Reform from within
Untouchability is a sin that must be abolished, but varṇa — duty by birth without hierarchy — is a good law. Hinduism can be purified; separating the untouchables would divide it forever.
Annihilation
Caste is a system of graded inequality sanctified by the Śāstras. It cannot be reformed while the scriptures keep their authority. The oppressed need political power, and may need to leave Hinduism.
The Exchange
who answered whom- BRB. R. Ambedkar
Give the depressed classes separate electorates, so they can elect their own representatives — not candidates chosen by caste Hindu voters.
- MGMahatma Gandhi
I will resist it with my life. Separate electorates will vivisect Hinduism. I begin a fast unto death.
- BRB. R. Ambedkar
I sign the Poona Pact under duress, to save your life — and the lives of my people who would be blamed for your death. It is coercion, not conversion.
- MGMahatma Gandhi
Untouchability is the greatest blot on Hinduism. Let us call them Harijans, children of God, open the temples and wells, and purify ourselves.
- BRB. R. Ambedkar
“Harijan” is condescension. Caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers; it rests on the Śāstras. You must destroy their authority, as the Buddha and Nānak did.
- MGMahatma Gandhi
The Śāstras are not the true source of Hinduism; its saints are. Varṇa, rightly understood, gives each a duty, not a rank. Reform must come by changing hearts.
- BRB. R. Ambedkar
Mahatmas have come and Mahatmas have gone, but the untouchables have remained untouchables. I was born a Hindu, but I will not die one.
The rounds compress twenty-four years: the Round Table Conferences and the Yerwada fast (1932), Annihilation of Caste and Gandhi’s reply in Harijan (1936), Ambedkar’s What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945), and the conversion at Nagpur (1956). See Annihilation of Caste and Hind Swaraj.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsAnnihilation of Caste
Ambedkar’s 1936 undelivered speech — the most powerful critique of caste ever written — arguing that caste is a division of labourers, not of labour, that it rests on the authority of the Hindu scriptures, and that it cannot be reformed but only destroyed.
Hind Swaraj
Gandhi’s 1909 manifesto, written in ten days on a ship — a dialogue in which the “Editor” tells an impatient “Reader” that true home rule is rule over oneself, that modern civilisation is a disease, and that India must win freedom by non-violence and the spinning wheel.
How Should One Act? — Dharma, Karma and Freedom
The Indian argument about action — from Vedic sacrifice to the Gītā’s action without attachment, the Buddha’s intention, the Jain refusal to harm, Kauṭilya’s realism, Gandhi’s satyāgraha and Ambedkar’s constitutional morality.
Premchand
The greatest writer of modern Hindi and Urdu fiction — novelist of the Indian village, of peasants crushed by debt, caste and colonial rule — whose Godān and stories like “The Shroud” founded social realism in Indian literature.
The Manusmṛti
The most famous of the Hindu law books — a treatise on dharma covering creation, the four classes, the stages of life, the duties of kings, marriage, inheritance, crime and penance. Revered for two millennia as the code of Hindu society, and condemned in modern times as the charter of caste and of women’s subordination.
Mahāvīra
The twenty-fourth and last tīrthaṅkara of Jainism — a prince of the eastern Gaṅgā plain who renounced everything at thirty, practised twelve years of extreme austerity, attained omniscience, and taught a path of radical non-violence, truth and non-possession for thirty years.