Suchergebnisse

Ramnarayan S. Rawat and K. Satyanarayana, eds, Dalit Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016, 304 pp.

There is a peculiar absence of the untouchable in Hind Swaraj. The absence is particularly striking, given that the annihilation of untouchability, if not of caste, would subsequently become indispensable for Gandhi's preoccupations with equality. More than two decades after Hind Swaraj, the Mahatma would consecrate the untouchable as harijan. Irrespective of whether one judges this gesture as incidental or integral to Gandhi's politics, the imbuing of divinity to the untouchable had deeper moral consequences, foremost of which was to institute touching as the site of moral warfare. What kind of war demanded touching and sacrifice at one and the same time? Gandhi's elaboration of touchability revealed the radical paradox and limits of satyagraha, for these consecrated unequals were neither political antagonists nor imperial sovereigns who might simply be apprehended as hostile combatants. They were his moral unequals, the constitutive ellipses of satyagraha, without which nonviolence itself might lose its precarious ethical equilibrium.

B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), the radical Indian anti-caste thinker, left unfinished a critical corpus of works on "Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India", a fragment of which was provisionally titled "Essays on the Bhagavad Gita". This essay engages with that corpus, situating Ambedkar's encounter with the Gita within a much broader twentieth-century political and philosophical concern with the question of tradition and violence. It interrogates the excessive and heterogeneous conceptual impulses that mediate Ambedkar's attempt to retrieve a counterhistory of Indian antiquity. Located as it is in the same Indic neighborhood from which a radical counterhistory of touchability might emerge, the Gita is a particularly fraternal and troubling text for Ambedkar. Yet his responsibility towards the Gita comes to be hinged not upon evasion but rather upon an exaggeration of its hermeneutic power; that is, upon his painstaking inflation of the Gita's willfully modern interest in instituting the universal. Ambedkar's relentless struggle to annihilate this universality of the Gita would have to be founded upon another universality, at once destructive, excessive and counterlegislative. In this unfinished attempt to recuperate the ideality of the universal, this essay asks, does Ambedkar himself become the most thorough modern practitioner of the Gita?