Editorial Team Sruthi Herbert
I cannot recall the exact day or time. It was one day during my masters course that I opened my reading list and started reading the ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development.
This was primarily because I had never known before that Dr Ambedkar was a prolific writer. Ambedkarism had never entered my realm of thinking, and indeed, I wasn’t even familiar with the word up until then. My knowledge about Dr B R Ambedkar was at the lower primary level: as the father of the constitution, but I had never even processed what that meant. What a herculean task it is to lead a team that framed a constitution for a country as diverse and huge as India which had just been freed from colonization! The magnificence of such a task was never mentioned at the school leveI. I suppose the teachers themselves never appreciated it.
Ambedkar never entered my consciousness as a writer. Indeed, he was non-existent in the intellectual and cultural universe that I grew up in. I knew Marx from a young age. If you can know Marx without reading him, but by living his ideas, I knew Karl Marx as well as any other person. Meanwhile, I studied in a Hindu school, and of course, I knew the Bhagavat Gita, Sanskrit, Karnatic music, lots of Bhajans, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. I recited revolutionary humanist poetry in my mother tongue. My father was fond of these lines from a famous poem: ‘Eeshwaranalla Manthrikanalla Njan, Pachamannin Manushyathvamaanu Njan’. ‘I am neither God, nor a Magician. I am humanity, made of raw earth.’ My parents never came in the way of my religious explorations as a child, and I was as familiar and at ease in a Savarna Hindu cultural world as I was at home, where we had strong Christian ethics but no practice of religion. More importantly, I saw around me, the mismatch between the ideological Marxist world and the Hindu way of life and how a resolution is accomplished, and how the Savarna Hindu cultural world and the Marxist comrade could co-exist harmoniously. In this secular revolutionary world, there was no Ambedkar.
I was a naïve sprig when I spotted Dr B R Ambedkar’s name in our reading list. I think that semester also had readings about the revolutionary paradise that I am from, describing how that state of bliss had been reached, and what are the economic problems with this bliss. My reason for reading ‘Castes in India’ was curiosity, because I had never known Dr B R Ambedkar as a writer, even though I was an avid reader.
Now, I remember exactly what happened as I started reading ‘Castes in India’. A story was being told. I was reading about a people, a country, a world which I knew, explained in a new light. I know I sat and read it one go. I read it like I would normally have read a crime thriller, transfixed, because it was explaining everything I had known till now as a puzzle to be solved, approached logically, to explain everything as a massive fraud and to shine light on the truth in a very rational manner. I remember reading about Sati, Child marriage, the surplus man and the surplus woman, and feeling the nerve endings in my brain explode with sunshine. Sometimes I stopped because I had to breathe and get more air. I don’t think it took me very long to read it the first time, although the readings after that have inevitably taken me longer. This was my moment of illumination. This was when I started becoming a failed Hindu project.
This was how I discovered Ambedkar, and how my world started to change. All the savarna universe I had gotten comfortable with during my education, it didn’t matter after I read Babasaheb Ambedkar once. I wondered why nobody had told me about this towering person before. It was from my classmates that I started learning about the vast world Babasaheb’s thoughts had created. A classmate would call him ‘Baba’, as his father, and this deeply emotional connect to a thinker was something I was witnessing for the first time. As my engagement with his thoughts slowly progressed, and as new understandings started forming, the Ambedkar Cartoon controversy vis-à-vis the NCERT text book happened. This was a defining moment, when I saw in every possible way, the violence of the defenders of that cartoon. If a teacher in school was not able to explain to students, ever, what being the father of the constitution meant, what being the drafter of the defining text of our legal existence in our own country was, how were they going to explain a cartoon in the way it was meant to be taught? I had studied an anti-woman verse from Manusmriti in school, and to unsuspecting naïve students, the teacher had said that this verse, much contested as being anti-woman, was not really anti-woman, and had rendered his interpretation which, in our naïve early teens I believed. Thus Manusmriti was introduced, as a pro-woman treatise. The power of the teachers to shape the mind is indeed huge.
The next critical moment was when Arundhati Roy wrote about Ambedkar. The sheer audacity was shocking, because my exposure to Ambedkarite friends, thoughts, and their convictions had taught me about the distance I have to travel to understand Babasaheb, and his writings and the new world and meanings he created. The material that Arundhati Roy had touched was not just about a person and his writing, but a social, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual world that he enabled, and was inhabited by millions. If the ignorance was glaring, the disrespect was shocking.
So what does Babasaheb mean to me now?
To me, Babasaheb Ambedkar is an on-going journey. He doesn’t illuminate the path standing alone. He is guided by Savitrimai and Jotiba. He stands on a highway, holding up a torch, and many others stand beside him, ahead of him, behind him. We have to find the way. But until we find the way, for me, Babasaheb is my rationale-master. My logic-guide. My ancestor. My reference point. He enables me to discover myself, and he tells me more about my history, and therefore about my present and future, than most other people would.
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Sruthi Herbert is a doctoral candidate at SOAS, University of London.
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This is the second essay in our ‘What Babasaheb Ambedkar Means to Me’ series.
