Ambedkar Buddhism in Maharashtra

Abstract

My purpose in this paper is to present an ethnography of a specific untouchable conversion movement in such a way that it clarifies theoretical issues relevant to understanding this kind of phenomenon more widely. It is therefore a contribution, however small, both to research on Buddhism in Maharashtra and also to the wider issues of untouchability and politics in India. There are many cases of untouchable castes converting to Islam or Christianity, and the Mahar conversion to Buddhism may in some respects belong to that wider group. What makes it of special interest, however, is firstly that it was Buddhism that was chosen to express the social, political and soteriological aspirations of this group; and secondly that it was Dr. B.R. Ambedkar himself who directly led this movement. Throughout his political career from the 1920s up to his death in 1956 he offered the scheduled castes the most incisive alternative to Gandhian high-caste paternalism, and his social and political thinking has been inherited most directly by the Buddhists, and by the Dalit movement with which the Buddhists have had a strong association.

My ethnography suggests that egalitarian rhetoric involves a reconceptualisation of the relation between ritual status and power. It may well have been true that untouchables have traditionally internalised, conformed to, and even reproduced, the value of hierarchical ritual status defined by relative purity, but increasingly status is seen by untouchables as itself an idiom of power which can be challenged politically. In this sense the Buddhists, and Ambedkar himself as their articulate spokesman, provide important insights into the changed relationship between status and power in India.