Ambedkar through the study of race, caste, and difference, 1870-1966

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the scholarship of B.R. Ambedkar, the renowned 20th century Indian politician, political leader of the Dalit community, and Chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee. The general historiographical consensus essentially argues that Ambedkar rejected race-based theories of caste due to his study at Columbia under the Boasian anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser, who favoured cultural anthropology over racial anthropology. My research reveals that this story is overly simplified—particularly, I bring out the enduring impact of late-19th century French Indology and Durkheimian sociology, as well as various understated currents within official colonial British anthropology. These approaches lodged their own respective critiques of race-based caste theories, critiques that are discernible, albeit subtly, throughout Ambedkar’s work. To elaborate the intellectual milieu colouring caste scholarship during the early-20th century (especially during the interwar years), my thesis also engages four other seminal scholar-cum-administrators educated between Britain and the United States: P. C. Mahalanobis, B. S. Guha, G. S. Ghurye, and D.N. Majumdar. This section reveals a constellation of transnational influences informing the study of caste among Indians, from American physical anthropology to British eugenics and biometry, to the more orthodox British social anthropology. Interestingly, by the 1940s, Indian scholars (Ambedkar included) were enthralled by the application of physical anthropology, especially anthropometry, to their studies of caste—a phenomenon often overlooked by contemporary scholarship. The synthesis of “caste” that crystallised at the dawn of Indian independence, thus, must be understood in light of this eclectic stream of influences. My project provides a corrective to the existing secondary literature in two senses: first, in its tendency to flatten Ambedkar’s academic influences and obfuscate their implications on his political and administrative career; and second, by more precisely locating how notions of biological and social difference developed throughout the Indian subcontinent during the first half of the 20th century, and how these notions informed fundamental values of Indian democracy.