Annihilation Of Caste By B. R Ambedkar Analysis

The individual suffering most from unfair obscurity when any person thinks about the founding and the freedom of the India is probably the one man who was very likely the greatest intellect of all of our Founders, and also one of the most impressive legal minds of the twentieth century. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956), Nehru’s Law Minister, primary architect of the Indian Constitution, champion of the lower castes and the underprivileged. Relatively little-known, his struggles get no interest whatsoever, and his immense writings, most published posthumously because of poverty and therefore inability to pay the fee for publication, have been available till recently only in ancient editions gathering dust in long forgotten corners until
“Annihilation of Caste” is arguably B.R. Ambedkar’s most revolutionary text. It is not an argument directed at Hindu fundamentalists or extremists, but at those who considered themselves moderate, the ones toeing the line of diplomacy, those whom Ambedkar has refered to as “the best of Hindus” and also known to us simply as left-wing Hindus. In India,he had to be not only an accomplished legal and political mind, but also an untouchable. His pivotal role in politics came later as Nehru’s law minister. It was his work on the Constitution and his awe inspiring speeches about it which preserved the Constituent Assembly proceedings.
Annihilation of Caste outdates all this; it belongs to a train of Ambedkar’s thought that is not really political, but more social and religious. In 1936, the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal
, a group of Hindu reformers, invited Ambedkar to deliver the comprehensive lecture at its annual meet. He showed them the script of his lecture ahead of the actual delivery, and they, finding it objectionable, canceled the meeting. They were dedicated to moderate incremental reform as in they aimed for mixed-caste dining, and entertained the notion that social mingling would lead to intermarriage. But denunciation of
The discriminations that dalits face are traumatizing to say in the least and the injustice of a whole people suffering under such treatment is hore horrifying when sanction is found in holy texts. The very faith of the people being their instrument of torture is worse than any dictatorship or despotism. Secondly, entailing the enforcement of the caste hierarchy, the upper castes, through the ages have deprived their so called “inferiors” of the two important tools for changing their lot: The right to education, which seriously hampered the chances of an untouchable to gain for himself knowledge for important posts and more fundamentally respect in the higher echelons and the right to bear arms. Without the potential use of arms, not solely for revolutionary purposes but also for self-defense in the case of violent oppression, any group would be reduced to a vegetable heard of stepping stones for the priviledged and the “high born”. The latter of the two problems could not be solved by simply renouncing the stigma associated to untouchability and reforming our conceptions of