In 30 Seconds
Story
They met for the first time in August 1931, in Bombay, and misread each other at once, Gandhi assuming the sharp spoken visitor to be a hostile Brahmin reformer and startled to learn he was himself of the depressed classes, Ambedkar leaving convinced that the Mahatma’s concern for his people was a proprietor’s. The two decades of argument that followed, in conference rooms, through fasts, in books and in the columns of rival weeklies, was the profoundest quarrel of the freedom struggle, deeper than any with the British, for it concerned what the freedom was for, and the republic that eventually employed them both, one as its father figure and one as its law giver, was built, quite literally, on their unfinished settlement.
The ground each stood was the whole of a life. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar had been born in 1891 into the Mahar caste, had sat outside his classroom on a gunny sack no touchable child would share, been refused water, Sanskrit and lodging, and had answered with the century’s most improbable education, doctorates from Columbia and the London School of Economics, the bar at Gray’s Inn, the learning worn ever after as armour and argument, that the caste system was not Hinduism’s excrescence but its structure. His movement’s premises followed, that untouchability would end not by the oppressor’s change of heart but by the oppressed’s acquisition of power, education, organisation, agitation as he ordered the famous triad, separate political instruments if necessary, and exit from Hinduism itself if the house proved unrepairable. Gandhi’s premises were the mirror’s reverse. Untouchability was to him Hinduism’s blackest sin but a corruption of it, not its essence, its removal a penance the caste Hindu owed and must perform, the untouchables, whom he named Harijans, God’s people, to be embraced back into an undivided fold, and the political separation of the oppressed from the body that had wronged them was, in his eyes, the sin made constitutional. Hence London, the Award, the fast and Poona, the collision the previous chapter told.
The years after Poona sharpened rather than softened the difference. Gandhi threw himself into the Harijan campaign, the tours, the temple entry agitations, the Sangh, and Ambedkar judged the campaign by its avoidances, charity without power, temple doors without land, jobs or intermarriage, and delivered his verdict at Yeola in 1935, that he would not die a Hindu. The next year supplied the argument’s classic texts. The address Ambedkar wrote for the Jat Pat Todak Mandal of Lahore, cancelled by its hosts for its radicalism and published as Annihilation of Caste, carried the case to its conclusion, that caste would survive every reform that spared the scriptures’ authority, and that the shastras themselves must be renounced. Gandhi answered in Harijan, defending varna as pristine ideal against caste as corruption, and Ambedkar’s rejoinder, printed thereafter with the address, remains Indian political literature’s most unsparing exchange. They quarrelled again over the village, which Gandhi held the republic’s cell and Ambedkar a den of iniquity for his people, over machinery, over conversion, Ambedkar taking millions with him into Buddhism at Nagpur in 1956, weeks before his death, the exit executed at last.
And yet the quarrel’s end was not victory but incorporation, of each by the other. It was Gandhi’s counsel that put Ambedkar, the Congress’s scourge, into free India’s first cabinet and, as chairman of the drafting committee, at the Constitution’s pen, and the document that resulted holds both men’s cases in permanent tension, Ambedkar’s framework, rights, law, the individual citizen, the state as caste’s adversary, abolishing untouchability by article and arming it with reservations descended from Poona, and Gandhi’s residue in the directive principles’ villages and prohibitions. The republic has argued their argument ever since, in every debate on reservation, conversion, temple and village, and the two portraits that now face each other in Parliament’s halls state the inheritance exactly, the reformer who wanted Hinduism to deserve the untouchables, and the emancipator who declined to wait, joint authors, against each other’s grain, of the country both were building.
