If Dalits are angry, it’s because they have every reason to be & Ambedkar is all that the Dalits have – “to fight off illness and death”. ***In the savarna view of the world, for Ambedkar to be just a Dalit deity is not an exalted enough status given his great intellect. He must, therefore, whether the Dalits like it or not, be elevated to his true position in the global, non-Dalit, pantheon of intellectual giants. And this requires transporting him – in a Brahmin bag -- from the claustrophobic confines of a Dalit temple to the open air of the global free market. **And nobody can deny that this edition of AoC, targeted at a non-Dalit audience, for many of whom caste is “an exotic Hindu thing” (Roy’s words), will render Ambedkar as an object available for consumption. *** If Dalits wish to keep Ambedkar for Dalits alone – for after all, they, and not the savarnas, have been the ones who have kept his legacy alive all these years – how can she then say that Ambedkar belongs to all? **First of all, does Roy’s introduction qualify as a form of representation? Well, it certainly does – not in terms of talking for, but in terms of talking about. As for the act of annotating, it is a practice embedded in what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the “scholarly habitus”, which, again, is so tied up in structures of power and privilege that, in the field of caste, it is available to a Dalit only rarely and against heavy odds. Let us assume for the sake of argument that both Dalits and the privileged castes have an equal right to introduce Ambedkar. Do both of them also have equal power to exercise that right? If they do not – and both Roy and Anand would readily acknowledge that they do not – how should a Dalit interpret a savarna’s assertion that they both have an equal right, if not as an instance of insincerity? ***Moving on from the assertion to the action, if we acknowledge that Dalits do not enjoy the kind of opportunities for exercise of knowledge capital that members of the privileged caste such as Anand and Roy do, Roy’s writing of the introduction and Anand’s annotations are an exercise of exactly the same privilege that is being denied to Dalits day in and day out on some ground or the other. *If the main thrust of her essay, in her own words, is to move the Gandhi monument out of the way so that savarna readers can get to Ambedkar, then this operation could very well have been carried out in a standalone publication. Why did it have to be presented as an introduction to AoC?.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 17:11:14 +0000
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