Circle of Statues

Omvedt is a doyenne of social history in India and several of her books, such as Dalits and the Democratic Revolution, have become influential works on other scholars. Her newspaper articles have consistently delineated the neglect of caste in policy as well as protest movements and she has acutely established that any Indian citizen seeking to work towards 8216;8216;democratisation8217;8217; is impoverished without the brilliant transformative power of Ambedkar8217;s thought.

Precisely because of the depth and complexity of Omvedt8217;s engagement with her subject, this laudatory new biography is confusing in its unabashed adulation. Ambedkar8217;s awful torments as a student in Satara and as a civil servant in Baroda, his lifelong battle to establish the principles of the Enlightenment, liberty, equality, fraternity, and his final humiliation over the Hindu Code Bill are movingly documented. Yet at the same time Omvedt fails to provide clues as to how the deification of Ambedkar among his followers precluded the emergence of a movement larger than the man, why his personality cult was so overpowering, why, while Gandhi developed a set of trusted lieutenants, Ambedkar8217;s leadership was marked by an absence of a second line of command.

The biography is a learned retelling of Ambedkar8217;s life and she regularly pays tribute to him. Yet relatively little attention is given to his personal evolution, instead the focus is much more on his political journey. A more intricate mesh of the two would perhaps have served the genre better. The death of his four children, including a favourite son, after which he wrote , 8216;8216;life to me is a garden full of weeds,8217;8217; as well as the lifelong search for companionship, first with an Englishwoman, later with his second wife Savita, were surely fundamental in his constant anger and unhappiness.

Yet, his disillusionment over the failure of the Hindu Code Bill and the final drift towards Buddhism is masterfully sketched. In Omvedt8217;s analysis Ambedkar embraced Buddhism because he wanted 8216;8216;a religion that was this-worldly in the sense of providing a morality that could have the potential of 8216;reconstructing the world8217; on the basis of liberty, equality and fraternity.8217;8217; Thus Ambedkar remained modern even in his conversion as his religion was centred on social change, rather than personal improvement, another difference with Gandhi.

He opposed the romantic Gandhian notion of village republics. To him industrialisation, urbanisation and education were the touchstones of a reformed India and Gandhi was nothing but a paternalist caste-bound Hindu. Yet while Omvedt has no hesitation in pointing to Gandhi8217;s inability to break from Vaishnavite Hinduism, she does not turn a similarly watchful gaze on Ambedkar, and his inability perhaps to transcend anger and separatism. She provides a defence of his anguished attempts to build a 8216;8216;castle on a dung heap8217;8217;, yet does not explore why others have not risen from the dung heap to attain similar stature and take over Ambedkar8217;s unfinished task.

Present day Dalit politics has focused on establishing Ambedkar statues in the countryside, a most unfortunate fallout of his life8217;s work. To freeze Ambedkar into an immobile statue without creatively harnessing his thoughts in order to create new equally intellectually vibrant Ambedkars for the future, has surely been a failing of the modern Dalit struggle.