Pagination in square brackets corresponds to:
B. R. Ambedkar, Ranade Gandhi & Jinnah: Address Delivered on the 101st Birthday Celebration of Mahadev Govind Ranade Held on the 18th January 1943 in the Gokhale Memorial Hall, Poona (Bombay: Thacker & Co., 1943)
The same text is reprinted as Part 3 of Volume 1 of Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1979), pp. 205–240.
All notes are mine.
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[23] His path as a reformer was not smooth. It was blocked from many sides. The sentiments of the people whom he wanted to reform were deeply rooted in the ancient past. They held the belief that their ancestors were the wisest and the noblest of men, and the social system which they had devised was of the most ideal character. What appeared to Ranade to be the shames and wrongs of the Hindu society were to them the most sacred injunctions of their religion. This was the attitude of the common man.
The intelligentsia was divided into two schools: a school which was orthodox in its belief but unpolitical in its outlook, and a school which was modern in its beliefs but primarily political in its aims and objects. The former was led by Mr. Chiplunkar and the latter by Mr. Tilak. Both combined against Ranade and created as many difficulties for him as they could. They not only did the greatest harm to the cause of social reform, but as experience [24] shows they have done the greatest harm to the cause of political reform in India.
The unpolitical or the orthodox school believed in the Hegelian view — it is a puzzle to me — namely to realize the ideal and idealize the real. In this it was egregiously wrong. The Hindu religious and social system is such that you cannot go forward to give its ideal form a reality because the ideal is bad; nor can you attempt to elevate the real to the status of the ideal because the real, i.e., the existing state of affairs, is worse than worse could be. This is no exaggeration.
Take the Hindu religious system or take the Hindu social system, and examine it from the point of social utility and social justice. It is said that religion is good when it is fresh from the mint. But Hindu religion has been a bad coin to start with. The Hindu ideal of society as prescribed by Hindu religion has acted as a most demoralizing and degrading influence on Hindu society.
It is Nietzschean in its form and essence. Long before Nietzsche was born Manu had proclaimed the gospel which Nietzsche sought to preach. It is a religion which is not intended to establish [25] liberty, equality and fraternity. It is a gospel which proclaims the worship of the superman: the Brahmin by the rest of the Hindu society. It propounds that the superman and his class alone are born to live and to rule. Others are born to serve them, and to nothing more. They have no life of their own to live, and no right to develop their own personality. This has been the gospel of the Hindu Religion.
Hindu philosophy, whether it is Vedanta, Sankhya, Nyaya, Vaishashika, has moved in its own circle without in anyway affecting the Hindu religion. It has never had the courage to challenge this gospel. That Hindu philosophy that everything is Brahma remained only a matter of intellect. It never became a social philosophy.1See also Philosophy of Hinduism, BAWS 3, pp. 84–87 The Hindu philosophers had both their philosophy and their Manu held apart in two hands, the right not knowing what the left had. The Hindu is never troubled by their inconsistency.
As to their social system, can things be worse? The Caste system is in itself a degenerate form of the Chaturvarna which is the ideal of the Hindu. How can anybody who is not a congenital idiot accept Chaturvarna [26] as the ideal form of society? Individually and socially it is a folly and a crime. One class and one class alone to be entitled to education and learning! One class and one class alone to be entitled to arms! One class and one class alone to trade! One class and one class alone to serve!
For the individual the consequences are obvious. Where can you find a learned man who has no means of livelihood who will not degrade his education? Where can you find a soldier with no education and culture who will use his arms to conserve and not to destroy? Where can you find a merchant with nothing but the acquisitive instinct to follow who will not descend to the level of the brute? Where can you find the servant who is not to acquire education, who is not to own arms and who is not to possess other means of livelihood to be a man as his maker intended him to be?
If baneful to the individual, it makes society vulnerable. It is not enough for a social structure to be good for a fair weather. It must be able to weather the storm. Can the Hindu caste system stand [27] the gale and the wind of an aggression? It is obvious that it cannot. Either for defence or for offence a society must be able to mobilize its forces. With functions and duties exclusively distributed and immutably assigned, what way is there for mobilization? Ninety per cent of the Hindus — Brahmins, Vaishyas and Shudras — could not bear arms under the Hindu social system. How can a country be defended if its army cannot be increased in the hour of its peril. It is not Buddha who, as is often alleged, weakened Hindu society by his gospel of non-violence. It is the Brahminic theory of Chaturvarna that has been responsible not only for the defeat but for the decay of Hindu society.
Some of you will take offence at what I have said about the demoralizing effect of the Hindu socio-religious ideal on Hindu society. But what is the truth? Can the charge be denied? Is there any society in the world which has unapproachables, unshadowables and unseeables? Is there any society which has got a population of Criminal Tribes? Is there a society in which there exists today primitive people, who live in [28] jungles, who do not know even to clothe themselves? How many do they count in numbers? Is it a matter of hundreds, is it a matter of thousands? I wish they numbered a paltry few. The tragedy is that they have to be counted in millions, millions of Untouchables, millions of Criminal Tribes, millions of Primitive Tribes! One wonders whether the Hindu civilization, is civilization or infamy?2See also Philosophy of Hinduism, BAWS 3, pp. 89–92.
This is about the ideal. Turn now to the state of things as it existed when Ranade came on the scene. It is impossible to realize now the state of degradation they had reached when the British came on the scene and with which the reformers like Ranade were faced.
Let me begin with the condition of the intellectual class. The rearing and guiding of a civilization must depend upon its intellectual class — upon the lead given by the Brahmins. Under the old Hindu Law the Brahmin enjoyed the benefit of the clergy and not be hanged even if he was guilty of murder,3See, for e.g., Manusmriti 8.379–81 which says: “Shaving the head is prescribed as the death penalty for Brahmins; but the other social classes are actually subject to the death penalty. The king should never put a Brahmin to death, even if he has committed every sort of crime; he should banish such a Brahmin from his kingdom along with all his property, without causing him hurt. There is no greater violation of the Law on earth than killing a Brahmin; therefore, a
king should not even think of killing a Brahmin”. and the East India Company allowed him the privilege till 1817.4‘Benares Brahmins’ were exempted from capital punishment by Bengal Regulations XVI and XXI of 1795. The exemption repealed by Bengal Regulation XVII of 1817.That is no doubt because he was the salt of [29] the Earth. Was there any salt left in him?5Matthew 5:13 (New Testament Bible): You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. His profession had lost all its nobility. He had become a pest. The Brahmin systematically preyed on society and profiteered in religion. The Puranas and Shastras which he manufactured in tons are treasure trove of sharp practices which the Brahmins employed to befool, beguile and swindle the common mass of poor, illiterate and superstitious Hindus. It is impossible in this address to give references to them. I can only refer to the coercive measures which the Brahmins had sanctified as proper to be employed against the Hindus to the encashment of their rights and privileges.
Let those who want to know read the preamble to Regulation XXI of 1795. According to it whenever a Brahmin wanted to get anything which could not be willingly got from his victim, he resorted to various coercive practices: lacerating his own body with knives and razors or threatening to swallows some poison were the usual tricks he practised to carry out his selfish purposes. There were other ways employed by the Brahmin to coerce the Hindus which were as extraordinary as they [30] were shameless. A common practice was the erection in front of the house of his victim of the koorh — a circular enclosure in which a pile of wood was placed — within the enclosure an old woman was placed ready to be burnt in the koorh if his object was not granted. The second devise of such a kind was the placing of his women and children in the sight of his victim and threaten to behead them. The third was the Dhurna — starving on the doorstep of the victim.6For the text of the Regulation XXI of 1795, see The Untouchables and the Pax Britannica, BAWS 12, pp. 115–26.
This is nothing. Brahmins had started making claims for a right to deflower the women of non-Brahmins. The practice prevailed in the family of the Zamorin of Calicut and among the Vallabhachari sect of Vaishnavas.7For more examples of such degeneracy, see What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables (1945/46), pp. 205–206; The Triumph of Brahmanism, BAWS 3, pp. 324–25. What depths of degradation the Brahmins had fallen to! If, as the Bible says, the salt has lost its flavour wherewith shall it be salted? No wonder the Hindu Society had its moral bonds loosened to a dangerous point. The East India Company had in 1819 to pass a Regulation (VII of 1819) to put a stop to this moral degeneracy.8This reference is either a mistake or a fabrication. The preamble to the Regulation says that women were employed wholesale to entice and take away the wives [31] or female children for purposes of prostitution, and it was common practice among husbands and fathers to desert their families and children.
Public conscience there was none, and in the absence of conscience it was futile to expect moral indignation against the social wrongs. Indeed the Brahmins were engaged in defending every wrong for the simple reason that they lived on them. They defended Untouchability which condemned millions to the lot of the helot. They defended caste, they defended female child marriage and they defended enforced widowhood: the two great props of the Caste system. They defended the burning of widows, and they defended the social system of graded inequality with its rule of hypergamy which led the Rajputs to kill in their thousands the daughters that were born to them. What shames! What wrongs! Can such a society show its face before civilized nations? Can such a society hope to survive? Such were the questions which Ranade asked. He concluded that on only one condition it could be saved — namely, rigorous social reform.