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Raising the Bar or a Missed Opportunity
The history of caste is not the history of saints and sinners. Rather, it is the history of particular social relations--of production and property--and the specific historical context that gave rise to caste and the caste system and reproduced it generation after generation. More thoughts on the Rajmohan Gandhi-Arundhati Roy discussion.
I want to thank Frehiwot Tesfaye for her help. Responsibility for the views is entirely mine.
This comment does not cover Arundhati Roy’s “The Doctor and the Saint,” nor Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste or Gandhi’s writings on caste in their entirety. I confine myself to Roy’s response (“All the World’s a Half-Built Dam,” EPW, 20 June 2015), to Rajmohan Gandhi’s “Independence and Social Justice…” (EPW, 11 April 2015). My aim is not to endorse or indict, but draw attention to conceptual and contextual issues of caste in the Ambedkar–Gandhi debate and Roy’s and Gandhi’s interventions.
Gandhi’s Two Bs
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