Dr Ambedkar and the ‘Prostitute’: Caste, Sexuality and Humanity in Modern India

Abstract

ABSTRACTDalits’ (Untouchables) most democratic and productive politics relentlessly returns to questions of caste violence, sociality, sexuality and ‘inclusion/exclusion’ in the larger Indian body politic, thus producing a new matrix and mode of power within the category of the human itself. This article analyses the intellectual and anti‐caste leader Dr B. R. Ambedkar's (1891–1956) multi‐pronged – social, cultural and political – strategies of creating manuski (human dignity), dharmantar (religious conversion) and respectable samaj (community) in a doubly colonial – British and brahmanical – context. It offers the first analysis of Ambedkar's hitherto under‐examined speech of 16 June 1936 and other fragmentary evidence in Marathi by focusing on the changing contexts, complex conjunctures of socio‐sexual and material forces and political transformations that Dalit women engaged with to carve out their womanhood and humanity. The article examines the unmitigated contingencies of particular interlocked social, political, cultural, economic, emotional and moral battles of constituting a new political Dalit. It illuminates the ways the most stigmatised, ‘immoral,’ ‘corrupt’ and multi‐dimensional ‘prostitute’ emerged as a conceptual and categorical limit and embarrassment to Ambedkar's strategies of building Dalit power. The article's focus shifts away from imperial and European contexts and discourses to write histories of caste, gender and colonial sexuality from the vantage point of local Dalit women. This approach highlights the importance of writing histories of transnational and multilingual epistemologies that reorganize social and sexual norms in colonial and postcolonial societies.