Remembering Dalit Marxism ANUPAMA RAO

Stigma and labour: remembering Dalit Marxism ANUPAMA RAO AMBEDKAR’S relationship to Marx- Jai Bhim Comrade had its ism is a persistent and unresolved inaugural screening at the Bombay issue for those interested in his thought. Improvement Trust chawls in Byculla It is clear that Ambedkar had a long on 9 January 2012. The occasion was and contentious engagement with the death anniversary of Bhagwat the Communists during the 1930s Jadhav, who was killed at a protest and 1940s, and that this struggle rally in 1974, during riots between the defined postcolonial Dalit politics in Dalit Panthers and Sena supporters Maharashtra as it tried to manoeuvre in the BDD chawls at Worli and between the Maratha Congress, the Naigaon. The film was an apt choice Communist Party, and later, the Shiv for commemorating lost worlds and Sena.1 Yet, the precise nature of lost lives. Jai Bhim Comrade pays- Ambedkar’s engagement with Marx’s homage to Dalit martyrs, known and thought remains understudied. This unknown, though the focal point of essay uses the recent screening of the film is shahir (balladeer) Vilas Anand Patwardhan’s film, Jai Bhim Ghogre, of the Avhan Natya Manch Comrade, as an occasion for engag- (associated with the M-L far left), who ing the longer-term trajectory of Dalit committed suicide in the aftermath of Marxism in Maharashtra, including the July 1997 police firing in Ramabai B.R. Ambedkar’s complex engage- Ambedkar Nagar. ment with caste-class. The essay Patwardhan’s film is an archive argues that the critique of labour of Dalit Marxism: the film recalls affi- exploitation enabled its ironic oppo- nities between the critique of labour site: a more complex representation as exploitation and caste as degra- of the ‘difference’ of caste. dation, but it also indicts the party 1. For an important discussion of Dalits and which expelled Ghogre, humiliated by Communists in late colonial Bombay, see lifelong poverty, for ‘left deviation’. Gail Omvedt, ‘Non-Brahmans and Commu- Some may argue that the film elides nists in Bombay’, Economic and Political Weekly 8(16), 21 April 1973. For an analysis the complex inter-dynamics, and ideo- of the divergences between Buddha and logical inconsistencies of Indian Marx in the Dalit Panther period, see Anupama Communism with regard to caste. Rao, Chapter Three, The Caste Question: (Patwardhan represents Dalit Marx- 23 Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, ism as caught between the betrayal of 2009, pp. 182-216. upper caste Communists on the one SEMINAR 633 – May 2012 hand, and opportunistic Dalit leaders stark bodies lifting waste at the Mulund on the other.) However, Jai Bhim garbage dump, a major site of Dalit Despite extensive differences within Comrade also provides occasion to activism where Ghogre’s musical tal- Marxism, it seems possible, nonethe- extend, rather than to reproduce the ents were first discovered. The film less, to argue that the theory assumes long-standing caste-class debate, and then takes us on a tour of subaltern a unique (and ethical) relationship to ask what that binarism forecloses. urbanity through places of waste, between labour and political subjec- The film is poignant witness to the refuse, and informalized existence tivity. In Marx’s account, the prole- end of an era in Maharashtra’s Dalit where Dalit critique ‘lives’. Dalit cri- tariat, as living labour, compensates politics, defined by the struggle to tique lives as sound, and especially as for a history of indifference and the represent a complex Dalit political song: Jai Bhim Comrade traces the misrecognition of their dead labour – subjectivity caught between caste-as- development of Dalit critique through now congealed in the commodity – labour, and caste-as-identity. the musical traditions of tamasha and through the work of politics. Labour jalsa, Ambedkari geet, and the per- universalism is by definition antagonis- formances of Ghogre and the recently tic to the global and universalizing Though Patwardhan’s film is reso- banned Kabir Kala Manch. Indeed, force of capital, though produced by it. lutely contemporary in focus, the the film begins where Patwardhan’s Ambedkar engaged labour uni- screening’s location recalled the earlier film on urban demolitions, Bom- versalism in his famous 1917 essay in importance of central Bombay as the bay Hamara Shahar ends, with the the Indian Antiquary, ‘Castes in India: home of working class radicalism, and unforgettable voice of Vilas Ghogre, Their Genesis, Mechanism, and Deve- Ambedkarite politics. The chawls of who offered a stinging indictment of lopment’, where he described caste the Bombay City Improvement Trust, state violence and caste dispossession as an ‘enclosed class’. Ambedkar held constructed in the aftermath of the in life, as in death. Ghogre chalked his the regulation of female sexuality notorious plague of 1896, and of the suicide note on the wall of his zhopadi responsible for producing caste as a Bombay Development Directorate like it was graffiti, that quintessentially deformed version of class; it was this (1919-1926) were important sites of urban form of insurgent, subaltern biopolitical element of caste that diffe- Dalit life, labour, and political activism. speech, ‘I salute the martyred sons of rentiated it from class. These included: marches and political Bhim. Hail Ambedkarite unity. Shahir In later writing, Ambedkar processions of the Samata Sainik Dal Vilas Ghogre.’ specified Dalit identity as it emerged (formed in 1924 by Dalit military pen- from a conflictual relationship with sioners to protect Ambedkar); the first Hindu history, and argued that the celebration of Ambedkar Jayanti on As Patwardhan tries to understand Dalit was a negated subject of histori- the BDD chawls’ maidan; study cir- what produced Ghogre and others cal violence; that she was a form of cles organized by Dalit Communists like him, Ambedkar becomes central. remaindered, detritus life produced by associated with the Delisle Road This is an insurgent Ambedkar, who the historic conflict between Buddhism Friends’ Circle; performances of remakes Dalit self and community. It and Brahminism in subcontinental his- Ambedkari jalsa, especially by the is true that this audacious thinker of tory. From efforts to specify the civic Scheduled Caste Federation, and the Dalit universality struggled with caste disability of caste (and untouchability), establishment of the offices of the and class, stigma and labour as supple- Ambedkar’s later writings expanded Independent Labour Party, and the mental, yet incommensurable cate- to cover a millennial frame: Dalit Municipal Kamgar Sangh in the area. gories. To anticipate my argument in dehumanization was located in the Indeed, central Bombay was Dalit this essay: it seems worth reminding Indic past, but disaggregated from Bombay: Ambedkar lived here until he ourselves that ultimately, the struggle what might appear to be the shared moved to Dadar’s Hindu Colony, for Ambedkar was with specifying history of Buddhism and Brahminism and almost all of his organizational and caste (and untouchability) as a pecu- in order to give the Dalit an agonistic publishing efforts were localized in liar kind of body history. Ambedkar role in Hindu history.2 the area. addressed this complex (and elusive) 2. Ambedkar was especially keen to challenge Jai Bhim Comrade does not form of dehumanization by taking the perspective put forward by Hindu nation- engage this past; neither does it recourse to terms such as class and alists such as Tilak, regarding the role of Vedic 24 address the complex reception of labour, but always to forefront the ‘dif- India, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, in incu- bating ideas of social equality, and non- B.R. Ambedkar as a theorist of caste- ference’ of caste, and the specificity violence. See e.g., Tilak’s Gita Rahasya, class. Instead, the film begins with the of its social experience. and Arctic Home in the Vedas. Therefore, SEMINAR 633 – May 2012 Ambedkar distinguished his Ambedkar argued that without a regime the example of Balkanization in the account from Shudra history, which of rights, outcaste labour was fated to interwar period to discuss the perilous was the story of the birth of a fourth be marginalized and hyperexploited. politics of minority rights. These efforts varna, the Shudras, from a class of The response to Dalits’ dilemma did not speak to his sense that a global, compa- degraded Kshatriyas excluded from call for politicizing labour as such via rative perspective opened up critical the right to perform the upanayanam the general strike. Rather, it required, possibilities foreclosed by a resolutely (thread) ceremony. Ambedkar under- as a first step, the dissolution of Hindu, upper caste cultural national- stood Shudra identity to be unstable Dalit-ness by bringing Dalits into the ism. Though important, the critique of because Shudra critiques of caste domain of the labour contract. Capital- nationalism (and its sociological base) came from a desire for incorporation ist modernity was to be applauded was not enough: Ambedkar’s commit- into the caste Hindu order, rather than because the ideas of abstraction and ments to eradicating Dalit subalternity from the position of symbolic negation, equivalence that were central to it also in all its manifestations required engag- as was the case with Dalits. enabled Dalits to cast off stigma: by ing a global history of ‘stigma’, if by bringing Dalits within a field of abstract this we understand a form of embod-

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