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COMMENTARY

Ambedkars Death Anniversary and the Politics of Urban Space


Ananya Vajpeyi

I realised instantly that almost all the shops up and down the main road were closed. Is 6 December a holiday in the state? I wondered. An Arrival, An Exodus Over the next few days in Mumbai, I learned that while there was no government holiday for Ambedkars death anniversary, conservative middle-class residents in the environs of Shivaji Park and the seafront Ambedkar shrine Chaitya Bhoomi locked their homes, downed their shutters, took their cars, and left the city for a couple of days. The fact that 6 December happened to fall on a weekend in 2013 is likely to have contributed to this mass exodus of sorts. Ofcial counts estimated that over six lakh people almost all of them Ambedkarites, mostly dalits or Navayana Buddhists, and almost all of them not local to Dadar or even to Mumbai came in from the outside to temporarily replace the local population. That one group should make way for another seemed a bizarre undermining of the fundamental premise of urban life: the coexistence and commingling of diverse populations in a limited area. There had been a favourable settlement of a long-running land dispute just days before 6 December, with the union cabinet passing a bill to allot 12.5 acres of prime real estate in Dadar, formerly belonging to the Indu Mill, estimated to be worth nearly Rs 25,000 crore, for the construction of an Ambedkar National Memorial. The promise of a bhoomi poojan (inaugural ritual) on the Indu Mill land on 6 December 2013 brought even more people that year than might normally participate in Ambedkars death anniversary. One could not help but notice the unpleasant fact that, consequently, a large number of residents had temporarily ed the locality. That afternoon I walked the streets of Dadar west, and into Shivaji Park, borne along by a sheer surge of human bodies. I had never been in such a large crowd before that day, but I did not feel in the slightest way afraid for my personal safety. People were dressed in their best clothes women wore brilliant white saris with discreetly festive borders
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EPW Economic & Political Weekly

An account of the observance of B R Ambedkars death anniversary on 6 December 2013 reveals the caste prejudices still at work, albeit muted or disguised, when dalits seek to lay claim to public space to observe public holidays of special signicance to their community in the midst of the citys everyday life.

Ananya Vajpeyi (vajpeyi@csds.in) is with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.

n Friday, 6 December 2013, I landed in Mumbai around 1 pm. I got to my hotel close to the airport, and asked for a car to go to the Shivaji Park neighbourhood in Dadar west, where I hoped to see how lakhs of people observed the 57th death anniversary Mahaparinirvanaparva of B R Ambedkar. I was advised against going there; the trafc and crowds would be unmanageable, said the hotel staff. Nonetheless, I insisted and headed out at about 2 pm. Trying to think of a landmark, I requested the cab driver to take me to Prakash, an old, low-budget Maharashtrian-style eatery close to the Shiv Sena Bhavan, known for its authentic local food and its prices reminiscent of a time before malls and fast-food chains. It was another cab driver some months earlier who had originally introduced me to Prakash, but this one seemed not to know it. Trafc was indeed heavy and slow, compounded by the closure of several arterial roads, parallel to one another, in order to free up the area for pedestrians. Buses, jeeps, lorries and trucks carrying Ambedkarite activists crawled alongside cars and scooters. At a busy crossroad presided over by a tall, half-built glass tower marked Kohinoor, next to a petrol pump, I got out of the car to walk the rest of the way. I asked a policeman standing by some barricades for precise directions to Prakash. He said it had been forced to relocate across the street because of massive construction in its original location. I walked a few hundred yards to the new (or temporary) Prakash. Its shutters were down. I was disappointed, but thought I had better begin my work, rather than look for sabudana khichdi, pohe, and other dishes perfectly banal for the ordinary Maharashtrian that I liked because I associated them with my days as a graduate student in Pune.
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COMMENTARY

and uttering blue ags with a white Buddhist dhammachakra at the centre, the symbols of the Republican Party of India (in its many factions), were everywhere in evidence. Thousands of posters, banners, buntings and billboards, bearing photographs of B R Ambedkar and of present-day politicians, inscribed with the slogans and signage of the Republican Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party, covered every visible surface. Books, pamphlets, photographs, paintings, busts, carvings, gurines, calendars all with images of the Buddha or Ambedkar, and other leaders who have been important in the struggles against caste-based inequality, like Mahatma Jotiba Phule were on sale at tiny makeshift shops set up on the sidewalk. Families or other small groups sat huddled on the ground in corners wherever they could nd space, on the road or next to it, eating packed lunches they had evidently brought with them. The way in which they created a zone of privacy, domesticity and stillness around a shared meal even in the midst of masses of strangers, in the open without shelter, was reminiscent of travellers on almost any major or minor Indian pilgrimage, whether in Maharashtra or indeed in any other part of the country that I have seen. There ought to have been the gigantic banyan trees of the Deccan countryside to give these people respite from the days heat, but the urban setting precluded any such shade. Inside Shivaji Park, which one entered after passing through metal detectors that had to have been completely inadequate to the size of the crowd, the dust and the noise were stunning. Dozens of stalls, all blaring conicting music, songs and speeches at a deafening volume through gigantic loudspeakers, stood cheek by jowl in an enormous semicircle. The result of so much sound was that one could not hear or understand anything at all but no one seemed to mind. Free food, free clinics, and the desks and tents of hundreds of organisations stretched as far as the eye could see. A makeshift campsite had been set up by the area administration, where those from out of town without
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relatives in Mumbai might spend the night. Men and women seemed present in equal numbers. There must have been 2,00,000 people just within the perimeter of the park, with a constant stream entering and exiting from multiple points on its circumference. I had meant to coordinate my movements with a scholar friend, but it was pointless trying to call or locate anyone in the melee. I found a man selling peanuts, and a small corner shop selling cold drinks. I felt ravenous. But more than exhausted, I was elated that such a large gathering could exude a feeling of complete ease and sociability to a lone woman like me. This conformed to my expectation of respect for women in public spaces in Maharashtra, especially in Mumbai, and allayed my apprehension that things had been changing for the worse, as had been discussed widely in the press after recent incidences of rape in the city. Only once did I get asked if I belonged to the media (my answer was No). I took as many pictures as I liked on my phone without anyone in the least bit bothered by my presence or activity. Cosmopolitan Contempt Most of the people one could see were actually part of a very long, snaking queue that eventually led to the Chaitya Bhoomi. That day I did not have enough hours to wait in line, but I did return a week later. The stalls in front of the Chaitya Bhoomi were selling their Ambedkarite and Buddhist memorabilia as usual. There were no crowds. A few visitors hung about the waterfront, a beach of rocks littered with plastic bottles and other trash in the foreground, the delicate spiders web of the BandraWorli Sea Link suspended over the shimmering waters in the distance, a few boats bobbing lazily in the afternoon sun. As I was buying a Hindi translation of Dhananjay Keers classic biography of Ambedkar, the shopkeeper said to me (in Hindi): You should come here on 14 April, Ambedkars birthday. We party all night here by the sea. Theres a lot of singing and dancing. Come next year; its great fun. (He used the English word party).
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Is it very different from 6 December, I asked? Yes, of course, he said. April is Babasahebs birthday we can celebrate. December is his death anniversary, his Mahaparinirvana the mood is sombre. But why were all the shops closed? I asked. Would they not prot from all the extra business of the visitors and pilgrims on 6 December? Ah, he said, smiling wryly at my seemingly naive question, The locals don't like our people to ood this place. They see us coming and clear out immediately. They dont want to do business with us. I remembered watching interviews with upper-caste and middle-class residents of Dadar and other neighbourhoods in Anand Patwardhans documentary lm, Jai Bhim Comrade (2011). I recalled feeling shocked by the intolerance, prejudice and fear of fellow citizens that the interviewees frankly communicated when asked the question point-blank. Right away, I rang my friend who teaches political science at the Mumbai University. He was to have met me and shown me around on 6 December, but we were unable to rendezvous in the overwhelming scene there. Is it true that shops are shut and locals leave town on Ambedkars birth and death anniversaries? I asked. Of course, he said, everyone who can, leaves. Then, he laughed bitterly, You could call it cosmopolitan contempt. At every opportunity I casually brought up the subject with folks I knew in south Mumbai. It gets a bit too much, they said. Too many people, too much of a rush, crazy trafc jams, unbearable noise and lth the city cannot take it. We just do not have the civic infrastructure; the government cannot provide adequate facilities of food, toilets, water and accommodation for so many outsiders pouring in. Why on earth did you go there? they exclaimed, belatedly worried for my safety. Research, I said, brushing aside their apprehensions, and it was absolutely ne. But, I could see disapproval and scepticism in their eyes. The Untouchables While working on a book about Ambedkars life, I keep reading about the resistance that Ambedkar encountered in his
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COMMENTARY

own lifetime, especially in the rst decade or two of his political activity, during the 1920s and 1930s. Through his early mass agitations, he persistently attempted to recongure structures and spaces like tanks, wells, and temples as public goods, commons, or civic resources equally accessible to all Indians regardless of caste or gender. His attempts, despite drawing thousands of volunteers, and often despite administrative support or at least non-interference and non-obstruction by the British authorities, met with a wall of upper-caste intransigence. If untouchables drank from a tank, the tank was later puried by the deployment of archaic brahminical rituals. If they besieged or entered a temple, the temple was claimed as private property by the local upper-caste elite. Public face-offs between opposing groups became tense and sometimes dangerous, creating law and order problems for the British. Rights of access and entry were endlessly disputed in the courts of law, Ambedkars powerful opponents weighing in with newspaper columns and letters to government and legal ofcials, as well as editors and political leaders. The Congress, which was conducting nationalist campaigns during this period in many of the same places, did not always provide the moral or practical backup that Ambedkar might have expected or solicited. Gandhis unpredictability and recalcitrance, his preference for the tactically advantageous rather than the morally defensible position, eventually led to a complete breakdown of relations between the Mahatma and Ambedkar, never to be repaired. The difculty and ultimate failure of the Mahad Satyagraha around the Chowder Tank, and the Nashik Kalaram Temple movement, that together stretched on for nearly a decade between the mid1920s and the mid-1930s, should both be read as evidence of the unapologetic unwillingness of upper castes to share public space with untouchables. Ambedkar became fed up with these apparently unrelenting attitudes, and declared in Yeola in October 1935 his intention to reject Hinduism in favour of some other religion. In Mumbai, in 2013, three-quarters of a century later, I saw
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the same prejudices, albeit now muted or disguised, at work on the occasions when dalits who did indeed follow Ambedkar into Navayana Buddhism in 1956 seek to lay claim to urban resources like roads, parks and the ability to observe public holidays of special signicance to their community in the midst of the citys everyday life. Before Independence, the practice of untouchability was the ip side of the coercive monopoly of public goods by upper castes. Such a monopoly is no longer considered valid on constitutional, legal, or moral grounds, and there is no group that can get away with trying to keep dalits out. The allotment of the Indu Mill land for the purpose of building an Ambedkar memorial is testimony to the postcolonial states recognition and ratication of the rights, claims, and aspirations of a section of Indian society that has consistently been denied its place in the sun. But, the desire to exclude is in some sense undiminished, and so, what do middle-class, upper-caste Dadar residents do on 6 December? Instead of asking dalits to stay away, they themselves temporarily abandon their locality and distance themselves from the Ambedkar mahaparinirvana observances. With varying degrees of prevarication, hesitation, equivocation and embarrassment, whether to me as I conduct research for my book, or to Anand Patwardhan as he was shooting his documentary Jai Bhim Comrade, citizens of free India still voice an us versus them, we residents versus those outsiders mentality that barely masks caste-based bigotry. Shivaji Park, a week after the fact, was lled as usual with kids playing cricket and football, and grown-ups talking animatedly on their cell phones on park benches. Admittedly, there were still several hundred people there, but nothing compared to the sea of humanity on 6 December. I was struck by the uncomfortable proximity of Ambedkars resting place to the ofces of the Shiv Sena on the one hand, and the Veer Savarkar National Memorial on the other. I walked about the neighbourhood, noticing other smaller parks, upmarket coffee shops and bookstores, beautiful decrepit art deco bungalows
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and apartment buildings from Bombays glory days. And, the old gnarled trees I had not noticed before. Echoes When I returned to Delhi, I looked for my copy of V S Naipauls India: A Million Mutinies Now. The opening chapter, Bombay Theatre, describes his rst day in Bombay more than 25 years ago it was 14 April, Ambedkars birthday, probably in 1988, which was when he began the book. The echoes between my own experience and his a quarter-century earlier, felt eerie. Naipaul too is driven through Dadar in those days there was no Sea Link connecting the airport to south Bombay and is puzzled by the throngs of people evidently out to mark some sort of special occasion whose exact nature he cannot decipher. They are in line for something, but he cannot gure out what (he hazards some guesses: a circus, perhaps, or an appearance by a movie star?). Naipaul gets to his hotel downtown. He enquires if it is a public holiday, and is told it is not. He calls a journalist friend (probably Vinod Mehta), who suggests that the long lines have something to do with the release of new telephone directories, but then reports that his maid servant was saying something about Ambedkar. Naipaul nally has his answer. He writes:
The Dr Ambedkar idea seemed better than the idea about the telephone directories. ... The Dr Ambedkar idea made sense of the ags and the emblems of which I had had a memory. The people I had seen were honouring their leader... and by this they were honouring themselves as well. Later that day I talked to an ofcial of the hotel. He asked me for my impressions of Bombay. When I told him about the Ambedkar crowd, he was for a moment like a man taken aback. He was at a loss for words. Then, irritation and unhappiness breaking through his well-bred hotel manner, he said, The countrys going from bad to worse.

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