- Length
- 128 pagesNavayana annotated critical edition, 2014, with an introduction by Arundhati Roy
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Annihilation of Caste
A speech about caste that a caste-reform society commissioned and then refused to hear. Ambedkar would not change a comma, the conference was cancelled, and he printed it himself - producing the most important text of the Indian anti-caste tradition and the sharpest attack on Hindu scripture written from inside India.
- Date
- 1936
- Author
- B. R. Ambedkar
- Region
- British India
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Suppressed — Held back, banned or circulated privately before print
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Commissioned by an anti-caste organisation, rejected by it as unacceptable, and published by its author at his own expense; the first printing sold out in two months.
What the book says
A speech that was found unspeakable by the reformers who commissioned it. Ambedkar's argument is that caste cannot be reformed, only destroyed, and that every attempt to abolish untouchability while leaving the system intact has failed for a reason. Caste is not a division of labour, he argues, but a division of labourers, fixed by birth and enforced by the impossibility of intermarriage; and it is not merely a social custom that religion happens to tolerate. It has religious sanction, in scriptures that are held to be divinely revealed, and a Hindu who obeys them is not being irrational but consistent. From this comes the conclusion that ended the conference. Reformers who appeal to Hindus' better nature are asking people to disobey what they take to be divine command, and no such appeal can succeed while the command stands - so the destruction of caste requires destroying the authority of the shastras themselves. Ambedkar closes by saying that he has decided to leave Hinduism, and adds that the reader may take it as the reason the speech ends there.
What it argues
That caste survives because it is believed to be sacred, and that no reform which leaves the belief in place can work. Ambedkar dismantles the usual defences one at a time. Caste is not a rational division of labour, because the division is by birth rather than by aptitude and there is no provision for changing it. It did not preserve racial purity, since the groups are not racially distinct. It has not produced social efficiency, since it has left the majority with no stake in the whole. What remains, on his account, is a system of graded inequality in which each group has someone below it, so that there is no common interest in abolishing it. And because the graded order is prescribed by texts held to be divinely revealed, the reformer who asks for goodwill is asking for disobedience - which is why the destruction of the scriptures' authority is not an extreme conclusion but the only consistent one.
What it answered
Bhagavad Gita c. 200 BC - 200 ADanonymous
Hindu scripture as the ground of caste, and Gandhi as its most effective modern defender. Gandhi had campaigned against untouchability while maintaining that the fourfold order itself was sound and that caste was a form of social organisation to be purified rather than destroyed; Ambedkar's reply is that this concedes the principle and rescues the system by removing its worst symptom. He is also answering the reformers who invited him - a genuinely anti-caste organisation which nonetheless could not accept an attack on the Vedas.
What answered it
Gandhi, in two articles in Harijan in July 1936 under the title A Vindication of Caste, arguing that Ambedkar had judged a religion by its worst practitioners and that the scriptures should be read selectively, with anything contrary to reason and morality rejected. Ambedkar's reply, added as an appendix to the second edition, is that a religion whose texts must be filtered by a criterion outside them has already conceded that the criterion is what matters - and that Gandhi's selective reading is available to a saint and not to the villager whose life the texts govern.
How it argues
By the methods of a trained economist and lawyer, laid out for an audience expected to disagree: statistics, historical cases, comparison with other societies, and a sequence of anticipated objections answered in turn. The tone is controlled and the anger is under the surface rather than on it, which is what makes the closing pages land. It is also, being a speech, unusually direct - short sentences, numbered points, and no scholarly hedging.
The moment
Ambedkar was born into an untouchable caste, took doctorates at Columbia and the London School of Economics, and was the first prominent Dalit in Indian public life. He had burned the Manusmriti publicly at Mahad in 1927. The invitation came in a letter of December 1935; when the organisers read the manuscript and asked him to remove the passages rejecting the Vedas and announcing his departure from Hinduism, he replied that he would not change a comma. They cancelled the conference entirely, fearing violence. He converted to Buddhism in 1956, weeks before his death, with several hundred thousand followers, and had by then written the Indian constitution.
How it travelled
By being unstoppable. Fifteen hundred copies sold out in two months, translations followed into Gujarati, Tamil, Marathi, Hindi, Punjabi and Malayalam, and the text has never been out of print in India since. Its readership grew steadily through the twentieth century with the Dalit movement and expanded again with the annotated Navayana edition of 2014, whose long introduction by Arundhati Roy provoked a substantial controversy of its own about who is entitled to introduce Ambedkar. Outside India he was little read as a philosopher until recently.
The strongest objection
That the remedy leaves the people it addresses with nowhere to stand. If caste is inseparable from the scriptures, and the scriptures cannot be reinterpreted, then the only exit is out of the religion altogether - which is the conclusion Ambedkar drew for himself and which asks of hundreds of millions of people something no political programme can deliver. Gandhi's version of the objection is that every tradition contains resources for its own reform and that Ambedkar has denied Hinduism the interpretive latitude he would grant any other body of thought. Ambedkar's answer is that the latitude is real for the educated and unavailable to those the texts most bind, which is a strong reply and does not remove the difficulty that his solution is conversion.
Why read it
Because it is short, lucid and one of the very few works of political philosophy that reads as though something is at stake in the next sentence. Read an edition containing Gandhi's articles and Ambedkar's reply; the exchange is where the argument is fully joined and it is as good as anything in the section.
- First printed
- 1936
- First in English
- 1936
- Digitised
- Yes
The second edition adds two appendices: Gandhi's articles against the speech, and Ambedkar's reply to them. Any edition without both is missing the argument.
Written in English. Translated into Gujarati and Tamil within months and subsequently into most Indian languages.
Where it stands
Live and central. Annihilation of Caste is a founding text of Dalit politics and of Indian political thought, is now read in political philosophy outside India, and the argument it makes about religiously sanctioned hierarchy is used well beyond the case it was written about.
On quoting this book
Copyright status varies by jurisdiction and the widely circulated editions carry modern editorial apparatus. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Ambedkar's reading of the scriptures is fair, or whether it takes prescriptive texts as descriptions of practice, is argued by defenders of the tradition. Whether conversion is a political strategy or an admission that the political strategy failed is disputed among his own followers. The Roy introduction to the 2014 edition provoked a serious argument about whether Ambedkar needs a non-Dalit interpreter to reach a wider readership. And the relation between this text and his later Buddhism - whether the conversion follows from the argument or supplies what the argument lacked - is a real interpretive question.