South Asian Studies Brown Bag Series: B.R. Ambedkar and the Logic of Democratic Rule, Hari Ramesh

Event time: 
Thursday, November 16, 2017 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Henry R. Luce Hall (LUCE), Room 203 See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

This paper offers a novel reading of B.R. Ambedkar’s democratic thought and practice, focusing especially on the decade between his most famous work, Annihilation of Caste (1936) and his acceptance of the invitation to chair the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constituent Assembly (1947). Against prevailing views of this period, which take Ambedkar to be engaged in a mode of liberal democratic identity politics which renounced more radical ends, I argue that Ambedkar’s intense advocacy of guaranteed Dalit representation was a necessary step toward realizing self-government in India. After reconstructing Ambedkar’s diagnosis of caste society as well as the alternative he proffered – an adapted version of Deweyan democracy – the paper argues that Ambedkar perceived a key obstacle standing in the way of reform and transition from caste society to self-government: the communal majority. This was a complex fusion of caste-based oppression in social life with modern democratic institutions. The chapter concludes with an extended analysis of what I call ‘Dalit representation as rule’ – the method he saw fit to break the grip of the communal majority. ‘Dalit representation as rule’ linked guaranteed Dalit representation and ambitious institutional proposals to the transformative power of the state to generate recognition of Dalits as politically salient agents and to coercively remake caste society.

Hari Ramesh, Department of Political Science, Yale University