Untouchables and Dalits, buddhists and Ambedkar

Early history of British in India

From early 18^th century East India Company started trading in India, gradually taking on the aspect of a quasi-state organization, interfering in the declining politics of Mughal India, until eventually the British government officially took over its activities (the Company having gone bankcrupt)

The Company’s main allies were the nawabs, or Mughal princes of various regions; the British came to be known as nabobs, in consort with the nawabs, and viewed by much of the Hindu population as just as bad as each other. The nabob’s higher caste soldiers, sepoys, defended the Company’s interests

To begin with the British had respect and interest for Indian culture; there was intermarriage between Indians and British upper class; to some extent class trumped race. A telling anecdote: at a party in 1881, the Prince of Wales insisted that King Kalakaua of Hawai take precedence over a mere German prince. When the prince objected, the P of W explained: ‘Either the brute is a king, or he’s a common or garden nigger; if the latter, what’s he doing here?’

White Brits settling in India, whatever their class – and quite often it was low – immediately slotted into the princely class of India, taking for themselves that lifestyle with its privileges and, at first, respecting the nawabs who were their equals

The Hindus in their turns saw the new invaders as kshatriya, i.e. a new type of warrior horsemen such as had invaded India before

Still, the Brits at first preferred to fraternize with Muslims rather than Hindus: they were better horsemen, like themselves; Islam revered the Hebrew Bible and Christian prophets; it was easier to convert to Islam than Hinduism.

In 1765 one of the last Mughals formally inducted Robert Clive, governor of Bengal from 1755 to 1760, into the Mughal hierarchy as diwan, or chancellor for Bengal

It was quite common for Brits at this stage to ‘go native’, and later some would call them ‘white Mughals’; they took Indian wives and the offspring were included in their wills. They were ‘equal opportunity thieves, robbers but not racist robbers’!

As governors of their regions, they did not interfere with local custom, on the contrary, often patronized local festivals and temples; they learned the local languages and dressed in the local garb

Still, make no mistake, they were also plundering the country on a large scale

Also: after the whites had settled permanently, they began to bring their own wives and family over – this put an end to mixed marriages and easy fraternizing; white women had to be protected, compounds built etc…so began the second phase of British rule in India

Now when whites learned Indian languages, they generally only learned the imperatives of the verbs: i.e. they spoke to the natives only to order them about.

The real turning point was the Black Hole of Calcutta incident, when the Nawab of Bengal attacked British Calcutta; the British retreated to sea leaving a number of British women and children in the city; the Nawab imprisoned them temporarily in a British prison, called the Black Hole. He didn’t mistreat them but on their release it emerged that perhaps 50 of them had died from suffocation and dehydration. The British used this incident for vicious retaliation and imposition of direct rule.

SECOND WAVE: EVANGELICALS, OPPORTUNISTS, MISSONARIES

In 1813, the growing evangelical movement in England forced the Company to allow missionaries to come out to India, reversing its previous policy of patronage and protection of local religion

The missionaries had little success, the exception being among tribals and low caste Hindus

THIRD WAVE: UTILITARIANS AND ANGLICISTS

The 1857 Mutiny, triggered by the incident of pork or beef fat in catridges (‘biting the bullet’)…led to India become a protectorate of Queen Victoria – but it also led to a cutting back of missionary activity, as the British could now see how dangerous such interference was

Still, the previous tolerance for Indian culture was totally killed off by the Mutiny – henceforth a policy of Anglicization would be pursued, if not Christianization…

[cp Russian attitudes to Islam in conquered territories: under and before Ivan Grozny, it was treated with respect; after the conquest of Kazan there were attempts at mass conversion; thenceforth it was seen as barbaric and pagan; under Catherine the Great as Russia pushed into Kazakhstan and then later into Central Asia, Islam became a tool for civilization against nomadic shamanism and paganism, and a muftiate was set up in Ufa. In Enlightenment fashion, Catherine saw Russia’s mission as generally civilizing rather than Christianizing, and Islam was considered to be a literate culture which could help in that mission…the Christianizing and civilizing aspects would alternate with the latter generally winning out; a similar situation arose re the Jews in 1795 after the Division of Poland: initially, Alexander I dreamed of converting all 1 ½ million to Christianity, but later tsars abandoned this hope as unrealistic, settling, as with Muslim subjects, for the goal of Russifiying the Jews. But again, the Enlightenment civilizing mission of the Russian empire, like its British or French counterparts, could still not abandon the notion entirely that to be a civilized gentleman, one had to be a Christian. Another interesting case in point is the Caucasian Muslims who were granted aristocratic status and high rank in the Russian imperial army: a bit like the British sepoys, their native aristocratic blood and their monotheistic religion, allowed them to be exotic additions to the empire without the need for conversion or Russification…]

One of the aspects of tolerance that was lost after the Mutiny was interfaith dialogue: continuing Akbar and Mughal tradition the English had hosted interfaith conversations with representatives of different religions; for the most part they were lively conversations but conversions to Christianity did occasionally ensue

But during the 3^rd Wave, suspicion of native religion ran riot: the Bhagvad Gita had once been seen as a worthy scripture, approaching the Bible for its sublimity; but now it was seen as dangerous and savage and encouraging of violence: it was said that members of one secret Bengal society were encouraged to take an oath of allegiance before an image of the goddess Kali, while holding a copy of the Gita in one hand and a revolver in the other and while lying flat on a human skeleton

The British also keyed into a discourse whereby Hindus and Muslims would be at each others’ throats without their help: in 1870 a report told how at the Babri Mosque Hindus and Muslims were clashing, even though the British had put up a railing to separate the Hindu worshipers outside the temple from the Muslims within; investigation reveals that the British themselves had put up the railing and that there had been no history of clashes, but rather of mutual communal worship in an untroubled atmosphere

In other respects, too, relations between Hindus and Muslims deteriorated: a Hindu myth about Islam emerged in the 19^th century (and is still current today, interestingly among neo-Hindu converts in Poland and other places) that Muhammad had been trained by the great Hindu yogi Gorakhnath: this was why the Muslim minaret tower and prayer niche so resembled the Shiva linga (phallus) and yoni (female reproductive organ) and that Mecca was originally a Shaiva center known as Makheshvara (Lord of the Sacrifice). This was the opposite attitude to pro-Muslim Hindu discourse under the Delhi Sultanate which for example parsed Muhammad’s name as Maha-muda, great seal/symbol. Of course, perhaps under ‘neutral’ British rule, Hindus were giving vent to resentment they wouldn’t have expressed under the Mughals.

DEEP ORIENTALISM

Orientalism is a term coined by Edward Said to refer to the exoticizing of the East by Western colonialists, often leading to distortion of history. Doniger refers to it as “the love-hate relationship that Europeans had with the Orient both for the right and the wrong reasons, making it in many ways the inversion of what Hindus called hate-love (dvesha-bakhti): loving India but with a skewed judgment and self-interest that amounted to hate…that was often horrendously destructive to the object of their affection…”

Others point to the existence of Occidentalism, a similarly distorted vision by the East of the West.

Both sides shared similar dichotomies:

East = religion, spirit, nature, the exotic, adventure, danger, romanticism, myth, feminine

West = science, materialism, the city, boredom, comfort, safety, the Enlightenment, logos, male

[these categories were often applied within Europe: so a southern country like Spain would be Eastern for the English; Russia was perceived as Eastern by many in Western Europe, and sometimes perceived itself was Eastern, as a form of self-compliment; at other times Russia saw itself as Western vis-à-vis its own Muslims, Jews,Buddhists etc.]

TRANSLATIONS, LOST IN COLONIZATION

Doniger says of the English approach to Hinduism: “As Protestants they preferred texts to practices, as Orientalists they preferred the glorious past to…the sordid present.”

The past Indians were glorious Aryans; their language Sanskrit was cognate with Greek and an ancestor and relative of European civilization

the present Indians were their degenerate heirs; this doublethink allowed the colonists to assuage their own conscience in ruling the Indians

the first translation of a Sanskrit text was actually a forgery: the Ezour Veda, a French text in the form of a dialogue between two Vedic sages, one a monotheist and one a polytheist, who find that ‘pristine Hinduism’, uncluttered by later dark imaginings, points to Christian truth. A bishop gave it to Voltaire in 1760, who was much influenced by it. It is now certain that it was originally a French text, probably composed by a Jesuit in the 1620s.

the first genuine translations were of the Bhagvada Gita, Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, and the Laws of Manu – all in the 1780s and 1790s.

the latter was translated by Jones, who was searching for something that Hindus could be sworn into in court. Manu’s Laws became an instrument in the British vision of an ancient Sanskrit text-based uniform Hinduism which could serve as the uniform religion of all Hindu subjects. This was a distortion as, while Manu was important, its influence was felt in the form of centuries of oral commentary intermixed with local lore and practice.

Doniger: “What the British did was replace the multiplicity of legal voices and the centuries of case law with a single voice, that of Jones’ Manu. It was as if U.S. courts had suddenly abandoned case law to rule only by the Constitution.”

The translation of the Gita by Wilkins had a massive impact on the American transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Empson, who read and loved it. But again, though the Gita had a place in Hinduism, it was not the central place the British ascribed it – only a small literate elite used it for spiritual inspiration. And again, the British interpreted the Gita as laying the way for Christianity, at least for the small aristocratic layer of the Indian population, the Brahmins.

In fact, the British admiration for the Gita led to reform movements among Hindus who sought to fashion Hinduism into something agreeing with British tastes. Thus started the Aryo Samaj and Brahmo Samaj reform movements.

SUTTEE AND REFORM IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE RAJ

Suttee under British eyes:

Suttee appears in the Mahabharata, a 9-5 century bce epic; 1 c bce Diodorus Siculus, the Greek author mentions it; in a Buddhist text a story from Hindu sources records how a queen says when her husband is forced into exile: ‘Burning on a fire, uniting in a single flame – such a death is better for me than life without you.’ In the Padma Purana, 1000 bc, Kshatriya women are said to be noble if they immolate themselves with their husbands; however this action is prohibited to Brahmin wives.

A widow is, for Hindus, a bad woman, since her duty is to support and keep her husband alive; if he dies she has failed in her duty and it is dishonorable for her to outlive him. A sati is a good woman, always remaining a wife and never a widow – since her husband is not regarded as dead until he is cremated and the two of them go to heaven

Some women thus did it voluntarily out of a sense of love and honor

Modern scholars have differed in their evaluation of suttee:

- One calls it a sacrifice and asks what were the traditions that drove some women to do it voluntarily and others to be forced to it

- Another sees it as murder, and sees it in the light of more general mistreatment of women in India: female infanticide and dowry murder of daughter-in-laws

- Another calls it ‘widow burning’ and asks why the British first denounced it, then covertly sanctioned it, then officially ban it

Doniger focuses mainly on the last question

RAMMOHUN ROY AND THE BRAHMO SAJ

Raja Rammohun Roy (1774-1883) was a Bengali Brahman who knew Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit and his native Bengali

He had read many scriptures, and found that for him there was not much difference between them

In 1814 he settled in Calcutta and was active in advocating Western style education, urging Hindus to learn mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy and ‘other useful sciences’

He himself always wore the sacred thread and observed the rituals of his caste but he had a very ecumenical theology

He believed in a strict monotheism, firmly opposed the sort of image worship characteristic of Puranic Hinduism (puja, temple worship, pilgrimage)

Probably he combined elements of Upanishadic Hinduism, Islam and 18^th century European Deism (belief in a transcendent Creator God reached through reason), Unitarianism, and the ideas of the Freemasons (a secret fraternity that espoused some deistic concepts)

He was one of the first upper-caste Hindus to visit Europe where he made a great impression on French and English intellectuals

1828 – he founded the Brahmo Samaj (‘Society of God’) based on the doctrines of the Upanishads, several of which he had translated into Bangla (Bengali)

Roy wrote 2 tracts against Suttee, first in Bangla then in his own English translation: A Conference between an advocate for and an opponent of the practice of burning widows alive, and Abstract of the arguments regarding the burning of widows considered as a religious rite.

The form of the first tract was a dialogue, ‘the classical Hindu bow to diverse arguments’ [Doniger]

Roy denounced suttee from the point of view of Hindu scripture and law, arguing against it even when it was voluntary and as such in accordance with scripture; he advocated ascetic widowhood instead

His writings may have been influential in the British decision to outlaw suttee in 1829, even though personally he was against government intervention in religion

Later he published a tract on women’s rights to property, Brief remarks regarding modern encroachments on the ancient rights of females.

Referring to the main commentary on Manu (by Mitakshara) and Dayabhaga law (the Bengali marriage code), he argued for a woman’s right to property, something which British woman were not granted until 1882

After Roy’s death in 1833, Debendranath Tagore became head of the society [he was the father of the famous poet and thinker Rabindranath); the third leader Keshab Chunder Sen abolished caste into the society and admitted women as members.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

British reactions at home were divided between conservatives and liberals:

Edmund Burke and William Jones insisted on the dignity of Indian culture and wanted to see Indians educated in their own languages and culture; the latter led the move to impeach Warren Hastings for his part in a massacre

James Mill, the originator of utilitarianism and father of John Stuart Mill, insisted that India suffered from arrested development and that it was the duty of the British to stay and intervene and interfere in her development; the Utilitarians in general wanted to teach Indians European languages and literatures, and supported the Anglicists and Evangelicals in their cultural and religious missionizing of India

One can summarize the split as Orientalist/Conservative vs. Liberal/Enlightenment – the former for a diversity of cultures and values, the latter for a monistic universalism

This manifested itself in the attitude to suttee: conservatives who saw it as religious upheld the pact not to interfere in native religion; those who saw it as secular saw it as murder and outright violation of human rights. As a result, the British were driving ‘with one foot on the brake, and one foot on the accelerator.’

The Hindus were likewise divided:

On one hand those who wanted to enforce the caste system strictly and opposed any new legislation, including anti-suttee legislation

On the other hand were the radicals, including those who advocate violence against the British and those who advocated complete assimilation to European norms, renouncing Hinduism, eating beef and drinking beer.

In between these two extremes was Rammohun Roy and the Indian Liberal Movement who opposed child marriage and suttee, preached nonviolence and tried to build a new world that would combine the best of Hindu and British values.

To some extent these camps are still in existence in India today and in the Western world in its attitude to cultural relativism and human rights, some defending strange practices, others against their will siding belatedly with Christian missionaries who sought to ban suttee etc.

It should also be remembered that Akbar and Jahanngir had tried to put an end to suttee before the British

THE RAJ RIDES TO THE RESCUE

Even though a law was passed banning suttee in 1829, it was not in fact just the efforts of the British and certainly not the undivided consensus of the British that led to its banning, as British historical myth sometimes proclaims

Under the guise of non-interference and not offending high caste Hindus, they turned a blind eye or else insisted that it be done properly, i.e. in accordance with Hindu tradition

For this they turned to the Laws of Manu again, except that Manu is big on ascetic widowhood and says nothing about suttee

However some Bengali scholars were found who argued that references to suttee had been taken out and who reconstructed the original to put it back in [the debate is reminiscent of those who maintained that stoning for adultery was in the Quran and not just in the hadith]

On the basis of this, in 1813 the British issued a circular saying the suttee would be allowed if countenanced by the religious authorities, and prohibited only when it was not voluntary, if the woman was under 16 or pregnant, intoxicated or otherwise coerced.

Occasionally interventions by ‘compassionate reformers’ led to tragedies, as in the case of Captain Robertson in 1828: he rescued a widow from a slow burning pyre; she had escaped once in agony as it had burned too slowly, but had insisted on being brought back; on the second occasion Robertson’s officer’s rescued her, and 20 agonizing hours later she died.

Shortly after this the 1829 ban came into effect – but by this time there were many Indians in the legislature and prominent Brahmins had spoken up against suttee…so by this point it was a joint effort of banners on both ethnic sides…

According to Doniger, the British used the 1829 ban to promote themselves as beacons of progressiveness against the devilishly backward Hindus, and it became a propaganda tool in the liberal Christianizing wing of colonial rule

ANIMALS: DAYANAND SARASVATI, THE ARYA SAMAJ AND COW PROTECTION

Dayanand Sarasavati (1824-1883) was trained as a yogi but lost faith in yoga

He claimed to base his doctrine on the 4 Vedas as the eternal word of god and denounced later scriptures for image worship, sacrifice and polytheism.

1874 he founded Arya Samaj

He insisted that “those who read or listen to the Bible, Quran, Purana, false accounts, and poetic theory – books of ideas opposed to the Veda – they become sensuous and depraved.”

The Arya Samaj developed the ritual of ‘reconversion’ to bring back to the Vedic fold Muslims (who had never converted from Hinduism in the first place) as well as to bring back some recent Hindu converts to Islam

They also sought to distinguish themselves as Aryans from Hindus who in their view (as in the British view) practiced a degraded view of Vedic religion

1893 – the A S divided into a meat-eating and vegetarian branch

From 1882 protection of cows and opposition to slaughter became their rallying cry across India – both against Muslims and against the British who permitted Muslims to slaughter cows, arguing that it was not a religious issue and that therefore cow-protectionists should not have the last word against others

Cow slaughter was specifically used to justify violence against Muslims and pariahs (untouchables)

VIOLENCE AND NONVIOLENCE

NONVIOLENCE: GANDHI

The Amritsar Massacre: a peaceful crowd gathered in a square to celebrate the feast day of Baisakhi; Brigadier General Reginald Dyer marched his troops in and without any warning gave the order to shoot on the crowd – a general ban on any gatherings had been imposed due to violent unrest in the previous weeks. The soldiers only stopped firing when they ran out of ammunition. More than 1200 men, women and children were seriously wounded, 300-500 were killed.

Dyer, who had a reputation for cruelty (he had made Indians crawl on the street and had prisoners beaten, sometimes in public) was proud of what he had done; the House of Lords passed a measure commending him, and declaring him ‘a defender of Empire’. The British press, though, was shocked, as were public figures like Winston Churchill. The House of Commons officially censured him in 1920 and he resigned.

The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 provoked anti-British sentiment even among those who had been aficionados of British culture: Tagore returned his Nobel Prize and Nehru’s father abandoned his Savile Row suits and took to wearing Gandhian homespun. It was the first significant step in the weakening of British resolve and the triumph of the Indian nationalists, culminating in independence in 1947.

Gandhi reacted to the massacre with a fast: “Fasting can only be resorted to against a lover, not to extort rights but to reform him, as when a son fasts for a father who drinks. My fast a Bombay and then at Bardoli was of that character. I fasted to reform, say, General Dyer, who not only does not love me but who regards himself as my enemy.”

Gandhi used fasting for other purposes too: to get Congress to recognize Pariahs as a Hindu community, and he succeeded; separate Harijan electorates were abolished and more seats were reserved exclusively for Harijan members. Fasting was seen in dharma texts as a restoration for sin and errors – and Gandhi’s fasting was also intended as self-improvement too. It was also intended to unite and control his own people, to get them to pull back from violence; he also succeeded in getting the British to release him from prison on several occasions due to fasting, or hunger-strikes as they would now be called. In some ways his hunger-strikes had more success with the British than with his own people – after all, the British eventually left.

Gandhi developed the idea of satya-graha, ‘holding firmly to truth’ – drawing on the nonviolent Jaina and Vaishnava traditions of his native Gujarat. He first applied his methods of non-violent resistance in South Africa to defend the rights of the Indian community there.

Indian women had used fasting as a means to influence their husbands for centuries, and Gandhi too used the ascetic discipline as a political tool to influence the stronger ‘partner’.

(Wives used to lock themselves into the ‘anger room’, withholding sexual favors from their husbands as a way of influencing them: the opposite, interestingly is mentioned in the Quran, namely that the husband should withhold sex if he suspects his wife of marital violations).

In a sense Gandhi created a ‘gendered nationalism’, that is, he imbued the resistance movement with the female qualities of endurance and nonviolence, in addition to the qualities of bravery and virility.

Gandhi also drew on more esoteric Indian traditions: he practiced sleeping with naked girls in order to test his resistance. This seems to draw more on the ancient Tantric techniques of “internalizing power, indeed creating magical powers, by first stirring the sexual energies and then withholding semen.”

Regarding meat consumption, there was a certain envy among Indians of the British for their non-vegetarianism. A ditty that Gandhi heard in his childhood was:

‘Behold the mighty Englishman/He rules the Indian small/Because being a meat-eater/He is five cubits tall.’

Gandhi himself went back on his Gujarati vegetarian traditions and did eat meat, feeling that the natural order of violence and power required him to eat it to gain the strength to defeat the British.

But he used the symbol of the cow’s love for its calf to express the bond between India and her people – though this had the unfortunate effect of excluding Muslims from his vision….it had echoes of cow-protection which had been used against Muslims, and it explains why Muslims never really got on board Gandhi’s program.

The cow in fact was part of his discourse of non-violence: just as an adherent of traditional ahimsa (nonviolence) would not spill the blood of a sacrificial victim so his struggle would not spill British blood (an ambiguous metaphor one would have thought, given that the victim ultimately is slaughtered).

Indeed Gandhi recognized that non-violence was not inherent in Indian tradition and he had to reinvent it, and in fact defend the concept against competing interpretations of Hinduism:

“…It may be freely admitted that the Gita was not written to establish ahimsa…But if the Gita believed in ahimsa or it was included in desirelessness, why did the author adopt a warlike illustration? When the Gita was written, although people believed in ahimsa, wars were not only not taboo, but no one observed the contradiction between them and ahimsa.”

Had things really changed in modernity? Seemingly not – which became evident in and after Gandhi’s death.

In fact Gandhi’s program of ahimsa may be said to have multiple origins, a mixture of Indian and Western thought influenced by Indian thought. In other words, there was mutual feedback. So Gandhi was influenced by Tolstoy and German idealists who had read the Upanishads (originally in Persian Muslim translations!) –making these ideas more attractive to Indians and Westerners.

Acc Doniger, though: “Gandhi’s nonviolence failed because it did not pay sufficient attention to the other, more tenacious Hindu ideal that had a deeper grip on real emotions in the twentieth century: violence. For as Krishna pointed out in the Bhagvad Gita it is quite possible to adhere to the mental principles of nonviolence while killing your cousins in battle.”

Gandhi himself wrote a commentary on the Gita in which he interpreted all the killing in a metaphorical way…

“The Vedantic reverence for nonviolence flowered in Gandhi; the Vedic reverence for violence flowered in the slaughters that followed Partition.”

Gandhi himself was shot to death by Nathuram Godse, a Pune Brahmin who had ties with the militant nationalist organization called the RSS (National Volunteers’ Organization).

CASTE

The Chamars and the Satnamis

The Chamars were leather-workers whose contact with cow carcasses excluded them from Hindu temples. Acc to legend in the 1820s a Chamar farm servant named Ghasidas threw the Hindu idols onto a rubbish heap (echoes of Abraham’s destruction of the idols!) and rejected the authority of the Brahmins, the temples and Hindu puja (prayer devotion), as well as the colonial authority. He proclaimed belief only in the formless god without qualities called the True Name (satnam). Other low castes joined the Satnampanth (path of the true Name), abstaining from meat, liquor, tobacco and red vegetables, and used bullocks instead of cows for field work. |They thus rejected their own rejection by the Brahmins, becoming what Doninger calls Sanskritizing, i.e. keying into Hindu Sanskrit literate culture – i.e. also taking on the characteristics of those whom they rejected.

Around 1868, Christian missionaries succeeded in converting some Satnams to Christianity by forging links between their own myths (where gurus replaced Hindu gods) and Jesus.

In the 1930s, the Satnams created a new genealogy for themselves, with Brahmin ancestors and drawing upon Manu, but adapting Manu to present him as an advocate of their own high caste status. They campaigned to be ascribed High Caste according to the Scheduled Castes system, thereby showing that they now accepted the system fully; the administration rejected their plea for reclassification, arguing that Harijans (untouchables) were Hindus in any case. In other words, they were back to square one: by accepting the caste system and arguing within its parameters they were firmly assigned their old place in it! And with British connivance –showing that the British for all their moral protests helped reinforce the caste system too.

UNTOUCHABLES AND DALITS, BUDDHISTS AND AMBEDKAR

Ambedkar was a Dalit who agreed with Gandhi that untouchability had to be stopped in the new India. Gandhi, though, thought that you could still keep caste, while Ambedkar thought you couldn’t.

At first he thought you could keep caste – but then he reasoned that since Hindus saw their scriptures as eternal and all its institutions as god-given, there was no way to unpick one element without bringing the whole thing crashing down. They were impossible to eradicate.

“Gandhiji, I have no homeland. How can I call this land my own homeland and this religion my own wherein we are treated worse than cats and dogs, wherein we cannot get water to drink?”

Finally he converted to Buddhism, translating the Buddhist concept of individual suffering (dukka) into his own awareness of social suffering, discarding a great deal of Buddhism and putting in its place his own doctrine of social activism.

One thing he jettisoned was the central story that Buddha was raised in a palace until the day when he went outside and happened to see the three evils: “it does not appeal to reason,” Ambedkar said, that a 29 year old man had not seen death.

In 1956 5 million Dalits led by Ambedkar converted en masse to Buddhism.

AMbedkar was worried that they would still be labeled Untouchables if they applied for the new affirmative action schemes, such as reserved university places.

This turned out to be true, as one convert said:

“I became a Buddhist…but only orally, because on the forms you have to write down Scheduled Caste. If you are a Buddhist you can’t get the scholarship. But I am proud to follow Ambedkar. Being Scheduled Caste causes inferiority in our minds. To be Buddhist, it makes me feel free!”

Some Dalits now accept the Aryan invasion theory of India, which many scholars and upper caste Hindus accept. The latter see this as making them superior to the natives; but Dalits now twist this, saying that they are the original more ancient population and therefore by the Law of Origins, more honorable than the Aryans. The vagaries of scholarship and social reality and historical memory…

On Nov 4, 2001 50,000 Dalits converted to Buddhism, some as a protest against mistreatment of Dalits and some genuinely.

As a result the Hindu Nationalist Party reclassified Buddhism and Jainism as branches of Hinduism…the legendary flexibility of Hinduism was here being used for retrogressive purposes, i.e. to stop untouchables from escaping their fate in Hindu India.

In Nov 2006, the conservative govt banned a mass conversion rally aimed at converting one million Dalits to Buddhism: Hindu nationalists said the rally was a ‘Christian conspiracy’. The rally went ahead.

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