What does Annihilation of Caste actually argue?
It is a speech he was never allowed to give. A reformist group in Lahore invited him to address them in 1936, then withdrew the invitation when they read the text and would not soften it. He published it himself, and it became the most influential thing he wrote. Its argument runs in a few hard steps.
The argument, in steps
- Caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers — people ranked and sealed at birth — and a society so divided cannot generate the common feeling a nation needs.
- It survives on endogamy, marriage kept strictly within the group; break that rule and the structure loses the mechanism that reproduces it.
- It is held in place not by habit but by religion: the ordinary believer observes caste because he takes it to be sanctioned by the sacred texts, so no appeal to reason or kindness will move him.
- Therefore reform cannot stop at custom. Inter-dining and goodwill are far too small; the real remedy is inter-caste marriage, and the real obstacle is the scriptural authority itself.
From this he drew the conclusion that made the speech unbearable to his hosts and to Gandhi, who answered it in print: to destroy caste you must destroy the belief that the scriptures are divinely infallible, because that belief is the thing holding it up. The address ends by announcing that he, born a Hindu, would not die one — the first public statement of the departure that took twenty years and ended at Nagpur. It is less a programme than a demolition of the idea that caste can be gently reformed away.
In the Journey: The speech that was never delivered, 1935–1936