Ramachandra Guha: A new commentary offers a fresh perspective on Ambedkar’s ‘Annihilation of Caste’

In my personal list of books every Indian must read, four stand paramount. These, in order of their year of first publication, are MK Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism (1917), BR Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936), and Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India (1946). These works are both timely and timeless, speaking to the India in which they were published but continuing to speak to an India that would exist long after the writers themselves had gone.

Gandhi’s book is perhaps most notable for its passionate advocacy of Hindu-Muslim harmony and its principled opposition to the use of violence as a means of settling political disputes. Tagore was addressing the dangers of xenophobic nationalism to warmongers in Japan and the United States, yet, a hundred and more years later, his words bear re-reading by young Indians today seduced by the claim that their country is destined to lead the world.

Ambedkar’s work focuses on that most characteristic – and most discriminatory – of Indian institutions, the caste system, and explains why it needs to be annihilated if our society is to renew itself on a more humane footing. Nehru’s reflections on the deeply layered and inescapably plural evolution of Indian culture are a direct challenge to the unifying, homogenising...

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