This Dhamma Day—Four Noble Books
Received wisdom has it that the four noble truths (Ariya Sacca) are about sorrow (dukkha), the cause of sorrow (samudaya), the removal of sorrow (nirodha) and the way leading to it (marga). Babasaheb Ambedkar begins his engagement with Buddhism by bluntly questioning such wisdom in his opus, The Buddha and His Dhamma:
Do they form part of the original teachings of the Buddha? This formula cuts at the root of Buddhism. If life is sorrow, death is sorrow and rebirth is sorrow, then there is an end of everything. Neither religion nor philosophy can help a man to achieve happiness in the world. If there is no escape from sorrow, then what can religion do, what can Buddha do to relieve man from such sorrow which is ever there in birth itself? The four Aryan Truths are a great stumbling block in the way of non-Buddhists accepting the gospel of Buddhism. For the four Aryan Truths deny hope to man. The four Aryan Truths make the gospel of the Buddha a gospel of pessimism.
On 14 October 1956, Babasaheb Ambedkar changed the course of dhamma in a society where suffering (dukkha) was primarily driven by caste and exacerbated by birth into certain castes. Along with half a million followers, he set the wheel of dhamma rolling in a new direction in Nagpur. Ambedkar’s call at the Deekshabhoomi continues to reverberate into the present. For Hegel, the ‘spiritual’ is a collective enterprise. And the 1956 event’s political and spiritual underpinnings were both equally pronounced—to become different to assert that one is equal, to change while remaining unchanged, and standing still while willing the world to change.
The seed of change had planted itself in Dr Ambedkar long before the happenings of 1956. While recording in detail the events of Dhamma Day, Ashok Gopal also tells us, in his magisterial biography of Babasaheb, A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar, that the decision to convert to Buddhism had already been made as far back as 1942. In the concluding chapter of the book, he writes at length about how for Ambedkar, saddhamma was a ‘philosophy of dhamma’. Gopal writes:
To ‘make the world a kingdom of righteousness’, dhamma was necessary. But it was not adequate. It had to become saddhamma. That could happen when learning is open to all; when learning leads to pradnya (wisdom), not pedantry; when pradnya is guided by sila (morality); when sila is driven by karuna (compassion); when compassion becomes maitri, ‘loving kindness’ towards all living beings; when all social barriers are pulled down; when worth and not birth is the measure of man; and when equality becomes a lived faith.
It is thanks to this painstaking attention to detail that A Part Apart has been shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation prize. The book is also on the long list for the Crossword Book Award this year (along with another Navayana title: Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India by Yamini Narayanan.)
The many valences of change that Babasaheb has inspired at Navayana have bloomed unrelenting. Shailaja Paik became the first dalit person to win the prestigious MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant for her work on dalit Tamasha women in The Vulgarity of Caste. Douglas Ober’s Dust on the Throne was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize in 2023. As the season of rewards beckons, we offer our own offerings to commemorate this year’s Dhamma Day: a boxset of four essential titles for a generous discount of 30%!
- A biography hailed as the most comprehensive account of Dr Ambedkar’s intellectual journey, Ashok Gopal’s A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar is shortlisted for multiple awards this year—from NIF to Crossword. Ashok’s work is the result of years of reading the bulk of Ambedkar’s writing, both in English and Marathi. He tells the story of the unprecedented struggle that went into the making of the Ambedkar legend.
- Douglas Ober’s Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India made it to the Cundill History Prize shortlist in 2023. Ober charts the history of Buddhism in shaping modern India. Through extensive examination of archival and ethnographic material, Dust on the Throne recovers the integral role of lesser-known anti-caste activists and Buddhist monastics in the making of modern global Buddhism.
- Gail Omvedt’s Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals is an enduring work. It is a primer to anti-caste thought. She undertakes the study of the leading anti-caste intellectuals over a period of five centuries: from the fifteenth century to the end of colonial rule. Their projected visions show us how another reality is possible. Gail is no longer with us, but we can still rest beneath the shade of her corpus.
- Bhanwar Meghwanshi offers a searing account of his disenchantment as an ex-Swayamsevak in I Could Not be Hindu: The Story of a Dalit in the RSS. Translated from the Hindi by Nivedita Menon, the memoir recounts his confrontation with the dangers posed by the Sangh’s ideological project to turn India into a Hindu Rashtra. Since leaving the RSS in 1991, Bhanwar has been an activist and a journalist chronicling the dalit movement. This book has been translated from English into Telugu, Marathi and Tamil.
All these works are spokes in the wheel of change—set rolling by Baba. On Dhamma Day, he administered twenty-two oaths to will a conversion to equality. In its twentieth year, Navayana trudges on, thanks to his lessons on change. This Dhamma Day, as the season turns, spare some change and get this set of four books that will set you thinking about thinking.
(Featured Image: “Labour Leader” by Vikrant Bhise)
