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B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution, and M.K. Gandhi, the Indian nationalist, two figures whose thought and legacies have most strongly shaped the contours of Indian democracy, are typically considered antagonists who held irreconcilable views on empire, politics, and society. As such, they are rarely studied together. This book reassesses their complex relationship, focusing on their shared commitment to equality and justice, which for them was inseparable from anticolonial struggles for sovereignty.
Both men inherited the concept of equality from Western humanism, but…mehr
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B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution, and M.K. Gandhi, the Indian nationalist, two figures whose thought and legacies have most strongly shaped the contours of Indian democracy, are typically considered antagonists who held irreconcilable views on empire, politics, and society. As such, they are rarely studied together. This book reassesses their complex relationship, focusing on their shared commitment to equality and justice, which for them was inseparable from anticolonial struggles for sovereignty.
Both men inherited the concept of equality from Western humanism, but their ideas mark a radical turn in humanist conceptions of politics. This study recovers the philosophical foundations of their thought in Indian and Western traditions, religious and secular alike. Attending to moments of difficulty in their conceptions of justice and their languages of nonviolence, it probes the nature of risk that radical democracy's desire for inclusion opens within modern political thought. In excavating Ambedkar and Gandhi's intellectual kinship, Radical Equality allows them to shed light on each other, even as it places them within a global constellation of moral and political visions. The story of their struggle against inequality, violence, and empire thus transcends national boundaries and unfolds within a universal history of citizenship and dissent.
Both men inherited the concept of equality from Western humanism, but their ideas mark a radical turn in humanist conceptions of politics. This study recovers the philosophical foundations of their thought in Indian and Western traditions, religious and secular alike. Attending to moments of difficulty in their conceptions of justice and their languages of nonviolence, it probes the nature of risk that radical democracy's desire for inclusion opens within modern political thought. In excavating Ambedkar and Gandhi's intellectual kinship, Radical Equality allows them to shed light on each other, even as it places them within a global constellation of moral and political visions. The story of their struggle against inequality, violence, and empire thus transcends national boundaries and unfolds within a universal history of citizenship and dissent.
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Produktdetails
- Produktdetails
- Verlag: Stanford University Press
- Seitenzahl: 416
- Erscheinungstermin: 17. Juni 2015
- Englisch
- ISBN-13: 9780804794268
- Artikelnr.: 48416665
- Verlag: Stanford University Press
- Seitenzahl: 416
- Erscheinungstermin: 17. Juni 2015
- Englisch
- ISBN-13: 9780804794268
- Artikelnr.: 48416665
Aishwary Kumar is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University.
Contents and Abstracts
1Of Faith in Equality: Toward a Global Measure
chapter abstract
What sort of relationships did anticolonial mobilizations for national
sovereignty forge between faith and politics, sacrifice and democracy,
philosophy and resistance? This chapter traces a crucial moment in this
genealogy to 1914-15, when Gandhi returned to India after spending two
decades in South Africa, and Ambedkar arrived in New York as a student at
Colombia University. Over the next three decades, the two created an
unparalleled body of work engaged with questions of belief, action, and
truth, replacing the nationalist aspiration for sovereignty with a resolute
commitment to what this book calls unconditional equality. Reconstructing
their inseparable and irreconcilable convictions, reclaiming the richness
of Ambedkar's formulation "faith in equality" as an interpretive,
performative, and methodological coup de force, this chapter charts out an
alternative history of ethical responsibility and political realism in the
modern nonwest. At stake, it argues, is the tension between the political
and "the social question" itself.
2Spirits of Satyagraha: A History of Force
chapter abstract
Gandhi was a master of neologisms, many of which, he insisted, were best
left untranslated. Satyagraha, coined in 1907, was one of the earliest,
through which Gandhi ingeniously supplanted the pacifism invoked by
"passive resistance" and introduced the notion of force (bal) and
resistance or firmness (agraha) in India's struggle against the empire.
Despite the growing popularity of the term "civil disobedience," Gandhi
continued to favor the more forceful term "civil resistance." "Civil
resistance is a complete substitute for violence," he declared in 1934.
"Through it everyone has to achieve his own swaraj. This weapon has given
spirit and new strength to the masses." This spirit, its place in Gandhi's
ontology of force, a force whose laws, he insisted, were at once natural
and proper to the human alone, is the focus of this chapter. At its center
is Gandhi's relationship to the spirit of the law as such.
3Laws of Force: Ambedkar and the Mystical Foundation of Authority
chapter abstract
Returning to Ambedkar's Atlantic commencements, retracing the relationship
between force and justice that he begins to forge in the 1910s, this
chapter offers a new history of the beginnings of Ambedkar's revolutionary
philosophy. It was in New York that Ambedkar begins to struggle with the
problem of force, its mysticism and secrecy, its potentiality and weakness.
But the struggle acquires radical form from the 1920s onward, first at the
Mahad Satyagraha in 1927 (where a copy of the Manusmriti is publicly burned
in the name of a new equality) and then in Annihilation of Caste in 1936
(where a critique of Plato's Republic is mounted for the first time). Was
Ambedkar's immense, almost mystical commitment to Indic texts on
sovereignty and sacrifice, such as the Gita, ever dissociable from his
ethics of destruction? Is resistance against religion, Ambedkar asks, not
the heart of every religious responsibility worthy of the name?
4Apotheosis of the Unequal: Gandhi's Harijan
chapter abstract
In 1931, Gandhi introduces the name harijan ("children of God") for the 50
million "untouchables" of India. The gesture radicalizes his phenomenology
of spirit irreversibly. For it reveals, in the most dogmatic form, Gandhi's
commitment to "equality of the spiritwithout which no other equality is
possible." This chapter recovers the morals and consequences of that
decision. The harijan, it argues, was neither simply another name nor a
"sacred force". Instead, it was a condensation of Gandhi's ontological and
phenomenological partitions, one in which his incalculable desire to touch
the untouchable was rendered indissociable from his ethics of disciplinary
limit and measure. Limit at the heart of religion, touching within the
calculus of reason alone: this is what Gandhi calls maryada dharma. And
this limit, in its punitive integrity, structures his indifference toward
the fearless revolutionaries of his time no less decisively than it does
his apotheosis of the atishudra.
5The Freedom of Others: Annihilation of Caste and Republican Virtue
chapter abstract
Like swords crossed against each other, Ambedkar's two major interwar
works, Annihilation of Caste (1936) and Thoughts on Pakistan (1941) seem
locked in perilous balance. One committed to the unconditionality of
equality, the other consumed by the rhetoric of republican security. Yet,
they share a set of methodological commitments that would come to
enduringly guide Ambedkar's struggle to imagine a freedom without mastery.
Beginning with the writings of the 1930s, this chapter follows the
modalities of those commitments up until Ambedkar's interventions in the
Constituent Assembly debates of the late 1940s. What kind of republic did
Ambedkar really envision? A republic of resistance and fearlessness, a city
of virtue and truth, it posits. It is this ethics of insurrectionary
courage (inscribed at the heart of citizenship), this resistance against
the over-constitutionalization of the political, this making reciprocal of
the right to freedom that this chapter reconstructs.
6Gandhi, the Reader
chapter abstract
"Thank Godhe is singularly alone," thus appears Gandhi's relief at
Ambedkar's purportedly faithless denunciation of scripture in Annihilation
of Caste. This chapter probes the depths of that Gandhian respite. It
tracks how Gandhi's conception of truth, transformed by the pressures of
mass politics, mediates the convictions of Gandhi, the reader. Did
Ambedkar's use of "annihilation" or ucched, a word that prophesized a new
religion of responsibility, a word that gestured toward the inalienable and
immeasurable freedom of force (which Ambedkar insisted the believer and
heretic must equally possess), lead Gandhi to discern in it a nihilistic
urge? Recovering the phenomenology of sacrifice and rigor that sustained
Gandhi's relationship to the law (and reading), the chapter delineates the
relationship between his ethical religion (dharma) and Ambedkar's struggle
for a religion without religion (dhamma). At stake, it proposes, was the
abyss between Ambedkar's religion of resistance and Gandhi's belief in
measure.
7Responding Justly: Ambedkar, Sunnyata, and Finitude
chapter abstract
Did Ambedkar's democracy have a place for belief? Could his "love of truth"
coexist with his "love of politics"? Focusing on his final works (beginning
with his opposition to capital punishment), this chapter realigns
Ambedkar's constitutionalism along his meditations on the ethical, mapping
a topography of his political philosophy that was at once deeply marked by
the religious and profoundly aware of its risk. A scrupulous theorist of
sovereignty, Ambedkar emerges here as a critic of mastery and sacrifice,
who seeks to open a new horizon of justice; a responsibility or maitri that
might transcend the anthropological distinctions between man and woman,
major and minor, citizen and noncitizen, human and nonhuman. It was
Ambedkar's sensitivity to the incommensurable (and yet equally shared)
vulnerability of citizens that had perhaps forced Gandhi to sigh at his
singular aloneness. Sunnyata was this vulnerability turned radical, the
void where force and justice became inseparable.
Epilogue: Citizenship and Insurrection
chapter abstract
As Ambedkar today emerges as the newest site of modern India's interminable
struggle with history, and the Hindu Right-whose politics he once called
"gangsterism"- becomes the latest ideological formation to enter the war to
appropriate his legacy, it becomes clearer than ever what Ambedkar had
meant by the void (of politics): an emptiness, a lawlessness, a lie at the
very heart of nation-states. But this void was not to be renounced. For the
void was also spirit, the invisible crypt of an insurrectionary
citizenship, an instance and institution of force at its most egalitarian.
Only when the encounter between Ambedkar and Gandhi is placed within a
global constellation of secular and theological traditions, the epilogue
argues, that it illuminates why the emancipatory possibilities offered by
the insertion of faith into democracy must honestly contend with the
transformative risk that the politicization of religion brings in its wake.
1Of Faith in Equality: Toward a Global Measure
chapter abstract
What sort of relationships did anticolonial mobilizations for national
sovereignty forge between faith and politics, sacrifice and democracy,
philosophy and resistance? This chapter traces a crucial moment in this
genealogy to 1914-15, when Gandhi returned to India after spending two
decades in South Africa, and Ambedkar arrived in New York as a student at
Colombia University. Over the next three decades, the two created an
unparalleled body of work engaged with questions of belief, action, and
truth, replacing the nationalist aspiration for sovereignty with a resolute
commitment to what this book calls unconditional equality. Reconstructing
their inseparable and irreconcilable convictions, reclaiming the richness
of Ambedkar's formulation "faith in equality" as an interpretive,
performative, and methodological coup de force, this chapter charts out an
alternative history of ethical responsibility and political realism in the
modern nonwest. At stake, it argues, is the tension between the political
and "the social question" itself.
2Spirits of Satyagraha: A History of Force
chapter abstract
Gandhi was a master of neologisms, many of which, he insisted, were best
left untranslated. Satyagraha, coined in 1907, was one of the earliest,
through which Gandhi ingeniously supplanted the pacifism invoked by
"passive resistance" and introduced the notion of force (bal) and
resistance or firmness (agraha) in India's struggle against the empire.
Despite the growing popularity of the term "civil disobedience," Gandhi
continued to favor the more forceful term "civil resistance." "Civil
resistance is a complete substitute for violence," he declared in 1934.
"Through it everyone has to achieve his own swaraj. This weapon has given
spirit and new strength to the masses." This spirit, its place in Gandhi's
ontology of force, a force whose laws, he insisted, were at once natural
and proper to the human alone, is the focus of this chapter. At its center
is Gandhi's relationship to the spirit of the law as such.
3Laws of Force: Ambedkar and the Mystical Foundation of Authority
chapter abstract
Returning to Ambedkar's Atlantic commencements, retracing the relationship
between force and justice that he begins to forge in the 1910s, this
chapter offers a new history of the beginnings of Ambedkar's revolutionary
philosophy. It was in New York that Ambedkar begins to struggle with the
problem of force, its mysticism and secrecy, its potentiality and weakness.
But the struggle acquires radical form from the 1920s onward, first at the
Mahad Satyagraha in 1927 (where a copy of the Manusmriti is publicly burned
in the name of a new equality) and then in Annihilation of Caste in 1936
(where a critique of Plato's Republic is mounted for the first time). Was
Ambedkar's immense, almost mystical commitment to Indic texts on
sovereignty and sacrifice, such as the Gita, ever dissociable from his
ethics of destruction? Is resistance against religion, Ambedkar asks, not
the heart of every religious responsibility worthy of the name?
4Apotheosis of the Unequal: Gandhi's Harijan
chapter abstract
In 1931, Gandhi introduces the name harijan ("children of God") for the 50
million "untouchables" of India. The gesture radicalizes his phenomenology
of spirit irreversibly. For it reveals, in the most dogmatic form, Gandhi's
commitment to "equality of the spiritwithout which no other equality is
possible." This chapter recovers the morals and consequences of that
decision. The harijan, it argues, was neither simply another name nor a
"sacred force". Instead, it was a condensation of Gandhi's ontological and
phenomenological partitions, one in which his incalculable desire to touch
the untouchable was rendered indissociable from his ethics of disciplinary
limit and measure. Limit at the heart of religion, touching within the
calculus of reason alone: this is what Gandhi calls maryada dharma. And
this limit, in its punitive integrity, structures his indifference toward
the fearless revolutionaries of his time no less decisively than it does
his apotheosis of the atishudra.
5The Freedom of Others: Annihilation of Caste and Republican Virtue
chapter abstract
Like swords crossed against each other, Ambedkar's two major interwar
works, Annihilation of Caste (1936) and Thoughts on Pakistan (1941) seem
locked in perilous balance. One committed to the unconditionality of
equality, the other consumed by the rhetoric of republican security. Yet,
they share a set of methodological commitments that would come to
enduringly guide Ambedkar's struggle to imagine a freedom without mastery.
Beginning with the writings of the 1930s, this chapter follows the
modalities of those commitments up until Ambedkar's interventions in the
Constituent Assembly debates of the late 1940s. What kind of republic did
Ambedkar really envision? A republic of resistance and fearlessness, a city
of virtue and truth, it posits. It is this ethics of insurrectionary
courage (inscribed at the heart of citizenship), this resistance against
the over-constitutionalization of the political, this making reciprocal of
the right to freedom that this chapter reconstructs.
6Gandhi, the Reader
chapter abstract
"Thank Godhe is singularly alone," thus appears Gandhi's relief at
Ambedkar's purportedly faithless denunciation of scripture in Annihilation
of Caste. This chapter probes the depths of that Gandhian respite. It
tracks how Gandhi's conception of truth, transformed by the pressures of
mass politics, mediates the convictions of Gandhi, the reader. Did
Ambedkar's use of "annihilation" or ucched, a word that prophesized a new
religion of responsibility, a word that gestured toward the inalienable and
immeasurable freedom of force (which Ambedkar insisted the believer and
heretic must equally possess), lead Gandhi to discern in it a nihilistic
urge? Recovering the phenomenology of sacrifice and rigor that sustained
Gandhi's relationship to the law (and reading), the chapter delineates the
relationship between his ethical religion (dharma) and Ambedkar's struggle
for a religion without religion (dhamma). At stake, it proposes, was the
abyss between Ambedkar's religion of resistance and Gandhi's belief in
measure.
7Responding Justly: Ambedkar, Sunnyata, and Finitude
chapter abstract
Did Ambedkar's democracy have a place for belief? Could his "love of truth"
coexist with his "love of politics"? Focusing on his final works (beginning
with his opposition to capital punishment), this chapter realigns
Ambedkar's constitutionalism along his meditations on the ethical, mapping
a topography of his political philosophy that was at once deeply marked by
the religious and profoundly aware of its risk. A scrupulous theorist of
sovereignty, Ambedkar emerges here as a critic of mastery and sacrifice,
who seeks to open a new horizon of justice; a responsibility or maitri that
might transcend the anthropological distinctions between man and woman,
major and minor, citizen and noncitizen, human and nonhuman. It was
Ambedkar's sensitivity to the incommensurable (and yet equally shared)
vulnerability of citizens that had perhaps forced Gandhi to sigh at his
singular aloneness. Sunnyata was this vulnerability turned radical, the
void where force and justice became inseparable.
Epilogue: Citizenship and Insurrection
chapter abstract
As Ambedkar today emerges as the newest site of modern India's interminable
struggle with history, and the Hindu Right-whose politics he once called
"gangsterism"- becomes the latest ideological formation to enter the war to
appropriate his legacy, it becomes clearer than ever what Ambedkar had
meant by the void (of politics): an emptiness, a lawlessness, a lie at the
very heart of nation-states. But this void was not to be renounced. For the
void was also spirit, the invisible crypt of an insurrectionary
citizenship, an instance and institution of force at its most egalitarian.
Only when the encounter between Ambedkar and Gandhi is placed within a
global constellation of secular and theological traditions, the epilogue
argues, that it illuminates why the emancipatory possibilities offered by
the insertion of faith into democracy must honestly contend with the
transformative risk that the politicization of religion brings in its wake.
Contents and Abstracts
1Of Faith in Equality: Toward a Global Measure
chapter abstract
What sort of relationships did anticolonial mobilizations for national
sovereignty forge between faith and politics, sacrifice and democracy,
philosophy and resistance? This chapter traces a crucial moment in this
genealogy to 1914-15, when Gandhi returned to India after spending two
decades in South Africa, and Ambedkar arrived in New York as a student at
Colombia University. Over the next three decades, the two created an
unparalleled body of work engaged with questions of belief, action, and
truth, replacing the nationalist aspiration for sovereignty with a resolute
commitment to what this book calls unconditional equality. Reconstructing
their inseparable and irreconcilable convictions, reclaiming the richness
of Ambedkar's formulation "faith in equality" as an interpretive,
performative, and methodological coup de force, this chapter charts out an
alternative history of ethical responsibility and political realism in the
modern nonwest. At stake, it argues, is the tension between the political
and "the social question" itself.
2Spirits of Satyagraha: A History of Force
chapter abstract
Gandhi was a master of neologisms, many of which, he insisted, were best
left untranslated. Satyagraha, coined in 1907, was one of the earliest,
through which Gandhi ingeniously supplanted the pacifism invoked by
"passive resistance" and introduced the notion of force (bal) and
resistance or firmness (agraha) in India's struggle against the empire.
Despite the growing popularity of the term "civil disobedience," Gandhi
continued to favor the more forceful term "civil resistance." "Civil
resistance is a complete substitute for violence," he declared in 1934.
"Through it everyone has to achieve his own swaraj. This weapon has given
spirit and new strength to the masses." This spirit, its place in Gandhi's
ontology of force, a force whose laws, he insisted, were at once natural
and proper to the human alone, is the focus of this chapter. At its center
is Gandhi's relationship to the spirit of the law as such.
3Laws of Force: Ambedkar and the Mystical Foundation of Authority
chapter abstract
Returning to Ambedkar's Atlantic commencements, retracing the relationship
between force and justice that he begins to forge in the 1910s, this
chapter offers a new history of the beginnings of Ambedkar's revolutionary
philosophy. It was in New York that Ambedkar begins to struggle with the
problem of force, its mysticism and secrecy, its potentiality and weakness.
But the struggle acquires radical form from the 1920s onward, first at the
Mahad Satyagraha in 1927 (where a copy of the Manusmriti is publicly burned
in the name of a new equality) and then in Annihilation of Caste in 1936
(where a critique of Plato's Republic is mounted for the first time). Was
Ambedkar's immense, almost mystical commitment to Indic texts on
sovereignty and sacrifice, such as the Gita, ever dissociable from his
ethics of destruction? Is resistance against religion, Ambedkar asks, not
the heart of every religious responsibility worthy of the name?
4Apotheosis of the Unequal: Gandhi's Harijan
chapter abstract
In 1931, Gandhi introduces the name harijan ("children of God") for the 50
million "untouchables" of India. The gesture radicalizes his phenomenology
of spirit irreversibly. For it reveals, in the most dogmatic form, Gandhi's
commitment to "equality of the spiritwithout which no other equality is
possible." This chapter recovers the morals and consequences of that
decision. The harijan, it argues, was neither simply another name nor a
"sacred force". Instead, it was a condensation of Gandhi's ontological and
phenomenological partitions, one in which his incalculable desire to touch
the untouchable was rendered indissociable from his ethics of disciplinary
limit and measure. Limit at the heart of religion, touching within the
calculus of reason alone: this is what Gandhi calls maryada dharma. And
this limit, in its punitive integrity, structures his indifference toward
the fearless revolutionaries of his time no less decisively than it does
his apotheosis of the atishudra.
5The Freedom of Others: Annihilation of Caste and Republican Virtue
chapter abstract
Like swords crossed against each other, Ambedkar's two major interwar
works, Annihilation of Caste (1936) and Thoughts on Pakistan (1941) seem
locked in perilous balance. One committed to the unconditionality of
equality, the other consumed by the rhetoric of republican security. Yet,
they share a set of methodological commitments that would come to
enduringly guide Ambedkar's struggle to imagine a freedom without mastery.
Beginning with the writings of the 1930s, this chapter follows the
modalities of those commitments up until Ambedkar's interventions in the
Constituent Assembly debates of the late 1940s. What kind of republic did
Ambedkar really envision? A republic of resistance and fearlessness, a city
of virtue and truth, it posits. It is this ethics of insurrectionary
courage (inscribed at the heart of citizenship), this resistance against
the over-constitutionalization of the political, this making reciprocal of
the right to freedom that this chapter reconstructs.
6Gandhi, the Reader
chapter abstract
"Thank Godhe is singularly alone," thus appears Gandhi's relief at
Ambedkar's purportedly faithless denunciation of scripture in Annihilation
of Caste. This chapter probes the depths of that Gandhian respite. It
tracks how Gandhi's conception of truth, transformed by the pressures of
mass politics, mediates the convictions of Gandhi, the reader. Did
Ambedkar's use of "annihilation" or ucched, a word that prophesized a new
religion of responsibility, a word that gestured toward the inalienable and
immeasurable freedom of force (which Ambedkar insisted the believer and
heretic must equally possess), lead Gandhi to discern in it a nihilistic
urge? Recovering the phenomenology of sacrifice and rigor that sustained
Gandhi's relationship to the law (and reading), the chapter delineates the
relationship between his ethical religion (dharma) and Ambedkar's struggle
for a religion without religion (dhamma). At stake, it proposes, was the
abyss between Ambedkar's religion of resistance and Gandhi's belief in
measure.
7Responding Justly: Ambedkar, Sunnyata, and Finitude
chapter abstract
Did Ambedkar's democracy have a place for belief? Could his "love of truth"
coexist with his "love of politics"? Focusing on his final works (beginning
with his opposition to capital punishment), this chapter realigns
Ambedkar's constitutionalism along his meditations on the ethical, mapping
a topography of his political philosophy that was at once deeply marked by
the religious and profoundly aware of its risk. A scrupulous theorist of
sovereignty, Ambedkar emerges here as a critic of mastery and sacrifice,
who seeks to open a new horizon of justice; a responsibility or maitri that
might transcend the anthropological distinctions between man and woman,
major and minor, citizen and noncitizen, human and nonhuman. It was
Ambedkar's sensitivity to the incommensurable (and yet equally shared)
vulnerability of citizens that had perhaps forced Gandhi to sigh at his
singular aloneness. Sunnyata was this vulnerability turned radical, the
void where force and justice became inseparable.
Epilogue: Citizenship and Insurrection
chapter abstract
As Ambedkar today emerges as the newest site of modern India's interminable
struggle with history, and the Hindu Right-whose politics he once called
"gangsterism"- becomes the latest ideological formation to enter the war to
appropriate his legacy, it becomes clearer than ever what Ambedkar had
meant by the void (of politics): an emptiness, a lawlessness, a lie at the
very heart of nation-states. But this void was not to be renounced. For the
void was also spirit, the invisible crypt of an insurrectionary
citizenship, an instance and institution of force at its most egalitarian.
Only when the encounter between Ambedkar and Gandhi is placed within a
global constellation of secular and theological traditions, the epilogue
argues, that it illuminates why the emancipatory possibilities offered by
the insertion of faith into democracy must honestly contend with the
transformative risk that the politicization of religion brings in its wake.
1Of Faith in Equality: Toward a Global Measure
chapter abstract
What sort of relationships did anticolonial mobilizations for national
sovereignty forge between faith and politics, sacrifice and democracy,
philosophy and resistance? This chapter traces a crucial moment in this
genealogy to 1914-15, when Gandhi returned to India after spending two
decades in South Africa, and Ambedkar arrived in New York as a student at
Colombia University. Over the next three decades, the two created an
unparalleled body of work engaged with questions of belief, action, and
truth, replacing the nationalist aspiration for sovereignty with a resolute
commitment to what this book calls unconditional equality. Reconstructing
their inseparable and irreconcilable convictions, reclaiming the richness
of Ambedkar's formulation "faith in equality" as an interpretive,
performative, and methodological coup de force, this chapter charts out an
alternative history of ethical responsibility and political realism in the
modern nonwest. At stake, it argues, is the tension between the political
and "the social question" itself.
2Spirits of Satyagraha: A History of Force
chapter abstract
Gandhi was a master of neologisms, many of which, he insisted, were best
left untranslated. Satyagraha, coined in 1907, was one of the earliest,
through which Gandhi ingeniously supplanted the pacifism invoked by
"passive resistance" and introduced the notion of force (bal) and
resistance or firmness (agraha) in India's struggle against the empire.
Despite the growing popularity of the term "civil disobedience," Gandhi
continued to favor the more forceful term "civil resistance." "Civil
resistance is a complete substitute for violence," he declared in 1934.
"Through it everyone has to achieve his own swaraj. This weapon has given
spirit and new strength to the masses." This spirit, its place in Gandhi's
ontology of force, a force whose laws, he insisted, were at once natural
and proper to the human alone, is the focus of this chapter. At its center
is Gandhi's relationship to the spirit of the law as such.
3Laws of Force: Ambedkar and the Mystical Foundation of Authority
chapter abstract
Returning to Ambedkar's Atlantic commencements, retracing the relationship
between force and justice that he begins to forge in the 1910s, this
chapter offers a new history of the beginnings of Ambedkar's revolutionary
philosophy. It was in New York that Ambedkar begins to struggle with the
problem of force, its mysticism and secrecy, its potentiality and weakness.
But the struggle acquires radical form from the 1920s onward, first at the
Mahad Satyagraha in 1927 (where a copy of the Manusmriti is publicly burned
in the name of a new equality) and then in Annihilation of Caste in 1936
(where a critique of Plato's Republic is mounted for the first time). Was
Ambedkar's immense, almost mystical commitment to Indic texts on
sovereignty and sacrifice, such as the Gita, ever dissociable from his
ethics of destruction? Is resistance against religion, Ambedkar asks, not
the heart of every religious responsibility worthy of the name?
4Apotheosis of the Unequal: Gandhi's Harijan
chapter abstract
In 1931, Gandhi introduces the name harijan ("children of God") for the 50
million "untouchables" of India. The gesture radicalizes his phenomenology
of spirit irreversibly. For it reveals, in the most dogmatic form, Gandhi's
commitment to "equality of the spiritwithout which no other equality is
possible." This chapter recovers the morals and consequences of that
decision. The harijan, it argues, was neither simply another name nor a
"sacred force". Instead, it was a condensation of Gandhi's ontological and
phenomenological partitions, one in which his incalculable desire to touch
the untouchable was rendered indissociable from his ethics of disciplinary
limit and measure. Limit at the heart of religion, touching within the
calculus of reason alone: this is what Gandhi calls maryada dharma. And
this limit, in its punitive integrity, structures his indifference toward
the fearless revolutionaries of his time no less decisively than it does
his apotheosis of the atishudra.
5The Freedom of Others: Annihilation of Caste and Republican Virtue
chapter abstract
Like swords crossed against each other, Ambedkar's two major interwar
works, Annihilation of Caste (1936) and Thoughts on Pakistan (1941) seem
locked in perilous balance. One committed to the unconditionality of
equality, the other consumed by the rhetoric of republican security. Yet,
they share a set of methodological commitments that would come to
enduringly guide Ambedkar's struggle to imagine a freedom without mastery.
Beginning with the writings of the 1930s, this chapter follows the
modalities of those commitments up until Ambedkar's interventions in the
Constituent Assembly debates of the late 1940s. What kind of republic did
Ambedkar really envision? A republic of resistance and fearlessness, a city
of virtue and truth, it posits. It is this ethics of insurrectionary
courage (inscribed at the heart of citizenship), this resistance against
the over-constitutionalization of the political, this making reciprocal of
the right to freedom that this chapter reconstructs.
6Gandhi, the Reader
chapter abstract
"Thank Godhe is singularly alone," thus appears Gandhi's relief at
Ambedkar's purportedly faithless denunciation of scripture in Annihilation
of Caste. This chapter probes the depths of that Gandhian respite. It
tracks how Gandhi's conception of truth, transformed by the pressures of
mass politics, mediates the convictions of Gandhi, the reader. Did
Ambedkar's use of "annihilation" or ucched, a word that prophesized a new
religion of responsibility, a word that gestured toward the inalienable and
immeasurable freedom of force (which Ambedkar insisted the believer and
heretic must equally possess), lead Gandhi to discern in it a nihilistic
urge? Recovering the phenomenology of sacrifice and rigor that sustained
Gandhi's relationship to the law (and reading), the chapter delineates the
relationship between his ethical religion (dharma) and Ambedkar's struggle
for a religion without religion (dhamma). At stake, it proposes, was the
abyss between Ambedkar's religion of resistance and Gandhi's belief in
measure.
7Responding Justly: Ambedkar, Sunnyata, and Finitude
chapter abstract
Did Ambedkar's democracy have a place for belief? Could his "love of truth"
coexist with his "love of politics"? Focusing on his final works (beginning
with his opposition to capital punishment), this chapter realigns
Ambedkar's constitutionalism along his meditations on the ethical, mapping
a topography of his political philosophy that was at once deeply marked by
the religious and profoundly aware of its risk. A scrupulous theorist of
sovereignty, Ambedkar emerges here as a critic of mastery and sacrifice,
who seeks to open a new horizon of justice; a responsibility or maitri that
might transcend the anthropological distinctions between man and woman,
major and minor, citizen and noncitizen, human and nonhuman. It was
Ambedkar's sensitivity to the incommensurable (and yet equally shared)
vulnerability of citizens that had perhaps forced Gandhi to sigh at his
singular aloneness. Sunnyata was this vulnerability turned radical, the
void where force and justice became inseparable.
Epilogue: Citizenship and Insurrection
chapter abstract
As Ambedkar today emerges as the newest site of modern India's interminable
struggle with history, and the Hindu Right-whose politics he once called
"gangsterism"- becomes the latest ideological formation to enter the war to
appropriate his legacy, it becomes clearer than ever what Ambedkar had
meant by the void (of politics): an emptiness, a lawlessness, a lie at the
very heart of nation-states. But this void was not to be renounced. For the
void was also spirit, the invisible crypt of an insurrectionary
citizenship, an instance and institution of force at its most egalitarian.
Only when the encounter between Ambedkar and Gandhi is placed within a
global constellation of secular and theological traditions, the epilogue
argues, that it illuminates why the emancipatory possibilities offered by
the insertion of faith into democracy must honestly contend with the
transformative risk that the politicization of religion brings in its wake.