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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2010
B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), the radical Indian anti-caste thinker, left unfinished a critical corpus of works on “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India”, a fragment of which was provisionally titled “Essays on the Bhagavad Gita”. This essay engages with that corpus, situating Ambedkar's encounter with the Gita within a much broader twentieth-century political and philosophical concern with the question of tradition and violence. It interrogates the excessive and heterogeneous conceptual impulses that mediate Ambedkar's attempt to retrieve a counterhistory of Indian antiquity. Located as it is in the same Indic neighborhood from which a radical counterhistory of touchability might emerge, the Gita is a particularly fraternal and troubling text for Ambedkar. Yet his responsibility towards the Gita comes to be hinged not upon evasion but rather upon an exaggeration of its hermeneutic power; that is, upon his painstaking inflation of the Gita's willfully modern interest in instituting the universal. Ambedkar's relentless struggle to annihilate this universality of the Gita would have to be founded upon another universality, at once destructive, excessive and counterlegislative. In this unfinished attempt to recuperate the ideality of the universal, this essay asks, does Ambedkar himself become the most thorough modern practitioner of the Gita?
1 The mobilization of legal and legislative metaphors in Walter Benjamin's early essay on the “Critique of Violence” and Ambedkar's on the Gita is suggestively similar. Where Benjamin invokes the police, the military and the state, Ambedkar deploys the metaphors of the courtroom, “trial for murder”, and Krishna as a defending lawyer and “dictator”. See Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, “Philosophic Defense of Counter-Revolution: Krishna and His Gita” in idem, Writings and Speeches (henceforth BAWS), ed. Vasant Moon (Education Department, Govt. of Maharashtra, 1987), vol. 3, 365.
2 Benjamin, Walter, “Critique of Violence”, in idem, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed., Bullock, Marcus and Jennings, Michael W. (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 252Google Scholar.
3 Hamacher, Werner, “Afformative, Strike: Benjamin's Critique of Violence”, in Benjamin, Andrew and Osborne, Peter, eds., Destruction and Experience: Walter Benjamin's Philosophy (Manchester, 2000), 113–14Google Scholar.
4 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 251.
5 Ambedkar, “The Literature of Brahminism”, BAWS, 3: 261–2.
6 Ibid., 262.
7 “Justice is the principle of all divine endmaking”, writes Benjamin, “power the principle of all mythic lawmaking’. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 248.
8 The Bhagavad-Gita in the Mahabharata: A Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed. J. A. B. Van Buitenen (Chicago, 1981), 113. Henceforth The Bhagavad-Gita.
9 Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 360.
10 Ibid., 360.
11 Ibid., 360.
12 Ibid., 364.
13 By which he means “that life in man that is identically present in earthly life, death and afterlife”. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 251.
14 And just before that: “Fate shows itself, therefore, in the view of life, as condemned, as having essentially first been condemned and then become guilty”. Benjamin, “Fate and Character”, 204.
15 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 248.
16 “All mythic, lawmaking violence, which we may call ‘executive’”, Benjamin writes, “is pernicious”. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 252. Also see Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike”, 109.
17 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 248.
18 As Benjamin writes, while distinguishing mythic or “executive” violence from divine violence: “Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred dispatch, may be called ‘sovereign violence’”. See Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 252.
19 Like when Fanon revolts on an equally angry humanist register, “I see constant denial of man, an avalanche of murders.” Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, new trans. Philcox, Richard (New York, 2004), 236Google Scholar.
20 Blood anyway, writes Benjamin, is a symbol of “mere life”. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 250.
21 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 250.
22 On the Gita's “manipulation of the question of history” and its interest in the “apparent disclosure of the law” see Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 58Google Scholar. As Krishna says, in Spivak's astute rendering of the Gita's legislative and semitic registers: “I make myself whenever the Law is in decline”. Ibid., 53.
23 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 252.
24 Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 375.
25 Ibid., 376.
26 Ambedkar's difficult relationship with the method of modern historiography and his radical “mythography” has been attentively explored, with great originality, in Ganguly's, DebjaniCaste, Colonialism and Counter-modernity: Notes on a Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.
27 For a theoretically sophisticated engagement with Ambedkar's genealogy of the dalit as political subject and his conceptual struggle to frame a counterhistory for the “minority” see Rao, Anupama, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley, CA, 2009)Google Scholar.
28 This term surfaces throughout Gandhi's corpus. But see Gandhi, The Bhagavad-Gita According to Gandhi (Berkeley, CA, 2000), 81.
29 See Ambedkar, “The Literature of Brahminism”, 263.
30 Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 376.
31 On the openness of the Gita as text and its permissive hermeneutic world which enables its prolific use in nationalist allegory, see Sawhney's, Simona probing work The Modernity of Sanskrit (Minneapolis, 2009)Google Scholar.
32 Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA, 2002)Google Scholar.
33 Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 376.
34 Ibid., 372–76.
35 Ibid., 376.
36 Ibid., 377.
37 Ibid., 377.
38 Ibid., 376. An entire chapter in Gandhi's Hind Swaraj goes by that term “brute force”. Is Ambedkar as unaware of that other critique of violence as his secretive evasion of Gandhi in his essay suggests? Or is it Ambedkar's attempt to recuperate the history of non-violence itself, untouched by the spirit of the Mahatma?
39 Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 377.
40 Ibid., 371.
41 Ibid., 369–71. On Ambedkar's comparative reading and literal matching of words of the Bhagavad Gita and Buddha's doctrine in Majjhina Nikaya I see 370. On dates and authorship see 371–4.
42 Maitri, Karuna, Mudita, and Upeksha are the words in Ambedkar's text.
43 Ambedkar, “The Literature of Brahminism”, 263.
44 Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 377.
45 Ambedkar, “The Literature of Brahminism”, 263.
46 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, 251.
47 Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 365.
48 On Varna founded as “innate, inborn qualities” see ibid., 361–2.
49 Thus Ambedkar's insistence of the Bhagavad Gita being a text of “counterrevolution”, which in turn reinforces Jamini's Purva Mimansa, “the Bible of Counter-revolution”, at the very moment when “revolutionary” Buddhism was articulating the himsa inherent in Chaturvarnya. Ambedkar's juridical metaphors and his allusions to that intractable relationship between violence, revolution and the law are remarkably persistent. Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 362–6.
50 See especially The Bhagavad-Gita, 85; and Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 377.
51 Telang, cited at length in Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 368.
52 Telang's argument is inconclusive: “either Buddhism having already begun to tell on Brahmanism, the Gita was an attempt to bolster it up”, or more conclusively: “the Gita [was] an earlier and less thorough going form of it”. Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 368.
53 Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 369.
54 Ambedkar's phenomenal awareness of muteness, the inhumanity that underlay the gesture of “silencing”, and, by the same token, the enormously retributive potential of that gesture over which he lays claim here, is evocatively arrested in the name he chose for his earliest weekly, Mooknayak, literally “The Mute Hero”.
55 See Gandhi, The Bhagavad-Gita According to Gandhi, 85. Skaria's, Ajay important essay “Gandhi's Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram”, South Atlantic Quarterly 101/4 (Fall 2002) offers an illuminating reading of Gandhi's conceptual practice that underlay his naming of the harijan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
56 State-making in antiquity, in that nascent form upon which the Mahabharat elaborates, is foundationally constituted by the move towards legislative and moral sanction for the sacrifice of blood kin. In its more mature forms, not less but more extractive and violent, it is again the state that also enables the economy of monastic renunciation. On the political and moral matrices of empire in Indian antiquity see Thapar, Romila, From Lineage to State: Social Formations in the Mid-first Millennium B.C. in the Ganga Valley (Delhi, 1984)Google Scholar.
57 Ambedkar, “Analytical Notes on the Virat Parva and Udyog Parva”, 390.
58 Ibid., 381–7.
59 The pastoral and sexual registers on which Ambedkar's thought operates, and which so powerfully regulates his idea of the “woman”, is itself worthy of an attentive reading.
60 Ambedkar, “Krishna and His Gita”, 364.
61 The Bhagavad-Gita, 113.
62 Guyer, Sara, “Buccality”, in Schwab, Gabriele, ed., Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.
63 On the distinction between “character” and “figure” and the cognitive implications of that distinction see Zupančič, Alenka, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Boston, 2008)Google Scholar.
64 This denial of humanity and historicity to Krishna is what makes Ambedkar's anthropology different in its performance from the semitic impulses of the Gita's other modern readers such as Bankim. On the latter's reclamation of Krishna as a Christ-like historical ideality see Kaviraj, Sudipta, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi, 1995)Google Scholar.
65 Brown, Norman O., Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, 1959)Google Scholar.
66 I draw here from Etienne Balibar's insightful elaboration of these relationships in “Violence, Ideality and Cruelty”, in idem, Politics and the Other Scene (London, 2002).
