by NICOLAS JAOUL and S. ANAND
Ananya Vajpeyi’s Righteous Republic, being marketed as the next big India book (after Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India), seeks to understand the manner in which the ‘Indian self’ (the swa of swaraj) was conceptualised by five key intellectuals through ‘Indic’ categories — M.K. Gandhi (ahimsa/non-violence), Rabindranath Tagore (viraha/longing), Abanindranath Tagore (samvega/shock), Jawaharlal Nehru (dharma and artha/order and purpose), and B.R. Ambedkar (duhkha/suffering). Her attempt at “mainstreaming Ambedkar”— by including him in this panchayat of privileged, “twice-born” intellectuals — is merely an unsympathetic act of epistemic charity, for Vajpeyi does not concern herself with the specificity of Ambedkar’s emancipatory project.
Her Ambedkar chapter focuses on his opus The Buddha and His Dhamma, and dubs his redefinition of Buddhism a mere “polemic” and a “failure of his imagination” that therefore has little to do with the ‘Indic tradition’. Such judgments are a logical consequence of her hazy and elitist idea of ‘Indian tradition’ that she restricts to brahminical textual knowledge. What place can a Dalit critique of brahminism, such as Ambedkar’s, really find in a research project culturally premised on the ‘Indic tradition’ which, for Vajpeyi, defines the ‘Indian self’ “from the Vedas to the Constitution”?
Had Vajpeyi’s been a non-academic effort — like say Arun Shourie’s Worshipping False Gods — it could have simply been regarded as yet another instance of social disdain towards Dalits and their uneasy attempt to define themselves as political subjects in their own right in contemporary India. But the fact is it has been published by Harvard University Press and has received ringing endorsements from India’s intellectual class — Pankaj Mishra, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Sudipto Kaviraj and Partha Chatterjee, among others. This raises concerns regarding the social and political sensitivity of the intellectual class towards the Dalit question.
Buddhism
It is not that Ambedkar’s engagement with Buddhism should not be evaluated critically. But Vajpeyi’s conclusions are drawn exclusively from her so-called intuitions and unconvincing psychological interpretations of Ambedkar’s Dalit psyche. These ‘intuitions’ only seem to give a free way to value judgments. In her account, Ambedkar is the rationalist who appears far less successful or talented than Gandhi whose poetic sensitivity to India’s soul is praised. Hence, while “The Bhagavad Gita spoke to Gandhi so vividly because it had achieved the supreme summit of poetry”, “Ambedkar, ever prosaic, ever pragmatic, ever the realist … was so eager to rewrite history that he never grasped the literary nature of his chosen task.”
The Hindu for more