Can we risk our own annihilation?
The market is flooded with editions of Annihilation of Caste. Navayana also has two different editions of the book. This desire of all publishers, from mainstream giants to small regional-language presses, to bring out Ambedkar’s works clearly indicates that it has become profitable to use his name. Does this also indicate that there is a general interest in seeing his ideas come to fruition? The jury is out. After all, Ambedkar has come to signify different things to different groups of people. To the sanatanis, he is a ‘margdarshak’. To the liberals, he is a status quoist. To the left, he is a figure to latch on to in the wake of their self-betrayal. Amidst this churn, what of the idea of the ‘annihilation of caste’? Can we imagine an end to this nightmare?
On 15 May 1936, Ambedkar brought out the first edition of Annihilation of Caste on his own dime, after he was disallowed from giving the speech he had prepared for the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal’s conference in Lahore. The speech is often mistaken as prescriptive. But it is tinged with melancholy. Ambedkar offers scant positive advice. He prefers to traverse the negative. He surveys the obstacles to the task of annihilating caste, and towards the end of the speech he concedes his inability to achieve it. All he can hope to do, he writes, is to find some amelioration for his people. The task even in his time, which was decidedly a time of ferment, seemed too insurmountable.
What of our own time? Despite our pretentions of greater radicalism, caste in our time has become even more entrenched. We get deeper and deeper into its mire, content with state-given sops, as human personality becomes attuned to birth-based identities. Now our dreams of regime change are reduced to wishing for a return of old regimes. Ambedkar wasn’t limited by such fantasies. He embraced becoming—‘I have decided to change.’ He realized that there was no fixity to be had, change could only be achieved by embodying its movement. Can we risk changing too? Can we risk our own annihilation?
Ambedkar mustn’t become mere window dressing for our existing identities. He must become a catalyst for unthinkable possibilities. We must attend to his words. This AoC Day, Navayana invites you to read Ambedkar. His writings, both in optimistic and pessimistic moments, embrace self-estrangement. They urge us away from the dread of fixity, to the exhilaration of a mutable humanity. Join him in this joy.
