Abstract
This article engages with B. R. Ambedkar as political philosopher and key contributor to debates on global democracy and the genealogy of democratic ideas outside the West. I focus specifically on Ambedkar's use of Buddhist philosophy and the concept of śūnyatā (emptiness/impermanence), which plays a central role in his search for a nontheological democratic politics. In order to explore the implications of such a politics, the article brings Ambedkar into conversation with Claude Lefort and his theorization of the relationships between politics, religion, and democracy. Through this reading, Ambedkar's political philosophy becomes legible not only as a profound challenge to what Lefort has called the “permanence of the theologico-political” but also as a radical way of combining everyday political practice with an emphatic notion of negative identity.
The Promise of a Breakup
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956)—one of India's foremost political thinkers, a fierce human rights activist, dedicated lawyer, committed politician, and astute scholar with a PhD from both Columbia and the London School of Economics—was not a preserver of political continuity. His project was instead a deconstructive breaking apart of oppressive social structures and their ideological formations. And so his most ambitious and long-lasting political project—a project that would eventually lead him to a new kind of religion and distinct notion of the political—began with the promise of a radical break. In a now-famous speech delivered in 1935 at Yeola, a small town about two hundred kilometers northeast of Bombay that hosted the Depressed Classes Conference, Ambedkar vowed that although he had been born a Hindu, he would most certainly not die as one. Along with this declaration, he asked his audience of so-called Untouchables to break away from Hinduism instead of trying to find recognition and equality within it, as he himself had tried to do in vain until that point. Ambedkar fulfilled his vow more than twenty years later, when on October 14, 1956, Ambedkar, along with almost half a million followers, converted to Buddhism and thus finally broke away from Hinduism.
The story of Ambedkar's promise and his struggle to break free encapsulates how deeply intertwined his political and social activism for Dalits is with his work on political philosophy and the critique of the political ideology of Hinduism. In order to understand Ambedkar's philosophy, one thus has to engage with his politics, which was deeply influenced by his own experience as someone born into the Mahar community, which was regarded as “untouchable” by upper-caste Hindus and whose members would only in the course of their political emancipation, so strongly influenced by Ambedkar, come to understand themselves as “Dalits” or “Broken Men,” as he called them.1 It was clear to him that Dalits could become free from caste oppression and the stigma of untouchability only if they were to form a separate community outside the broad but stifling fold of Hinduism. The only way to assert their humanity was for them to first assert their own separate community as a fraternity of the oppressed, the sort of fraternity that Hannah Arendt had called “the great privilege of pariah peoples.”2 This was, however, a community that was itself based on the very notion of a necessary dismantling of something that could be conceptualized as a whole only by ignoring the constitutively violent appropriation at its very core. This was expressed most compellingly by Ambedkar himself. When he was told by a political opponent to think of himself as part of the great Indian nation (“as part of a whole”) Ambedkar famously replied, “I am not a part of a whole; I am a part apart.”3
The story of Ambedkar's promise also shows that he saw the task of individual and collective emancipation as deeply intertwined with the question of religion.4 Ambedkar regarded religion as the only social force that could inspire humans to transgress the sphere of material benefits,5 and yet he was also highly critical of what he regarded as irrational or socially harmful in religions as social institutions.6 While he was particularly critical of Hinduism and to a lesser extent of Islam, his position toward religion in general came close to a total rejection of its metaphysical aspects altogether. Instead, he saw the primary purpose of religion in its potential to ensure lasting equality. The only religion that could really live up to this expectation was Buddhism, precisely because—at least in his understanding—it limited itself to this purpose and did not claim to possess any metaphysical wisdom or allow for direct access to an otherworldly, transcendent salvation.7 Buddhism differed from all other religions in its rejection of any supernatural elements and in what Ambedkar regarded as the Buddha's reinterpretation of salvation (nirvāṇa or nibbāna in Sanskrit and Pali) as a decidedly this-worldly concept that referred to the “happiness of a sentient being” instead of “the salvation of the soul.”8
What made the “world-making authority”9 of Buddhism particularly well suited for Dalits was Ambedkar's strictly materialist reinterpretation of the concept of duḥkha or suffering, which he stripped of its metaphysical content, defining it as “suffering from social and economic causes”10 and explicitly comparing it to Marx's notion of exploitation, arguing that the Buddha had not merely spoken of the existence of duḥkha but had also “emphasize[d] the duty of removal of Dukkha.”11 Ambedkar's Buddhism thus consists of both a particular and a universal dimension.12 On the one hand, it represents the distinct religion of a new self-asserted (but ultimately negatively defined) Dalit identity. On the other, it is a universal religion for a truly democratic society of equals.
At the core of Ambedkar's “religion without religion”13 or “post-religious religion”14 stands a new notion of democratic sovereignty that is closely tied to an idea of radical impermanence and opposes any reification of social categories. The main task of this article is to draw out the political implications of this impermanence for discussions of democracy and equality beyond Ambedkar's immediate historical context. To this end, I bring Ambedkar into conversation with Claude Lefort and his theorization of the relationships between politics, religion, and democracy. This will allow me to devote particular attention to the phenomenological dimensions of Ambedkar's political thought and its applicability today. Ambedkar died before he could work out his understanding of the relationship between democracy and religion in more detail, and he did not himself draw a direct connection to his use of the term “impermanence,” which he developed out of a critical rereading of the classical Buddhist concept of śūnyatā or emptiness. In reconstructing a relationship between Ambedkar's conceptualization of “the impermanence of the nature of all things”15 and his distinct notion of religion as this-worldly and deeply political, however, we can unearth an argument that remains urgent for the global reception of Ambedkar's thought today.
I will argue that the concept of śūnyatā/impermanence and the notion of a nontheological religion, when taken together, provide the possibility for a new way of being political and practicing (democratic) politics, based on a history of the political that takes the impermanence of the theologico-political as an irreducible vantage point rather than the telos of emancipatory politics. In stark contrast to Claude Lefort, therefore, who argued in his pioneering essay “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” that within Western discourse the political had always been closely tied to the theological and that this “permanent” tie had only recently begun to be questioned, Ambedkar insisted that at least in India the theologico-political formation had already been questioned much earlier and was then actively reinstated as the result of a violent Brahminical oppression of Buddhist political thought. In his view, there has thus never been a “permanence of the theologico-political.” While the historical dimension of Ambedkar's argument about the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism might be disputable, the broader theoretical-philosophical framework that such an alternative history of democracy could help to forge remains highly relevant today.
In focusing on his political appropriation of the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā, I am interested in finding a balance between a more pragmatic engagement with Ambedkar's politics16 and a more fleetingly utopian or speculative reading of his work.17 Reading Ambedkar both historically and within the context of current political discussions (thus historicizing and decontextualizing his work at the same time)18 will allow me (1) to firmly situate Ambedkar within global discussions of democracy during his own time as well as today, and (2) to show that his practice of breaking apart allegedly unified social structures needs to be understood as an intimate act of democratic care based on the assumption of a radical impermanence of the theologico-political.
The Buddha's Dhamma and Political Reconstruction
Ambedkar declared that his social philosophy—“enshrined in three words: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”—was not “borrowed from the French Revolution” but rooted in religion and derived “from the teachings of the Buddha.”19 Despite this assertion, Ambedkar's Buddhism has often been described by Ambedkar scholars as a “civil,” “civic,” or even “post-religious religion”20 and thus portrayed as another effort to found a universal religion for civil society in the vein of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Dewey, with whom Ambedkar had studied at Columbia University. Placing Ambedkar within that philosophical tradition touches upon an important aspect of his Buddhism. And yet, it is important, as I will show, to take Ambedkar's own claim about the “root” of his philosophy more seriously while also acknowledging the rhetorical character of this claim.
Several discussions of the (re)turn to religion in political philosophy in the last decades have noted that the very concept of the political is not only inextricably bound to that of the religious and the theological but more specifically also to the history of Christianity.21 For Ambedkar, too, politics and religion are inseparable, but his long engagement with the history of Hinduism and religion in India reveals that there is more than one universal history of the relationship between religion and politics—and thus also more than one “genealogy of the political.”22 Through his historical analysis of Hinduism as an ideological formation and social institution (particularly in the manuscripts that formed the corpus of the unfinished Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India), Ambedkar developed a strong sensibility for the contingency of what Lefort called the “theologico-political formation”—that is, for the specific configuration in which the religious is always already political and the political always necessarily involves religious aspects. For Lefort, it was only with the advent of modern democracy that the “permanence of the theologico-political” was put into question and “the theological and the political became divorced.”23
Almost half a century before that, Ambedkar made a similar, if less explicitly worded, argument but with one striking difference: the fundamental change in the configuration of the political did not come with modern democracy but with the rise of Buddhism in ancient India—“as Great a Revolution as the French Revolution.”24 The seemingly historiographical structure of Ambedkar's analysis should not distract from its primarily theoretical significance. Since democracy is tied to the history of Buddhism in Ambedkar's analysis, the democratic revolution of Buddhism does not undo the strong relationship between the political and religion but only that between the political and theology (literally understood as the study of the divine or of God).25 The Buddhism that Ambedkar foregrounds knows neither God nor divine authority. As a religion, it is not structured around a set of beliefs that claim to be universally true or that require faith. And although it has a strong political dimension, this dimension is not sustained through the logic of a God-given law. The shift from theology as the study of the divine to religion as a social practice of everyday communion enables Ambedkar to make a much more comprehensive claim for the impermanence of the theologico-political.26 It is this impermanence that holds the greatest political potential for Ambedkar because it opens the possibility for an inherently democratic configuration of what one could call the “religious-political formation.” Whereas Lefort (like most European commentators) does not sufficiently distinguish between religion in general and the Judeo-Christian tradition in particular—thus partially conflating religion with theology—Ambedkar's critique of the political philosophy of Hinduism casts Buddhism as a religious basis for a nontheological notion of the political.27
In order to unpack this claim, it is helpful to turn to the specific notion of religion developed in Ambedkar's magnum opus, The Buddha and His Dhamma, which he finished around the time of his public conversion and just before his death in 1956. As the title suggests, the term “dhamma” is of central importance here, as it is through this term that Ambedkar develops his theory of a democratic religion. In the idiosyncratic style of the book,28 Ambedkar declares,
What the Buddha calls Dhamma differs fundamentally from what is called Religion. What the Buddha calls Dhamma is analogous to what the European theologians call Religion. But there is no greater affinity between the two. On the other hand, the differences between the two are very great. On this account, some European theologians refuse to recognize the Buddha's Dhamma as Religion. There need be no regrets over this. The loss is theirs. It does no harm to the Buddha's Dhamma. Rather, it shows what is wanting in Religion.29
The passage offers a complex negative definition of dhamma as the kind of religion that includes what is wanting in the European understanding of religion. There also seems to be something lacking in dhamma, however, that prevents it from being recognized as religion by European theologians. Both aspects—the distinctive lack as well as the specific surplus of dhamma—bear heavily upon its political significance. The term “dhamma” is taken from the Pali-language canon of Buddhist literature and is cognate with the Sanskrit term “dharma”—“undoubtedly the most central and ubiquitous concept in the whole of Indian civilization,”30 as Patrick Olivelle declares. In its most basic sense, dharma means “order” and “lawfulness.” It is not merely an abstract or given ideal but includes the constant maintenance and upholding of the cosmic and social order through rituals and proper moral conduct.31 As such, the concrete and specific structure of the cosmic and moral order can differ greatly from community to community and from period to period, which is how the term has acquired the meaning of “religion,” still used in many modern Indian languages today. Two aspects are particularly important here: dharma is much more explicitly connected to political order, law, and social norms than the concept of “religion,” and it strongly implicates the individual in the constant act of maintaining this very order. It is thus directly linked to the question of sovereignty and righteousness.32
In the shift from the Sanskrit and Hindu/Brahmanical term dharma to the Prakrit and Buddhist term dhamma, Ambedkar attempts nothing less than a religious-political revolution. He wants to purge the term of its earlier associations with divine law and sovereignty in favor of a much stronger emphasis on moral responsibility. In his own words, this amounted to a notion of religion as “a matter of principles” instead of as “a matter of rules.”33 The responsibility of every individual becomes rooted in their own freedom: “A principle leaves you freedom to act. A rule does not. Rule either breaks you, or you break the rule.”34 As mentioned above, Ambedkar's Buddhism knows no God and therefore no act of revelation of a divine law or a God-given social order. That is why Ambedkar emphasizes that, in contrast to all other religions and their prophets, the Buddha did not lay down rules that would ensure salvation. He only formulated guiding moral principles that could ensure justice and equality but that it was the responsibility of each individual to decide when and how to adhere to these principles. With this notion of Buddhism as a nontheological religion, Ambedkar retains the image of a moral order as a guiding principle but dispenses with the attempt to fully control or master this order.35 This is why dhamma is both more and less than religion (in the European sense) for Ambedkar: it knows no divine or priestly authority but puts much greater emphasis on individual freedom and moral responsibility.
As revolutionary as this shift from dharma to dhamma—from authority to responsibility—might appear in Ambedkar's work, it is explicitly based on the first rise of Buddhism under the reign of Ashoka in the third century BCE. Ashoka deliberately based his “new imperial non-Brahmanical program”36 of rule on the conscious adoption of a Buddhist dhamma and his own conversion to Buddhism. In turn, Ambedkar—“ever the traditionalist, ever the iconoclast”37—developed his own notion of dhamma from a critical rereading of the history of Buddhism in India, placing an even greater emphasis on morality rather than law. His dhamma (or his “Buddha's Dhamma”) was thus not so much based on an outright invention of tradition as on a conscious act of remolding traditional concepts. Precisely because he projected himself as a warrior against traditional beliefs, he also recognized the significance of tradition for any (religious-)political project.
We should not be too quick to conflate Ambedkar's engagement with Indian history and tradition with explicitly anticolonial practices of worldmaking. The juxtaposition between dhamma and religion that Ambedkar constructs does include a certain measure of anticolonial critique, and Ambedkar's interest in and contact with other political thinkers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois,38 might seem to situate him—at least from a certain temporal and geographic distance—within the anticolonial camp. As Anupama Rao and others have shown, however, the history of anticasteism radically challenges the convenient “binary of colonialism and anti-colonialism.”39 Despite the vast difference between the Western concept of religion and the Indian notion of dharma, what counted for Ambedkar was that both were premised on a set of rules and regulations, whereas the notion of dhamma he ascribed to the Buddha was based on the principle of responsibility.40
An awareness of the significance of everyday practices for the reproduction of the ideology of caste and its manifold forms of discrimination lies at the heart of Ambedkar's notion of politics. This awareness was largely based on his own experience of caste discrimination in India. The specific theorization of everyday practices, however, he owed mostly to his study of American pragmatism and particularly to the lasting influence of Dewey.41 Above all, it was Dewey's notion of democracy as “a mode of associated living”42 that became central for Ambedkar; this notion also explains his twofold approach to politics—as “Dhamma plus Magistrate,” in Ambedkar's own words.43 As a member of parliament, minister, practicing lawyer, legal reformer, and chairman of the drafting committee of the Indian constitution, he was deeply committed to “Democracy as a Form of Government.”44 As a Dalit social reformer and political philosopher, however, he knew that the numerical logic of “political democracy” also needed what he called “social democracy”—everyday social practices mediated through experience, images, and ideals.45
Religion, and Buddhism in particular, played a central role in Ambedkar's notion of “social democracy.” In contrast to most Western conceptions of civil religion, however, the task of Buddhism was not just to foster a “fellow-feeling” between citizens.46 Whereas religion, concerned with metaphysical knowledge, was essentially private for Ambedkar, dhamma is concerned with social practice.47 Or, as Ambedkar succinctly puts it, in a style clearly evocative of Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The purpose of Religion is to explain the origin of the world. The purpose of Dhamma is to reconstruct the world.”48
Ambedkar's otherwise surprisingly broad range of perspectives on social life and the political can, then, all be understood as aiding the reconstruction of the world. Dewey-inflected pragmatism and the relentless emphasis on everyday practices—practices of oppression as well as of mutual support and solidarity—were an important aspect of this process. No less important, however, were Ambedkar's critique of the ideology of Hinduism and untouchability, his complex relationship with Marxism, and his reconstruction of democracy through a thorough reinterpretation of Buddhist tradition. In this reinterpretation, particularly in his political appropriation of Buddhist dialectics, lies the most revolutionary insight of Ambedkar's philosophy: an insight into the impermanence of the theologico-political that allows for a critique of the classical notion of sovereignty.
Śūnyatā in the Century of Negative Identity
In his persuasive reading of Theodor Adorno's early work, Eric Oberle describes the proliferation of identity discourses in the twentieth century as dialectically intertwined with the emergence of an ineluctably “wounded” subjectivity that is itself the result of the irrevocable homelessness of the modern subject and the most brutal forms of racial oppression and domination. Accordingly, the pursuit of a (positive) identity arises out of a prior existing rupture that could only ever be overcome in what Adorno called “the world of a genuinely emancipated humanity.”49 Until such a world materialized, however, a notion of “negative identity”—aware of its own impossible origin—remained necessary for concrete acts of political resistance.50 While Adorno emerges as the central figure in Oberle's account of the “century of negative identity,” this argument points toward the larger question of universality and identity that pervaded the century as a whole and remains important today. In order to analyze the gravity of the paradigm of negative identity in the twentieth century, it is necessary, however, to dispense with a limited Western genealogy and to see it as more than just a European affair.
Ambedkar plays a crucial role here because his political program for the emancipation of Dalits and the establishment of true democracy relied mainly on an engagement with the question of a negative identity. As a Dalit, this question was concrete and profoundly practical for Ambedkar, as he saw the assertion of a negatively defined Dalit identity as the only possible way out of a millennial oppression. He found the philosophical basis for this politics of negativity in the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā (or emptiness), and it is by analyzing his understanding of śūnyatā that we can most clearly elucidate the continuing political relevance of Ambedkar's notion of a Buddhist dhamma as nontheological religion.
In its canonical version, the concept of śūnyatā51 is attributed to Nāgārjuna, one of the most influential philosophers of ancient India and the founder of the Madhyamika or “Middle Way” school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, who lived in the second or third century CE. Nāgārjuna developed a form of radical critique that centered on the notion of a fundamental “emptiness” (śūnyatā) of reality. According to him, things do not consist of any inherent quality or substance but exist “only for a temporally non-extended instant and immediately self-destruct after that instant, causing, as they do, another, temporally succeeding thing that is very much like, though distinct from, the first thing.”52 Predictably, Nāgārjuna's claim that reality was empty and that things did not exist (at least not in any persistent way) was quickly deemed nihilistic by his contemporary critics. Nāgārjuna replied by pointing out that even though things indeed did not exist in any fundamental or essential sense, they can still be understood as existing in a practical, pragmatic, or conventional sense. According to this “doctrine of the two truths,” the notion of śūnyatā was thus not nihilistic but relied on a merely “conventional” understanding of reality in order to refute any form of fundamental existence.53
It is easy to mistake the whole argument—and indeed the entire notion of śūnyatā—for a purely sophistic debate without any moral or political consequence. The broader implications of it become much clearer, however, once we acknowledge that Nāgārjuna had developed his “Middle Way” of logical reasoning precisely in order to escape the dead-end of metaphysics, on the one hand, and nihilism, on the other.54 This twofold negation, of existence and nonexistence as well as of subject and object, is one of the central aspects of Nāgārjuna's argument and one of the reasons he is regarded as the founder and principal proponent of Buddhist dialectics.55 Not unlike Adorno in Negative Dialectics, Nāgārjuna was very clear that there was nothing positive to recuperate from a twofold negation.56 What remains instead is “pure” negation or absolute emptiness, that is, śūnyatā. For the antinihilist Nāgārjuna, however, this absolute emptiness does not signify the futility of life but rather the very necessity and possibility of ethical and political action. The ultimate aim of the “anti-system” of śūnyatā was, after all, liberation from suffering:
Most Buddhist philosophers, and certainly Nāgārgjuna, would contend that their concept of “liberation” is a primarily soteriological one. As Ambedkar sought to show, however, the same philosophical basis could also be used to redefine the project of liberation as a purely material and this-worldly one. Combined with his historical analysis of the ideology of Hinduism that led to the current state of “bondage” and inequality, such a redefined notion of liberation allowed Ambedkar to develop his own theory of political practice that would be uniquely suited to the everyday challenges within a democratic society.
Against this background, the brief discussion of “Sunnya Vad” or “the principle of emptiness” in The Buddha and His Dhamma becomes legible as a crucial aspect of Ambedkar's reformulation of democratic politics. He begins the short paragraph with the by-now familiar refutation of the charge of nihilism, a charge that he partially blames on the conventional translation of śūnya as “empty.” In order to minimize the possibilities for further misapprehensions and to emphasize the significance of perpetual change as the prime consequence of śūnyatā, he proposes to translate the concept as “impermanence”:
The Buddhist Sunnyata does not mean nihilism out and out. It only means the perpetual changes occurring at every moment in the phenomenal world. Very few realize that it is on account of Sunnyata that everything becomes possible; without it nothing in the world would be possible. It is on the impermanence of the nature of all things that the possibility of all other things depends. If things were not subject to continual change, but were permanent and unchangeable, the evolution of all of life from one kind to the other, and the development of living things, would come to a dead stop.58
In Ambedkar's rendition, the concept of śūnyatā takes on an almost scientific character when he describes it as the basis of all forms of change, including the evolution of humanity and life as such. Given his high regard for science as well as his criticism of all forms of “irrationality,” this is less surprising than it might seem. More important, however, is that the focus on the transformative effect of śūnyatā allows him to place a much stronger emphasis on the concept's political and social aspects over its strictly philosophical ones (such as nonessence, the ultimate nonexistence of anything, or the fundamentally contradictory nature of reality as simultaneously existing and nonexisting). He thus quickly dispenses with the ontological aspects of śūnyatā and goes straight to what he regards as a “much more important question”:
All things are impermanent, was the doctrine preached by the Buddha. What is the moral of this doctrine of the Buddha? This is a much more important question. The moral of this doctrine of impermanence is simple. Do not be attached to anything. It is to cultivate detachment—detachment from property, from friends, and such other things—that he said “All these are impermanent.”59
With the identification of detachment as “the moral of the doctrine of impermanence,” Ambedkar has reached a tricky point in the teachings of the Buddha. In Ambedkar's own reading of the hegemonic Hindu tradition, the cultivation of detachment is directly linked to the acceptance of a predestined cosmic order enshrined in the caste system. As a moral practice, it is thus inextricably connected to what he describes as the “philosophical defence of counter-revolution”60 in the Bhagavadgītā, the principal text that gives expression to this Hindu understanding of detachment. The Buddhist conception that Ambedkar unearths is very different, however. It is not a surrender to the cosmic—that is, the ontotheological—forces of one's destiny (as in the Bhagavadgītā) but instead the acceptance of one's own irrefutable responsibility. “The moral order of the universe may be good or it may be bad. But according to the Buddha, the moral order rests on man and on nobody else.”61 If the impermanence of śūnyatā leads to radical detachment and the acceptance of one's own moral responsibility, this is necessarily a responsibility that is always already shared with others since there is no entirely independent entity or individual but only “dependent co-origination” (pratītya-samutpāda).
In Ambedkar's political reading of śūnyatā as radical impermanence there thus appears a notion of sovereignty that breaks with its own tradition and thereby emphasizes the impermanence of the theologico-political. In the words of Aishwary Kumar, “Sunnyata was the foundation of shared will, the will to sharing and responsibility beyond the in-finite difference of species life. It was the autonomy of mortals without the desire for transcendence, their sovereignty without theology.”62 This sovereignty without theology is primarily a notion of sovereignty that dispenses with mastery and universal authority. It is thus a somewhat paradoxical notion of sovereignty (classically understood as “supreme authority”) that foregrounds its own limits and impermanence but without fully rescinding the claim to power and to govern. It is on the basis of śūnyatā, therefore, that Ambedkar argues for what could be called a “democratic sovereignty.”63
Democracy as Politics on Impermanent Ground
Based on his reinterpretation of the Buddha's dhamma, Ambedkar argued that Buddhism was not at all detached from the world but could be made into a tool for concrete social analysis and transformation. While this was of course precisely what Indian Marxists had claimed for their own theories, Ambedkar argued that they would necessarily fail to deliver as long as they remained unable to grasp the unique challenge that the caste system represented for any emancipatory political struggle. The caste system was the ultimate wound that made any form of reconciliation impossible so long as it was not cured. The only cure that Ambedkar saw would necessarily involve a radically new notion of society and politics with the Buddhist principle of śūnyatā at its very root, as it could provide the necessary basis for a nontheological notion of sovereignty. Because, in Ambedkar's eyes, communism ultimately relied on force instead of a morality of responsibility, it would necessarily be less effective in achieving and maintaining a truly democratic form of sovereignty. While Ambedkar might thus have discerned a kind of theological surplus in communist ideals, he also insisted that on the level of social analysis, as well as in their ultimate sociopolitical goals, there was hardly any difference between Marx and the Buddha. Both declared that the function of philosophy was the reconstruction of the world and not its interpretation, both saw that social conflict was the root of individual suffering, and both declared that in order to remove the cause of suffering it was necessary to abolish private property.64 As Ambedkar argued in his article “Buddha and Karl Marx,” both figures shared the same goal—the end of suffering and exploitation. But whereas Marxists wanted to achieve this end through “violence and dictatorship of the proletariat,”65 the Buddha wanted to do so through teaching and persuasion in order to achieve a “democratic revolution.”66
In concrete terms, for Ambedkar this democratic revolution was inextricably tied to the emancipation of Dalits. While he did see Dalits as a universal revolutionary subject, his notion of a democratic revolution—at least in theory—was not tied to a united or unified people and thus also much less bound to any concept of the nation. In practice, however, and certainly against the grain of his more radical theoretical standpoints, Ambedkar did believe that in order to function properly, democracy required a socially homogeneous population so as to make the domination of one group over another ultimately impossible, and he even advocated for the transfer of populations to ensure such homogeneity.67 Ultimately, however, he believed that even social homogeneity would not lead to a fully unified and universal political subject of “the people.” This was one of the many lessons of his own experience of the oppressive character of such a proclaimed unity. In turn, it also informed his insistence on Dalit difference as born out of sheer political necessity. This necessity would diminish with the gradual withering away of caste and class under the political conditions he sought to establish.68 Both of these aspects found their common theoretical basis in the Buddhist philosophy of śūnyatā. For Ambedkar, however, Buddhism did not merely provide a theoretical justification for an already established political practice. Much more importantly, Buddhism constituted the cornerstone of his political philosophy as well as his political practice because it allowed him to draw from a broadly conceived Marxist framework and simultaneously remain highly critical of communist ideals and practices in India and beyond.
The impermanence of the theologico-political that Buddhism would guarantee, and that Ambedkar saw as the inherently democratic principle of Buddhism, was neither a teleological endpoint nor marked by a specific historical event. Whereas Lefort reads the “genealogy of democratic representations” as revealing a fundamental break within the “fabric of history” and regards the previously lasting continuation and permanence of the theologico-political principle as all but “abolished” with the advent of modern democracy,69 Ambedkar's take on Buddhism and sovereignty is contingent upon a rather different understanding of democracy and its historicity. The historical precedent of a flowering Buddhism and the proliferation of justice and social equality under Ashoka in the third century BCE—as Ambedkar tells it—is not so much a historical event that inaugurated a radical break in the structure of the political as an example that proves the very possibility of a Buddhist basis for political and social justice. The significance of the Buddhism-inspired reign of Ashoka lies not in the fact that it brings the end of the theologico-political to a point in time two thousand years prior to the advent of modern democracy. A nontheological form of sovereignty is not a historical development or a utopian endpoint for Ambedkar but rather a historically independent political imperative, which turns democracy into a project that undermines all forms of a (quasi-)theological sovereignty in favor of the fundamental impermanence of all power relations. Democracy is thus not a historic development or a radical break. Instead, it is much more a principle, a certain logic of justice and equality that could be aspired to and achieved at any time.
Śūnyatā highlights both the impermanence and singularity of the individual as well as its radical dependence on others. In its emphasis on becoming and openness as impermanence, śūnyatā gestures toward what could be construed as a utopian moment in Ambedkar's thought. Insofar as it is utopian, however, it is not something that could ever be achieved and that would then exhaust the fundamental emptiness or impermanence of things. It is not a utopia that signifies the becoming-whole of a once splintered and fragmented reality or community. As Ambedkar saw it, the utopian dimension of śūnyatā would remain tied to the notion of the minor insofar as it precludes any notion of universality as sublation (or Aufhebung) of opposites. There is, therefore, no seamless move from the oppressed to the universal in his political philosophy. While Dalits do occupy the position of the universal revolutionary subject, they do so only insofar as they have come to represent an irrefutable minorness, preserved in their negative identity as “broken men”—those excluded from the political community. As Anupama Rao and Ajay Skaria have pointed out, it is in the understanding of the category of the minority—particularly the religious minority—that Ambedkar differs most strongly from Marx, who had famously argued that “the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”70 Ambedkar instead insisted on the necessity of the political emancipation of Dalits as Dalits in order to arrive at the emancipation of society. Crucially, however, this was not an act of inclusion but rather one of negation. Or, as Rao puts it, “A negative identity became the basis of collective political rights and also converted the democratic political field into a space of agonistic combat.”71 Rather than relinquishing the minority in favor of political universality, Ambedkar insisted that the Indian situation demanded the universalization of the very essence of the minority via the figure of an all-encompassing negativity. What Ambedkar arrived at was no longer a minority in the process of becoming universal but rather the fact of being-minor as itself a universal condition.72
Even though such a politics of the minor cannot be reduced to a specific minority, it requires a constant shift between the political and the social and therefore necessarily introduces a sociological element in order to prevent the erasure of the minor through the major(ity). In other words, in order to achieve political emancipation, it becomes necessary to identify the negated and disavowed sections of society. For Ambedkar, the agonistic combat of democracy is therefore never just situated in the field of the political but also relies on a sociological dimension that is neither independent of the political nor ever fully subsumed by it. This distinguishes Ambedkar from Lefort and other postfoundationalist political theorists, who insist on a break with “the political sciences and political sociology in particular”73 and who regard the appeal to an “outside” as based on a misguided understanding of the genuinely political moment or the event-like character of the political.74 For Lefort, the distinction between the sphere of politics, on the one hand, and that of society, on the other, is itself an altogether political distinction that cannot be based on any ground outside the political itself. Society is thus constituted through the political as an ultimately contingent event. While this fact is obscured in monarchic or totalitarian forms of rule, democracy is characterized precisely by such a “radical indetermination” of power and knowledge. Therefore, Lefort declares, “The locus of power becomes an empty place.”75
While it would seem that Ambedkar would have certain sympathies with such a view, his own priorities lay elsewhere and he regarded scientific methods, which could bolster claims for representation, as a strategically necessary bulwark against the tyranny of the majority.76 At the same time, he was also clear that, more than reason and science, what counted in politics was power.77 Instead of foregrounding the ultimate emptiness of the seat of power, however, Ambedkar emphasized the need to constantly claim the power in the name of a particular group and therefore the need to identify and delineate, even if these processes were never permanent. Hence his strategic choice to translate śūnyatā as “impermanence” rather than “emptiness” in order to foreground the need for a constant shifting between the assertion of a negatively defined identity and the breaking apart of allegedly unified social structures.
It is in this context that Ambedkar's twofold approach to social and political democracy becomes pertinent. Ambedkar fully accepts the representational, postfoundational, and performative—one could also call it the “constructivist”—character of “the people.” After all, several of his texts deal explicitly with the ideological prerequisites of Brahminism as the social force that made the construction of an Indian people as essentially Hindu, male, and upper-caste possible in the first place. At the same time, Ambedkar also saw the necessity for a sociologically descriptive view of society that would identify marginalized sectors and provide the concrete yardstick against which the effectiveness of any political measure could be determined.78 After all, the goal of his politics was not only fundamental equality but also the active removal of duḥkha, or suffering.
At the heart of Ambedkar's acknowledgment of the layers of representation and his twofold understanding of political and social democracy—the necessity to reaffirm Dalit identity in the intermediate term so as to abolish it in the long term—lies a paradox that could be identified as Nāgārjuna's political inheritance. In accordance with Nāgārjuna's doctrine of the two truths, which posits the ultimate nonexistence and the conventional existence of reality, this inheritance resides in the conviction that while there is no ultimately sociologically determinable unity of “the people” or its various individuals and subgroups, it is nonetheless conventionally necessary to act as if the “people” is composed of entities that do correspond to a sociologically attestable reality.79 This doctrine of the two truths of democracy would also allow for a notion of the political that is neither presentist nor necessarily antirepresentational. In stark contrast to an understanding of political representation that posits a constitutive disjuncture between the political and the social, and also sees the principle of representation as a consequence of the autonomy of the political, Ambedkar's approach allows for a different understanding of representation in which the social and the political are indeed not separate nor configured as each other's unmediated expressions. This approach could also avoid the peril of a presentist notion of democracy that posits the full presence of the people in the “now” of the event. In effect, it would thus be tantamount to rejecting the false opposition between (a necessarily liberal representative) democracy, on the one hand, and a naturalist populism or totalitarianism on the other.80
Ambedkar offers a notion of democracy grounded in the politics of the everyday, one that includes the constant labor of political representation, on the one hand, and that of social reconstruction on the other. This is a democracy unmoored from certain specific institutions and not necessarily confined to certain specific periods in European history (in ancient Greece and after the French Revolution). Instead, Ambedkar challenges us to look for democratic practices and “political deliberation”81 at all times and in various places around the globe. Alongside his interest in the historical roots of social differences and his sustained critique of ideological formations of power and oppression (particularly those embodied by Hinduism), Ambedkar was a political leader and politician whose principal aim was the liberation and emancipation of Dalits. What comes to the fore in his vision of Buddhism as a deeply political and nontheological religion—one devoted to ending suffering and asserting equality—is thus a deeply praxeological understanding of democratic politics that foregrounds everyday practices and is not unlike what Lefort, in some of his later texts, designated with the rather cryptic term “savage democracy” or démocratie sauvage.82 However, this praxeological notion of politics is not just a consequence of Ambedkar's political activism but is itself rooted in the distinct philosophical framework and ontological foundation of śūnyatā as impermanence. With this insistence on the positive force of negativity, Ambedkar opens the possibility for another politics: one not aimed at absolute universalism but rather a “minor universalism” that is constantly broken apart and continuously reconstructed.
Acknowledgments
A very early version of this paper was presented at the conference “Decolonising Archives, Rethinking Canons: Writing Intellectual Histories of Global Entanglements,” held in Cambridge (and online) in March 2021, organized by Shuvatri Dasgupta. I thank all the participants and particularly Ananya Vajpeyi for her rich response. I further want to thank Brigitte Rath, whose comments and questions helped me find my way back to this article. My sincere thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers for their generative comments and critical remarks and to Samera Esmeir and Ramsey McGlazer for their thoughtful suggestions on revising this article.
Notes
The term “Dalit”—derived from the Sanskrit root dal for “broken”—was coined by the Maharashtrian social reformer and political activist Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890). Ambedkar, who first used the term in 1928, related the social institution of “untouchability” to what he referred to as “broken men,” whom he describes as having been barred from living in the village and from participating in communal life. Despite this, the term was rarely used until the 1970s and the rise of the Dalit Panther Movement. See Rao, Caste Question, 15, 290, 182–216; Ambedkar, “Untouchables”; Ambedkar et al., Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men.
Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times,” 13; my emphasis. The term “pariah,” which Arendt uses for all socially ostracized groups, is derived from the English spelling of the Tamil name for the South Indian paraiyar caste, who are also considered part of the Dalit community.
Ambedkar's view of religion as a quintessential aspect for social and political transformation has most recently been explored by Martin Fuchs in “Dhamma and the Common Good.”
I am thinking, for example, of the work of Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai as well as of Martin Fuchs. Guru and Sarukkai, Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social; Fuchs, “A Religion for Civil Society?”; Fuchs, “Dhamma and the Common Good.”
For such a philosophical engagement with Ambedkar's writing, particularly in light of theories of democracy, I am deeply indebted to the work of Aishwary Kumar, Ajay Skaria, Prathama Banerjee, Soumyabrata Choudhury, and Ananya Vajpeyi, among others. Kumar, Radical Equality; Kumar, “In the Void of Faith”; Skaria, “Ambedkar, Marx and the Buddhist Question”; Skaria, “Subaltern and the Minor”; Banerjee, Elementary Aspects of the Political; Choudhury, Ambedkar and Other Immortals; Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic.
Akin to the concept of “contemporanizing” as suggested in Banerjee, Nigam, and Pandey, “Work of Theory: Thinking across Traditions.”
Derrida has emphasized this, arguing that from the moment we talk about “religion,” we are always already speaking Latin and are thus part of the history of what he terms “globalatinization” or “this strange alliance of Christianity, as the experience of the death of God, and tele-technoscientific capitalism” (“Faith and Knowledge,” 13, 27). Similarly, Daniel Boyarin has argued that the concept of religion was co-nascent with the divide between Christianity and Judaism and that the concept's use for “religions” other than Christianity necessarily “involves the reproduction of a Christian worldview” (Border Lines, 8). The last point has recently been further emphasized by Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, who noted that the entire discipline of religious studies and its insoluble tie to the concept of religion is inextricably bound to racism and colonialism (“A Theosophical Discipline,” 1159).
The expression “genealogy of the political” is taken from Raschke, Force of God, 13, 78.
This essentially means a break from Carl Schmitt's famous dictum that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (Political Theology, 36).
The term “impermanence” holds a crucial significance in Ambedkar's political philosophy, as we will see in the following section on śūnyatā, which Ambedkar translates as impermanence (Buddha and His Dhamma, 130).
See also Kumar, Radical Equality, 332.
In an article written for the Maha Bodhi Society, published in 1950, Ambedkar declared the “production of a Bible of Buddhism” to be the “first and foremost need.” The style of such a text, he argued, “must be lucid, moving and must produce an hypnotic effect” (“Buddha and the Future of His Religion,” 105, 106).
For the relationship between political sovereignty and dharma as righteousness, see Banerjee, Mortal God, chap. 3.
Martin Fuchs has rightly indicated that Ambedkar's understanding of the political necessity of “a picture of society” prefigures some aspects of the work on the social imaginary by Cornelius Castoriadis and others (Fuchs, “Dhamma and the Common Good,” 373; Ambedkar, Buddha and His Dhamma, 232).
Ambedkar, “Letter from B. R. Ambedkar to W. E. B. Du Bois,” July 1946; Kapoor, “B R Ambedkar, W E B DuBois and the Process of Liberation”; Immerwahr, “On B. R. Ambedkar and Black–Dalit Connections.”
Ambedkar does not make this point explicitly. But based on the contrast between Brahminical Hinduism and Buddhism that he employs, it would be possible to conclude that dharma, unlike dhamma, does include a strong theological aspect. This is not only because it is concerned with the role of various Gods in the Hindu pantheon but more importantly because the ethics of dharma is derived from a set of rules that stipulate the duties and obligations of the individual and is thus concerned with the interpretation of divine commandments.
Queen, “Ambedkar's Dhamma”; Stroud, “What Did Bhimrao Ambedkar Learn from John Dewey's Democracy and Education? ”; Mukherjee, “B. R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of Democracy.”
The expression is taken from “Annihilation of Caste,” 57; it is part of a longer discussion on fraternity and equality that is distinctly Deweyan. It is an almost verbatim reproduction of a sentence from Dewey's Democracy and Education, the most marked-up book in Ambedkar's private library: “A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (93). See also Stroud, “What Did Bhimrao Ambedkar Learn from John Dewey's Democracy and Education?,” 81.
Ambedkar, Buddha and His Dhamma, 168; quoted in Fuchs, “Dhamma and the Common Good,” n. 52.
For “fraternity” as “the name of the social affection that is meant to bind the citizens” and as “the central term” of the concept of civil religion in the wake of the French Revolution, see Lüdemann, “Fraternity as a Social Metaphor,” 46.
My transliteration of the term follows the Sanskrit spelling of it. Since many texts of the Buddhist canon are preserved in Pali, however, transliterations based on the Pali spelling (suññatā) are equally common. The etymology is the same in both cases, deriving from the Sanskrit term śūnya for “empty, void, hollow; vacant, barren, non-existant” (Monier-Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 1017).
Westerhoff, “Nāgārjuna on Emptiness,” sec. Ontological Non-foundationalism.
Jay Garfield notes that for Nāgārjuna, “ultimate nonexistence and . . . conventional existence are the same thing. . . . And this is because emptiness is not other than dependent arising and, hence, because emptiness is empty” (Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, 320). The two truths are therefore not really separate but rather two sides of the singular notion of śūnyatā.
Morton, “Hegel on Buddhism,” para. 30.
For a concise overview of Buddhist dialectics see Fathi, “Logic in Buddhism.”
Timothy Morton has pointed out that “Adorno remains one of the few philosophers working within Western traditions whose thinking has a flavor that a Buddhist would recognize as sympathetic” (“Hegel on Buddhism,” para. 19). The actual compatibility between the thought of Nāgārjuna and his own, of which he was obviously not aware, has not kept Adorno from continuing the long history of reducing Buddhism to a form of nihilistic quietism (a tradition that extends from Hegel to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), or from describing Zen Buddhism as “corny exoticism” and “non-conceptual vagary” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 68; see also Morton, “Hegel on Buddhism,” paras. 1 and 39). Despite the similarities, there is surprisingly little work available on the relationship between Buddhist philosophy and Adorno or critical theory in general. I am aware of only two more articles on the subject: a very good comparison between Nāgārjuna and Adorno (including a discussion of their possible political implications) by Asher Horowitz; and a more superficial outline of this comparison in German by Ram Mall. See Horowitz, “Adorno and Emptiness”; Mall, Nagarjunas Philosophie interkulturell gelesen.
Garfield, Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, 72; chap. XXIV, verses 38–39.
Ambedkar, Buddha and His Dhamma, 130; my emphasis.
Kumar, Radical Equality, 313–14; emphasis mine.
Ambedkar, “Buddha or Karl Marx,” 446. The congruency with a Marxist approach to private property in “Buddha or Karl Marx” is somewhat limited, however, in The Buddha and His Dhamma, where Ambedkar concedes that the Buddha's prohibition of private property pertained only to the community of monks and nuns and not to society as a whole. At the same time, Ambedkar's Buddha also declares that without private possessions there would be peace on earth (Buddha and His Dhamma, 240, 300).
See particularly his “Pakistan, or the Partition of India” and “Thoughts on Linguistic States.” This is certainly the most troubling aspect of Ambedkar's political theory and has been interpreted as the necessary underside of his strong focus on representation and his “militant republicanism” (Kumar, Radical Equality, 257). While this argument can serve as a welcome reminder of the political ambivalence of the principle of representation, particularly where the question of community is concerned, it seems equally important to note the difficulty (if not impossibility) of not seeing some form of Islamophobic nationalism at work in Ambedkar's argument in favor of the separation of India and Pakistan. See Tejani, “The Necessary Conditions for Democracy.”
In the “First Reading of the Draft Constitution” to the Constituent Assembly on November 4, 1948, Ambedkar observed: “It is wrong for the majority to deny the existence of minorities. It is equally wrong for the minorities to perpetuate themselves. A solution must be found which will serve a double purpose. It must recognize the existence of the minorities to start with. It must also be such that it will enable majorities and minorities to merge some day into one” (“First Reading of the Draft Constitution,” 62).
Lefort is primarily concerned with various operations that effectively conceal the actual functioning of the political in society, and he regards what he calls “political sociology” as one of the most salient contemporary expressions of such a disavowal of the political and its eventlike character (“Question of Democracy”). See also Rancière, Disagreement, chap. 4, “From Archipolitics to Metapolitics.” For Lefort as postfoundational thinker of the political, see Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought.
The system of separate electorates and reserved seats for Dalits, which was and indeed still is determined on the basis of politico-legal and sociological procedures and has to be formerly extended every ten years through the Indian parliament, is conceived along the lines of this representational paradox. Just as in Ambedkar's lifetime, there are still intense debates on whether this elaborate and increasingly complex system of affirmative action has led to a consolidation of caste identities and to their increased political significance—rather than to the withering away of caste. On the other hand, there is also little doubt that the system was indeed very effective in redistributing political power and sociopolitical representation (Jaffrelot, “Politics of Caste Identities”; Jaffrelot, India's Silent Revolution; Kumar, Pratap, and Aggarwal, “Affirmative Action in Government Jobs in India”; Lee, “Does Affirmative Action Work?”).
This might be another reason for his insistence on the need for socially homogeneous populations.
This opposition between democracy and totalitarianism forms a central aspect of Lefort's work. See, for example, Lefort, “Question of Democracy.”
Lisa Wedeen argues that instead of embracing “a minimalist, procedural definition of democracy as contested elections,” we should regard public political deliberation as the cornerstone of a more expansive notion of democracy that includes democratic practices of “political contestation outside of electoral channels,” as in her example of Qāt chews in Yemen (“Politics of Deliberation,” 60, 61).
Abensour, “‘Savage Democracy’ and ‘Principle of Anarchy’”; Nelson, “Lefort, Abensour and the Question: What Is ‘Savage’ Democracy?”