From structure to substance: Ambedkar, Dumont and orientalism

Abstract

Dumont has been criticised by writers such as Appadurai, Dirks and Inden for placing caste at the centre of his analysis of Hindu ideology, and arguing for the subordination of power to ritual status in India. This formulation is supposedly orientalist. In this article I reject the accusation that Dumont is guilty of orientalism, and I suggest that the case of B. R. Ambedkar and the Buddhist/Dalit movement which he initiated gives some support to Dumont's analytical categories. Ambedkar's own analysis of Hindu ideology was similar to Dumont's in two important points: he identified Untouchability as an essential feature of caste and Hindu ideology; and he argued that political power is subordinated to religious values. This would help to explain, for example, his public conversion to Buddhism, the religion of the renouncer, after a lifetime in politics. However, the picture is complicated by the political intention of Ambedkar and the contemporary Buddhists to transform the relation between religion and power, so that what traditionally had been an internalised conformity by Untouchables with a divine hierarchical order has now become a struggle between two contradictory value systems, as a result of which ritual status has itself increasingly been re-represented as an idiom of political power.