‘In India we don’t have language to understand political freedom’: Prof Aishwary Kumar
Aishwary Kumar is the Shri Shantinath Endowed Chair in Ahimsa Studies and Associate Professor of History at Cal Poly Pomona. He directs the Ahimsa Center and The Democracy Institute at CPP, focusing on the global lineages of modern political thought and the moral and constitutional life of democracy. With degrees from prestigious institutions like the University of Delhi and Trinity College, University of Cambridge, Kumar's research delves into the relationship between human freedom and political violence, spanning topics such as moral psychology, epistemology, and political philosophy. His work, supported by esteemed institutions worldwide, offers profound insights into modern political history, constitutionalism, and dissent, reflecting a commitment to both rigorous scholarship and broad accessibility. This interview focused on Gandhi, Ambedkar, the Constitution, political freedom and democracy In the context of current political scenario.
As we speak, in the University of Hyderabad, the student community is commemorating Rohit Vemula. When we go through the history of reading, engaging with Ambedkar within the academic spaces, we can see that often the marginalised community had to suffer a lot. How do you make sense of this branding of being a factionalist and the stereotyping of students who engage with Ambedkar in a larger sense?
The most important thing to remember about the relationship between anti-caste thought and anti-colonial thought is that anti-caste thought was always seen as utterly revolutionary. In fact, it was always considered to be a revolutionary supplement to anti-colonial politics. You could become an anti-caste thinker, as Ambedkar was. You could become a constitutionalist, as Ambedkar was, but broadly the relationship between anti-caste revolutionary traditions and the anti-colonial traditions was always going to be one of dominance. This means that the broader thrust of anti-colonial political thought was always configured around or scaffolded by a desire for dominance. The dominant thrust of anti-colonial politics was always shaped and fueled by a desire for national sovereignty. The desire for human freedom, which is to say a freedom beyond and in excess of national sovereignty, was the province of the anti-caste revolutionary tradition.
At a given moment in which this tradition came to question the dominant concerns of anti-colonial thought, anti-caste politics became something of a supplement to nationalist narratives. It seemed like, to critique caste is to create the conditions for a social critique of the nation form, not a political critique of nationalism itself. But Ambedkar's anti-caste thought is marked by a distinctive, radical conception of the political. This is not simply a reformist agenda. Ambedkar is not simply pursuing a reformist agenda. He's mounting and creating the conditions of a political critique of the nation form, of sovereignty, of power, and the way this power works and insinuates itself through caste. So once you have a thinker like Ambedkar who creates a vocabulary, or at least who strives to create a vocabulary for a political critique of the nation form, the only response that nationalism has to offer is to consign it through an act of condescension, is to consign it to the realm of the factional. Ambedkar's political judgement is deemed to be a factional judgement. Much of how we see students' movements, anti-caste mobilisations today designated as or deemed to be or described as factional comes from that original crime of Indian nationalism. The fundamental mistake of Indian nationalism was failing to recognize Ambedkar's ideas on politics, his criticism of national sovereignty, and most importantly, his views on human freedom.
As always being something other than nationalism. It was always the other heading. It was always the other of nationalist thought and in that sense, Ambedkar has a paradoxical effect on nationalist and anti-colonial thought. On the one hand, he's the only thinker of universalism. On the other hand, he is supposed to be a profoundly factional thinker. I would say that Dalit and anti-caste student organisations, that are today carrying on that critical work of critiquing our obsession with nationalism are actually, precisely because they're deemed factional, are carrying forward that legacy of revolutionary thought in India.
In a lot of instances you have addressed and have spoken about Ambedkar. According to you what is annihilation? What meaning did it hold for Ambedkar? How do you position this in the context of the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate, particularly on caste?
Annihilation for Ambedkar is three main things. First and foremost it’s a force. It's an act of force made political. It is the ability of thought to break out of the systems and the mechanisms, or as Ambedkar might say, the machine of enslavement that is spun around and woven around a web of human consciousness. So for Ambedkar, annihilation is the word of unconditional force, which is why he uses annihilation, not destruction. In fact, in annihilation of caste, he uses the word destruction. Yet the word in the title, which is annihilation, never appears in the text and that has something to do with how he wants to keep that force almost pure, almost uncontaminated. In fact, more than that, he wants to keep it unconditional. So first and foremost, Ambedkar understands annihilation as force made political, as force that now belongs to the weakest, as force that is now an inalienable attribute of the oppressed.
The second is annihilation as rejection. For Ambedkar, annihilation is the rejection of the word as it is. Remember, annihilation comes from the same word as nihilism, as nothingness. There's a long conversation that we can have on Ambedkar's relationship to the nihilist tradition, to the tradition of nothingness and shunyata. I've written about that elsewhere. For now, what we need to remember is that for Ambedkar, annihilation is not simply a destructive force. It is a moral force that allows the oppressed to stand on their own feet and reject untruth. Remember, the epigraph of annihilation of caste is a tribute and a homage to the notion of truth. So one of the things that annihilation of caste does and one of the things that this concept does is it allows Ambedkar to reject the world as it is, the world of graded inequalities and disparities.
Finally, and most importantly, perhaps if we were to read Ambedkar himself closely, annihilation is for Ambedkar an act of responsibility. You don't simply reject the world as it is. You create the conditions of moral and political responsibility. Because without responsibility, all politics will die. Without responsibility, there is no freedom. My freedom is never greater than the freedom that you have when we are face to face. This equal sharing of freedom is what Ambedkar calls the foundation of democratic responsibility. For Ambedkar, annihilation and, as the text says, annihilation of caste, is above all a responsibility. So force, rejection, responsibility, or if we were to say it even more philosophically in a classical language, force, exit, responsibility.
How do you understand Ambedkar as a key thinker? In an interview, you said that Ambedkar is radical because he is a constitutionalist. Can you add some more to it?
One of the great speeches of Ambedkar is the one he gives towards the end of the Constituent Assembly debates. Ambedkar's real question is not whether India is truly free. Ambedkar's question is whether India will be able to remain free. The question for him is can we keep our freedom or will we lose this freedom again. I think one of the great powers Ambedkar has is almost this profoundly intricate and nuanced understanding of caste as not simply an Indian system of oppression. For Ambedkar, caste is not one among different systems of domination. Caste is the exemplary form of domination and of cruelty. This intricate and radical, almost expansive, understanding of caste allows him to see the coming tragedies of Indian democracy and democracy in a way few mid-century thinkers really managed to do. Ambedkar is singular in that sense.
Only in Ambedkar does the figure of the majority become a dominant problem of modern political and constitutional thought. In the 40s, the entire discourse around democracy and tyranny, around authoritarianism, revolved around minorities and stateless populations. One thing here, for example, is Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and other such books coming out of American political thought in the 40s and 50s. One reason why I believe Ambedkar is such a key and almost a timeless thinker, perhaps a prophetic thinker, is because he has that capacity to see how this ghost of the majority - what a young Ambedkar calls the Ghost of Manu - will continue to haunt modern democratic culture and modern democratic mentalities. So for him, I think the Constitution is a name or an act of faith that we pose together in the idea that we will all follow a certain responsibility.
We will all follow and we will all abide by the obligation to share our freedom equally. If we fail or if we refuse to see freedom as that which can be had only if we share it equally, that is to say, if we fail to understand freedom as incomplete, unless there is also equality, there will be no freedom left, then there will be absolutely no way that a Constitution can save a democracy. For the Constitution to be able to save a democracy, first the people have to save the Constitution. Ambedkar's constitutional thought and his constitutional theory is so radical because rather than placing its faith in the body of laws and statutes, it places its faith in the body politic, in the people. It is the people who will keep the Constitution alive and relevant, which he calls constitutional morality. We will have to keep the Constitution alive. We will have to save it before it becomes capable of saving our democratic republic. It is in that sense that Ambedkar places moral priority on the political subject as opposed to the law, that his constitutionalism is unthinkable without a certain kind of revolutionary urgency. He's a constitutionalist, as I've said, only because he's a revolutionary.
Usually conversion of Ambedkar to Buddhism is understood as distant from the political. Do you think it is the resurrection of the political or is it something else?
I see that act of conversion in 1956 to be distinct and even more powerful descent in that same lineage to which the annihilation of caste belongs. Annihilation of caste in 1936 and the conversion in 1956, but also, more importantly, his masterwork, the Buddha and his dhamma. They are all in the same line of philosophical and conceptual descent. They belong to the same lineage of political thought. It is often assumed that somehow Ambedkar was critical of religion in annihilation of caste. But by the time he returns to Buddhism and converts in 1956, he's turned towards a sort of civil religion, a religion of citizens.
I find it slightly problematic because the assumption there is that somehow Ambedkar converts to Buddhism only after he's disappointed in the capacities of the Indian state to ward off the threat and the destructive power of caste in India. I find that slightly inadequate. Because conversion is first and foremost, neither a civil religion nor a secularist card. Conversion is a political expression of what we could call Ambedkar's radical atheism. More recently, I think Aniket Javare makes this point in his beautiful book, Practising Caste, where Javare argues or sees conversion as a religious act and Aniket Javare ponders why atheism never crossed Ambedkar's mind. I think that is a mistake. I think Aniket gets it wrong. I think conversion was never meant to be an expression of Ambedkar's religious politics. It was never simply an expression of Ambedkar's disappointment in the state. Another problem.
Ambedkar always believed that an equal society or a society of equals will come about through fraternity, not through legislation. What he used to call in the later years of his life, metric. So the act of conversion is neither an expression of Ambedkar's return to religion, nor an expression of Ambedkar's secular politics or civil religion. What it really is, is an expression of Ambedkar's radical atheism, his belief that any society must anchor itself in one fundamental truth, that is the truth of its own finitude. That we shall all in the end know ourselves and become aware of ourselves truly as political actors, political agents, only when we understand that we live in this world.I think that we need to change this world. In that sense, conversion is both a transcendence and an atheism.
How do you define political freedom within the Indian tradition?
That's another big question, partly because Ambedkar is animated almost for the entirety of his intellectual life by that question. The trouble, as Ambedkar says, with India is that there is no word in the Indian traditions for political freedom. You can have different versions or different ways to say the word freedom in different Indian languages, including Sanskrit, which he uses profusely in a remarkable way. But there is nothing that captures the political nature of human freedom. There is nothing in the Indian traditions that will let us grasp what it means to be politically free, which is to say free together. Free equally.
I think the problem we have in India is understanding what is being stolen from us, what is it that we are losing with this kind of neo-democratic consolidation of fascism or fascist power in India. What we simply fail to register is the depth of this theft and loss of freedom. In our linguistic universe we are simply not trained to understand what being free politically means. This is what Ambedkar means in Annihilation of Caste, I quote him, is the Hindu free to use his reason?. He's worried about human and political freedom in India because we simply do not have a language to understand political freedom. In a society that does not have that language, that freedom can be lost and stolen quickly. We will have no moral resources to resist that.
Gandhi drew his idea of politics or politics itself from his religious tradition. So how can we understand Gandhi as secular or are we able to decouple Indian secularism from religion?
Gandhi's thought in many ways was shaped by his idiosyncratic conception of religion and Hinduism as such. I will say this about Gandhi that he was a much more formidable thinker of religion as a concept than he was a thinker of Hinduism as a religion. Gandhi's strength came from the fact that so much of what he said seemed to be so integrated with his religious views that carried and brought with it a profound resonance for the Indian masses of his time. That was his strength. But I think the weakness of that resonance stemmed from the fact that while Gandhi could take from different religious traditions, his understanding of religion and Hinduism as a religion remained extremely weak and at times completely morally untenable and inexcusable. So when we take Gandhi's moral failing seriously and this is one of the things I've tried to do in Annihilation of Caste, in my reading both Gandhi's reading of Annihilation of Caste and Ambedkar as a thinker who writes Annihilation of Caste.
In both these readings, what I've tried to understand is Gandhi as one of the most exemplary moral failures of his time and to say that is to not condescend Gandhi, but to actually take Gandhi's failings and his ambitions very seriously. I think the real problem with much of the reading of Gandhi and his place in the anti-colonial tradition stems from the fact that his failures are always seen as distractions. His failings are always seen as somehow supplemental and if not down right irrelevant to Gandhi as a political thinker. One of the things that radical equality does is to place his moral failings at the centre of Gandhi's ambitious ethical project. It comes out of failure, but Gandhi's ambition and his failure, they come out in remarkably sharp light when we see how Gandhi reads Ambedkar. So that chapter on Gandhi, the reader, which is Gandhi, the reader of Annihilation of Caste is all about placing his moral failure at the centre. One of the things I have always maintained is that those followers of Gandhi, and we know that in the academic world there are many who think of Gandhi as a profound thinker of religion, are not in themselves inaccurate or wrong.
Gandhi is quite a remarkable thinker of religion and religiosity. I think he is a much weaker, inexcusable thinker of Hinduism. I think Ambedkar is the most dramatic illuminator of that asymmetry in Gandhi, of that failing in Gandhi. Ambedkar is not saying Gandhi is dishonest or Gandhi is illiterate. Ambedkar is saying Gandhi is unfaithful. He lacks a kind of political faith that a democracy needs. Now, we can gloss it over different things. Some people have said more recently and in the last 20 years, especially that it has become fashionable to write of Gandhi as a critic of parliamentary democracy and as a critic of, you know, the political itself. All of it is basically a roundabout way of trying to move past Gandhi's profound and inexcusable moral failures and that failure has a name, which, as you were saying, is caste.
When I say caste, I do not mean caste simply as the system that we often think of. I speak of caste as a moral framework and a machinery, a machine that hides in plain sight and needs nothing for its own endurance and its deathless power. It is Ambedkar who says this in his 1916 paper Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development. He's barely 24 and he writes about caste as this thing without gravity, like weed on the surface of a pond. It hangs there until this day without support. That's what caste is. I think Gandhi does not lack sensitivity towards caste. I think he lacks a certain kind of rigour that we need to think of caste as an exemplary form of human temptation to punish. In the end, Ambedkar is profound because he sees in caste not just one system among others of oppression. Ambedkar is so profound because he sees in caste a compressed expression of our will to punish others.
Once you said that Ambedkar is - you cannot see a single Ambedkar - a constellation of Ambedkars. So can you elaborate? Do you think he draws a similar line with Nietzsche as we always say, my readers are yet to come ?
Nietzsche and Ambedkar are fascinating. I absolutely am thrilled that you pose this question and that you end this question with Nietzsche. Because I think Ambedkar shares this profound anxiety and awareness with Nietzsche. My thinkers are yet to come and Nietzsche is someone who knows that his work will always be celebrated posthumously. Ambedkar is such a dramatic, at times insane, critic of philosophy that even he knows that philosophers will take a long time to understand what his work has done to philosophy, to philosophical discourse. I think Ambedkar in that way is Nietzsche. He's Nietzsche because on the one hand, he's the only one who sees in Hinduism a certain affinity for absolute nihilism.
It's the kind of system in which words will have lost all their meaning and their moral gravity. It's a system in which it will become, given a chance, absolutely impossible to distinguish between truth and lie. It is a system in which everything can go on, as long as it is protected by the immunity that certain people have by the virtue of their birth into a caste. So in some ways, he's critical of Nietzsche, by the way. As we know, he separates himself from Nietzsche's understanding of Hinduism and nihilism. But in that one simple aspect of their distaste for religiosity, they both appear resonant and similar. They are confident that their analysis will encourage other experts to join them. They expect that more people will listen to and read their work in the future, leading to a larger following.So in that sense, there is a Nietzschean Ambedkar, as you were rightly pointing out. There is also a Hobbesian Ambedkar. You know, Ambedkar delivered in the late 20s, early 30s, an entire lecture course in Bombay, lectures on the English Constitution.
In that context, it is important to remember that one of the few British thinkers that Ambedkar will often quote from are a liberal and a conservative, like John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke. But the real, the most indicative thinker from the English tradition that Ambedkar quotes from is Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan. I've always been fascinated by this little, powerful but very small detail about Ambedkar's reading of Leviathan, his use of that one particular chapter from Leviathan that Hobbes has on punishment. Because that is how Ambedkar is examining and trying to excavate, as it were, because he calls his work archaeology. He's trying to excavate this relationship between sovereignty, punishment and caste. Right. So there is the Hobbesian Ambedkar. There is Nietzschean Ambedkar. There is the Ambedkar of the Madhyamaka tradition, an Ambedkar who is an epistemologist of nothingness, of shunyata. There is the Ambedkar who is a political theorist of friendship. Ambedkar has a distinctive understanding of friendship because he's so acutely aware of what a society of hostility and enmity looks like. In the end, when he describes India as not being a caste, India not being a society, I'm sorry. Right. India does not have a society. It only has factions of hostilities. I get it. Yeah. So there are Ambedkars who fascinate me. Nothing more than the Madhyamaka Ambedkar is actually as enriching for us today.
So many scholars project Gandhi and Ambedkar as national icons. India itself has different regional spaces and we can see many thinkers like Periyar, who is from the south. We are more into Periyar, Srinarayanaguru and Sahodaran Ayyappan who are thinking differently and contributing in a different way. So when can we move? Can we move beyond this monolithic thinking of Gandhi and Ambedkar vice versa?
We should. I think it is high time. One of the problems of engaging with Gandhi and Ambedkar, I feel, is that we remain somehow trapped in an area studies paradigm in which certain key thinkers are picked up and used to demonstrate either the richness of the Indian tradition or its limits. When the constellation and the archive of this thought, including but especially anti-caste thought is so vast and one of the one of the ways in which we can break out of it is to leave behind the idea of the anti-colonial tradition as the final word on the Indian nation form. Part of why we cannot and we fail to get past that moment is because we believe that the fundamental coordinates of the Indian nation form were already pinned on the wall for us forever. And that any line we draw and any constellation we reforge or any cloud we lift over a patch of land all have to be all these things must reside within this system of wall pins that have already been decided for us in advance. I think a lot of it has to do with institutional politics. A lot of it has to do with Brahminic gatekeeping. A lot of it has to do with how powerfully Ambedkar dislodges some of these kinds of wall pins, so to speak, thereby unleashing a way.
Sibahathulla Sakib is a freelance journalist currently based in Hyderabad.