The Archive

10 questions answered

• +−What did untouchability actually mean, day to day?

  Hindu society was ordered into hereditary groups, fixed at birth, which a person could not leave, marry outside, or rise above. Below all of them sat communities whose touch was held to pollute — and in places their shadow, and the sound of their voice. The word for them was Untouchable. It names a ritual and legal position, not a level of income: a prosperous Untouchable was still untouchable, which is the whole point of the arrangement. Day to day it was not an attitude but a set of specific rules.

  Some of what was already decided

  • Which well or tank you drew water from, and whether you could touch the vessel or had to wait for someone to pour.
  • Which streets you could walk, at what hours, and how far you stood from a caste Hindu coming the other way.
  • What you could wear, what ornaments you could own, and what you could be called.
  • Whether your children sat inside the schoolroom or on the verandah.
  • Which work you were permitted to do, and — the half usually left out — which work you were not permitted to refuse. A Mahar household held a hereditary village office: watchman, messenger, remover of dead animals. The last carried the pollution; the others made the community indispensable to every village that excluded it.

  None of it was in a statute or enforced by a court. It was enforced by the village, immediately and physically, with no appeal because there was nothing to appeal to — which is why so much of Ambedkar's life turned on the difference between a right existing and a right being enforceable. It was neither poverty nor a colour line: money did not remove it — in 1917 he returned from Columbia to a senior post in Baroda State and no household would rent him a room — and the two sides were often indistinguishable by sight, which is exactly why the marks, names and standing distances mattered.

  Article 17 of the Constitution he chaired the drafting of abolished untouchability outright and made its practice a punishable offence — one of the few articles that bind private persons and not only the state. Parliament followed with the Untouchability (Offences) Act of 1955, renamed the Protection of Civil Rights Act in 1976, and the Prevention of Atrocities Act of 1989. Whether those have delivered what they promise is a live argument this site cannot settle. A right is worth exactly what the machinery enforcing it is worth, and the tank at Mahad stayed shut for ten years after two resolutions had opened it.

  This answer on its own page · In the Journey: A boy born in a cantonment, 1891

• +−Dalit, Harijan, Scheduled Caste, Untouchable — which word is right?

  Four words, four different kinds of thing. Only one is neutral, and none is simply a synonym for the others.

  Where each word comes from

  • Untouchable is the descriptive term for the ritual position: a person whose touch was held to pollute. This site uses it when describing that position, because it is the only word that names the thing being described.
  • Depressed Classes was the official British term of the early twentieth century — the wording of the Southborough Committee, the Round Table Conferences and the Poona Pact. It appears here only where the period record uses it.
  • Scheduled Castes is the legal term, from the Government of India Act of 1935 and the schedule made under it listing the communities entitled to reservation. It is still the term in Indian law.
  • Harijan — children of God — was Gandhi's coinage, taken up from 1933 and given to the weekly he edited under that name.
  • Dalit is Marathi and Sanskrit for broken, or ground down. In use in the nineteenth century, it was made a political self-description by the Dalit Panthers in the nineteen-seventies. It is a word chosen by the people it names.

  The contested one is Harijan, and the objection is not that it is impolite. It is a benediction handed down: it names the group by the pity of the people above it, leaves the arrangement that produced the group undisturbed, and asks the person named to be grateful. Ambedkar rejected it and went on rejecting it. The word never entered the Constitution — which abolishes untouchability in Article 17 and speaks of Scheduled Castes in Articles 341 and 366 — and governments later instructed their departments to stop using it. Gandhi did not intend it as condescension and said so — his position was that the Untouchables were Hindus and the language should say they belonged. That is a real argument, and it is the same one that ran through the Poona Pact: whether a group can be named, spoken for and repaired from the outside by people acting in good faith. The site does not settle it, here or anywhere.

  In practice: Dalit is the ordinary respectful word in Indian English today, and the one most of the people described would choose. Scheduled Caste is correct in any legal or statistical context. Untouchable fits the historical position itself. Harijan is best avoided unless you are quoting Gandhi, or Ambedkar's objection to him.

  This answer on its own page · In the Journey: A party, a war, and a labour portfolio, 1936–1946

• +−Was the Poona Pact a defeat?

  The question is asked in India far more often than neutrally, so it is worth setting out what changed hands before what people make of it. In August 1932 the British Communal Award gave the Depressed Classes separate electorates for twenty years — seats only their own voters could fill. It was what Ambedkar had asked for since 1919. Gandhi, in Yerwada Jail, began a fast to the death against it on 20 September, objecting not to reserved seats but to the separate electorate, which he said would freeze a social wrong into a permanent constitutional category. On 24 September, after five days, Ambedkar signed it away for more seats reserved inside the joint electorates: 148 in the provinces against the Award's 71, eighteen per cent of the Central Legislature, and a primary in which Depressed Class voters alone would first pick a panel of four candidates.

  The case that it was a gain

  • Twice the seats, plus representation in the Central Legislature, which the Award gave none of.
  • Reservation proved durable where the Award's twenty-year electorate would not have. It went into the Constitution he drafted and is still there.
  • A permanent electoral fence around fifty million people, fixed as the constitution itself was, would have been hard to remove and would have gained defenders.
  • The fast pulled Congress into anti-untouchability and temple-entry work on a scale it had never attempted.

  The case that it was a defeat

  • A reserved seat inside a joint electorate is won on the majority's votes, so the winner is the candidate the majority finds least troubling. Ambedkar made this argument for the rest of his life, and in 1952 lost his own seat to a Congress candidate from his own community.
  • It was extracted by a fast to the death, the life of the most revered man in India laid at his door. Whatever it was, it was not a negotiation between equals.
  • He had won the point through the constitutional process, and it was overridden from outside by a method that has no constitutional answer.
  • The anti-untouchability campaign that followed did not deliver what was promised. His 1945 book on Congress and Gandhi says why at length.

  The panel provision is the part almost every summary drops, and it shows what he thought he had salvaged: making the community's own voters the gatekeepers of who could stand. Whether it would have worked is unknowable. Both readings are held by serious historians on real evidence; no sentence resolves them, and the absence is deliberate. He signed it, and never once called it a victory — and within three years had concluded that no arrangement of seats inside Hindu society would be enough, saying so at Yeola in October 1935.

  This answer on its own page · In the Journey: London, Yerwada, and the pact, 1930–1932

• +−Were Gandhi and Ambedkar enemies?

  They were opponents for twenty-five years, on a question neither could concede without giving up the thing that made him what he was. Whether that makes them enemies depends on the use of the word, and both answers are argued seriously. The disagreement was not about whether untouchability was wrong — Gandhi said publicly and often that it was a sin that had to end. It was about three other things.

  What they actually disagreed about

  • Who is entitled to speak for a group. Gandhi held that the Untouchables were Hindus, that Congress spoke for all Hindus, and that he spoke for the Untouchables. Ambedkar held that a body led by caste Hindus could not represent the people it excluded.
  • Whether the disease was Hinduism or its practitioners. Gandhi defended varna, the ideal order, as distinct from caste as practised, and said a religion is judged by its best exponents. Ambedkar answered that an ideal never once practised is not judged unfairly by its results, and that untouchability was established by scripture rather than tolerated by it.
  • Method. Gandhi's instrument was moral pressure on the majority's conscience, including on his own body. Ambedkar's was legal and constitutional machinery that would work whether or not anybody's conscience moved.

  They met for the first time in Bombay on 14 August 1931, and it went badly. Their positions collided at Poona in September 1932, when Gandhi fasted against the separate electorates Ambedkar had just won and Ambedkar signed them away to end it. In 1936 Gandhi answered Annihilation of Caste in Harijan and Ambedkar conceded nothing; in 1945 he published What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, a book-length and untemperate indictment.

  One reading holds this was a genuine argument between two men who each had a serious answer to the other, that Gandhi moved further on caste than any mass leader of his generation, and that they are best read as opposed, not as hero and villain. The other holds that a fast to the death used against the weaker party is coercion whatever its author intended, that only one man could have his people held responsible for the other's life, and that softening it into a difference of emphasis is how the coercion gets forgotten. This site sets out both and settles neither. Not in dispute: they disagreed in public and in print for a quarter of a century and never resolved it; both replies to Annihilation of Caste are printed at the back of later editions — the right way to read the book, as one half of something.

  This answer on its own page · In the Journey: London, Yerwada, and the pact, 1930–1932

• +−Did Ambedkar write the Constitution of India by himself?

  No, and nobody did. A constitution of that length is not written by one person. He chaired the seven-member Drafting Committee from 29 August 1947 and carried the draft through the Assembly clause by clause for the better part of three years. Whether that is authorship is a real argument, worth having properly rather than settling by adjective.

  The case against calling him the author

  • B.N. Rau, the constitutional adviser, prepared the initial draft, with a large secretariat under him.
  • The Assembly sat for two years, eleven months and eighteen days, debating continuously and amending heavily — some seven and a half thousand amendments were tabled.
  • Much of the structure was inherited, most obviously from the Government of India Act of 1935.
  • He credited others generously in his closing speech and did not claim sole authorship.

  The case for it

  • Illness, absence, death and resignation took a steady toll of the seven; the daily work of carrying, defending and redrafting fell to him.
  • The closing speech of 25 November 1949 shows a man who knew the document at the level of its clauses and failure modes — not a figurehead.
  • The strongest witness is a fellow committee member, on the floor of the Assembly at the time. T.T. Krishnamachari told the House: "The burden of drafting this constitution has fallen on Dr. Ambedkar and I have no doubt that we are grateful to him for having achieved this task in a manner which is undoubtedly commendable."

  A further fact complicates the hero version: he did not get the constitution he wanted. In 1947 he put a memorandum to the Assembly, later published as States and Minorities, proposing state ownership of key industries and collective farming — economic rights entrenched in the text, on the argument that political democracy resting on a landless population is a formality. Almost none survived; what did went into the Directive Principles, which are not enforceable. He defended the document that emerged, and it is not the one he would have written alone.

  Both versions circulate in India, usually for something other than accuracy: the inflated one makes him sole author and writes the Assembly out; the deflating one points at Rau's draft and stops, which would equally prove that no minister ever carried any bill. The record supports neither.

  This answer on its own page · In the Journey: Drafting the thing itself, 1946–1950

• +−What is reservation, and did Ambedkar invent it?

  Reservation is the setting aside of a proportion of something — seats in legislatures, posts in government employment, places in state educational institutions — for communities listed in a schedule. It is not one policy but three, on different provisions with different histories and expiry rules, and most arguments collapse the three into one.

  The three, kept apart

  • Seats in legislatures. Articles 330 and 332 reserve seats in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Article 334 reserved these for ten years, and it is that clause — not the whole of reservation — that Parliament has extended every decade since.
  • Public employment. Article 16 permits reserving appointments for backward classes not adequately represented in the services, and Article 335 requires their claims to be weighed against administrative efficiency. There is no ten-year clause here and never was.
  • Education. Article 15 permits special provision for socially and educationally backward classes and for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

  He did not invent it. Reserved seats for the Depressed Classes were already the substance of the Poona Pact of 1932 — 148 in the provincial legislatures, eighteen per cent of the Central Legislature — and the schedule that names the Scheduled Castes was made under the 1935 Act. What the Constitution did in 1950 was carry an existing arrangement into a republic's founding document and attach it to an enforceable guarantee of equality. He chaired the committee that drafted it. Reservation is not a poverty programme and was never designed as one: the disability it answers is exclusion by birth, which money does not remove. Arguments that treat it as welfare for the poor are about a different policy; whether it should be one is a real and separate question.

  He was also its sharpest critic on one point. A seat reserved inside a joint electorate is filled by the whole electorate's votes, so the winner is the candidate the majority finds acceptable — not the one the reserved community would have chosen. He made that argument from 1919, against the Poona Pact in 1932, until he died. In 1952 he lost his own Bombay North Central seat to a Congress candidate from his own community who had been his assistant — the first general election of the republic whose constitution he drafted demonstrating his objection on him personally.

  Most of what is argued about in India today — the extension to the Other Backward Classes after the Mandal report was implemented in 1990, the fifty per cent ceiling set by the Supreme Court in 1992, the later quota for economically weaker sections — came after his death in December 1956 and cannot be attributed to him either way. This site covers his life, and stops where it stopped.

  This answer on its own page · In the Journey: Drafting the thing itself, 1946–1950

• +−He said in 1935 he would not die a Hindu. Why did it take twenty-one years, and why Buddhism?

  What he said at Yeola on 13 October 1935 was not a destination but a departure: "I was born a Hindu, but I solemnly assure you that I will not die a Hindu." The twenty-one years that followed were not hesitation but an examination in public and in print. Several faiths approached him within weeks; Sikhism he considered seriously enough that a delegation went to Amritsar. Islam and Christianity he ruled out on a stated ground: both, he judged, would move his people out of the civilisation they belonged to, and he would not buy equality at the price of nationality.

  The four tests he applied

  • It must rest on reason and morality, open to revision in the light of both, rather than on unquestionable revelation.
  • It must not contain, or sanctify, a hierarchy of birth.
  • Morality must be at its centre rather than ritual, and owed to other people rather than a god.
  • Converting to it must not remove a community from its own country's history and culture.

  Buddhism met all four, and had one quality he valued: it began in India, so choosing it was a claim on part of Indian history rather than an exit. He argued further, in The Untouchables in 1948, that the Untouchable communities were descendants of Buddhists who had refused to conform, so that the conversion was a return — an argument that is his own and is not accepted by most historians.

  On 14 October 1956 at Nagpur he took the three refuges and five precepts from Bhadant U Chandramani, the senior-most Buddhist monk in India, then administered them to the crowd with twenty-two vows of his own composition. Attendance is reported from three hundred thousand to half a million. He died seven weeks later, on 6 December 1956. The census shows the scale: a few hundred thousand Buddhists in 1951, several million in 1961, mostly former Mahars in Maharashtra — among the largest religious conversions in history to have happened without violence, inducement or an army.

  Two things this answer does not claim. Not that the conversion was a tactic: he wrote and spoke about the choice for two decades, and treating it as instrumental means ignoring most of the record. Not that the twenty-two vows are ordinary Buddhist practice — several are explicit renunciations of Hindu deities and rites, some Buddhists regard them as polemical, and those who took them regard the break as the entire point. The disagreement is recorded, not adjudicated.

  This answer on its own page · In the Journey: Nagpur, and seven weeks, 1956

• +−What was the Hindu Code Bill, and why did he resign over it?

  Personal law — marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption, guardianship, maintenance — is administered separately for each religious community. For Hindus it was, in 1947, uncodified. Under it a woman had no right to divorce, a wife no share in her husband's property, a daughter none in her father's, a widow's interest was limited and reverted on her death, and a man could take more than one wife.

  The Hindu Code Bill would have replaced all that with a single statute: monogamy, divorce on equal grounds, a daughter's share in her father's property, an absolute estate for widows, and rights of adoption and maintenance. The codifying work had begun before him, under a 1941 committee chaired by B.N. Rau; Ambedkar, as Law Minister from 1947, took the bill and carried it. It was the largest social reform proposed in independent India, and aimed squarely at the majority community.

  Why it failed, in the objections actually made

  • That the state had no business legislating on religion.
  • That codifying Hindu law alone, leaving other communities' personal law untouched, was itself discrimination against Hindus. The same argument is still made about the same subject.
  • That an unelected provisional parliament had no mandate for a change of this size and should leave it to the first elected one.
  • And, said quietly and often, that it was being drafted by a man who had announced he would not die a Hindu.

  Rajendra Prasad, the President, raised objections of his own and let it be understood he might decline assent. Nehru supported the Bill but, in Ambedkar's judgement, did not spend his authority on it when it needed spending — a judgement historians have argued about since. In September 1951 it was talked out: four clauses passed and the rest was abandoned. He resigned on 27 September. Rising to explain himself on 10 October, he was ruled out of order for want of an advance copy; he walked out and gave the text to the press. In it he wrote that "to leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu society, untouched and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap."

  The statement went well beyond the Bill: no portfolio of substance beyond Law; left off the Planning Commission; the Scheduled Castes no better than under the British; disagreement with the government's foreign policy, including on Kashmir. The Bill was defeated and its contents became law anyway. Between 1955 and 1956, after Congress returned with a large majority, Parliament passed the Hindu Marriage Act, the Hindu Succession Act, the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act and the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act — the Code broken into four pieces and carried after he had gone. Whether the resignation forced the question into an election, or the reform simply outlasted him, is a fair question and not one this site answers.

  This answer on its own page · In the Journey: The bill he resigned over, 1948–1952

• +−Did Ambedkar refuse to draft Article 370?

  This is the most widely circulated claim about him on the Indian internet, and the honest answer is that no primary record of it has been found. That is not the same as saying it did not happen, and the difference is the whole answer. Article 370 gave Jammu and Kashmir a special constitutional position, limiting Parliament's power to legislate for it; it was rendered inoperative in August 2019. The story is that Sheikh Abdullah asked Ambedkar, as Law Minister, to draft it, and that he refused in blunt terms — usually quoted at length, in varying wording.

  What the record does contain

  • The provision was moved in the Constituent Assembly by N. Gopalaswami Ayyangar — a former Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, then a minister without portfolio — and defended by him in the House. It did not come from the Drafting Committee.
  • Ambedkar chaired the Drafting Committee and was Law Minister, so such a request would have been an ordinary thing to make of him.
  • He was, on his own account, out of sympathy with the government's foreign policy including on Kashmir, and said so in the resignation statement of October 1951.

  What the record does not contain

  • Any version of the refusal, or the quoted words, in the Constituent Assembly Debates.
  • Any version in the Government of Maharashtra edition of his Writings and Speeches, where his own account of a dispute this size would sit.
  • Any version in the 1951 resignation statement, where he set out his disagreements at length and had every reason to include it.

  The absence matters because the quoted refusal is used, constantly, in a live political dispute — by people who want Ambedkar's authority behind a position on Kashmir, and against those who want to deny it to them. Repeating it because it is everywhere would hand that authority over on no evidence; declaring it invented would do the same in reverse. What can be said is where it is not — and the places it is not are the places it should be. If a primary source turns up — anything with a date and a provenance — this entry will be rewritten around it and say so. Nothing here is a claim about the merits of Article 370.

  This answer on its own page · In the Journey: Drafting the thing itself, 1946–1950

• +−Was Ambedkar a British collaborator?

  The charge is old, was made in his lifetime, and rests on four episodes that are all real. Worth putting them down first, because an answer that begins by defending him is not an answer.

  What is actually alleged, and all of it happened

  • In 1928 Congress boycotted the Simon Commission for having no Indian member, meeting it with black flags. Ambedkar gave evidence to it.
  • He attended all three Round Table Conferences in London between 1930 and 1932 for the Depressed Classes, the first with Congress absent and its leaders in jail.
  • He accepted separate electorates in the Communal Award of 1932, which Congress regarded as a device for dividing Indians from each other.
  • In July 1942 he took office as Labour Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council and held it through the war. Quit India broke out three weeks later, and most of the Congress leadership spent the period in prison.

  His answer never varied, and it is a single argument, not four excuses. A body that will write the rules writes them whether or not you are in the room, and the Depressed Classes could not afford a gesture. Independence, he held, was a transfer of power from one set of hands to another, and the fate of fifty million people whose disabilities were social rather than statutory would be settled by whoever was in the room. He intended to be there, and said so from 1919 onward.

  There is also a factual problem with the picture of a man serving British interests — the decade nobody summarises. In 1936 he founded the Independent Labour Party, a labour party and not a caste one, running non-Untouchable candidates on tenancy and wages. In 1937 he moved a bill to abolish the khoti landlord tenure of the Konkan, whose tenants were mostly not Untouchables. In November 1938 he opposed a Congress government's Industrial Disputes Bill, which criminalised certain strikes, joining the communist-led unions in a general strike that stopped something like a hundred thousand workers. And with the labour portfolio he is accused of taking, he brought the factory week from fifty-four hours to forty-eight and the day from ten to nine, against the cotton mills.

  The strongest form of the charge is not about motives at all: that whatever his reasoning, separate electorates and a wartime office weakened a national movement when it was most exposed, and that a subordinated group is not served by a settlement from a colonial power that will be gone within a decade. That is a serious argument, made by serious people. His answer — that the settlement the national movement offered him was to be spoken for by others — does not reconcile with it, and this site does not reconcile them. Not in dispute: he held no office under the British after 1946, sat in the Constituent Assembly of independent India, was its first Law Minister, and chaired the committee that drafted its constitution. Whatever else the charge explains, it does not explain that.

  This answer on its own page · In the Journey: A party, a war, and a labour portfolio, 1936–1946