What did Ambedkar say was the real way to destroy caste?
He named it bluntly: the real remedy for caste is inter-caste marriage. Having argued that the essence of caste is marrying only within the group, he drew the logical conclusion that the way to dissolve it is to break that rule — to make marriage across caste ordinary rather than forbidden. Fusion of blood, he wrote, is what creates the feeling of being kindred, and until that feeling exists the separateness caste depends on will not go.
He was clear that lesser measures would not reach the root. Inter-dining — sharing food across caste lines — was often proposed by reformers as the great step, and he thought it far too small; people who eat together may still refuse to marry, and the wall stands. Only when the marriage rule itself falls does the structure lose the mechanism that reproduces it in each new generation.
This is also why his analysis of women and his analysis of caste meet at the same point. Caste is maintained by controlling whom women may marry; caste is destroyed by letting people marry freely across its lines. The remedy he named for the one is the freedom he demanded for the other, which is why he could treat the annihilation of caste and the emancipation of women as a single task.
In the Journey: The speech that was never delivered, 1935–1936