Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India

Description

This book offers a reading of Bhimrao Ambedkar’s engagement with the idea and practice of socialism in India by linking it to his lifelong political and philosophical concerns: the annihilation of the caste system, untouchability and the moral and philosophical systems that justify either. Rather than view his ideas through a socialist lens, the author suggests that it is important to measure the validity of socialist thought and practice in the Indian context, through his critique of the social totality. The book argues its case by presenting a broad and connected overview of his thought world and the global and local influences that shaped it. The themes that are taken up for discussion include: his understanding of the colonial rule and the colonial state; history and progress; nationalism and the questions he posed the socialists; his radical critique of the caste system and Brahmanical philosophies, and his unusual interpretation of Buddhism. Titles Published Titles Forthcoming Acknowledgements Contents 1 Introduction 1 A Haunting 2 A “Politically Unimaginable” Politics 3 Chapters 4 Terminology 2 ‘A Part Apart’: The Life and Times of  Dr. Ambedkar 1 Straddling Times and Places 2 Ambedkar’s Maharashtra 3 A Worthy Forebear: Jotirao Phule and His Kingdom of Bali 4 Educational Journeys 5 Querying Nationalism 6 Interwar India: Gandhi, the Left and Ambedkar in the Late 1920s 7 Thinking Beyond Nation and Class 8 The Making of a National Leader 9 Annihilating the Social Order 10 The 1940s and After: Constitutional Labour and the Buddhist Turn 3 Pax Britannica: Conceptualizing Colonial Rule and State 1 A New Politics 2 Social Liberals, Radical Nationalists and the Colonial State 3 Refusing Colonial and National Political Custodianship 4 Communists, Ambedkar and the Repressive State 5 The Modern State and Common Welfare: Ambedkar, American Progressives and British Socialists 6 Arguing with the State 7 Colonial Law and Social Transformation: Ambedkar’s Legal Labour 8 Rethinking the Political: Colonial Reform and Constitutional Norms 9 Moral Force, Public Conscience and the State 4 A New Time: Arguing with History and Imagining Utopia 1 Turning to the Past 2 At the Threshold of History 3 Could History Be Freedom? 4 The Left Turn to Ancient India 5 History and the Question of Indian National Unity 6 Writing Histories of Inequality 7 Conceptualizing Conflict and Change 8 Who Were the Shudras? and the Untouchables? 9 History and the Question of Reproduction 5 Graded Inequality and Untouchability: Towards the Annihilation of Caste 1 The Right to Well-being 2 The Caste Order and Untouchability: A Double Negation 3 Caste and Other Anxieties: Apologists, Reformers, Critics 4 Caste Matters and Colonial Knowledges 5 The Sexual Economy of Caste 6 Fetishizing Inequality 7 Once an Untouchable Always an Untouchable 8 Equality and Fraternity: Beyond Rules and Towards Principles 9 Social Kinship and Sympathetic Resentment 6 The Pre-requisites of Communism: Rethinking Revolution 1 A Man for Labour 2 Plebeian Revolts and Labour’s Future 3 Labour and Caste: From the Interwar Years to the 1940s 4 Thinking of Communism: The Practice of Theory and the Politics of Practice 5 Despite the Communists: Ambedkar and British Socialist Thought 7 What Path to Salvation? The Conundrum of Social Reproduction 1 The Riddle of Social Reproduction 2 The Women’s Question in Late Colonial India 3 Legislating for Equality: The Hindu Code Bill 4 Refusing Caste Reproduction: The Case of Pandita Ramabai 5 Jotirao Phule: Unsettling the Caste Family 6 Anti-caste Movements and the Question of Social Reproduction 7 Eutopic Acts: Anticipating a New Social Order 8 Buddha or Karl Marx: Fraternal Ethics and Economic Justice 1 Did the Buddha Preach Against Greed? 2 The Religious, the Moral and the Fraternal 3 Discovering the Buddha 4 A Buddhist Future? 5 The Buddha, the Dhamma and the Acquisitive Instinct 6 The Dhamma Against Brahmanism 7 Against the Counter-Revolution of the Present 8 What of Marx? 9 Reconstructing the World Bibliography Index