Ambedkar and Gandhi Debate

Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences?
Author(s): Aakash Singh

Source: International Journal of Hindu Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3 (December 2014), pp. 413-449
Published by: Springer
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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable
Differences?
Aakash Singh
I know Gandhi better than his disciples. They came to him as devotees
and saw only the Mahatma. I was an opponent, and I saw the bare man
in him. He showed me his fangs.
-B.R. Ambedkar1
Mohandas K. Gandhi's relationship with other epoch makers of his

time—whether allies like Jawaharlal Nehru, friends like Rabindranath
Tagore, or antagonistic rivals like Mohammed Ali Jinnah—was never
straightforward, uncomplicated, or free of turbulence. One of the most
controversial relationships was that between Gandhi and Bhimrao Ramji
Ambedkar, the "untouchable" genius who rose rapidly to prominence
throughout India and abroad and came to represent his community, the
Dalits, and to serve India in several capacities, most famously perhaps
as the chair of the Constitutional Drafting Committee. Scrutinizing the
relationship between Gandhi and Ambedkar, to be sure, is of crucial
importance to a proper understanding of both of these pioneering figures,
in spite and perhaps because of their notorious rivalry. As Upendra Baxi
has argued, "Our understanding of leading historic figures like Gandhi or
Nehru is bound to remain incomplete, both in the sense of biography and
history, in the absence of the grasp of their relations with Ambedkar."
The rivalry between Gandhi and Ambedkar lives on through polemics
in street-corner debates, newspaper columns, blogs, books, documentary
films, and so on, often with aggressive insults parlayed between the pro
International Journal of Hindu Studies 18, 3: 413-449

© 2014 Springer
DOI 10.1007/s 11407-014-9167-5
414 / Aakash Singh
Ambedkar, anti-Gandhi group and the pro-Gandhi, anti-Ambedkar group.

And indeed, the numerous differences between Gandhi and Ambedkar
during their own lifetimes are always evoked in support of the contempo
rary enmity between their followers. Ramachandra Guha has well encap
sulated many of these differences:
Gandhi wished to save Hinduism by abolishing untouchability, whereas

Ambedkar saw a solution for his people outside the fold of the dominant
religion of the Indian people. Gandhi was a rural romantic, who wished
to make the self-governing village the bedrock of free India; Ambedkar
an admirer of city life and modern technology who dismissed the Indian
village as a den of iniquity. Gandhi was a crypto-anarchist who favoured
non-violent protest while being suspicious of the state; Ambedkar a
steadfast constitutionalist, who worked within the state and sought solu
"3
tions to social problems with the aid of the state.
Of late, however, a growing number of prominent intellectuals have been

attempting to find ways of reconciling these camps, giving both Gandhi
and Ambedkar due credit and respect for their lifelong struggles and
attempting to find the numerous and profound ways that they worked
toward the same goals and in a similar spirit. For example, in his essay
"Gandhi-Ambedkar Interface: When Shall the Twain Meet?," Suhas
Palshikar presents the case that Gandhian and Ambedkarian discourses
were not antithetical.4 Both were fundamentally concerned with emanci
pation, despite their different approaches and areas of concentration.
Palshikar adds that when we consider how contemporary social move
ments have lost emancipation as a concern and have devolved to exclu
sively local issues, it is increasingly urgent to see the unifying theme of
emancipation between Gandhi and Ambedkar and to synergize this in
order to unite their factions toward this important shared aim.
In this paper I shall discuss three of the finest examples of these recon
ciliatory efforts; namely, the work of Thomas Pantham, Ramachandra
Guha, and Partha Chatterjee. I have chosen these three scholars from
among so many others because each attempts to resolve the tension
between the pro-Ambedkar, anti-Gandhi group and the pro-Gandhi, anti
Ambedkar group essentially by dissolving the personal quarrel between
Ambedkar and Gandhi in three rather different, though, as we shall see,
Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? / 415
not unlinked, paradigmatic ways. Among the three, Pantham attempts to

uncover the greatest degree of homogeneity in Gandhi's and Ambedkar's
aims, following Palshikar in his linkage of Gandhi and Ambedkar through
their fundamental goal of emancipation: "In their truly emancipatory
though largely different ways...Gandhi...and...Ambedkar...both shared
a genuine and deep commitment to the eradication of untouchability."5
For Guha, it is within a broader historical narrative that we find the diverg
ing and often conflicting work of Gandhi and Ambedkar harmonized and
reconciled. Guha does not homogenize the aims and activities of Gandhi
and Ambedkar during their own lifetimes as Pantham tries to do, but
rather unites them retrospectively in the historical tapestry within which
they both clearly participated constructively:
Whereas in their lifetime Gandhi and Ambedkar were political rivals,

now, decades after their death, it should be possible to see their contri
butions as complementing one another's....The history of Dalit emanci
pation is unfinished, and for the most part unwritten. It should, and will,
find space for many heroes. Ambedkar and Gandhi will do nicely for a
start.6
The reconciliation attempted by Chatteijee is the most tenuous; at the

same time, the most sophisticated of the three discussed here. It partakes
of elements both of Pantham's homogenizing gesture as well as of Guha's
historicizing maneuver, but also overcomes them both in a sort of subla
tion (in the Hegelian sense of cancellation and preservation) as structural
moments; that is, Chatteijee's is a dialectical reconciliation where homo
geneity and heterogeneity interplay and play out, on the one hand, on the
historical stage and, on the other, within the political scientist's pure
theory. According to Chatterjee's dialectic, Ambedkar "had no quarrel
with the idea of the homogenous nation as a pedagogical category" and
would have agreed with Gandhi
that it was not just the ignorant masses that needed training in proper
citizenship but the upper-caste elite as well....But Ambedkar refused to
join Gandhi in performing that homogeneity in constitutional negotiations
over citizenship....Homogeneity breaks down on one plane....Hetero
geneity, unstoppable at one point, is forcibly suppressed at another.
416 / Aakash Singh
While I appreciate the efforts and condone the motive behind attemp
ting to resolve the conflict between these two giants of Indian history, I
am in fact quite skeptical about the validity of such attempts of recon
ciliation. After presenting the positions of Pantham, Guha, and Chatterjee,
I shall attempt to fully lay out the reasons that ground my skepticism.
These grounds—or at the great risk of being pedantic, the grounds for the
grounds—are primarily two. First, in spite of Gandhi's indisputable abhor
rence of the practice of untouchability, he nevertheless seemed to remain
attached to an idealized version of the varna system, a system to which
Ambedkar was inalterably and profoundly opposed and which indeec: he
was intent on completely "annihilating." This immediately throws into
question the homogeneity of aim defended by Pantham. Second, in starkest
possible contrast to Gandhi's romanticist nostalgia for a pre-modern orga
nization of human society and economy (which some regard as post
modern rather than pre-modern8), Ambedkar was through and through a
pro-enlightenment modernist. The fusion of these two fundamentally
contradictory outlooks—exemplified through the metonym of the Indian
village and Gandhi's and Ambedkar's radically opposing estimations of
it—has proved well-nigh impossible, as I shall discuss and illustrate
further in the conclusion of the paper.
While it is true to say that Gandhi and Ambedkar were united in their
fundamentally emancipatory aim for the untouchables, reconciliation on
that ground is thin. The real questions are: emancipation from what and
into what? In light of these crucial issues, discussed below in further
detail, attempts to reconcile Gandhi and Ambedkar ring false in several
decisive respects. Homogeneity of aim, such as Pantham presents, breaks
down if one chooses not to peg emancipation simply to the Gandhian aim
of abolition of untouchability, but instead to the Ambedkarian aim of the
total annihilation of caste.
Furthermore, retrospective historical reconciliation, such as Guha pre

sents, assumes a certain privileged view over where we presently stand;
it plucks us out from and places us, in a way, at the end of history—
beyond the politics of identity, beyond electoral, communal, ethnic and
cultural politics, beyond the politics of history, and beyond all the other
social, economic and political clashes that were being played out by
Gandhi and Ambedkar and that we are ourselves inevitably currently still
immersed in. The very fact that Guha's article takes shape as a polemic
against Arun Shourie is itself evidence that the historian's view is privi
leged only insofar as it is retrospective, but this does not make it a view
from nowhere—the historian is himself very much immersed in space
and time, in politics and history. Certainly, as Guha may rebut, we now
live in the Republic of India, a sovereign nation-state guided by the great
Indian (Ambedkarian, but also Gandhian) Constitution, and it is from this
vantage point that we look back upon these two men and reconcile them.
But all these names and notions are not fundamentally uncontested.
Indeed, it is the burden of Chatterjee's writings to show that the smooth
and seamless historical discourse—transparent, rational, progressivist—
is masking what is arguably the nature of real political practices in India.
If Pantham's homogenizing reconciliation is thrown into doubt by the
first of my above-mentioned two grounds for skepticism and Guha's
historical reconciliation is thrown into doubt by Chatteijee's work itself,
what of Chatterjee's dialectical reconciliation? This is where the second
of my two grounds for skepticism comes into play. As I shall argue,
Chatterjee's dialectical reconciliation of Gandhi and Ambedkar smacks
of an appropriation of the latter to revitalize and legitimize a scholarly
movement—namely, subaltern studies—that had strangely turned its back
on Ambedkar for years. The post-modernist influence of post-colonial
theory, allied with the pre-modemist Gandhians, found the ultra-modernist
Ambedkar impossible to digest. But the exclusion of this subaltern par
excellence from the concern of post-colonial theory was an irony too
cynical even for post-modernists to cope with. Chatteijee's reconciliation
seems, therefore, too instrumental to be fully convincing.
As mentioned already, these thoughts and arguments shall be further
clarified in the concluding section. We begin, however, with a prelimi
nary groundwork: observing first-hand the nature and magnitude of the
quarrel between Gandhi and Ambedkar, such that the heroic efforts of
those scholars who have expended so much energy attempting to reconcile
them may be brought out into fullest possible relief.
The Gandhi-Ambedkar Dispute
He was never a Mahatma. I refused to call him Mahatma....He doesn't
deserve that title. Not even from the point of view of his morality.
—B.R. Ambedkar9
418 / Aakash Singh
These harsh judgments of Ambedkar occur within the context of his recol
lection of Gandhi's hunger fast in the lead-up to the Poona Pact, where
Ambedkar was more or less presented with the impossible alternatives
of, on the one hand, permitting Gandhi to starve to death in order that the
untouchable communities be granted special voting privileges within
democratic elections or, on the other hand, giving in to Gandhi's demand
for normal, undivided general elections for the untouchables, thereby
radically decreasing their political influence but saving Gandhi's life.
Ambedkar gave in to Gandhi, and Gandhi broke his fast. After this event,
Ambedkar became increasingly bitter toward Gandhi's movement and
his biopolitical methods.10
On the eve of Gandhi's fast, Ambedkar enjoined him in these words
addressed publicly:
I hope that the Mahatma will desist from carrying out the extreme step
contemplated by him. We mean no harm to the Hindu society when we
demand separate electorates. If we choose separate electorates, we do
so in order to avoid the total dependence on the sweet will of the Caste
Hindus in matters affecting our destiny....The Mahatma is...fostering
the spirit of hatred between the Hindu Community and the Depressed
Classes by resorting to this method and thereby widening the existing
gulf between the two.11
Many writers—though not Pantham, as we shall see below—view this

unfortunate event as the paradigmatic conflict between Gandhi and
Ambedkar. Actually, the situation is far more complicated. In an inter
view conducted for BBC radio in 1955, Ambedkar, nearing the end of his
life, spoke candidly about Gandhi, withholding none of the acrimony that
had accumulated over the years since his coerced submission to Gandhi
decades before. In reply to the interviewer's question, "So you would say
Gandhi was an orthodox Hindu?," Ambedkar answered:
Yes, he was absolutely an orthodox Hindu. He was never a reformer.

He has no dynamics in him....All this talk about untouchability was
just for the purpose of making the untouchables drawn into the
Congress; that was one thing. And secondly, he wanted that the untouch
ables would not oppose his movement of Swaraj. I don't think beyond
12
that he had any motive of uplift....
In the same interview, Ambedkar characterized Gandhi as a cunning poli

tician rather than as a Mahatma:
[Gandhi] was very much afraid that the scheduled castes would be sort
of as independent a body as the Sikhs and the Muslims were. And that
the Hindus would be left alone, to fight a battle against a combination
of these three sections. That was what was at the back of his mind, and
he didn't want the Hindus to be left without any allies.13
For his part, in contrast, Gandhi did not speak harshly of Ambedkar in
any known public forum, nor did he communicate enmity openly against
Ambedkar even though he was well aware of the harsh critiques both
stated and published by Ambedkar against Gandhi. In a letter to Ambedkar
(dated August 6, 1944), Gandhi wrote:
The Hindu-Muslim question is for me a lifelong question. There was a

time when I used to think that when that question was solved India's
political troubles would be over. Experience has taught me that it was
only partly true. Untouchability I began to abhor when I was in my
teens, But it was a question with me of religious and social reform.
And though it has attained a great political importance its religious and
social value is for me much greater. But I know to my cost that you
and I hold different views on this very important question. And I know,
too, that on broad politics of the country we see things from different
angles. I would love to find a meeting ground between us on both the
questions. I know your great ability and I would love to own you as a
colleague and co-worker. But I must admit my failure to come nearer
to you. If you can show me a way to a common meeting ground between
us I would like to see it. Meanwhile, I must reconcile myself to the
present unfortunate difference.14
As is apparent from Ambedkar's 1955 assessment, the "present unfortu

nate difference" to which Gandhi had to reconcile himself was not itself
reconciled in any subsequent events. The politics of the era pitted Gandhi
and Ambedkar as antagonists on too many issues and on issues so crucial
420 / Aakash Singh
to their persons and personalities that the bridging of their divide would
have been nearly impossible. As mentioned, until recent efforts at recon
ciliation, the Gandhi camp has often had a blind spot vis-à-vis Ambedkar
and the Ambedkar camp has often been dismissive of or even hostile to
the legacy of Gandhi. Interestingly, however, a pioneering Dalit-Gandhian
literary historian and writer, D.R. Nagaraj, foreshadowed much of these
efforts through dramatized scenes of Gandhi and Ambedkar musing on
the fate and developments of India in the fifty years post-independence.
In his collection of essays on the Dalit movement in India, The Flaming
Feet, Nagaraj imagines Ambedkar and Gandhi occupying adjoining cham
bers in heaven, looking down on India in 1997, the fiftieth anniversary of
India's independence. Ambedkar, displeased with the stubborn persistence
of religious superstition, notes that his "intimate enemy, that Gujarati
Bania Mr Gandhi, also does not like these things." In the other room, we
find Gandhi wondering, "how Hind Swaraj would be if my nextdoor
neighbour, the learned Baba-saheb, had written it?"15 Gandhi humorously
concedes that the rationalistic economist Ambedkar would have improved
the argumentation of the work by appending all the relevant statistics.
Nagaraj was certainly unique in the 1980s and early 1990s for admiring
both Gandhi and Ambedkar; and by explaining with insight and sympathy
the constraints faced by each of them, he paved the way for a broad rec
onciliation between their respective camps. Further, Nagaraj showed that
Gandhi and Ambedkar mutually influenced each other in the course of
their debates and argumentation. By learning of the discrimination per
sonally faced by Ambedkar even at the height of his prominence, Gandhi
became more sensitive to the structural roots of caste discrimination. At
the same time, through Gandhi's rhetoric of self-purification of the caste

Hindus, Ambedkar came to recognize that Dalit emancipation required
an element of moral regeneration alongside economic opportunity. By
honoring both Gandhi and Ambedkar, Nagaraj stated that he was battling
"deep-rooted prejudices," which urged their followers to adhere to only
one or the other, and also "wishful thinking," which deluded one into the
mistaken belief that only one of the two provided the unique answer to
the Dalit problem.16 Thus he permits the transit from the wide chasm of
differences between Gandhi and Ambedkar to the various recent attempts
at reconciliation. This was indeed his own stated goal: "from the view
point of the present, there is a compelling necessity to achieve a synthesis
Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences ? / 421
of the two."17 He goes so far as to label the unbridgeable gap between

them as "the greatest paradox of modern Indian history"; that is, he fails
to understand how it is possible that "both Gandhian and Ambedkarite
perceptions of the issue are partially true, and the contending visions are
yet to comprehend each other fully."18 We shall now turn to some promi
nent attempts to forge comprehension and synthesis between these two
contending visions.
Thomas Pantham: Reconciliation through Homogenization
Thomas Pantham, in a thoughtful and well-researched study of the com

plex relationship between Gandhi and Ambedkar and their respective
discourses, seeks to follow Suhas Palshikar in his effort at "building
bridges between the two rich discourses of our times."19 Pantham states:
Such a bridge-building calls for interpretive understanding, by us, of

the making of our complex political heritage from the mutually con
ditioned and, arguably, complementary or compatible emancipatory
interventions of Gandhi, Ambedkar, and other thinker-leaders of our
Freedom Movement.20
Along this line, Pantham attempts to sketch and underscore the ways in
which Gandhi and Ambedkar had "interlocked and arguably comple
mentary/compatible discursive approaches to the eradication of untouch
ability."21
And indeed, Pantham adduces numerous eloquent and moving appeals
made by Gandhi against untouchability, about which he spoke in the
most uncompromising of terms:
The advice I receive from one and all is that if I do not exclude the
Antyajas [untouchables] from the national schools, the movement for

swaraj [self-rule] will end in smoke. If I have even a little of the Vaish
nava in me, God will also vouchsafe me the strength to reject the
swaraj which may be won by abandoning the Antyajas.22
Gandhi was in accord with Ambedkar on the idea that an independent

India free of British rule but one where the untouchables were oppressed
422 / Aakash Singh
by the Hindu majority would be a zero-sum gain, an empty victory. True

swaraj would not countenance this hypocrisy:
If it is necessary for us to buy peace with the Mussalmans as a condi

tion of Swaraj, it is equally necessary for us to give peace to the Panch
ama (untouchables) before we can with any show of justice or self
respect talk of Swaraj....Hence for me the movement of swaraj is a
23
movement of self-purification.
Moreover, according to Pantham, Gandhi's abhorrence of untouchability

was grounded in a fundamentally democratic and egalitarian estimation
of humanity, also radically championed by Ambedkar:
When I ask you to purify your hearts of untouchability, I ask of you

nothing less than this—that you should believe in the fundamental
unity and equality of man. I invite you all to forget that there are any
distinctions of high and low among the children of one and the same
God.24
This vehement and indeed politically risky opposition to untouchability

on the part of Gandhi drew the attention and respect of Ambedkar early
on. Of course, Ambedkar urged even greater effort and deeper commit
ment, but nevertheless acknowledged Gandhi for what he had undertaken.
In a 1925 speech Ambedkar stated:
Before Mahatma Gandhi, no politician in this country maintained that

it is necessary to remove social injustice here in order to do away with
tension and conflict, and that every Indian should consider it his sacred
duty to do so....However, if one looks closely, one finds there is a slight
disharmony...for he does not insist on the removal of untouchability as
much as he insists on the propagation of Khaddar [home-spun cloth] or
the Hindu-Muslim unity. If he had he would have made the removal of
untouchability a precondition of voting in the party. Well, be that as it
may, when one is spurned by everyone, even the sympathy shown by
Mahatma Gandhi is of no little importance.25
It also seems that the 1920s held out some promise for closer and more
unified strategic and ideological alliance between Gandhi and Ambedkar,

and the assumption of at least some central motifs of Gandhi's thought
were visible in certain of Ambedkar's discourses of that decade. For
example, in a 1927 speech, Ambedkar takes up Gandhi's vocabulary of

self-purification:
No lasting progress can be achieved unless we put ourselves through a

three-fold process of purification. We must improve the general tone of
our demeanor, re-tone our pronunciations and revitalize our thoughts.
I, therefore, ask you now to take a vow from this moment to renounce
eating carrion....Make an unflinching resolve not to eat the thrown-out
crumbs. We will attain self-elevation only if we learn self-help, regain
our self-respect, and gain self-knowledge.26
Although by the early 1930s the differences between Gandhi and Ambed
kar, especially (though not exclusively) over the separate electorates for
the untouchables, began to forge an unbridgeable divide between their
positions, still there were some noteworthy cooperative achievements to
arise out of the very disagreements themselves. Pantham points to the
salient resolution passed in those very days, on September 25, 1932, by a
committee of leaders of caste Hindus and depressed classes in Bombay,
who drafted the resolution with the endorsement of Gandhi (from his
prison in Yerwada) and passed it in the presence of Ambedkar. The reso
lution read in part:
This Conference resolves that henceforth, amongst Hindus, no one

shall be regarded as an untouchable by reason of his birth and those
who have been so regarded hitherto will have the same rights as the
other Hindus in regard to the use of public wells, public roads and
other public institutions. This right shall have statutory recognition at
the first opportunity and shall be one of the earliest acts of the Swaraj
Parliament, if it shall not have received such recognition before that
time.27
Gandhi broke his fast, as noted, in response to the compromise reached

and assented to by Ambedkar and others, which has come to be known as
the Poona Pact, and he envisioned upholding the above resolution abol
424 / Aakash Singh
ishing untouchability as an integral commitment on his part with respect

to the compromise reached in the Pact. In his press statement, Gandhi
admitted:
The settlement arrived at is, so far as I can see, a generous gesture on

all sides. It is a meeting of hearts, and my Hindu gratitude is due to Dr
Ambedkar...[who] could have taken up an uncompromising and defiant
attitude by way of punishment to the so-called caste Hindus for the sins
of generations. If they had done so, I at least could not have resented
their attitude and my death would have been but a trifling price exacted
for the tortures that the outcastes of Hinduism have been going through
for unknown generations. But they chose a nobler path and have thus
shown that they have followed the precept of forgiveness enjoined by
all religions. Let me hope that the caste Hindus will prove themselves
worthy of this forgiveness and carry out to the letter and spirit every
clause of the settlement with all its implications.28
For his part, Ambedkar spoke in reconciliatory terms at the Bombay

Conference which passed the resolution abolishing untouchability while
ratifying the Poona Pact, giving Gandhi "a large part of the credit" for
the settlement of the dispute and somewhat unexpectedly declaring "I
must confess that I was surprised, immensely surprised, when I met him
[Gandhi], that there was so much in common between him and me."29
Pantham closes his harmonization of Gandhi and Ambedkar with a
poignant reminder of what has come to be known as Gandhi's "Last

Will"; that is, the draft resolution that he had penned the night before his
assassination for the consideration of the Congress. In it Gandhi called
for Congress to be disbanded and a new Lok Sevak Sangh to be created,
within which every Hindu member was required to abjure "untouchability
in any shape or form in his own person or in his own family."30 Pantham
assumes that in this document Gandhi had in mind Ambedkar's longstand
ing criticisms both of his position and of the elitism of the Congress.
Pantham closes by suggesting:
Gandhi seems to me to have been appreciative of the fact that Ambedkar's

emancipatory approach...was, in a broad sense, compatible with, if not
complementary to, his own approach....Hence, we may conclude that
Gandhi and Ambedkar made, sometimes together and sometimes sepa

rately, truly pioneering contributions to a mass political movement for
an as yet incomplete multifaceted programme for human freedom from
untouchability....Recognizing the compatibility, if not a mutual supple
mentarity, between their emancipatory legacies in the religious and
political spheres may perhaps be needed today for a co-operative revi
talization of our unfinished moral-political movement against untouch
ability.31
Ramachandra Guha: Reconciliation through History
The homogeneity of aim that Thomas Pantham attempts to establish, in

terms of the tireless work of both men toward the removal of untouch
ability, is only one way of reconciling Gandhi and Ambedkar. The pro
lific historian Ramachandra Guha has attempted to work out a recon
ciliation that functions only from the vantage point of hindsight. For
Guha, Gandhi and Ambedkar acted out their parts within the crucible of
that testing historical moment, and whereas tragic drama cannot accom
modate two heroic personae of such power and charisma on the very
same stage, fortunately for us history can:
Here then is the stuff of epic drama, the argument between the Hindu
who did most to reform caste and the ex-Hindu who did most to do away
with caste altogether. Recent accounts represent it as a fight between a
hero and a villain, the writer's caste position generally determining who
gets cast as hero, who as villain. In truth both figures should be seen as
heroes....32
Although there are many, predominantly upper-caste critics of Ambedkar

who excoriate him for the trouble he caused Gandhi and the Congress
Party,33 more sensitive renditions of those times, such as social histories
rather than mainstream political histories, often reveal that the Congress'
claim to represent and speak for all of India was always under dispute.
Communists referred to the Congress as a party of landlords and capital
ists. The Muslim League relegated it to the party of the Hindu majority.
Ambedkar merely specified and narrowed this in accord with his obser
vations borne out by his experiences: the Congress did not even represent
426 / Aakash Singh
all the Hindus, but only the upper castes. This assertion deeply affected
Gandhi, and he took it upon himself to act as representative for the untouch
ables within the Congress. In some respects, obviously, the struggle
between Gandhi and Ambedkar played out in terms of which man more
adequately and fully represented the best interests of the untouchables.
While, on the one hand, Gandhi made some dubious remarks about suf
fering more as an untouchable since he was a convert to untouchabüity
and not born into it, on the other hand, he remained sensitive to the pal
pable suffering that Ambedkar himself experienced at the hands of his
own colleagues. Guha taps into this as a primary source for his recon
figuration of the Gandhi-Ambedkar conflict:
I think, however, that for Ambedkar to stand up to the uncrowned king

and anointed Mahatma of the Indian people required extraordinary cour
age and will-power. Gandhi thought so too. Speaking at a meeting in
Oxford in October 1931, Gandhi said he had "the highest regard for Dr.
Ambedkar. He has every right to be bitter. That he does not break our
heads is an act of self-restraint on his part." Writing to an English friend
two years later, he said he found "nothing unnatural" in Ambedkar's
hostility to the Congress and its supporters. "He has not only witnessed
the inhuman wrongs done to the social pariahs of Hinduism," reflected
this Hindu, "but in spite of all his culture, all the honours that he has
received, he has, when he is in India, still to suffer many insults to
which untouchables are exposed." In June 1936 Gandhi pointed out
once again that Dr. Ambedkar "has had to suffer humiliations and
insults which should make any one of us bitter and resentful." "Had I
been in his place," he remarked, "I would have been as angry."34
Guha also points out the many occasions on which Gandhi attempted to
defend the attitude and actions of Ambedkar and in large degree even to
assent to the validity of the charges that Ambedkar accused the Congress
Party of, if not Gandhi himself. As Guha notes, towards the end of his life
Gandhi spoke with remorse about the indifference of his fellow Hindus
to uplifting the untouchables: "The tragedy is that those who should have
especially devoted themselves to the work of (caste) reform did not put
their hearts into it. What wonder that Harijan [untouchable] brethren feel
suspicious, and show opposition and bitterness."35
Guha's main thrust is that Gandhians judge Ambedkar more harshly

and give him less respect and admiration than Gandhi himself did. While
Gandhi found every reason for Ambedkar to be bitter, self-proclaimed
Gandhians instead bitterly attack the Ambedkarite camp for their contin
ued polemics.36 In broader support of his position, Guha also mentions
one of the Gandhians from around the time of the "temple-entry" cam
paign and the Poona Pact conflict, who testified to Gandhi's admission of
guilt in light of the accusations that Ambedkar made against him and the
Congress. C. Rajagopalachari, in a 1932 speech at Guruvayoor, addressed
the high-caste Hindus enjoining them that it would have helped the fight
for swaraj if they had opened the temple doors to the "harijans." He
pointed out that one of the reasons why swaraj was delayed was that
Hindus were divided among themselves. He then appealed to them to help
the Mahatma, stating that he had received many wounds in London during
the Second Round Table Conference of 1931, but that "Dr Ambedkar's
darts were the worst. Mahatmaji did not quake before the Churchills of
England. But as representing the nation he had to plead guilty to Dr
Ambedkar's charges."37
Guha closes his essay by reasserting the grounds for his attempt
to reconcile these two central and integral personae of modern Indian
history:
Whereas in their lifetime Gandhi and Ambedkar were political rivals,

now, decades after their death, it should be possible to see their contri
butions as complementing one another's. The Kannada critic D.R.
Nagaraj once noted that in the narratives of Indian nationalism the
"heroic stature of the caste-Hindu reformer," Gandhi, "further dwarfed
the Harijan personality" of Ambedkar. In the Ramayana there is only
one hero but, as Nagaraj points out, Ambedkar was too proud, intelli
gent and self-respecting a man to settle for the role of Hanuman or
Sugreeva. By the same token, Dalit hagiographers and pamphleteers
generally seek to elevate Ambedkar by diminishing Gandhi. For the
scriptwriter and the mythmaker there can only be one hero. But the
historian is bound by no such constraint. The history of Dalit emanci
pation is unfinished, and for the most part unwritten. It should, and
will, find space for many heroes. Ambedkar and Gandhi will do nicely
for a start.38
428 / Aakash Singh
Partha Chatterjee: Dialectical Reconciliation—Homogeneity versus

Heterogeneity
A first reading of Partha Chatterjee's path-breaking recent book The

Politics of the Governed leaves the reader under the impression that
Chatterjee's Ambedkar is irreconcilable with Gandhi.39 This is because
Chatterjee spends a great deal of time teasing out the heterogeneity at
play and the inherent and apparently irresolvable tension between Gandhi's
idea of the nation and Ambedkar's demand for specially protected and
affirmed particularist rights:
Seldom has been the tension between Utopian homogeneity and real
heterogeneity played out more dramatically than in the intellectual and
political career of B.R. Ambedkar. My focus here will be on certain
moments in Ambedkar's life, in order to highlight the contradictions
posed for a modern politics by the rival demands of universal citizenship
on the one hand and the protection of particularist rights on the other.
My burden will be to show that there is no available historical narrative
of the nation that can resolve those contradictions.40
Closer scrutiny shows that Chatterjee's problem is not the inability to

resolve the contradictions between Gandhi and Ambedkar, but to attempt
to resolve them through univocal or homogenizing discourses, pegging
their lives and work to some fixed conception or narrative that plays into
the dominant political theoretical paradigms and its accompanying cate
gories, such as "civil society" and "citizenship," and so on. In this respect,
Chatterjee's approach clearly supersedes that of Ranajit Guha's historical
reconciliation, insofar as the latter attempts precisely to forge a univocity
out of heterogeneity under the development of an encompassing histori
cal narrative. We may say that Chatteijee's reconciliation sublates Guha's,
even as Guha's abstracted, historical view had sublated Thomas Pantham's
straightforward homogenizing endeavor. But is Chatterjee's approach
really reconciliatory at all? Let us look more closely at his work and also
gain some clarity on the meaning of key terms such as "homogeneity"
and "heterogeneity" therein.41
Chatteijee analyzes and criticizes Benedict Anderson's reading of social
history, which he believes tacitly operates within the progressivist para
digm of historical development and relies upon the prevalence and even
universality of "homogenous" time, by which he means the Utopian dimen
sion wherein imaginaries such as the "nation" get configured. Chatteijee
also argues—following Walter Benjamin—that homogenous time is also
the temporality upon which capital relies. In contrast, Chatteijee develops
the notion of "heterogenous" time: this is the real, lived dimension of most
popular politics, of governmentality, and of the Foucauldian "heteroto
pia." As apparent in the above citation from Chatterjee, the example of
Ambedkar (as also the fictional character of Satinath Bhaduri's novel,
Dhorai Charitmanas, which I leave aside here) is brought in by Chatteijee
in order to show the continuing tension within efforts to narrativize the
nation between the Utopian dimension of homogeneous time and the real
space constituted by the heterogeneous time of actual practices. These
actual practices may occur in what Chatterjee had earlier called "political
society" (in contrast to "civil society") and through the colorful and
diverse politics spawned by governmentality.
Interestingly, Chatterjee unfolds a normative injunction, to the effect
that it is not merely bad political theory, but in fact morally illegitimate
to uphold the universalist ideals of nationalism without simultaneously
demanding that heterogeneity be recognized as an equally integral part of
the real time-space of the modern political life of the nation. And it is
precisely here—where Chatteijee's own discourse evolves into an eman
cipatory one—that we realize that homogeneity and heterogeneity are
reconciled in Chatterjee's own dialectics of emancipation, which he has
inherited from his participation in the founding of the Subaltern Studies
group and has exhibited through his writings over decades. Chatteijee
frames this in terms of the quest and demand for "political justice," the
words which close his study of Ambedkar.
Within Chatterjee's writing on Ambedkar, Gandhi assumes the role of
homogeneity or representative and stand-in for the (imaginary, homoge
nous) nation. In this way the stand-off between Ambedkar and Gandhi
gets reconfigured as illustrative of Chatteijee's abundant alternative politi
cal theoretical concepts, such as "political society" versus "civil society"
or "heterogeneous" versus "homogenous" time. These dyads, however,
pit fundamentally corrective supplementary notions against mainstream
hegemonic ideas with the explicit aim not merely to improve upon posi
tive social science research, but to normatively influence it: in short,
430 / Aakash Singh
operating under Thesis 11, in the effort to change the world and not just
to interpret it.42
Indeed, it must be noted that Ambedkar is brought in by Chatterjee to
exemplify and illustrate an earlier constructed thesis; it is not the case
that Chatterjee's thesis is inductively churned out as a result of his study
of the life and work of Ambedkar. It is, I believe, a thesis that arose two
decades earlier in Chatterjee's monumental work, Nationalist Thought
and the Colonial World. In that text of some two hundred pages, where
the name Ambedkar does not appear even once, it is Gandhi who repre
sents heterogeneity, the critique of civil society, and the real politics of
fringe hybridities and—as we may expect—it is Jawaharlal Nehru who
takes on the role of homogeneity (here called "rational monism"):
Thus it now became possible for Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of

India, to inaugurate on Gandhi's birthday a new factory for making
railway coaches and say, "I am quite sure if it had been our good fortune
to have Gandhiji with us today, he would have been glad at the opening
of this factory." For now, Gandhi's Truth had surrendered the specificity
of its moral critique: it had been cleansed of its religious idiom and
subsumed under the rational monism of historical progress.43
Chatterjee ends his 1986 study of Gandhi with expressions rather similar
to those that he will subsequently use in his study of Ambedkar twenty
years later. With the help of the Congress elite, Gandhian heterogeneity
had been assimilated into the rationalist, progressive nation-building pro
ject: "it has now found its place within that universal scheme of things."44
But is it fixed there stably and seamlessly? Not at all:
For hardly anywhere in the post-colonial world has it been possible for
the nation-state to fully appropriate the life of the nation into its own.
Everywhere the intellectual-moral leadership of the ruling classes is
based on a spurious ideological unity. The fissures are clearly marked
on its surface.45
While in Nationalist Thought the leadership of the ruling classes with its
spurious ideological unity was a role played by Nehru in opposition to
Gandhi, in The Politics of the Governed it becomes the role played by
Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences ? / 431
Gandhi in opposition to Ambedkar. Ironically, in this respect, Chatterjee's

(re)presentation of the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate turns out to be a meta
historical paradigm illustrative of a theory of meta-narrative. The theory:
narratives homogenize difference; heterogeneity must be sustained and
granted legitimacy. The meta-narrative: the emancipation of the "gov
erned" and any future hope of them becoming "citizens" or at least achiev
ing "political justice" relies upon legitimizing the heterogeneous real
practices of political society and other peripheral sites.
It is, then, perhaps no accident that Chatterjee's "Nation in Heteroge
neous Time" gets chosen by Thomas Pantham, that champion of recon
ciliation through homogeneity of emancipatory aim, for reprint as "B.R.
Ambedkar and the Troubled Times of Citizenship" in the latter's anthol
ogy. For Chatterjee's dialectics of homogeneity and heterogeneity does
turn out, in the end, to be a dialectics of reconciliation: what dialectical
philosophers refer to as the identity of identity and difference.
This, however, is only a part of the problematic nature of Chatterjee's
reconciliation of Gandhi and Ambedkar. More troubling is the dialectical
logic at play, which is arguably one of appropriation. This idea will be
fleshed out in the Conclusion. Before this, let me collect together and
recapitulate my reasons for resisting the three forms of reconciliation that
we have examined above.
Irreconcilable Differences?
In Gandhism, the common man has no hope....Under Gandhism the

common man must keep on toiling ceaselessly for a pittance and remain
a brute. In short, Gandhism with its call of back to nature, means back
to nakedness, back to squalor, back to poverty and back to ignorance
for the vast mass of the people.
—B.R. Ambedkar46
As outlined at the beginning of this paper, despite the obvious virtue of

attempting to achieve a reconciliation between Gandhi and Ambedkar,
whether it takes a homogenizing, historicizing, or dialectical form, it is
arguably an illegitimate move if due weight is given to the full extent and
nature of their differences. While I appreciate the efforts to resolve the
conflict between them, I remain skeptical even in the face of the heroic
432 / Aakash Singh
efforts of scholars such as Thomas Pantham, Ranajit Guha, and (in his
own way) Partha Chatterjee. For, in spite of how convincingly Pantham
has established Gandhi's abhorrence of the practice of untouchability,
Ambedkar himself believed that Gandhi remained attached to an idealized
version of the varna system, a system to which Ambedkar was inaltera

bly and profoundly opposed and which indeed he was intent on com
pletely "annihilating." Moreover, in starkest possible contrast to Gandhi's
romanticist nostalgia for a pre-modern organization of human social and
political economy, Ambedkar was an irrepressible pro-enlightenment
modemist. Both remained firm in these fundamental beliefs. Thus, although
Gandhi and Ambedkar were indeed both champions of the emancipation
of the untouchables, their conceptions from what and into what they were
being emancipated were radically and funda-mentally at variance.
Ambedkar's systematic polemic writings against Gandhi and the Con
gress Party, including Mr. Gandhi and the Emancipation of the Untouch
ables and What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables,
are full of numerous citations of Gandhi on the question of varna, quoted
with venomous disdain and contempt by the egalitarian Ambedkar. He
sketches the progression of Gandhi's ideas on the subject from his e;irly
South Africa days to the end of his life, attempting to show that Gandhi's
subtle differentiation between caste and varna amounts to mere rhetoric.
Passages such as the following two summarize Gandhi's position on the
matter, as far as Ambedkar is concerned:47
[A Shudra] may not be called a Brahman in this birth. And it is a good

thing for him not to arrogate a varna to which he is not bom. It is a
sign of true humility.48
I do not believe the caste system...to be an "odious and vicious dogma."

It has its limitations and its defects, but there is nothing sinful about
it....49
In reply to these and similar statements made by Gandhi to follow the

hereditary profession, Ambedkar insightfully retorts:
For in India a man is not a scavenger because of his work. He is a

scavenger because of his birth irrespective of the question whether he
does scavenging or not. If Gandhism preached that scavenging is a

noble profession with the object of inducing those who refuse to engage
in it, one could understand it. But why appeal to the scavenger's pride
and vanity in order to induce him and him only to keep on to scaveng
ing by telling him that scavenging is a noble profession and that he
need not to be ashamed of it? To preach that poverty is good for the
Shudra and for none else, to preach that scavenging is good for the
Untouchables and for none else and to make them accept these onerous
impositions as voluntary purposes of life, by appeal to their failings is
an outrage and a cruel joke on the helpless classes which none but Mr.
Gandhi can perpetuate with equanimity and impunity.50
Neither Chatterjee nor Guha attempt to take this deep and lasting diver
gence into account, and they elide over it completely in their writings. For
them, as for numerous others who have touched on the debate in newspa
per articles and blogs, the key factor dividing Gandhi and Ambedkar
appears to be the history of the Poona Pact episode. Were that so, the task
of reconciliation would be ever so simple, given that both Ambedkar and
Gandhi spoke in mollifying and reconciliatory terms in the period follow
ing it.51 However, as Ambedkar's remarks from 1945 and 1955 illustrate,
the divide was far deeper than such words even began to address. Pantham,
though, spends several pages discussing the differences between Gandhi
and Ambedkar on caste and Hinduism, the topics that were as divisive
between them as untouchability may be seen as unifying them. Pantham,
true to his thoroughly reconciliatory position, argues that Gandhi contin
ued to adapt and make his position on varna more and more egalitarian
in reaction to Ambedkar's writings such as What Congress and Gandhi
Have Done to the Untouchables:
Recognizing the validity of some of his criticisms, Gandhi pursued a

more radical approach to caste-reform. As if in reaction to Ambedkar's
criticism that Gandhism stands for the iron-law of hereditary professions
in respect of the SCs [scheduled castes], Gandhi stated in December 1947
that a bhangi "should not be forced to clean lavatories today" and that if
52
he can become a barrister, he should not be prevented from doing so.
The problem with the passages to which Pantham refers is that there are
434 / Aakash Singh
numerous examples in Gandhi's writings and speeches wherein he simul

taneously speaks of the abhorrence of untouchability, the equality of all,
the freedom for all to pursue their hobbies or interests whatever their caste
and class, and the mandate that a person's livelihood ought nevertheless
to be dictated by that of his forefathers'. For example, in writings through
out the 1920s and even 1930s, Gandhi's ideas about varnashrama were
loaded with caveats and subtleties:
The law of varna prescribes that a person should, for his living, follow
the lawful occupation of his forefathers. I hold this to be a universal
law governing the human family....No one is precluded from rendering
multitudinous acts of voluntary service and qualifying [educating, train
ing] oneself for it. Thus.. .[a person] bom of Brahmin parents and I bom
of Vaisya parents may consistently...serve as honorary national volun
teers or honorary nurses or honorary scavengers in times of need, though
in obedience to that law...I as a Vaisya would be earning my bread by
selling drugs or groceries. Everyone is free to render any useful service
so long as he does not claim reward for it.53
It is difficult to know whether Gandhi's later remark about a bhangi, a

sweeper, becoming a barrister is pegged to the "universal law" or whether
Ambedkar's critique of decades finally took hold on the later Gandhi and
he totally abandoned the ruse of equality between mandated varnas.54
For Ambedkar, to be sure, equality did not mean mere equality of varrias,
but truly substantial political, social, and material economic equality. Did
Gandhi, as Pantham claims, come closer to Ambedkar in this regard?
There are scholars who support Pantham's position, such as D.C. Ahir to
some degree, and especially Harold G. Coward, who argues forcefully
that because "of...continually having to contend with Ambedkar's cri
tique," Gandhi's ideas on the political activity of the untouchables and
indeed his ideas on varna changed from the 1940s onwards.55 Coward
makes a special point of mentioning Gandhi's support for appointing
Ambedkar as chair of the Constituent Assembly's Constitutional Drafting
Committee, even in the face of opposition, as well as sundry remarks of
Gandhi about having a bhangi as president of India.56 These and similar
arguments57 about Gandhi's changing position toward the end of his life
perhaps raise a reasonable doubt about the issue of varnashrama consti
tuting one of the principle bedrocks for the irreconcilability of Gandhi

and Ambedkar. However, one cannot fail to mention that Ambedkar
himself was unconvinced by the argument defended by Pantham and
Coward, and perhaps he deserves the last word about whether his under
standing of Gandhi's later position was more reconcilable with his own.
It should be noted, though, that the larger share of Gandhians has indeed
come over to Ambedkar's position on the need to annihilate caste in
order to establish egalitarian justice, and at least in this respect, the con
temporary Gandhian and Ambedkarite camps have no justification for
mutual antagonism.
The second reason for my skepticism about the possibility of reconciling
Gandhi and Ambedkar is the more germane, insofar as it remains open to
question whether the current followers of Gandhi and Ambedkar have
come any closer on this issue than the great men themselves did: that is,
on Gandhi's anarcho-romantic, anti-machine, anti-modern primitivism
versus Ambedkar's anti-romantic, pro-mechanistic, pro-enlightenment
modernism. This fundamental difference can be illustrated succinctly
through the metonym of their respective positions on the concept of the
village.
From early works like Hind Swaraj back near the turn of the century
to later writings on "village swaraj," Gandhi maintained a Utopian vil
lage ideal as the inner truth of Indian life. In 1945 he wrote to Nehru:
"You must not imagine that I am envisaging our village life as it is today.
The village of my dreams is still in my mind,"58 and earlier in 1942, he
wrote:
My idea of village swaraj is that it is a complete republic, independent

of its neighbours for its own vital wants, and yet interdependent for
many others in which dependence is a necessity. Thus every village's
first concern will be to grow its own food crops and cotton for its cloth.
It should have a reserve for its cattle, recreation and playground for
adults and children. Then if there is more land available, it will grow
useful money crops, thus excluding ganja, tobacco, opium and the like.
The village will maintain a village theatre, school and public hall. It
will have its own waterworks, ensuring clean water supply.59
The real village and the village of Gandhi's imagination differed analo
436 / Aakash Singh
gously to the way that caste as it was practiced and Gandhi's ideal of
varnashrama did. Obviously, Ambedkar was not convinced by either one
of them. For Ambedkar—and Nehru shared many of Ambedkar's ideas
here—the Indian village is "a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow
mindedness, and communalism."60 As Ambedkar poignantly characterized
Gandhi's "so-called republic," Indian villages represent...
a kind of colonialism of the Hindus designed to exploit the Untouch

ables. The Untouchables have no rights. They are there only to wait,
serve and submit. They are there to do or to die. They have no rights
because they are outside the village republic and because they are out
side the so-called republic, they are outside the Hindu fold. This is a
vicious circle.61
In total contrast to Gandhi, Ambedkar viewed the village as paradigmatic

of the oppressive social system and lack of social, political, and economic
mobility of the untouchables. While Gandhi portrays the village in Utopian
terms, Ambedkar portrays it as a prison and ghetto:
The Hindu society insists on segregation of the Untouchables. The

Hindu will not live in the quarters of the Untouchables and will not
allow the Untouchables to live inside Hindu quarters....It is a ...cordon
sanitaire putting the impure people inside the barbed wire into a son of
cage. Every Hindu village has a ghetto. The Hindus live in the village
and the Untouchables live in the ghetto.62
Clearly, the urban modernist Ambedkar portrayed "in the pink skin and
blue suit that has become almost canonical of his iconography among his
followers, the skin a challenge to the 'Aryan' upper castes, the suit an
insistence on the modernity of his enterprise,"63 is in deepest contrast to
Gandhi, the romantic anti-modernist, the spinner and wearer of khadi.
Ambedkar's statues portray him always with a book, the Constitution of
India; Gandhi's, by contrast, occasionally with a very different book: the
Bhagavad Gita. Does this Indian version of Raphael's "School of Athens"
not present us with two characters, each great, each worthy of utmost
respect, but both looking in totally different directions, with clearly irrec
oncilable differences?
Conclusion: Against Appropriation—Bringing Gandhi and

Ambedkar into "Constellation"
You should become like Ambedkar. You should work for the removal
of Untouchability and caste. Untouchability must go at any cost.

—M.K. Gandhi [to Arjun Raof4
I have argued that in spite of homogenizing, historicizing, or dialectical

attempts to reconcile Gandhi and Ambedkar, these two figures may be
forever irreconcilable. I threw Thomas Pantham's homogenizing endeavor
into doubt by pointing out that in spite of Gandhi's established abhorrence
of untouchability, he nevertheless arguably remained attached to an ideal
ized version of varnashrama dharma to which Ambedkar was profoundly
opposed and which he was intent upon "annihilating." Ambedkar himself
remained unconvinced of any change in Gandhi's position, despite the
evidence that certain scholars have proffered to show that Gandhi moved
closer to Ambedkar's position in the last years of his life. There is another
fundamental difference that complicates the reconciliation process. This
is Gandhi's romanticist nostalgia for a pre-modern organization of human
society and economy as against Ambedkar's pro-enlightenment modern
ism, which I illustrated through the metonym of Gandhi's and Ambedkar's
deeply opposing views of the Indian village.
Partha Chatteijee himself served to call into doubt the historical recon
ciliation of Gandhi and Ambedkar that was put forward by Ranajit Guha.
A grand view such as Guha's illegitimately assumes a privileged position
at the end of history, beyond the politics of history, and above the politics
of identity and electoral, communal, ethnic, and cultural politics. Guha's
article is participating in these politics, as his polemic against Arun
Shourie itself evidences, and thus his declarations from on high may
correspond with our own political ambitions, but we must admit that they
express strategic hopes as much as historic facts.
As for dialectical reconciliation, I have suggested that Chatteijee's
approach, in its tacit longing for "political justice," suffers from very
much the same defect as that of Guha: it lays out a theory awash with a
kind of Freire-like pedagogy of hope. 5 But beyond this, I am skeptical
about Chatterjee's project for the dialectical reconciliation of Gandhi and
Ambedkar because it smacks of an appropriation of the latter, with the
438 / Aakash Singh
purpose of more broadly legitimizing post-colonial theory, whose post

modern trends have had a great deal of trouble accommodating the irre
pressibly modernist Ambedkar.
Indeed, the vast majority of disciplines within the social sciences and
humanities in Indian academia (except of course Ambedkar studies, but
then look at the current sorry state of that discipline) have been unreceptive
to Ambedkar's work. He hardly appears on the curriculum in departments
of Philosophy, Political Science, or Sociology. As Johannes Beltz remarks:
The sociological community has so far largely ignored Ambedkar,

which is surprising...because his analysis of Indian culture, the caste
system, authority and religious power, and the religious foundation of
the Hindu social order are significant contributions to contemporary
sociological debate.66
But it is most surprising that even in the field of post-colonial studies,

Ambedkar has been all but ignored. Post-colonial theory is of course just
as much dominated by high-caste intelligentsia as the other social sciences
and humanities, but insofar as this group is generally radical and leftist, it
is difficult to attribute their exclusion of Ambedkar to class or caste bias.
It is rather the sheer difficulty of assimilating the thought and work of this
ultra-modernist. Even the political theology of Ambedkar has been ignored
in the vast and vibrant "secularism debates" in India, so influenced by
Gandhian thought, and in the writings of Ashis Nandy and other pre
modern/post-modern scholars. I imagine that much of the reason for this
may be pinned down to Ambedkar's ambiguous use of the term "enlight
enment."
As is well known, toward the end of Ambedkar's life, he finally broke

entirely with Hinduism in an effort to escape the confines of caste and
untouchability. In the process, Ambedkar contributed to the creation of a
new Buddhist movement, Ambedkarite Buddhism, or what scholars like
Christopher S. Queen subsume under the broader category of engaged
Buddhism.67 Ambedkar's role in the construction of a new Buddhism
obviously entailed his reappraisal of certain terms within the tradition(s)
passed down till then—writing in English, as he chose to, also led to
terms being loaded willy-nilly with a host of additional resonances in the
process of translation, some desirable and others possibly less so. One
such term is "enlightenment." Ambedkar's pioneering masterpiece The

Buddha and His Dhamma68 often substitutes "enlightenment" in the sense
related to nibbana (as a self-conscious liberation) by enlightenment in
the sense related to the German Aufklärung or the French éclairissement
(as a civic achievement of liberty, equality, fraternity). Ambedkar's
preoccupation with providing an account of Buddhism that could serve
his broader political ambition of the liberation and uplifting of the Dalits
naturally contributed to his ambiguous use of the term.
Indian post-colonial theorists—who predominantly tend to equate
enlightenment modernity with its coincidental colonial/imperialist surge—
have tended to ignore Ambedkar (and partly as a consequence, Dalits)
even in the process of attempting to write "histories from below," sub
altern studies, and, unbelievably, while striving to disclose the dynamics
of hidden power relations in South Asia in the light of colonization.69
Ironically, Ambekdar's modernist-rationalist inclinations had meant that
for decades he could not be assimilated into radical left (anti-enlighten
ment) post-colonial political theory. In "The Decline of the Subaltern in
Subaltern Studies," Sumit Sarkar harshly criticized Partha Chatteijee for
failing to mention the Dalits as a "fragment" of India in his major 1993
work, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories.
This critique is very likely responsible for Chatterjee's turn to the study
of Ambedkar the following year.70
An awareness of the harmonizing traits in Gandhi and Ambedkar,
irrespective of the cause, is especially valuable for uniting progressive
forces in contemporary society, rather than permitting them to expend
energy engaged in polemics against one another, so that they may
collaborate strategically in shared or overlapping objectives. Such an
endeavor may be encouraged. However, I argue that the value of this
strategic collaboration should not prevent us from remaining attuned to
the fundamental, irresolvable differences between them: the laudable
goal of emancipation may itself require attentiveness to differences, espe
cially when there is a risk of appropriation.
Therefore, rather than attempting to reconcile Gandhi and Ambedkar in
a move which puts harmony and resolution in the foreground and differ
ences in the background, in order to resist appropriation, I would suggest
instead that we be content to bring these two great men into a constella
tion. In deployment of this methodological conception of "constellation"
440 / Aakash Singh
I follow Péter Losonczi, who has borrowed the term from Hent de Vries'
Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas.
De Vries, speaking of Emmanuel Levinas' agenda, writes:
Levinas wants to graft modern-critical, philosophical discourse onto

the Jewish religious tradition—or, more cautiously, to bring the two
into a constellation (to use one of Adorno's privileged terms), so that
the former can be enriched in the light of the latter and can be evaluated
in novel ways.71
In Losonczi's interpretation, "constellation" implies something less than

identification, less than reconciliation, "but still overcoming the chasm of
separation. At the same time, it implies the interplay of relatedness and
interaction, as well as the genesis of something new out of this interplay."72
For Theodor W. Adorno (who himself borrowed the term from Walter
Benjamin), "constellation" signified "a juxtaposed rather than integrated
cluster of changing elements that resist reduction to a common denomi
nator, essential core, or generative first principle."73
I seek, therefore, neither to reconcile and to homogenize, and thereby
reduce to a common denominator, nor to pit in intractable, atomic oppo
sition. Rather, I want to add to these alternatives the equally necessary
and evident perspective of irreducibility, but one susceptible to the dynam
ics of preservation and change, the porosity of stability that renders pos
sible the exchanges and cross-influences between the labor, thought, and
action of Gandhi and Ambedkar. I propose constellation over reconcilia
tion because nothing can be more destructive to the inner dynamics of
Ambedkar's emancipatory ambitions than its opportunistic appropriation.
Notes
1. Ambedkar, interview on BBC Radio, New Delhi, December 31,

1955. See: roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content &view=
article&id=3797:dr-ambedkar-remembers-the-poona-pact-in-an-interview
on-the-bbc-&catid=l 16:dr-ambedkar&Itemid=128 (accessed May 13,
2013).
2. Baxi, "Justice as Emancipation: The Legacy of Babasaheb Ambed
kar" (1995), pp.123-24.
Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences? t 441
3. Guha, "Gandhi's Ambedkar" (2010), p.33.

4. Palshikar, "Gandhi-Ambedkar Interface: When Shall the Twain
Meet?" (1996).
5. Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses of Gandhi and
Ambedkar" (2009), p.179; emphasis added.
6. Guha, "Gandhi's Ambedkar" (2010), p.38; emphasis added.
7. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular
Politics in Most of the World (2004), pp. 16-17.
8. Rudolph and Rudolph, Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi
in the World and At Home (2006). Perhaps "anti-modern" would be least
problematic.
2013).
10. The most recent work to take up the Gandhi-Ambedkar relationship
deeply and sensitively is Lelyveld's Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and
His Struggle with India (2011), chapter 9, "Fast unto Death" (pp. 224-53).
Lelyveld's evaluation would seem closer to my own than to those who
seek reconciliation. See especially the discussion from p.226 and follow
ing: "...Ambedkar, the seemingly irreconcilable untouchable leader...."
11. Ambedkar, "Appendix IV: Statement by B.R. Ambedkar on Gandhi's
Fast," in What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables
(1946), p.324.
2013).
2013).
14. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume
84, p.272.
442 / Aakash Singh
15. Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement
in India (2011), pp. 82, 87. Nagaraj characterizes the approach of the two
to differ in this essential concern: for Gandhi it was self-purification; for
Ambedkar, self-respect.
in India (2011), p.21.
in India (2011), p.57.
in India (2011), p. 161.
19. Palshikar, "Gandhi-Ambedkar Interface: When Shall the Twain
Meet?" (1996), p.2072, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The
Discourses of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 180.
Ambedkar" (2009), p. 180.
Ambedkar" (2009), p.181.
22. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1958-94), vol
ume 19, p.73, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses
of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 183.
ume 24, p.227, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses
ume 57, p. 147, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses
25. Ambedkar, cited in Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability:
Fighting the Indian Caste System (2005), p.63, which in turn is cited
(slightly edited) in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses of
Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), pp. 186-87.
26. Ambedkar, cited in Keer, Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission (1991),
p.71, which in turn is cited (slightly edited) in Pantham, "Against Untouch
ability: The Discourses of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 187.
ume 57, p.l 18, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses
ume 57, pp. 123-25, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Dis
courses of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 194.
29. Gandhi, cited in Pyarelal, The Epic Fast (1932), p. 188, which in turn
is cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses of Gandhi
and Ambedkar" (2009), p. 194.
30. Gandhi, cited in Pantham, "Against Untouchability: The Discourses
of Gandhi and Ambedkar" (2009), p.205.
Ambedkar" (2009), p.206.
33. Guha has in mind especially Arun Shourie, against whom his own
essay functions as a polemic: "That is of course the burden of Shourie's
critique [of Ambedkar] but curiously, the very week his book [Worshipping
False Gods: Ambedkar and the Facts Which Have Been Erased [1997])
was published, at a political rally in Lucknow the Samajvadi Party's Beni
Prasad Verma likewise dismissed Ambedkar as one who 'did nothing
else except create trouble for Gandhiji.' This line, that Ambedkar had no
business to criticise, challenge or argue with Gandhi, was of course used
with much vigour and malice during the national movement as well"
("Gandhi's Ambedkar" [2010], p.36).
35. Gandhi, cited in Guha, "Gandhi's Ambedkar" (2010), p.37.
36. See, for example, Harris' Gandhians in Contemporary India: The
Vision and the Visionaries (1998), where the author superfluously argues
that Gandhi fought "more against the evil of untouchability" even than
Ambedkar (p.40). In another needlessly dismissive assessment, Plotkin,
in his article "Resistance to the Soul: Gandhi and His Critics" (n.d.),
suggests that Ambedkar's "lack of comprehension" and "lack of vision"
gave rise to his critique of Gandhi.
37. Rajagopalachari, cited in Guha, "Gandhi's Ambedkar" (2010), p.37.
39. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular
Politics in Most of the World (2004); see especially Chapter 1, "The
Nation in Heterogeneous Time."
40. Chatteijee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular
Politics in Most of the World (2004), p.8.
41. Chatterjee's only study of Ambedkar has had at least four major
444 / Aakash Singh
incarnations since it was composed in Berlin in 2000-2001 and delivered

as a Schoff Memorial Lecture at Columbia University (Dr. Ambedkar's
own alma mater) in November 2001: first, as an article entitled "The
Nation in Heterogeneous Time" in the Indian Economic and Social History
Review (2001); then in revised form as the crucial opening chapter—again
entitled "The Nation in Heterogeneous Time"—in his own book The
Politics of the Governed (2004); again, revised, as an article still entitled
"The Nation in Heterogeneous Time," published in the journal Futures
(2005); and finally, reprinted from the original IESHR appearance under
the new title "B.R. Ambedkar and the Troubled Times of Citizenship," as
a chapter within the anthology entitled Political Ideas in Modern India,
edited by Mehta and Pantham (2006).
42. For the way in which Karl Marx's 11th Thesis gets reconfigured in
the Subaltem Studies group, see its original "manifesto" by Ranajit Guha,
"On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India" (1982).
43. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Deriva
tive Discourse (1986), p. 154.
46. Ambedkar, "Gandhism: The Doom of the Untouchables," in What
Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1946), pp. 294,
295.
47. It may be worthwhile to note that these two passages were selected
by Ambedkar himself to make his case. Lindley, "Changes in Mahatma
Gandhi's Views on Caste and Intermarriage" (n.d.), on the contrary,
adduces several of Gandhi's statements from 1945 onwards tending closer
toward Ambedkar's own view.
48. Gandhi, Young India (November 24, 1927), volume 9, number 46,
p.393.
49. Gandhi, Harijan (February 11, 1933), volume 1, number 1, p.3.
50. Ambedkar, "Gandhism: The Doom of the Untouchables," in What
Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1946), pp. 303
4; emphasis added.
51. See the passages cited in section 2 of this paper, "Thomas Pantham:
Reconciliation Through Homogenization."

Ambedkar" (2009), pp. 201-2.
53. Gandhi, Hindu Dharma (2005), pp. 57-58.
54. Gandhi's numerous distinctions about the true nature and inner
significance of varna make it difficult to determine whether the more

Ambedkarian-sounding statements from 1945 onwards are actually
rejections of varnashrama dharma or just further refinements of it, in
relation to his clearly evolving views on inter-caste marriage. Recall that
inter-caste marriage can also be conceived as a tool for strengthening a
certain conception of varna—as Gandhi held in the 1920s and 1930s—
insofar as it serves to reduce the proliferation of sub-castes. Ambedkar
knew of Gandhi's evolving views on inter-caste marriage and even
remarked in a letter about his own marriage to a Brahmin woman, "that
Bapu, if he had been alive, would have blessed the marriage" (cited in
Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India
[2011], p.225).
55. Coward, "Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Untouchability" (2003), p.62.
56. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume
89, p.351. See also Coward "Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Untouchability"
(2003), p.63.
57. See Lindley's well-documented essay, "Changes in Mahatma
Gandhi's Views on Caste and Intermarriage" (n.d.), for a blow-by-blow
presentation of Gandhi's gradual conversion to Ambedkar's view on inter
marriage by 1947. The paper is, however, not altogether convincing on
the topic of varnashrama dharma. Anil Nauriya's "Gandhi's Little-Known
Critique of Varna" (2006) contains additional material that may help to
build such a case; however, I—along with Ambedkar—still maintain there
is substantial ambiguity in the citations and remain unconvinced that
Gandhi totally abandoned an idealized version of varna.
58. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (1997), p.150.
59. Gandhi, The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi (1991), pp.
358-59; emphasis in original.
60. Ambedkar, cited in Rudolph and Rudolph, Postmodern Gandhi and
Other essays: Gandhi in the World and At Home (2006), p.29.
61. Ambedkar, "Outside the Fold" (2002), pp. 330-31.
62. Ambedkar, The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They
Became Untouchables? (1948), pp. 21-22.
446 / Aakash Singh
63. Hoskote, "Ambedkar's Legacy." The Hindu (December 10, 2006).

64. Remarks made to Goparaju Ramachandra Rao's prospective son
in-law, Arjun Rao, who had been born an untouchable, in 1946; as told to
Mark Lindley in an interview with Aijun Rao, February 1996. See Lindley,
"Changes in Mahatma Gandhi's Views on Caste and Inter-marriage"
(n.d.), note 30.
65. See Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(2004).
66. Beltz, "Introduction" (2004), p.5.
67. On the centrality of Ambedkarian Buddhism within the notion of
engaged Buddhism, see Queen and King, eds., Engaged Buddhism: Bud
dhist Liberation Movements in Asia (1996), and Queen, ed., Engaged
Buddhism in the West (2000).
68. See Singh and Verma, eds., B.R. Ambedkar: The Buddha and His
Dhamma (2010). It was originally published by Siddharth College Publi
cations, Bombay, in 1957.
69. See especially the insightful critique of Sarkar, who left the Subaltem
Studies group over this issue, "The Decline of the Subaltem in Subaltem
Studies" (2000).
70. See note 41 above.
71. De Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in

Adorno and Levinas (2005), p.532; emphasis in original.
72. Losonczi, "Religion, Pluralism, Politics: A Case for an Inter-Con
textual Study on Europe and India" (forthcoming).
73. Jay, Adorno (1984), pp. 14-15.
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AAKASH SINGH is a Research Professor at the Center for Ethics and

Global Politics at LUISS University, Rome, Italy.
asingh@luiss.it

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Gandhi and Ambedkar: Irreconcilable Differences?

Author(s): Aakash Singh

Mohandas K. Gandhi's relationship with other epoch makers of his

International Journal of Hindu Studies 18, 3: 413-449

Ambedkar, anti-Gandhi group and the pro-Gandhi, anti-Ambedkar group.

Gandhi wished to save Hinduism by abolishing untouchability, whereas

tions to social problems with the aid of the state.

Of late, however, a growing number of prominent intellectuals have been

not unlinked, paradigmatic ways. Among the three, Pantham attempts to

Whereas in their lifetime Gandhi and Ambedkar were political rivals,

The reconciliation attempted by Chatteijee is the most tenuous; at the

Furthermore, retrospective historical reconciliation, such as Guha pre

The Gandhi-Ambedkar Dispute

He was never a Mahatma. I refused to call him Mahatma....He doesn't

Many writers—though not Pantham, as we shall see below—view this

Yes, he was absolutely an orthodox Hindu. He was never a reformer.

In the same interview, Ambedkar characterized Gandhi as a cunning poli

The Hindu-Muslim question is for me a lifelong question. There was a

As is apparent from Ambedkar's 1955 assessment, the "present unfortu

the same time, through Gandhi's rhetoric of self-purification of the caste

of the two."17 He goes so far as to label the unbridgeable gap between

Thomas Pantham: Reconciliation through Homogenization

Thomas Pantham, in a thoughtful and well-researched study of the com

Such a bridge-building calls for interpretive understanding, by us, of

Antyajas [untouchables] from the national schools, the movement for

Gandhi was in accord with Ambedkar on the idea that an independent

by the Hindu majority would be a zero-sum gain, an empty victory. True

If it is necessary for us to buy peace with the Mussalmans as a condi

Moreover, according to Pantham, Gandhi's abhorrence of untouchability

When I ask you to purify your hearts of untouchability, I ask of you

This vehement and indeed politically risky opposition to untouchability

Before Mahatma Gandhi, no politician in this country maintained that

unified strategic and ideological alliance between Gandhi and Ambedkar,

example, in a 1927 speech, Ambedkar takes up Gandhi's vocabulary of

No lasting progress can be achieved unless we put ourselves through a

This Conference resolves that henceforth, amongst Hindus, no one

Gandhi broke his fast, as noted, in response to the compromise reached

ishing untouchability as an integral commitment on his part with respect

The settlement arrived at is, so far as I can see, a generous gesture on

For his part, Ambedkar spoke in reconciliatory terms at the Bombay

poignant reminder of what has come to be known as Gandhi's "Last

Gandhi seems to me to have been appreciative of the fact that Ambedkar's

Gandhi and Ambedkar made, sometimes together and sometimes sepa

Ramachandra Guha: Reconciliation through History

The homogeneity of aim that Thomas Pantham attempts to establish, in

Although there are many, predominantly upper-caste critics of Ambedkar

I think, however, that for Ambedkar to stand up to the uncrowned king

Guha's main thrust is that Gandhians judge Ambedkar more harshly

Whereas in their lifetime Gandhi and Ambedkar were political rivals,

Partha Chatterjee: Dialectical Reconciliation—Homogeneity versus

A first reading of Partha Chatterjee's path-breaking recent book The

Closer scrutiny shows that Chatterjee's problem is not the inability to

Thus it now became possible for Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of

Gandhi in opposition to Ambedkar. Ironically, in this respect, Chatterjee's

In Gandhism, the common man has no hope....Under Gandhism the

As outlined at the beginning of this paper, despite the obvious virtue of

version of the varna system, a system to which Ambedkar was inaltera

[A Shudra] may not be called a Brahman in this birth. And it is a good

I do not believe the caste system...to be an "odious and vicious dogma."

In reply to these and similar statements made by Gandhi to follow the

For in India a man is not a scavenger because of his work. He is a

does scavenging or not. If Gandhism preached that scavenging is a

Recognizing the validity of some of his criticisms, Gandhi pursued a

numerous examples in Gandhi's writings and speeches wherein he simul