human ability to build and continuously improve society, but there are no guarantees. Some societies remain arrested in barbarism and savagery because they have wasted the creative potential of the individual. Others grow and flourish because they liberate the human being’s potential to learn and to grow by allowing her freedom. Ambedkar adopts the Deweyan term “social efficiency” as a yardstick to judge Indian society. How deeply interpellated is Dewey in Ambedkar’s thought processes can be seen by comparing the following excerpts. The first one is Ambedkar’s, the second and the third ones are Dewey’s:

Social and individual efficiency requires us to develop the capacity of an individual to the point of competency to choose and to make his own career. This principle is violated in the Caste System in so far as it involves an attempt to appoint tasks to individuals in advance, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the social status of the parents. Looked at from another point of view this stratification of occupations which is the result of the Caste System is positively pernicious. . . . As a form of division of labour the Caste system suffers from another serious defect. The division of labour brought about by the Caste System is not a division based on choice. Individual sentiment, individual prefer-ence has no place in it. It is based on the dogma of predestination. Considerations of social efficiency would compel us to recognize that the greatest evil in the


industrial system is not so much poverty and the suffering that it involves as the fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to those who are engaged in them. Such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill-will and the desire to evade. (AC 47–48)

A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of competency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents. (DE 139–40)

Sentimentally, it may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the present régime is not found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them, which are pursued simply for the money reward that accrues. For such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a desire to slight and evade. (DE 370)

As we can see from comparing the passages, Ambedkar weaves Dewey’s sentences and phrases into his own critique of the caste system. In fact, on page 370, Dewey also uses the term “social predestination” to talk about the inequity of distribution of social opportunities and occupations based on class privilege. If Ambedkar substitutes Dewey’s “A democratic criterion,” with “social and individual efficiency” while retaining the rest of his sentence, it does not really change Dewey’s meaning as the section where the sentence comes from is subtitled “Social Efficiency as Aim.” It would appear that for both, a democratic society is also the society that is based on the principle of social efficiency. Ambedkar’s condensing of Dewey’s comments from different sections of his book into a single paragraph demonstrates how deeply he had absorbed not just Dewey’s arguments but also his language.

By using “social efficiency” as a criterion to criticize the caste system, Ambedkar shifts the discourse around caste from the Gandhian terms of “social evil,” “sin,” and “repentance” to one about caste as a barrier to India’s modernization and progress. He transforms the religion-tinged discourse into one about building a social order that is efficient and does not waste its human resources. Both for him and for Dewey, this efficiency can be achieved not by coercing individuals, but by providing them with a choice of vocation and education that will enhance their “original capacities.” Ambedkar demonstrates that the caste system, when it forces people to follow hereditary occupations, not only restrains individual liberty, but also becomes an impediment to the growth and progress of society. Thus, while the Congress leadership and Gandhi maintained that the caste system was a social matter and not relevant to the political struggle to attain freedom from colonial rule, Ambedkar


brought it into the discourse of civil liberties and the individual’s right to choose. It just so happens that it is also the most efficient method to make things better.

For both Ambedkar and Dewey, the right to choose one’s occupation is a major aspect of democracy. Coerced into a job, either because of the caste system or because of the capitalist system, “neither men’s hearts nor their minds are in their work[.] As an economic organization Caste is therefore a harmful institution, inasmuch as, it involves the subordina-tion of man’s natural powers and inclinations to the exigencies of social rules” (AC 48). Dewey goes one step further when he claims that right livelihood is the key to happiness: “An occupation is the only thing which balances the distinctive capacity of an individual with his social service. To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness” (DE 360).

Ambedkar’s attempt to persuade the Indian elite that the ancient Varna system, the four tiered caste system whose apex consisted of Brahmins and bottom of untouchables, was inconsistent with democracy as well as socially inefficient fell on deaf ears. Gandhi, in his review of Annihila-tion of Caste, in Harijan, July 18, 1936, insisted that the individual must follow his ancestral calling: “The law of Varna teaches us that we have each one of us to earn our bread by following the ancestral calling. It defines not our rights but our duties. . . . Indeed one traces even now in the villages the faint lines of this healthy operation of the law.”35 So what was dead and diseased for Ambedkar was a symbol of health for Gandhi. Elsewhere Gandhi defended the system of ancestral callings as superior to the European idea of choice as it prevented class conflict.

While the Gandhian idea of social cohesion was based on an externally given divine law, Ambedkar and Dewey insisted that the individual only consented to obey the law because he had a hand in making it. Duty could not be imposed from without. It had to be felt from within. Indi-viduals do consent to authority if it is established democratically and if it is established to promote their welfare.

In Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar warned the high caste Hindus that it was the last time he was going to speak to them because he had made up his mind to convert to another religion that would treat him with the dignity that he deserved as a human being. By 1935, based on his interactions with Gandhi at the Round Table Conference of 1931 and Gandhi’s subsequent fast unto death in 1932 to prevent the granting of separate electorates to the untouchables, Ambedkar seems to have made up his mind that the high caste Hindu leadership of the Congress party was not interested in championing the rights of the untouchables. However, there is evidence that right up to 1932 Ambedkar tried the way of persuasion and dialogue. Besides fighting for the rights of the


untouchables in the political arena, he sought for ways which would bring the high caste Hindus and untouchables together in social settings. In a 1932 letter to A. V. Thakkar, secretary of the Harijan Sevak Sangh (Society of Servants of Harijans), an organization started by Gandhi for the welfare of the untouchables, Ambedkar made several suggestions about how the Sangh could help the untouchables. One of these was to make Congressmen employ untouchables as servants:

[The Sangh] should attempt to dissolve that nausea, which the touchables feel towards the Untouchables and which is the reason why the two sections have remained so much apart as to constitute separate and distinct entities. In my opinion the best way of achieving it is to establish closer contact between the two. Only a common cycle of participation can help people to overcome the strange-ness of feeling which one has, when brought into contact with the other. Nothing can do this more effectively in my opinion than the admission of the Depressed Classes to the houses of the caste Hindus as guests or servants. The live contact thus established will familiarize both to a common and associated life and will pave the way for that unity which we are all striving after. (WCG 138)

“A common and associated life,” Ambedkar insisted repeatedly, was the prerequisite for people to get motivated to participate in any political struggle. The suggestion given in the letter appears modest, but given that Thakkar never responded to Ambedkar’s letter, one can conclude that Gandhi did not think that Congress members would allow untouch-ables in their homes, either as guests or as servants. Indeed, the Sangh, instead of working to bring touchables and untouchables together in social spaces, worked to build separate wells and separate schools for untouchables.

Ambedkar was deeply disappointed by this body for various reasons, but a very important reason was Gandhi’s refusal to allow untouchables to serve on its board. While Ambedkar, and indeed many other represen-tatives of the community who questioned Gandhi about this exclusion, wanted participation in every area of associated life and a share in deci-sion making on things which would affect them, Gandhi failed to grasp the importance of this principle. As Ambedkar observed: “Mr. Gandhi has propounded a new doctrine to console the deputations. He says: ‘the Welfare work for the Untouchables is a penance which the Hindus have to do for the sin of Untouchability. The money that has been col-lected has been contributed by the Hindus. From both points of view the Hindus alone must run the Sangh. Neither ethics nor right would justify Untouchables in claiming a seat on the Board of the Sangh.’ Mr. Gandhi does not realize how greatly he has insulted the Untouchables by his doctrine, the ingenuity of which has not succeeded in concealing its gross and coarse character” (WCG 142).


The passage quoted above comes from What Congress and Gandhi have Done to the Untouchables, a text Ambedkar wrote in 1945 in the hope of reaching out to people both in India and abroad to explain what he saw as the betrayal of untouchables’ interests by the Congress and Gandhi. Quoting profusely from Gandhi’s writings to demonstrate that he sup-ported the Varna system, the capitalist mill owners, and the big landlords, Ambedkar declared that Gandhi did not believe in democracy. He ac-cused the Congress of being run by “capitalists, landlords, money-lenders and reactionaries,” and fighting only for “national liberty” and not for “political democracy” (WCG 236). He told his foreign readers that an “ideology which has vitiated parliamentary democracy is the failure to realize that political democracy cannot succeed where there is no social and economic democracy. . . . Social and economic democracy are [sic] the tissues and the fibre of a political democracy. The tougher the tissue and the fibre, the greater the strength of the body. Democracy is another name for equality.” He said that because parliamentary democracy had forgotten the principle of equality, “liberty swallowed equality and has made democracy a name and a farce” (WCG 447).

In 1947, after India’s independence, Ambedkar accepted India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru’s invitation to join independent India’s first government as Law Minister and headed the “Drafting Committee” that prepared the Constitution. Though Ambedkar ended up doing the majority of the work on the Committee, the draft Constitution was a result of compromises and, by 1949, he had become so disillusioned with India’s parliamentary democracy that he raged: “I myself will burn the Constitution!”36 His misgivings were recorded in the speech he gave in the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949. Here, too, we can recognize Dewey’s presence: “We must make our political democracy a social democracy as well. Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it, social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life, which recognize [sic] liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life. . . . On the 26th January, 1950,37 we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. . . . We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy, which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.”38

Disappointed with the Congress party’s conservative agenda, Ambedkar resigned from the cabinet on September 27, 1951. He devoted himself to writing and speaking to various audiences on democracy. These pub-lished and unpublished writings reverberate with Ambedkar’s dialogue with Dewey. Indeed, I would suggest that “social endosmosis” became a key concept for Ambedkar, which he also deployed to speculate about


the origin of the caste system as a result of Brahmin domination of other social groups. As the comparison of Buddha’s thought with Dewey and Marx in a manuscript entitled “Buddha or Karl Marx” suggests, he also found Dewey’s ideas compatible with Buddha’s, particularly Dewey’s views on the use of force and the relationship of means to the desired end.39

Both Ambedkar and Dewey have left an extensive corpus and, as I hope to have shown, a comparative study of their works will yield rich dividends. Ambedkar’s politics and writings demonstrate that philosophy can grow more than cabbages. Today, Dewey’s words, interwoven with Ambedkar’s, speak from multifarious locations: in committees’ and par-liamentary records, in writings on Ambedkar, and now, on various Web sites on Ambedkar in cyberspace. It is important to recognize this piece of the pattern of Ambedkar’s life and work. Reading him in isolation, without paying attention to his dialogue with Dewey, as well as with an astounding number of other thinkers both contemporary and from the past, does justice neither to the richness and complexity of his thought nor to his belief in the common destiny of humanity.

York University, Toronto

NOTES

1 See, for example, Alok K. Mukherjee, This Gift of English: English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2009), 85–105.2 The term is derived from the Sanskrit root dal, which means to crack open, split, crush, grind, and so forth. Appropriated by untouchable activists and intellectuals, including Ambedkar, it has been used as a noun and an adjective since the early decades of twentieth century to metaphorically describe the extreme oppression of untouchables. 3 Upendra Baxi, “Emancipation as Justice: Legacy and Vision of Dr Ambedkar,” in From Periphery to Centre Stage: Ambedkar, Ambedkarism and Dalit Future, ed. K. C. Yadav (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000), 49.4 Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005), 31.5 Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar, 144.6 Suresh Mane, “Constitution and Dr. Ambedkar’s Vision for Social Change,” in Ambedkar on Law, Constitution, and Social Justice, ed. Mohammad Shabbir (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2005), 248.7 Arun Shourie, Worshipping False Gods: Ambedkar, and the Facts Which Have Been Erased (New Delhi: ASA Pub., 1997).8 The ancient Hindu sage widely regarded by high caste Hindus as India’s preeminent law giver, best known for his work, Manusmriti, or the Code of Manu, which his critics consider to be antiwoman and anti-low caste.9 M. A. Kishore, “Dr. B. R. Ambedkar: His Approach Towards Human Rights,” in Ambedkar on Law, Constitution and Social Justice, ed. Mohammad Shabbir, 234–35.10 Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar, 144.11 K. N. Kadam, “Dr. Ambedkar’s Philosophy of Emancipation and the Impact of John Dewey,” in The Meaning of Ambedkarite Conversion to Buddhism and Other Essays (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1997), 1–33.


12 Quoted in Dinkar Khabde, Dr. Ambedkar and Western Thinkers (Pune: Sugava Prakashan, 1989), 42.13 Kadam, “Dr. Ambedkar’s Philosophy,” v.14 See, for example, John Patrick Diggins, “Pragmatism and Its Limits,” in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1998), 209.15 Stanley Fish, “Truth and Toilets: Pragmatism and the Practices of Life,” in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, 419.16 B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste with a Reply to Mahatma Gandhi (1936), in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, vol. 1, compiled by Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1979), 79, original ellipsis (hereafter cited as AC).17 John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1916; New York: Macmillan, 1958), 24 (hereafter cited as DE).18 Hindus regard Ram as the ideal king, whose reign, called Ram Rajya, or the rule of Ram, is deemed to have been just, fair, and harmonious.19 Quoted in Diggins, “Pragmatism and its Limits,” in The Revival of Pragmatism, 212.20 Robert B Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), 93.21 This committee, headed by Lord Southborough, was sent by the British government to inquire into electoral arrangements for India’s multireligious population.22 Ambedkar, “Evidence Before the Southborough Committee on Franchise” (1919), in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, vol. 1, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1979), 248–49 (hereafter cited as “SCF”).23 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 198.24 Ambedkar, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution” (undated manuscript), in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, vol. 3, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1987), 305–6.25 Ambedkar, “On the Bombay University Act Amendment Bill: 4” (1927), in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, vol. 2, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1982), 61–62.26 Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945), in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, vol. 9, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1991), 187 (hereafter cited as WCG).27 Ambedkar, “Away from the Hindus” (undated manuscript), in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, vol. 5, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department, Govern-ment of Maharashtra, 1989), 413 (hereafter cited as “AH”).28 Dewey and J. H. Tufts, Introduction to Social Psychology (1908), reprinted as John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 5, 1908, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1978), 6 (hereafter cited as ISP).29 Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” in The Philosopher of the Common Man: Essays in Honor of John Dewey to Celebrate His Eightieth Birthday (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 225.30 Ambedkar, “Submission to the Indian Statutory Commission” [1928], in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, compiled by Vasant Moon, 2:445–46.31 Ambedkar, “Dr. Ambedkar at the Round Table Conference,” in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, vol. 2, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay: Education Department, Govern-ment of Maharashtra, 1982), 538 (hereafter cited as “ART”).32 Ambedkar, “India and the Pre-Prequisites of Communism” [undated manuscript], in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, 3:113; see also Dewey, DE 97.33 Diggins, “Pragmatism and its Limits,” 213.


34 Westbrook, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2005), 86.35 Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Dr. Ambedkar’s Indictment” [1936], in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, 1:83.36 Quoted in Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1994), 325.37 On this date, independent India adopted a new constitution, and became a democratic republic, with an elected Parliament replacing the Constituent Assembly.38 Quoted in James Massey, “Dr. Ambedkar’s Vision of a Just Society,” in Ambedkar on Law, Constitution and Social Justice, 168–69.39 Ambedkar, “Buddha or Karl Marx” [undated manuscript], in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, 3:451.

b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy

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