Why Institutional Casteism Demands Anti-Caste Discourse: An Ambedkarite Reading of an Ancient Platonic Debate

I once had an acquaintance, Ashwin (pseudonym), a Brahmin, who was from my hometown, Shimla. One day, we found ourselves hanging out with some friends from Delhi; they were a part of some progressive groups of artists and intellectuals. I happened to crack some insignificant joke on Brahmins and vegetarianism. One of them asked, “Who’s a Brahmin here?”, to which I said, “Ashwin”. Ashwin shuddered and intervened frantically, “I am a lower caste, bro”. I did express my surprise, albeit with restraint, since I knew immediately that he was lying. People from his clan are practicing pandits and while his immediate family has often denounced untouchability, they have not shied away from their Brahmin identity. Time and again, Ashwin has looked down upon people who have availed of reservation and has even wished to have been born to a caste on the basis of which he could have availed of reservation himself – he has struggled for a few years to crack a certain competitive exam, holding the very casteist belief that reservation gives undue advantage to the so-called lower castes. A few months from that day, he got enrolled in a PhD program, and has, ever since, built up his career to become one of the more noted voices on caste and Western Himalayan folkloristics. Ashwin, who has subjected many around him to casteism, will teach courses on caste in a few years, most probably at a technical institution, such as the one he will complete his PhD from.

This essay might foray into the territory of trying (in vain) to take to task the likes of Ashwin, but that is really not the point of this inquiry. I am quite confident in Ashwin’s knack for absorbing discourse like a sponge and releasing it wherever required. This is, unfortunately, what newer programmes in the humanities, as offered by technical and private (usually liberal arts) institutions demand – an endless flow of a chain of anti-caste words, signifying, paradoxically, an infidelity towards an Ambedkarite revolution. At Ashoka University, when students protested to get the administration to conduct a caste census, eventually to demand caste based reservation, some professors who have taught Babasaheb’s texts in class, either refused or withdrew their support from the cause.¹ Several technical institutions like IITs and NITs have held important talks, events and conferences on caste, while coexisting with the brutal, shameless casteism that actually pervades their campuses. This is often painted beautifully as ‘carving out space for anti-caste thought’, or something similar. It is actually a disavowal of their own contribution in erecting these structures of inequality and intimidation, for actual confrontation between the inherently Brahmanical nature of these institutions and the subjective part that these thinkers play as Ambedkarites is absent. The contradiction is only apparent. These institutions thrive on Ambedkarite discourse, if and only if it forbids an Ambedkarite encounter.

In spirit, this is exactly the same as Plato’s struggle with the sophists, the teachers and masters of rhetoric, of his time. The sophist can be characterised as follows:

1. The sophist concerns themselves with discourse/speech over ‘truth’. Not that the philosopher, exemplified by the likes of Plato and Socrates, does not, but they distinguish themselves by committing language to ‘truth’, instead of language itself.²
2. The sophist reveals what is not, instead of what is. This follows necessarily from the previous, since what is, is what is true.³
3. The sophist imitates the philosopher.⁴
4. For the sophist, knowledge is merchandise.⁵
5. The sophist thrives on appealing to young, wealthy men, in order to teach them the art of rhetoric. Plato’s character, the Eleatic stranger, uses the metaphor of the ‘hunter’ to describe this tendency.⁶
6. The sophist sometimes attempts to stay clear of a universal ethics, but the dialogue invariably reveals their position as a universal one. In Protagoras, this happens most directly, when Socrates challenges Protagoras’ idea of virtues and their teachability, without there being a unifying idea of virtues in the first place.⁷ Similarly, while the eponymous Gorgias denies any direct relationship between sophistic practice and virtue, he does acknowledge that rhetoric enables the greatest good, i.e. the freedom of human beings to rule over other human beings. His student, Polus, justifies rhetoric as something that gives agency to people to act on their desires.

These qualities seem all too familiar in the educational institutions of today. In the most tragic way possible, this debate feels as contemporary as it can. But more importantly, much of Plato’s own dialectical thought is established as a radical separation from the commitment of the sophist, in order to discover what must be preserved and pursued as the ‘truth’. While Plato, much akin to the sophist, uses language and argumentation extensively, he does so, possibly to create encounters with, and thereby reveal what actually governs the sophist’s motivations, even when it is disavowed. His disagreements are actually a separation between language and what remains excessive to it. This is exactly what Babasaheb sought to achieve in separating formal procedures of electoral democracy from constitutional morality, in his famous The Grammar of Anarchy. While much like the art of argumentation, the constitution offers the means of achieving the truth of constitutional morality and thereby, a casteless society, it can never guarantee the same. For constitutional morality requires fidelity to a radical equality to actualise itself. The imitation of fidelity for this ‘truth’ is essentially what the Brahmanical sophist excels at.

Nonetheless, one must realise that Babasaheb was anything but a Platonic philosopher in his positions that I will present with respect to this debate. Anti-caste thought could not have existed as we know it today, without the sophistic act of revealing what is not as what is. In a strict sense, Guru Ravidas’ Begumpura, or any casteless society, for that matter, could not have existed without being posited as something that, in a split fashion, does not exist as a social reality, while existing as a rational, natural reality. In other words, one can say that it does not exist, but not that it does not exist at all (this is also a distinction one encounters in Sophist). In a deeper sense, Babasaheb inherits a commitment to the being of what is not, particularly from anti-caste thinkers like Buddha and Kabir, in the form of shunyata.⁸ This follows because the being of nothingness in an infinite sense, no-things the very thing caste is. From this procedure, the very possibility of castelessness is derived. Babasaheb himself was deeply critical of Plato’s socio-political vision, which also immures its citizens and non-citizens into caste, or at least caste-like systems. This is not only unscientific, but prohibits any kind of change or transformation.⁹ This critique is testified by later ideas that blur the lines between the sophist and the philosopher, as we see in Barbara Cassin’s work, particularly in her essay, Sophistics, Rhetorics, and Performance; or, How to Really Do Things with Words (2009). She argues that the very truth philosophy pledges its fidelity towards, is created by the language it uses – the philosopher is no different from the sophist.

This does not immediately lend itself to the crucial distinction between the procedure of fidelity, versus the sophist’s infidelity, that any form of constitutional morality demands. In order to address this, one must radically revise what ‘truth’ really is, in the first place. Is truth knowable? If so, then acts of language can circumscribe it, as demonstrated in Cassin’s thought. If not, then it can be thought of as something that remains outside language, while giving it a certain logic. This is demonstrated in Alain Badiou’s debate with Cassin.¹⁰ For Badiou, while certain acts (including poetic acts of language) are procedures for achieving ‘truth’, it remains above the resources of reflection. The very name of Begumpura, thus, is a poetic one, whose promises of equality remain infinite, and whose logic we must receive as a logic of a new world. For the struggle was always one of actualising castelessness, instead of knowing it (whatever that is without the practice of actualisation). In his book, Ambedkar and other Immortals (2018), Soumyabrata Choudhury builds on the understanding that Babasaheb acts within a fidelity towards the infinite promise of a radical equality, thus instituting it as a truth, thus the term ‘Mahad Saty/agraha’. Be it formal electoral democracy, or the language of discourse (including Ambedkarite), as long as they are not guided by fidelity towards a casteless world beyond anti-caste language, they will not change anything in a substantial way.

To return to the originary problem, one is doomed to fail if one tries to ‘figure out’ the contemporary infidels of elite institutions the way Plato figured out the sophists – their logic will seldom falter, thanks to their academic training. What is actually more sinister is that institutions have become procedures of infidelity towards a radical equality. Thus, it will not be of much consequence to single out the likes of Ashwin. What is needed is something drastic – in Badiouvian terms, an event – for institutions as structures of fidelity to transform completely and actually deliver the promises they have only pretended to deliver so far.¹¹ Promises of an actual inalienable right to education. Appealing to these institutions and their gatekeepers will only strengthen their desire, as in a sophist to rich young men of the city. As obvious as it is, the annihilation of caste cannot, at any cost, appeal to any logic or desire of casteism.