How should ordinary citizens understand the nature of responsibility in the case of the recurring deaths of migrant workers that they are witnessing? So many have died on the road, absolutely needlessly, in the process of trying to escape death by hunger which the Indian Covid-19 lockdown had made a grim reality. India has a very large number of (internal) migrant workers, especially from its rural areas, who travel to more urban centers, looking for work. How does one even begin to view such instances, say, as a matter of ethics?  

By ILO’s estimate, close to 80% of India’s economy is in the informal sector. The country has about 45 crore (450 million)  internal migrants as per the 2011 census. For such a large percentage of the economy to have been thrown into disarray and acute distress, the official recognition of their hardship has been grudging and sparse. 

There have been no admissions of any moral discomfort by those in authority and no expression of feelings of remorse.  There are occasional social media messages from position-holders expressing sorrow, but by and large there has been little admission of guilt, misdoing or miscalculation.  

What is especially disturbing, from an ethical viewpoint, is the impersonalisation of the deaths – as though they were no one’s fault, as though they were happening because of ill-advised choices on the migrants’ part, which was to exercise the choice to head home. There is no attempt at a genuine and heartfelt acknowledgement of the unfolding tragedy or to recognize the enormity of the situation.  

Is it possible to assign moral, and even legal, responsibility in such cases? How does one assess the role and responsibility of executive-level decisions? Or is one to simply let such instances pass, thinking of them as “collateral damage,” as in the case of military operations? Does one view the situation merely as an unfortunate epi-phenomenon (a secondary-effect), as a sideshow to a “noble war,” in which some sacrifices are inevitable?  

Legal theorists and others in the legal professions can probably slice-and-dice such situations to evaluate accountability and culpability. For the sympathetic, ordinary observers, who have the privilege to view the unfolding drama from a distance, the real imperative is to make sense of the injustice playing out before their eyes – and maybe press for some justice.  

Can such injustices be relativised in the larger picture of the struggle against the virus, as seems to be happening? Can they be normalised as unfortunate road accidents, invisibilising the turbulent and raw story enveloping the migrants’ distress? 

What we see is a moral distancing from the tragedy. There appears to be a feigned un-involvement and disengagement with the incidents as though they have nothing to do with us, as though they ought to be viewed only impersonally. There are no causes one should look for beyond individual folly.  One should also not seek to determine responsibility since the lockdown placed the onus of compliance on each individual, seems to be the attitude.  

In fact, in the Indian prime minister’s first lockdown speech there was a sense of the impending hard times for the poor, when he stated that, “This crisis has certainly brought on a very difficult time for the poor.”  

These “difficult times” turned out to be deadly for migrant workers. It will be a hard case to advance that such deaths are not on account of a hasty and unilateral lockdown. The timeline of the lockdown has been discussed and it has been pointed out that the decisions leading up to it were taken without adequate preparation, and without consulting those people who were likely to be most affected. So, putting the burden of adhering to the lockdown on migrant workers, imposed without their assent and understanding, seems to be grossly unfair. 

For its proponents, the sudden announcement of the lockdown is viewed as a tactical choice, to freeze people in their tracks to stop the spread of the virus; a sort of morally higher-order decision bound up with the reality of “difficult times” for many, but one which was still the most optimum recourse for the greatest good.  

That it resulted in such undeniable hardship to a significant section of the population will be viewed, by the decision-makers and proponents, as an unfortunate and unintended consequence. In fact, as is becoming increasingly clear, besides being “unintended,” the distress to migrant workers also seems to be a case of an “unanticipated consequence.” 

The executive’s role during covid-19 in India is increasingly being admired according to different polls and surveys. It seems that the people of India are managing to see some bigger picture of the fight against Covid-19 against whose backdrop they are able to subsume the “smaller” tragedies of worker deaths.  

These deaths become rationalised and incorporated in the grand narrative arc of the fight against the virus – and a moral compromise is skillfully effected. It is almost as if all such people are saying: “How do you stop people who want to keep walking?” 

It is precisely here that the moral question becomes very important. For it is the differential attitude towards lives that makes the insensitivity towards some even more acute and stand out. It is a moral question that concerns one’s true caring towards the most vulnerable, the workers in the informal economy, even if some special safeguards are coded into legal obligations.  

It also casts a profound doubt of the nation’s valuation of the labour that the migrant workers provide; while there might be inconvenience at not having them around to serve our endless needs, their well-being, their humanity and their flourishing as fellow humans with similar impulses as our own, is none of our concern. How they live, how they conduct their daily lives in order to make urban life possible has been none of our concern. And now that their often precarious lives have been turned upside down, we have no mechanisms to reach out to them and stand with them in their hour of distress.  

A journalist reports how the Indian prime minister reacted in the early days of the travel ban when he heard complaints from some incoming air-travellers: “During the present pandemic, when the Prime Minister received two complaints from returning passengers about the scanning at the Delhi airport being inadequate, he woke up all departments concerned in the middle of the night to examine the video footage from the surveillance cameras to see if there were any slip-ups.” 

We do not know how many government departments have been similarly roused from their sleep on account of the tumult in the migrant workers’ lives. But how we treat those who are most vulnerable, especially when their lives have been upended by decisions beyond their control but set in motion by an identifiable set of “political actors,” is of paramount importance in assessing our political and societal priorities, and moral compass.  

How we respond to any special hardship caused to them – which in India has meant death too – is a question of undeniable moral ownership and our capacity for empathy. How one “ought” to respond is a moral question, different from whatever technicalities and legalities might advise. 

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar did not trust in a moral responsibility towards the Scheduled Castes on the part of India’s rulers after Independence – mostly composed of the so-called higher castes. He had decided “to have the rights of the Scheduled Castes embodied in the Constitution,” as he stated in States and Minorities. 

It seems that in the outward concern for all lives, some lives actually matter less than some others, especially because they can be considered expendable, commodifiable, and an indiscriminate mass. Surely our claim to lofty ideals of caring for everyone and thus operating on a moral pedestal are irreparably undermined.  

One could of course chalk-up such moral indifference as inherent in the socio-economic systems we are under, which are anti-people in spirit and where inequality and impoverishment of the most marginalized is a direct result of official policies. In India’s case, it’s steady increase in inequality has been documented by economists as not being accidental and temporary, but long-term and a feature of the economic system.  

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx observes that, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” The evident apathy and indifference from India’s ruling classes towards the plight of its working class is a glaring case in point.  

The Indian socialist leader, Ram Manohar Lohia, in his attempt at fixing accountability for the subcontinent’s partition in 1947 in which hundreds of thousands had perished, observed the following just over a decade after the tragic event, as he echoed Dr. Ambedkar’s mistrust of any morality-driven emancipation for India’s marginalized masses.:  

“At the bottom of all of India’s ills is the almost complete loss of identification between the rulers and the ruled, the middle class and the mass. This absence of identification has been over the centuries documented as total divorce in the shape of castes. The right word to use is not divorce but a state of total unrelatedness. India’s masses have been totally unrelated to her ruling classes, the vast sea of the mass to the tiny ruling minority among the high caste.”    

On a similar note, an article on the demonstrable differences in the effect of the virus on African-Americans in the United States, titled The Politics of Disposability notes, “systemic social inequalities have made some groups more vulnerable than others…when the dust settles…there will be a tale to tell of who mattered and who was sacrificed.”

In India, we already can read the tale of who matters and who can be sacrificed.

 (The author is a writer based in the National Capital Region of New Delhi, India)

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The decision to implement an almost complete lockdown such as the one in India is seen as an enlightened path out of a moral dilemma. The dilemma presented seemingly incommensurable and conflicting options, that of privileging lives over livelihoods.

As philosopher B.K. Matilal observed regarding moral dilemmas in the volume titled Ethics and Epics, “Very roughly, such dilemmas arise when the agent is committed to two or more moral obligations, but circumstances are such that an obligation to do x cannot be fulfilled without violating an obligation to do y.” In India’s case, the state as the ‘agent’ chose to fulfill its obligation to protect lives (the Right to Life), in the process ‘violating’ the obligation to protect livelihoods (by restricting the Right to Liberty), at least for the short term. 

The approach to prioritise lives above social and economic considerations seems to shine through by its moral weight, by the inherent goodness that attaches to valuing life above all other mundane concerns. It is also a matter of fact that various forms of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders around the world are touted to have brought a measure of control over the spread of the disease. Any decision that aims to ensure the preservation of lives, as in the current coronavirus pandemic, is seen as “the right thing to do,” as in this analysis[1] by an Indian economist. 

Such decision-making derives its legal authority from the fact that in a parliamentary democracy like India, the people of India have vested the powers of decision-making in matters concerning almost all aspects of their lives in their elected representatives. For the decision-maker, the kind of moral responsibility such an action entails, as all actions of a state which have a bearing on the lives of its citizens, is one springing from acting on behalf of others – in this case, the citizens. 

This decision-making on behalf of the citizens of the nation, however, rests on some assumptions. It is assumed such decision-making is undertaken with the best intentions, in the best interests of all the citizens, and with the best understanding of the situation. The state arrogates to itself the authority to decide on behalf of the entire citizenry.

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who put in place much of the Indian constitution, was not in favor of such an assumption of decision-making powers on behalf of an entire people.  As noted in a piece [2] titled ‘What is constitutional morality?’, Dr Ambedkar placed his faith in the parliamentary system because “he [saw] parliament’s function as questioning any claims the government might make to embody popular opinion or sovereignty simply on account of its majority.”

In laying out its plan of action, the current state demanded what might be termed a sacrifice in return, a quid pro quo. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said as much when, in his pre-lockdown address, he stated that he would need a “few weeks from us” – mujhe aapke kuch hafte chahiye. 

In the spirit of speaking and acting on behalf of all citizens, the call for the sacrifice (“kuch hafte”) was across-the-board. It sought a uniform relinquishment of certain rights from all citizens of the nation regardless of any social division, say, of economic status or caste. There was a “we are all in it together” sense that was sought to be communicated.

The call, however, concealed the crucial assumption that everyone would in fact be able to make the sacrifice willingly – while still keeping their body-and-soul together. There was an inherent graded-inequality in the sacrifice demanded by the state, to repurpose Dr. Ambedkar’s famous characterization of caste inequality. 

As part of this differential demand, the effects of the sacrifice ended up ranging from minor inconvenience for some to total incapacitation for others. 

While for a lot of white-collar workers, their modes of livelihood transitioned seamlessly online, those of the daily-wage workers and the migrants, ground to a halt. Their mode of livelihood was rooted in physical transactions with the full and necessary participation of their entire person, and their remuneration was for each day’s work.  

They could not load the truck in the mandi while working from home, they could not somehow ferry passengers online in their rickshaws, they had no recourse to installing the lintel on a roof via zoom.  

While the promised protection of the Right to Life sought a tradeoff with the Right to Liberty, it was that Right to Liberty which ensured the Right to Life for the daily-wage workers. In the final reckoning, then, there was no continuing Right to Life which was being offered to the workers; it was really a “question of lives versus lives,” as an  article  titled India’s Lockdown [3] argued. That the dichotomy between “Lives and Livelihoods” is a false one is contentious, but several commentators, including those from the “third world,” like David Ndii from Kenya, have  written persuasively [4] about it.

It is probably not for nothing that these two rights go together and are guaranteed under a single article, Article 21, as explained in this piece [5] in a national daily. 

How did it come to pass that the most vulnerable were the worst sufferers? Why was that not anticipated? How do we look at the situation and the distress caused to those who could have least borne it? As necessary and inevitable collateral damage? As a suffering of a few for “for the greater common good?” 

If good intentions, the subsequent decision-making, the execution of the plan, and the (short-term) consequences had lined up, one could have considered the lockdown an overall wise step. However, the immediate consequences, as evident from the chaos and continued human suffering to the most vulnerable, raise some difficult questions about the decision. 

The way the poor, especially the migrant workers, reacted upon realizing that their survival was at stake, by thronging bus-stations (Anand Vihar), by walking hundreds of kilometers, by coming out to demand for resumption of transportation services (Bandra), is empirical evidence that the implications of the lockdown had caught them by a total surprise.

It is not that the government did not express its awareness of the hardships to the poor. The prime minister made due mention of such exigencies in his  March 24 lockdown speech, “This crisis has certainly brought on a very difficult time for the poor…Several people are collaborating their efforts to help the poor.”

But that was pretty much it, in terms of that undifferentiated category of the “poor.” Somehow, the collaboration of the various efforts did not seem to have reached the poor in time for they had to take matters in their own hands, and in a large number of cases, strike out on their own on the country’s highways to secure their survival. 

In an  interview [6] the executive director of Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development (Kerala) said that the various administrations – local, state and central – were unaware of the numbers and condition of migrants: “Essentially, we were not prepared for the lockdown, and I do not think that people imagined so many migrants existed in urban centres without any support…They make the city run but are invisible to the system… State governments and urban local bodies were not prepared for the situation.” 

One would ideally have hoped that the decision-makers would have made it a top priority of theirs to communicate the details regarding a lockdown to every single citizen, especially those who are the most vulnerable and for whom special measures might have been needed to deliver the message. 

But the workers were not consulted with anything resembling conscientiousness and thoroughness regarding the impending cataclysm about to befall their lives, demonstrating an ignorance, indifference and apathy regarding their lives and livelihoods. It was an unethical oversight and a condemnable deception. 

The most vulnerable population was not accorded the dignity and humanity it deserved. When the magnitude of their presence manifested itself, they were treated as objects to be controlled and contained, herded and quarantined.

Actions, especially those which are praised for moral courage, are charged with moral responsibilities and have to reckon with their moral consequences.

In  an article reproduced by the Economic Times, titled ‘How Coronavirus is shaking up the moral universe’, the author summarised the various inspirations behind the lockdowns around the world. He concluded that most lockdowns in the West had followed a “Rawlsian” approach, referring to the philosopher John Rawls’ thinking: “If a person is unwilling to be abandoned, governments are not entitled to give up on them; they must do their best to protect everyone, particularly the weakest.”

The intention “to protect everyone, particularly the weakest,” was probably not uppermost in the minds of the decision-makers in the case of the Indian lockdown. In India, the approach behind the lockdown seems to be closer to a Utilitarian one, under which, according the piece just referenced, “rulers must be guided to the total happiness, or ‘utility,’ of all the people, and should aim to secure ‘the greatest good for the greatest number.’”

Such a generic approach, while it might appear to be neutral and even-handed, ignores the socio-economic realities of India, wherein any sweeping action ostensibly for, and on-behalf of, all people necessarily causes greatest inconvenience to the most vulnerable. We have seen enough written about the “greater common good” in relation to the discourse on development, as for instance by Arundhati Roy.

As Rawls explains at the beginning of  his book A Theory of Justice, which he wrote as a “systematic alternative to utilitarianism”: “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many.”

There was no justification or moral grounds to expect disproportionate sacrifice from those that could least afford to make it to feed into some greater cause, without first taking them into confidence at least. 

In one of the recent speeches to panchayat leaders , the prime minister made mention of the lessons of self-reliance, especially of self-reliant villages, that the current crisis had taught us. It seems a little difficult to reconcile such observations with the fact that it is the chipping away at the modicum of self-reliance of villages that has caused a lot of distress migration to cities. 

With the lockdown, thousands of migrant workers in cities, engaged in modes of livelihood that offered them some avenues of self-reliance, had the rug pulled from under them. They were left helpless, with their precious self-reliance shattered.  

*Umang Kumar is a socially conscious writer in the Delhi NCR region.

[1] https://theprint.in/ilanomics/faced-with-covid-19-india-chose-to-protect-lives-not-livelihoods-and-thats-a-good-thing/384197/

[2] https://www.india-seminar.com/2010/615/615_pratap_bhanu_mehta.htm

[3] https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/indias-lockdown

[4] https://www.theelephant.info/op-eds/2020/04/10/notes-on-leviathan-the-invisible-hand-and-moral-sentiment-in-the-time-of-coronavirus/

[5] https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/life-liberty-and-law-in-the-times-of-a-lockdown/story-8uqeCaOFaw2FJkHfPz6A7O.html

[6] https://www.indiaspend.com/now-is-the-time-to-show-india-cares-about-its-migrants/?fbclid=IwAR10HDNph3NUavDHncHdABPoMVS1OtUgob0dcHIzHJ6Ma1C5gV8OTPtj_34

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Babasaheb Ambedkar’s prefaces to his works were often as penetrating and incisive as the main body of the work that followed. His book, Who were the Shudras? How they came to be the  Fourth Varna in the Indo-Aryan Society  written in 1946, was dedicated to Mahatma Phule (or Fule): “Inscribed to the Memory of  MAHATMA JOTIBA FULE,” runs the dedicatory line in the book.

For Dr. Ambedkar, Phule (or Fule) was the “Greatest Shudra of Modern India,” of course, “because he made the lower classes of Hindus conscious of their slavery to the higher classes” but more specifically because he “preached the gospel that for India social democracy was more vital than independence from foreign rule.”

Babsaheb had already set forth this argument in his book from the 1930s, Annihilation of Caste (AoC), wherein he had stressed on the need for social reform to precede political reform. It was in the spirit of searching for ways to get to the bottom of social deformities and emerging with clues towards social reform that he had undertaken the project of investigating the history of the Sudras.

Who were the Shudras was written before Dr. Ambedkar embarked upon the successor volume, Who were the Untouchables, which appeared in 1948. As the title of the former book makes it clear, it was regarding the Shudras, who were, in the caste hierarchy, a rung above the Untouchables, Ambedkar’s own people. Yet, in the overall spirit of seeking justice from the Hindu social order, in tribute to the groundwork laid by Jotiba Phule in anti caste struggle, and to address the “problem of the Shudras,” as he calls it, he undertook the remarkable project of researching and writing Who were the Shudras. 

He explained the seriousness of the problem at hand to justify a penetrating study into the historical background of the problem: 

Under the system of Chaturvarnya, the Shudra is not only placed at the bottom of the gradation but he is subjected to innumerable ignominies and disabilities so as to prevent him from rising above the condition fixed for him by law. Indeed until the fifth Varna of the Untouchables came into being, the Shudras were in the eyes of the Hindus the lowest of the low. This shows the nature of what might be called the problem of the Shudras. If people have no idea of the magnitude of the problem it is because they have not cared to know what the population of the Shudras is. Unfortunately, the census does not show their population separately. But there is no doubt that excluding the Untouchables the Shudras form about 75 to 80 per cent of the population of Hindus. A treatise which deals with so vast a population cannot be considered to be dealing with a trivial problem.

What mattered to Ambedkar was the fact that the Shudras were “subjected to innumerable ignominies and disabilities,” and given their large proportion in the population of Hindus, their condition pointed to the severity of the social ills within Hinduism – and thus the crying need for social reform.

But, being the brilliant legal mind, he also undertook this painstaking study based on empirical evidence of the fact of the Shudras’ and Untouchables’ actual prevailing condition as proof of the continuance of the Varna system, despite what someone might have claimed. “The best evidence to show that the Varna system is alive notwithstanding there is no law to enforce it, is to be found in the fact that the status of the Shudras and the Untouchables in the Hindu society has remained just what it has been. It cannot therefore be said that a study such as this is unnecessary,” he observed.

He repeated his conviction about the primacy of social reform at different places over the years. In the Preface to Who were the Shudras, he once again alludes to it explicitly, when he describes the possible reactions from his Hindu readers to his book. Speaking about the “politically minded” class of Hindus – surely an influential class of Hindus – Babsaheb felt that they would be “indifferent to such questions” because for them, “Swaraj [was] more important than social reform.”

His book, with its deep interrogation of Hindu sacred literature, was directed at scholars too, since Ambedkar knew that his thorough engagement with that literature had scarcely been carried out by anyone else, either by the Brahmanical Hindus for whom the literature was sacred, or by the Indological scholars who had pioneered the study of India’s past by utilizing its Brahmanical literature. 

Ambedkar was confident of the fruit of his labours, for he felt that even his scholarly critics would “have to admit that the book [was] rich in fresh insights and new visions.”

But, while he was solicitous of the reaction of the scholars and the general Hindu reader, he also anticipated their charges against him, as a non-expert in matters of religion and religious history of India: “I have already been warned that while I may have a right to speak on Indian politics, religion and religious history of India are not my field and that I must not enter it.”

With disarming simplicity and directness, Dr. Ambedkar, while agreeing to the charges that he was not proficient in the Sanskrit language, responds to the accusations against him by turning them on their head by revealing their pettiness: “For I venture to say that a study of the relevant literature, albeit in English translations, for 15 years ought to be enough to invest even a person endowed with such moderate intelligence like myself, with sufficient degree of competence for the task.”

Dr. Ambedkar is actually making several very important points here, all at once, even under the modesty of acknowledging himself as “ a person endowed with…moderate intelligence.” He is making the claim that a sufficient amount of engagement with so-called specialized material (“15 years”) by someone even of moderate intelligence should be grounds enough for a certain degree of understanding of the material. 

He also seems to be  undermining the vaunted loftiness and impenetrability of the Hindu sacred literature while making a case for the non-expert to be fully capable of acquiring a modicum of competence in dealing with an area deemed for experts. He also seems to be conveying that, despite the accusations of not using the sacred texts in the sacred language, he has utilized the best scholarship available in the form of translations. 

For, anyone with even a superficial familiarity with the fields of scholarship in matters of Hindu Brahmanical traditions and their literature, what is termed Indological research, will know that Dr. Ambedkar utilized the most recent and reliable scholarship in the field in his time and before, whether Indian or European. 

In Who were the Shudras, he references a stunning array of scholars as was his hallmark, and these include not just Europeans like Max Mueller, John Muir, V. Fausboll, Horace Wilson, but Indian scholars like P.V. Kane (of Dharmashastra fame), V.S. Sukhthankar (“the erudite editor of the critical edition of the Mahabharata”), K.P. Jayaswal (Hindu Polity) and S.D. Satwalekar (Rig Veda).

It might be pertinent to note that Dr. Ambedkar’s zeal to explore the depths of Indian religious traditions. He had attempted, while still in London for his London School of Economics thesis, to try to learn Sanskrit from one of Europe’s leading Indologist, Hermann Jacobi, at the Bonn University in Germany, as described by scholar Maria Bellwinkel-Schempp. That did not come to pass but it just goes to indicate the burning quest Dr. Ambedkar was on. Those 15-years of study that he mentions in the Preface were marked by intense effort at engaging with all manner and complexity of textual material, as recorded by his personal aide in Delhi, Nanak Chand Rattu, in his book Reminiscences and remembrances of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.

Even when referencing Indological scholars, many Europeans among whom were the target of niggling disagreements about their methods and intentions down the years, Ambedkar exercised his own judgement in evaluating every interpretation they offered. Consider his verdict on the description of Shudras as “anasa” at several places in the Rig Veda. While heavyweight Sanskritist and Indologist Max Mueller parses it as “one without a nose,” Sayana, the 14th century commentator on the Rig Veda, holds that it means “mouthless, that is devoid of good speech.” Dr. Ambedkar casts his vote for Sayana’s version based on a contextual evaluation of the description of the Shudras, thereby not blindly privileging a leading Indologist’s opinion.

Not just that, as a uncompromisingly conscientious scholar, he left nothing to chance, especially the issue of Sanskrit passages in his text, which he had cross-checked by competent scholars: “I must thank Prof. Kangle of Ismail Yusuf College, Andheri, Bombay. He has come to my rescue and has checked the translation of Sanskrit shlokas which occur in the book. As I am not a Sanskrit scholar, his help has been to me a sort of an assurance that I have not bungled badly in dealing with the material which is in Sanskrit,” he notes in the book.

It is worth noting at this stage that the so-called expert’s domain as also fenced-off by the expert’s language is an exclusionary stance, meant to keep away the well-meaning “non-expert” who might uncover inconvenient truths. All traditions which originally record their sacred literature in a sacred language – Brahmanical Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism – also develop traditions of commentaries (and sub commentaries) to elucidate the message and purport in the sacred language. 

Many of these commentaries are not written in the sacred language but in other, “non-sacred” languages, but are held in great esteem down generations. Casting doubts on Dr. Ambedkar’s relatively less-advanced grasp of Sanskrit as evidence for his ineligibility to make a foray into Indian religions and their literature is obviously baseless. This is more so if one considers the kind of utilitarian research that Dr. Ambedkar sets out to perform in Who were the Shudras, where he mostly looks for evidence of certain names, meanings of some terms, and some more historical and mundane information, rather than engaging with possibly multi-layered ideological interpretations. 

More recently, the noted linguist and political activist, Noam Chomsky, when faced with similar criticism for expressing opinions in a field he is not considered an expert in, is said to have observed that, “Virtually anybody who stops watching television, paying attention to sporting events, or playing the stock market, and concentrates, instead, on the society in which he or she lives, could effect an appropriate political critique.” 

Even with regard to the historical method he employs, Dr. Ambedkar makes his procedure clear: “Firstly I claim that in my research I have been guided by the best tradition of the historian who treats all literature as vulgar – I  am using the word in its original sense of belonging to the people—to be examined and tested by accepted rules of evidence without recognizing any distinction between the sacred and the profane and with the sole object of finding the truth.” One cannot miss the method of constant examination and testing “by accepted rule of evidence” employed scrupulously by this polymath who also happened to be a legist. 

The book itself, Who were the Shudras, is testimony to the thoroughness of a scholar on a quest for uncovering the truth. Dr. Ambedkar probes every “sacred text” he can lay his hands on to make his argument. His reading and references are staggeringly vast, covering pretty much the entire Vedic corpus as it is known – from the Vedic Samhitas, to Aranyakas, Brahmanas and Upanishads – to other “sacred texts” such as the Dharma Sutras, Dharma Shastras, the Epics and Puranas. He also strays into Indo-Iranian texts and linguistics to find instances and meaning of cognate terms.

His methods, mostly of textual analysis, are not unlike those utilized by a lot of Indological scholars, but crucially, Dr. Ambedkar was not writing a generalist’s descriptive book on Vedic history of mythology; he scoured these often repetitive and ritualistic texts for instances of things like origin stories and was able to compare them with acute observation – and draw conclusions. Just dealing with the host of ancient personages especially in Vedic literature and  keeping all the accounts with their tiny variations in some sort of order and organization is a feat that even experienced Indologists and textual scholars might not be able to match. 

All this, “to proclaim the truth,” as he declared in the book, and needless to say, to seek justice for those who suffered from the system of graded inequality, which, as he reiterates in the book, “is not merely notional [but] is legal and penal.” 

But even in his quest against this system of inequality, engaging with the Brahmin’s books which, according to him, “contain[ed] fabrications which are political in their motive, partisan in their composition and fraudulent in their purpose,” he never lost his grace and magnanimity. Much like in the Annihilation of Caste, he addressed the  Orthodox Hindus too: “[N]o matter what happens…follow the determination of Dr. Johnson in the pursuit of historical truth by the exposure of the Sacred Books so that the Hindus may know that it is the doctrines contained in their Sacred Books which are responsible for the decline and fall of their country and their society; secondly, if the Hindus of this generation do not take notice of what I have to say I am sure the future generation will.” 

Despite all the doubts cast on his abilities and abuses hurled at him for challenging orthodoxy, he still had kind advice for the orthodox Hindus – and hope in the future generation of Hindus. He even had the intellectual capaciousness to quote a line from the Sanskrit poet and playwright, Bhavabhuti: “Time is infinite and earth is vast, some day there will be born a man who will appreciate what I have said.” He can rest assured that there are an increasing number of women and men around the world who deeply appreciate what he said. —

Umang Kumar is a socially conscious citizen living in the National Capital Region of Delhi.

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