The Constitution of India, guaranteeing rights and privileges to all citizens without discrimination, faced criticism from some who saw it as a break in India’s civilisational continuity. Prashant Kumar uses ‘hierarchical suggestivity’ to argue how and why the text’s anchoring in universal equality was unacceptable to some of its own citizens.
The stalwart figure of emancipation whose existence and figurations in diverse contexts invokes the very idea of egalitarianism has certainly not been an easy figure to decode for many Brahmanical minds. Dr B. R. (Babasaheb) Ambedkar’s rationale behind intellectual imperialism by upper castes and his hermeneutics of Hindu sciolism has provided not just an epistemological ground to assert dissent to the downtrodden but has also unveiled a series of opaque and congealed appearances of the persistence of caste both in its traditional and modern avatars.
The Constitution of India was adopted on 26November 1949 by the Constituent Assembly of India; the adoption, however, faced serious criticism by scholars like Pandurang Vaman Kane who considered it as the greatest break in India’s civilisational continuity. While a discussion of the discourse that frames India as a culturally homogeneous land of Hindus is important, what is more significant in this context is the choice that has been favoured in contrast to Constitution, i.e., the Dharmashastras.
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Born in Padhem village in Ratnagiri district in Maharashtra, Kane’s inclination towards Indology, especially the Dharmashastras, since the age of 12 allowed him to establish himself as an associate of several organisations including Brahman Sabha and the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute to name but a few. His involvement and contributions in diverse capacities reflects a deep commitment to the cyclical continuity of Brahmanical aggrandisation which I argue focuses exclusively on immunising the hierarchical order of the caste system.
A recent article maintains Kane’s position as someone who bridged the gap between Hindu scriptures and ‘modern western traditions of logic and argumentation’. What seems to be missing in this conceptualisation is the gap in the mind of Brahmins that Ambedkar pointed out when he propagated the idea of ‘Prabuddha Bharat’ (lit., ‘Enlightened India’). It also suggests a lacuna in understanding Ambedkar’s propositions in the Constitution as a result of experientiality. Such assertions undermine the notion of Dalit experientiality and language in Ambedkar’s thought and reason a homogenisation of Indians as a Hindu community, inaugurating a ‘hierarchical suggestivity’—a concept I develop here with respect to Brahmanical scriptures and scholarships.
‘Hierarchical suggestivity’ underscores the imperialism present in discourses without explicitly stating them, thereby continuing their existence in power in a silent yet violent manner. This hidden logic displays deep anathema not only to the Constitution but also to a whole strain of intellectual thought whose premise lies in creating an egalitarian society with an ‘oppositional imagination’, paying deep regard to multifarious knowledge systems produced by diverse communities.
Having been deprived of material, social and economic capital, lower caste communities have faced social injustice at the hands of upper castes both in India and beyond. Lower caste communities’ experiences and alternative imaginations in the form of anti-caste utopias such as Ravidas’s Begumpura, Kabir’s Premnagar and Tukaram’s Pandharpur have paid due attention to the idea of responsibility with an ethical lens that goes beyond either Gandhi’s conceptualisation of Ramrajya or Kane’s idea of preferring the Dharmashastras over the Constitution.
The arguments in the article referred above speaks volumes about how Dalits’ positionality, ideas and lived experiences, even when sanctioned by the state, is looked at with suspicion by upper castes. Assigning the Constitution as a ‘narrative victimhood’, it reflects a deeper Brahmanical forgetting thereby disparaging an anti-caste intellectual tradition and model of justice, dignity and equality.
Such an argumentation lacks an ethics towards understanding experientiality, a discomfiture in admitting Ambedkar’s inclusionary model of citizenship and state. This complicated and narrowed down understanding will not only restrict one in identifying their social location in defining their ideas but also propagate Brahmanical ‘civilisational continuity’ of sciolism. Instead of being driven by ‘a sense of grievance of not having their rights and a narrative of victimhood’, Ambedkar’s language reflects his deeper concern of historical collectivity for the marginalised. The Constitution’s demand of justice, equality, liberty, and fraternity inaugurates a radical intellectual and political activism which demands a critical lens towards ideas of hegemony and power.
Reflecting inventive political histories of dissent and experientiality, the language in the Constitution drafted by Ambedkar is an effort to envisage an egalitarian social whole. In the words of Gopal Guru, this self-conscious reflectivity which comes from experiencing the discontents of the hierarchical caste system uses specific ‘methodological, conceptual and hermeneutic’ tools to suggest a deliberate and conscious de-brahmanisation of knowledge systems and communication. Interventions through experiences of the marginalised embodied in the Constitution through its several provisions (from abolition of untouchability to establishment of protective institutions as noted in Article 338) are not mere legal interventions but epistemological instruments of Dalit experience. They ingrain, in the words of Guru, a ‘reflective intellectual consciousness’ which provides a deeper mechanism and techniques of knowledge production from the margins that cannot be addressed only by abstract theories of emancipation but also be guided by experiences of the marginalised.
By proclaiming the ideas of justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity, Ambedkar initiates an ethical, moral and emancipatory possibility highlighting the role of historical relations in concretising these ideas. In this regard, the Constitution of India acts as a significant piece in the history of Dalit activism inaugurating a tradition of theorising experientiality. It is a piece of literature where, in the words of Paik, ‘incremental intersecting technologies of caste, class, gender and sexuality’ find hope — a hope for dissent, for justice and for visibility.
The idea that premises both Saxena’s and Kane’s argument is analogically determining the Indian state with the idea of Hindu religion. This conceptualisation lacks the attention towards Dalit-bahujans constituting the majority of the population of India, and their engagement with Hinduism. It disregards not only the minority religious and gender communities but, equally, paints them outside the theoretical interest of the idea of India. Where Saxena asserts that ‘in a society governed by a Dharmashastric worldview, individuals and communities are driven by a sense of responsibility for society’, I argue that the responsibility of the Constitution lies in creating an ethical and moral responsibility, whereas that of the Dharmashastras is a Brahmanical responsibility.
Even after seven decades of the adoption of the Constitution, Dalit scholarship has continued to irk upper caste communities because it has not only unveiled their production structures but equally inaugurated a critical philosophy of caste. The Constitution therefore acts as a product of the experientiality faced by subjugated communities and, subsequently, the democracy in their reflective capabilities.
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