CONTENDING VISIONS
- How D.R. Nagaraj reconciled Gandhi with Ambedkar
Politics and Play - Ramachandra Guha
Books do not change lives, but books can change the way we look at the
world. As a student of economics, I was a high modernist who believed
in transforming rural communities through industrialization. Concern
for the poor came with a heavy dose of condescension. Those who lived
outside cities had to be improved and uplifted through an infusion of
modern technology and what used to be known as the 'scientific
temper'. Then I read Verrier Elwin's Leaves from the Jungle, a
charming evocation of the life of the Gond tribals of central India.
This, and his other works, showed me that despite their apparent
illiteracy and lack of material wealth, the tribals had a rich
tradition of poetry, folklore and art, a deep identification with
nature, and a strong sense of community solidarity. In the latter
respects they had, in fact, something to teach a modern world that
dismissed them as primitive and uncivilized.
A little later, I became a Marxist, persuaded into the faith by the
scholars who taught me in Calcutta. I was young and impatient; the
incremental idealism of my parents' hero, Jawaharlal Nehru, did not
seem sufficient to make a dent in the poverty and inequality that was
so manifest a feature of social life in India. Then, on a visit to
Dehradun, I picked up from the pavement of the town's main street a
copy of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. I took the book home and
read it through the night. Orwell had seen, at first-hand, how the
democratic aspirations of the Spanish people had been undermined by
the takeover of their movement by a band of cynical and amoral
communists, acting under the instructions of Josef Stalin. He
communicated his experiences in prose of an uncommon clarity. By the
morning, I had abandoned Marxism, and was a social democrat once more.
Another book that changed the way I looked at the world was Truth
Called Them Differently, published by the Navajivan Trust in
Ahmedabad. This reproduced the debates between Rabindranath Tagore and
Mahatma Gandhi. They argued about many things — India's place in the
world, the role of the English language, whether an hour a day at the
spinning wheel was mandatory for the patriot. The exchanges reveal the
intellectual and moral qualities of the two men, each of whom had the
ability (and courage) to change his views when circumstance or reason
so demanded.
Elwin was once a well-known writer in India. Tagore, Gandhi and Orwell
enjoy global reputations. All had a considerable and varied oeuvre in
English. Their books were published by the most prestigious publishing
houses. A fourth book whose reading radically altered my understanding
of the world was, in contrast, written by an author unknown outside
his native Karnataka. And it was published by a totally obscure press.
Browsing through Bangalore's Premier Book Shop in the early 1990s, I
came across a slim book called The Flaming Feet. The title was
intriguing, as were its contents — a series of essays on and around
the figure of B.R. Ambedkar.
Published by a local NGO called the Institute of Cultural Research and
Action, The Flaming Feet was the first work in English by D.R.
Nagaraj, a professor of Kannada in Bangalore University. The politics
of the 1930s and 1940s had placed Gandhi and Ambedkar as antagonists —
as, more recently, had the politics of the 1980s and 1990s. The
Bahujan Samaj Party had launched a series of stinging attacks on the
Mahatma, accusing him of patronizing the Dalits and impeding rather
than aiding their emancipation. From the other side, the Hindutva
ideologue, Arun Shourie, had written a 600-page screed depicting
Ambedkar as a toady of the British.
D.R. Nagaraj was unusual and — at that time, at least — unique in
admiring both Gandhi and Ambedkar. To be sure, in their lifetime their
respective social locations made it hard for these men not to be
political adversaries. By the time Ambedkar returned from his studies
in the US, Gandhi was the acknowledged leader of the national
movement. For a brilliant and ambitious young man from a Dalit
background, to join the Congress was to relegate oneself to a
secondary role in politics. Thus, as Nagaraj pointed out, "there was
very little scope for a Congress Harijan leader to develop interesting
and useful models of praxis from within". So, Ambedkar chose to form
his own political party and fight for his people under a banner
separate from, and opposed to, Gandhi's Indian National Congress.
In The Flaming Feet, Nagaraj demonstrated how, through their debates
and arguments, Gandhi and Ambedkar transformed each other. The Mahatma
became more sensitive to the structural roots of caste discrimination,
while Ambedkar came to recognize that moral renewal was as critical 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".
Reading Nagaraj, like reading Tagore, Gandhi, Orwell and Elwin, was an
epiphanic experience. He taught me to recognize that while Gandhi and
Ambedkar were rivals in their lifetime, from the point of view of
India today the two men should rather be viewed as partners and
collaborators. The legacy of both was required to complete the
unfinished task of Dalit emancipation. After the publication of The
Flaming Feet, Nagaraj began writing more often in English. These later
essays, like the book, were marked by an unusual ability to bring
disparate worlds into conversation: the past and the present, the
elite and the subaltern, the vernacular and the cosmopolitan.
In 1998, just as he was maturing as a scholar and political analyst,
Nagaraj died of a heart attack. Now, 12 years later, his published and
unpublished essays on Dalit questions have been brought together in an
expanded edition of The Flaming Feet, edited and sensitively
introduced by his former student, Prithvi Datta Chandra Sobhi, and
appearing this time under the imprint of a more mainstream publisher.
Here Nagaraj writes with elegance and insight about a wide range of
subjects — on the "lack of a living tradition of militant
Gandhianism"; on the self-invention of a Dalit identity (as he points
out, in searching for a history outside Hinduism, "the modern Dalit
has to seek his rebirth in a state of fearful loneliness. S/he has
nothing to rely upon in his/her immediate Hindu surroundings"); on the
need to build a united front of ecological, Dalit and tribal
movements.
Nagaraj was a social scientist as well as littérateur whose mode of
writing was sometimes empirical, at other times metaphorical. Here is
a representative excerpt: "Babasaheb [Ambedkar] had no option but to
reject the Gandhian model. He had realized that this model had
successfully transformed Harijans as objects in a ritual of
self-purification, with the ritual being performed by those who had
larger heroic notions of their individual selves. In the theatre of
history, in a play with such a script, the untouchables would never
become heroes in their own right, they were just mirrors for a hero to
look at his own existentialist anger and despair, or maybe even
glory."
This new edition of The Flaming Feet may be the most important work of
non-fiction published in this country in 2010. At any rate, it is
indispensable for anyone with any serious interest in society and
politics in modern India.
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