Contents · 4 sections · 3 min
Key Ideas
Caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers.
Caste has no scientific basis and is not eugenic.
Caste destroys public spirit, charity and public opinion.
Political reform cannot precede social reform.
Hindus observe caste because they are religious — so the authority of the Śāstras must be destroyed.
An ideal society is based on liberty, equality and fraternity.
Annihilation of Caste is a speech written by B. R. Ambedkar in 1936 for the annual conference of the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (“Society for the Abolition of Caste”), a Hindu reform organisation in Lahore. When the organisers read the text in advance, they objected to its attack on the Hindu scriptures and asked Ambedkar to remove it; he refused — “I would not change a comma” — and the conference was cancelled. Ambedkar published the speech himself. It is the most celebrated and uncompromising critique of the caste system ever written, and a classic of Indian political thought.
The argument
Political reform needs social reform
Ambedkar begins by attacking the idea, common among nationalists, that political independence should come first and social reform later. History shows, he argues, that “political revolutions have always been preceded by social and religious revolutions”. A society that denies human dignity to millions is not fit for self-government.
Not division of labour
Defenders of caste said it was a natural division of labour. Ambedkar replies that caste is “not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers.” A civilised society needs division of labour, but “in no civilised society is division of labour accompanied by this unnatural division of labourers into watertight compartments”, graded one above the other. Caste assigns occupations by birth, not aptitude; it forbids people to change occupations even when starving; and it makes work a matter of dishonour rather than of free choice.
Not eugenics
To the claim that caste preserves “purity of blood”, he answers that the castes of India are not racially distinct — “the caste system does not demarcate racial division” — and that caste is “a social system which embodies the arrogance and selfishness of a perverse section of the Hindus”.
What caste has done to Hindus
Caste, he argues, has destroyed Hindu society: it has prevented the Hindus from becoming a society or a nation, “a mere collection of castes”; it has killed public spirit, public charity and public opinion — “a Hindu’s public is his caste”; it has prevented the conversion of others into Hinduism; it has made the aboriginal tribes savages by keeping them outside; and it has made morality “caste-bound”.
The ideal society
Against caste he sets an ideal society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. He defines democracy not as a form of government but as “primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” — a phrase from his teacher John Dewey.
The root: the Śāstras
The decisive argument comes at the end. Why do Hindus observe caste? “People are not wrong in observing caste. In my view, what is wrong is their religion, which has inculcated this notion of caste.” Caste is sanctioned by the Śāstras, which Hindus regard as sacred and infallible. Therefore inter-dining and inter-marriage campaigns cannot succeed while the Śāstras keep their authority:
You must take the Shastras and the Vedas… You must not only discard the Shastras, you must deny their authority, as did Buddha and Nanak. You must have courage to tell the Hindus that what is wrong with them is their religion — the religion which has produced in them this notion of the sacredness of caste.
He ends by declaring that this is probably his last address to Hindus: “I have decided to change my religion.”
Gandhi’s reply
Gandhi reviewed the speech in his journal Harijan (July 1936). He praised Ambedkar as a man who “cannot be ignored”, but argued that the Śāstras are not the true source of Hinduism, which lies in the lives of its saints; that caste (jāti) is bad but varṇa — hereditary occupation without hierarchy — is a good law; and that untouchability can be removed without destroying Hinduism. Ambedkar answered that the saints had never attacked caste as a system, that varṇa is caste under another name, and that Gandhi’s ideal of hereditary occupations was itself the problem. The exchange is one of the great debates of modern India.
Significance
Annihilation of Caste has become a foundational text of the Dalit movement and of anti-caste thought everywhere. Its 2014 annotated edition, with an introduction by Arundhati Roy, reignited debate over Gandhi and Ambedkar.
In conversation
The sentence everyone should know: caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers.
Curiosities
did you know?- The Jat-Pat Todak Mandal of Lahore invited Ambedkar to preside over its 1936 conference, saw the text in advance, asked him to delete the passages attacking the Vedas — and when he refused, cancelled the conference.
- Ambedkar printed 1,500 copies at his own expense; it has since been translated into most Indian languages and sold in huge numbers.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Can a religion be reformed without rejecting its scriptures?
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsGandhi vs. Ambedkar
The great argument of modern India — can caste be reformed from within Hinduism, as Gandhi believed, or must it be annihilated, with the scriptures that sanctify it, as Ambedkar argued?
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.
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.
Swami Vivekananda
The Bengali monk, disciple of Ramakrishna, who brought Vedānta and Yoga to the West at the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago (“Sisters and brothers of America!”), preached a “practical Vedānta” of service to humanity as service to God, and awakened modern Hindu self-confidence.