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The below was in response to an email (dated 01 September, 2016) which referenced a snippet from Ramchandra Guha's website. The response, as will be evident, is influenced by Arundhati Roy's introduction to the 2013 release of the Annihilation of Caste along with the content of that book itself.
Extract from the email:
In one of the articles of Ramchandra Guha, I came to know about the Kannada writer D.R.Nagaraj. He wrote extensively on the Dalit movement in India. Quoting from Ramchandra's website:
In the Flaming Feet, Nagaraj demonstrated how through their debates and arguments, Gandhi and Ambedkar transformed one another. The Mahatma became more sensitive to the structural roots of caste discrimination, while Ambedkar came to recognize that moral renewal was as critial to Dalit emancipation as economic opportunity. In seeking to honour both men, Nagaraj was, as he put it, fighting both 'deep-rooted prejudices' (which urged Indians to follow only one or the other) as well as 'wishful thinking' (which made one believe that one or other thinker provided all the answers to the Dalit predicament). Nagaraj insisted that 'from the viewpoint of the present, there is a compelling necessity to achieve a synthesis of the two.' 'The greatest paradox of modern Indian history', wrote Nagaraj, was that 'both Gandhian and Ambedkarite perceptions of the issue are partially true, and the contending visions are yet to comprehend each other fully.'
Response:
An overall remark: It is important when reading a book to be clear why one is reading the book. Take the case of the book (Annihilation of Caste) in question. For people with our background we are reading the book not because we wish to be part of the movement to change the status of Dalits and other equally or more marginalized sections of society. We are reading the book for the simple reason so as to to sensitize ourselves on how to look at the question of Dalit so that we do not contribute any further to that problem through our conduct in our day to day life.
This latter motivation demands that we do not get drawn into the opinions and commentaries by individuals with regard to a particular book when the governing aim of these opinions and commentaries is to enable the former (changing the status). When a book is read for personal education, it is best to read the book and formulate one's own opinions about it, in accordance with one's own motives, and draw the necessary lessons thereon.
The debate between Gandhi and Ambedkar is important for an average Indian only from one perspective: it tells him or her to not accord greatness to the words of a 'Mahatma' simply because of the weighty prefix. Arundhati Roy's long essay enables one to adopt this attitude. However, it does not mean that the essay should be viewed as an excuse to believe that Gandhi was largely incorrect and Ambedkar was right. Indeed, the question of who is right and wrong is the wrong question to ask in the first place. It is enough to know that Gandhi's opinions on the matter were not final and there was scope for an alternative point of view.
Both Gandhi and Ambedkar were men of reason and intelligence who were shaped by a plethora of events in their individual lives, of which only one is the correspondence between them. To best understand Gandhi and Ambedkar on the Dalit question it is useful to consider the following analogy:
Imagine a patriarch of a household with two sons. The elder sons treats the junior one unfairly, even though the junior is as capable as the elder one. The patriarch sees the issue clearly. He often draws the attention of the elder son to his mistreatment of the junior but he stops short of commanding the elder son to treat the junior son as an equal in a fair manner at all times. The patriarch believes in the family as an institution, and thus believes that there is a need to preserve a certain order and hiearchy. Thus, he stops short of throwing the elder one out even when his conduct borders on a manifest vulgar and repulsive criminal offence.
In the meantime, if a guest arrives at the household who is fair-minded and out-spoken, and he notices the mistreatment, he is more likely than not going to rebuke the elder son in the strongest of terms and will be prone to take the side of the junior one. Now, if this guest has also undergone a similar situation in his personal life in the past his sensitivity to the mistreatment will be exponentially higher, and his preference very clear and straight. So clear and straight indeed that it causes revulsion to the patriarch because the guest happens to express in clear terms what the patriarch knows, but refuses to bring to the surface lest there be an open fight within the family. The guest, before leaving, tells both the sons that neither of you are superior to another: obey a common law of respecting each other's property and dignity and both of you shall prosper.
You can easily figure out who is the patriarch and who is the guest in the Gandhi versus Ambedkar debate. Gandhi, at his root, was attached to the conception of a 'society'. Ambedkar, on the other hand, who was mistreated by the very society that Gandhi clung to and tried to preserve (by force or by choice), looked at the individual within the society. His unit of observation, reflection and analysis was 'AN INDIVIDUAL' when it came to the Dalit quesiton. He did advocate the need to mobilize, aggreate and strive for collective action, but that was a strategy to achieve emancipation of an individual and not a social group. His views, thereby, will always seem sharper and more radical given that he was not bound in as strong terms by conceptions of Hindu Society, civilization, loyalty to lineage, &c. as Gandhi was more likely to have been.
It is because of this that, if given a choice, I would tend to lean with the views of Ambedkar in general. With Gandhi I feel that one will retain the category and label of 'Dalit'. With Ambedkar, one will take away the ideal of a classless, casteless, and in general, category-less society. In that sense, Gandhi was a man of the world and what is doable while Ambedkar was a man of imagination and what is necessary to do even if it is not doable.
It is my opinion that it is this idealism of his which made Ambedkar look at the Dalit question as one of religious revival, and hence, for him, it was a spiritual question. For Gandhi, while he said he drew his inspiration from the Hindu philosophy, it was at the end of the day a social question he was trying to address: much like the patriarch in our story who deep-down was aware the solution had to wade through a religious path, but if that path was advocated then it would lead to a radical reformation which would break the notion of the family --- the one in which Gandhi was born in and was, deeply attached to. Like many around us we would presume. There was nothing wrong with Gandhi. It is how a deeply intense man of the world will respond to the wordly questions around him. The typical Indian psyche, given the paradoxical blend of materialism and religious fervour it harbours, will at the end of the day prefer men of the world more than the idealists. Idealists have never had a field day in this land (or most other lands for that matter) for very long. Religion for Indians makes sense if it combines superstition and pragmatism of an opportunist in just the right proportion.
The distinction between the two men is the distinction between the native sensibility and when native sensibility mixes with Enlightenment. The last, is in some sense, a difficult proposition to conduct one's life by in India.
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