'Iconoclast' By Anand Teltumbde | Excerpt

Babasaheb Ambedkar stands as a remarkable figure among the founding fathers of our republic. While many of his contemporaries are getting eclipsed in the political vortex, Ambedkar is the one whose legacy is celebrated by politicians of all stripes in an almost competitive fashion. This has led to an environment rife with hyperbole and hagiography, particularly since the early 1990s when his writings and speeches became widely accessible, coinciding with the centenary of his birth. Paradoxically, this trend has unfolded alongside a deterioration in the movements centred on Dalits—his primary constituency—and in the broader state of the nation. 

Anand Teltumbde, a distinguished scholar and public intellectual, offers this biography—Iconoclast: A Reflective Biography of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar—with insightful reflections on Ambedkar’s thoughts and actions, striving to cut through the thickening layers of myth, and present him as a human being—a complex, dynamic figure from whom future generations can draw meaningful lessons. In the context of the deification of Ambedkar and the prevailing political practice of distorting the legacies of influential figures, Teltumbde’s book is a groundbreaking contribution. 

The following excerpt from the book, which directly addresses the current trend of mythmaking, offers readers a glimpse into the contents of the book. 

Profound Anti-Heroism 

💯On 18 January 1943, Ambedkar delivered the speech ‘Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah’ as a presidential address on the 101st birthday celebration of Mahadeo Govind Ranade in the Gokhale Memorial Hall, Poona. In this speech, while extolling Ranade as a great man vis-a-vis Gandhi and Jinnah, he said, ‘Ranade argued that there were no rights in the Hindu society which the moral sense of man could recognize. There were privileges and disabilities, privileges for a few and disabilities for a vast majority. Ranade struggled to create rights.

♌Ranade wanted to vitalize the conscience of the Hindu society which had become moribund as well as morbid. Ranade aimed to create a real social democracy, without which there could be no sure and stable politics.’ Sure, on the social reform front, Ranade would outshine Gandhi and Jinnah as the latter did not have much claim.

൩He called Ranade a devoted and courageous social reformer who knew that reform of the caste system was an urgent need. Was Ranade truly a courageous social reformer? The oft-cited instance of his succumbing to the pressure from his orthodox family in marrying a second time to Ramabai, a girl of almost one-third of his age bespeaks his courage. Most upper-caste reformers posed progressivism but could not cross the bounds of social customs and traditions. And Ranade does not appear to be any great exception. 

Obviously, Ambedkar did not know how Ranade, the moving spirit of Social Conference, had invited Madava Row, a Marathi-speaking Brahmin, who as the Dewan of the Travancore had once forbidden Nadar women to cover their breasts, to preside over its inaugural session, betraying the extent to which it was captive to upper caste interests. The much flaunted Social Conference that made some Brahmin individuals the great social reformers, in its initial years, espoused the kind of causes that affected dominant castes, such as the disabilities attendant on distant sea voyages, ruinous expenses of weddings and child marriages෴. The inequities affecting lower castes were not on its radar.

🐭Ambedkar also did not know that Ranade in the strange company of Tilak had meekly submitted to the prescribed rituals of expiation to end his boycott by the Brahmin community for having had tea and biscuits with others at an event in a Christian Mission school in Poona in October 1890, which was organized by another social reformer, Gopal Joshi, who had helped his wife, Anandi Joshi become the first Indian female physician. He also might not know that Ranade always showed elitist bias and little reformatory zeal in his early judicial career.

Mita cites a case in 1898 that came in appeal to the Bombay High Court ♍before Ranade. Ranade’s verdict unquestioningly reflected the elitist assumption that ‘the law applicable to the elite varnas was the norm, while the one governing the majority of Hindus was the exception’. In another case, Ranade had upheld the entitlement of the watandar Brahmin to perform ceremonies irrespective of Yajman’s wishes, as well as to receive the fees. 

This is not to undermine Ranade’s greatness but rather to underscore the point that every so-called great person has his/ her feet of clay. Actually, greatness is intimately associated with history which is written by the powerful and seldom reflects the perspective of the powerless majority. Bhagat Singh𒉰 was a terrorist for the colonial rulers but for the masses, he was a great hero. Ambedkar tried to dwell upon the topic of who could be called ‘great men’, which might be particularly helpful for Indians where every politician, big and small, is automatically given the halo of greatness. For him great men play a vital role in societal growth and renewal; they must be ‘a scourge and scavenger of society’. 

🎃Crisp and simple though, even this definition is not sans perspective. It valorizes social and political activists over others. Greatness, correlated with perspectives such as ideology, identity, politics, religion, etc., and historical circumstances would be truly difficult to define objectively. It needs to be regarded with scepticism. 

🔯While he could make his own evaluation of his contemporaries, the value of this speech lay not in this evaluation but in the general principles he propounded concerning heroes and hero worship. How true it sounds when he says, ‘For in these days, with the Press in hand, it is easy to manufacture Great Men.’ The power of the press has gone billion times more today with the advent of mass communication technologies that have effectively displaced truth and brought in a paradigm of the ‘post-truth world’, where rapists, murderers, individuals and criminals, buy State power with money and muscle and mock at people from street corner hoardings as their heroes.

﷽And paradoxically, the more insultingly they mock them, the more vehemently people make them bigger heroes. Leave aside this ugly and vulgar hero-making syndrome, the heroes were always the product of power. There is no use of caution as he said: ‘I admit that we ought to be more cautious in our worship of great men.’ Why should there be great men and why should they be worshipped? Does that not belittle the contribution of millions and billions who silently contribute day in and day out to sustain the world? Even Carlyle, he cites, who defended the worship of Great Men, warned his readers how: ‘Multitudes of Men have figured in history as Great Men who were false and selfish.’ He regretted deeply that ‘the World’s wages (of homage) are pocketed (by these so-called Great Men), the World’s work is not done. Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in.’ This is what the giver of The Great Man Theory said. 

❀What is of particular importance in this speech is the relationship between great people and their followers. In relation to the followers of a great man, what he wrote may be more illumining to his own followers who have packaged him into an inert cult figure and themselves into his slaves: ‘What a Great Man does is not to impose his maxims on his disciples.

☂ What he does is to evoke them, to awaken them to vigorous and various exertions of their faculties. Again, the pupil only takes his guidance from his master. He is not bound to accept his master’s conclusions. There is no ingratitude in the disciple not accepting the maxims or the conclusions of his master. For even when he rejects them, he is bound to acknowledge his master in deep reverence: ‘You awakened me to be myself; for that I thank you. The master is not entitled to less. The disciple is not bound to give more.’ 

𓆏Nonetheless, Ambedkar left behind enough guidance for his followers, as it were, how to relate to him. Nowhere else does one find the clarity and profundity with which he expressed the concept of great people and their relation with the ordinary. In a country, that harvests bumper crops of great men, this wisdom is of immense value.

💦Alas, his own followers would disregard it and package him into an icon endowed with infallibility. Any view or act that does not reflect devotion to him could be blasphemy. Here comes the dichotomy of words and deeds; while the words left behind stun anyone for their spinning a radical worldview, his deeds of tacit approval of the mass construction of a cult figure would violently negate that worldview. While these words were being epitomized in his writings and speeches, on the ground he was already a lord father, a God-incarnate with salutation in his name, seen as saviour a la Moses, a living legend that personified the movement, whose jayantis was a mass festivity when he was barely forty years old. 

ܫWith the mass conversion to Buddhism, this deification would only get fortified in his iconography as a divine figure alongside Buddha, a Bodhisattva in Buddhist cosmology! 

 
 (This lecture was published in the form of a book in April 1943.)