Caste Environment and the ‘Unthinkability’ of ‘Annihilation of Caste’

Abstract

This article revisits Ambedkar’s speech ‘Annihilation of Caste’, the delivery of which was stalled as permission for it was withheld by the organization who had originally invited Ambedkar to deliver a talk on curbing denigrating social practices like ‘untouchability’. The article revisits this moment of denial as well as the speech in its written form and argues for the political significance both (the ‘speech’ and the ‘final act of denial’) hold in contemporary Indian socio-political culture with respect to caste and its ideological mechanisms. It is argued that the consequent ‘final un-deliverance of the speech’, owing to its cancellation by the Mandal, the conference organizer, accounts for political Hinduism’s ‘unthinkability’ to accept any intellectual that does not belong to the ‘upper’ caste/caste dominant to exegete on any matter requiring intellectual exercise. This article attempts a critique of this ‘unthinkability’, which it argues is a basic paradigm in the ideology of caste.