The Scourge of Caste

King's Review

Arundhati Roy, Jan 17th

“The Doctor and the Saint” is the name of the introduction that I wrote to one of modern India’s most classic texts, Annihilation of Caste, written by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar was one of the most fascinating modern thinkers in India’s national movement, yet he is a person who has somehow either been written out of the popular account, or has been written in but not for the passions that guided him. He has been written in as the leader of the untouchables, or the person who drove the writing of the Indian constitution.Annihilation of Caste has this dubious distinction of being an underground classic, in that you can’t walk into a bookshop in India and ask for the writings of Ambedkar in the way you can ask for the writings of Gandhi or Nehru. Ambedkar’s people, the people who were once known as untouchables and who today call themselves Dalits, Gandhi rechristened very patronizingly as harijan, which means “the children of god”. While Annihilation of Castewas loved and passed around in the Dalit community, the privileged castes for whom it was written remain quite blissfully ignorant.
The Scourge of Caste by Thavam Ratna