Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms)

This book offers a reading of Bhimrao Ambedkar’s engagement with the idea and practice of socialism in India by linking it to his lifelong political and philosophical concerns: the annihilation of the caste system, untouchability and the moral and philosophical systems that justify either. Rather than view his ideas through a socialist lens, the author suggests that it is important to measure the validity of socialist thought and practice in the Indian context, through his critique of the social totality. The book argues its case by presenting a broad and connected overview of his thought world and the global and local influences that shaped it. The themes that are taken up for discussion include: his understanding of the colonial rule and the colonial state; history and progress; nationalism and the questions he posed the socialists; his radical critique of the caste system and Brahmanical philosophies, and his unusual interpretation of Buddhism. Titles Published 7 Titles Forthcoming 10 Acknowledgements 13 Contents 16 1 Introduction 17 1 A Haunting 17 2 A “Politically Unimaginable” Politics 19 3 Chapters 20 4 Terminology 24 2 ‘A Part Apart’: The Life and Times of Dr. Ambedkar 27 1 Straddling Times and Places 27 2 Ambedkar’s Maharashtra 31 3 A Worthy Forebear: Jotirao Phule and His Kingdom of Bali 33 4 Educational Journeys 40 5 Querying Nationalism 44 6 Interwar India: Gandhi, the Left and Ambedkar in the Late 1920s 49 7 Thinking Beyond Nation and Class 56 8 The Making of a National Leader 61 9 Annihilating the Social Order 66 10 The 1940s and After: Constitutional Labour and the Buddhist Turn 68 3 Pax Britannica: Conceptualizing Colonial Rule and State 74 1 A New Politics 74 2 Social Liberals, Radical Nationalists and the Colonial State 77 3 Refusing Colonial and National Political Custodianship 82 4 Communists, Ambedkar and the Repressive State 86 5 The Modern State and Common Welfare: Ambedkar, American Progressives and British Socialists 101 6 Arguing with the State 104 7 Colonial Law and Social Transformation: Ambedkar’s Legal Labour 107 8 Rethinking the Political: Colonial Reform and Constitutional Norms 113 9 Moral Force, Public Conscience and the State 122 4 A New Time: Arguing with History and Imagining Utopia 124 1 Turning to the Past 124 2 At the Threshold of History 125 3 Could History Be Freedom? 130 4 The Left Turn to Ancient India 132 5 History and the Question of Indian National Unity 135 6 Writing Histories of Inequality 138 7 Conceptualizing Conflict and Change 141 8 Who Were the Shudras? and the Untouchables? 146 9 History and the Question of Reproduction 153 5 Graded Inequality and Untouchability: Towards the Annihilation of Caste 162 1 The Right to Well-being 162 2 The Caste Order and Untouchability: A Double Negation 163 3 Caste and Other Anxieties: Apologists, Reformers, Critics 165 4 Caste Matters and Colonial Knowledges 175 5 The Sexual Economy of Caste 182 6 Fetishizing Inequality 186 7 Once an Untouchable Always an Untouchable 194 8 Equality and Fraternity: Beyond Rules and Towards Principles 196 9 Social Kinship and Sympathetic Resentment 202 6 The Pre-requisites of Communism: Rethinking Revolution 206 1 A Man for Labour 206 2 Plebeian Revolts and Labour’s Future 208 3 Labour and Caste: From the Interwar Years to the 1940s 210 4 Thinking of Communism: The Practice of Theory and the Politics of Practice 222 5 Despite the Communists: Ambedkar and British Socialist Thought 244 7 What Path to Salvation? The Conundrum of Social Reproduction 249 1 The Riddle of Social Reproduction 249 2 The Women’s Question in Late Colonial India 251 3 Legislating for Equality: The Hindu Code Bill 257 4 Refusing Caste Reproduction: The Case of Pandita Ramabai 263 5 Jotirao Phule: Unsettling the Caste Family 273 6 Anti-caste Movements and the Question of Social Reproduction 276 7 Eutopic Acts: Anticipating a New Social Order 284 8 Buddha or Karl Marx: Fraternal Ethics and Economic Justice 286 1 Did the Buddha Preach Against Greed? 286 2 The Religious, the Moral and the Fraternal 288 3 Discovering the Buddha 294 4 A Buddhist Future? 298 5 The Buddha, the Dhamma and the Acquisitive Instinct 301 6 The Dhamma Against Brahmanism 315 7 Against the Counter-Revolution of the Present 320 8 What of Marx? 323 9 Reconstructing the World 327 Bibliography 329 Index 342 "This is intellectual history at its best from one of India's foremost feminist historians. V. Geetha pursues a recursive method as she maps the coordinates of Ambedkar's vision of time and the ethical across his theorization of caste, colonial rule, labor, social reproduction and religion. In the context of several interlocutors and historical moments, with sparklingly clear prose, she shows how socialism was a 'spectral presence' in his thought as he worked to create forms of epistemic, ontological and socio-political rupture with the order of caste and untouchability." --Smriti Srinivas, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, USA This book offers a reading of Bhimrao Ambedkar's engagement with the idea and practice of socialism in India by linking it to his lifelong political and philosophical concerns: the annihilation of the caste system, untouchability and the moral and philosophical systems that justify either. Rather than view his ideas through a socialist lens, the author suggests that it is important to measure the validity of socialist thought and practice in the Indian context, through his critique of the social totality. The book argues its case by presenting a broad and connected overview of his thought world and the global and local influences that shaped it. The themes that are taken up for discussion include: his understanding of the colonial rule and the colonial state; history and progress; nationalism and the questions he posed the socialists; his radical critique of the caste system and Brahmancal philosophies, and his unusual interpretation of Buddhism. V. Geetha is an independent scholar based in Chennai, India