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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 Press


DOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0083

For additional information about this article


http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v040/40.2.mukherjee.html

Access Provided by Columbia University at 11/19/10 1:35PM GMT


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

I
ndia’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.
New Literary History, 2009, 40: 345–370
346 new literary history

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

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
348 new literary history

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
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 349

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
350 new literary history

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-
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 351

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:
352 new literary history

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
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 353

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
354 new literary history

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
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 355

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
356 new literary history

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
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 357

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-
358 new literary history

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
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 359

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
360 new literary history

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
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 361

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
362 new literary history

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
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 363

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
364 new literary history

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
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 365

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
366 new literary history

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).
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 367

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
368 new literary history

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.
b. r. ambedkar, john dewey, and the meaning of democracy 369

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.
370 new literary history

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.

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