When one thinks of American pragmatism, one usually places an excessive amount of emphasis on the American half. It’d even stunt our enquiry, irrevocably fixating on thinkers akin to John Dewey, William James, and Jane Addams. However there may be extra to the story of pragmatism than what occurred in the USA across the flip of the twentieth century. Pragmatism itself was a versatile, loosely allied method to pondering that held few maxims in widespread aside from the concept our theorising and arguing ought to come back from lived expertise and must return again to expertise as the final word check of its worth. Its advocates akin to Dewey drastically affected nations akin to China by means of his educating and lecturing, main us to see that pragmatism has a world narrative linked with it. Is there the same story to be advised about pragmatism and its interactions with India?
Portrait of John Dewey (1932) by Samuel Johnson Woolf. Courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
Any narrative of pragmatism’s affect and evolution in India will centre on Bhimrao Ambedkar, a scholar of Dewey’s at Columbia College in New York. Some may recognise Ambedkar (1891-1956) as a chief architect of the Indian structure within the Forties. Others may recognise him because the indefatigable chief of India’s ‘untouchables’ (now denoted by the self-chosen label ‘Dalit’), given his fixed advocacy for the rights of these oppressed by the complicated and long-rooted caste system. Ambedkar himself was a so-called untouchable, which solely fortified his dedication to searching for justice within the legislation and in social reforms for India’s most weak populations. On the finish of his life, he channelled his frustration on the prevailing caste consciousness inside Hindu society right into a conversion effort that attempted to persuade his fellow Dalits to transform away from Hinduism and right into a extra egalitarian Buddhism. On 14 October 1956, simply weeks earlier than he died, he led what was on the time one of many world’s largest voluntary mass conversions. This occasion held in Nagpur featured Ambedkar, his spouse Savita, and an estimated 500,000 Dalits changing to Buddhism. For causes akin to these, Ambedkar was voted the ‘biggest Indian’ in post-independence India in a ballot that included greater than 20 million votes being forged.
Ambedkar was not merely a political determine or chief. He was additionally a thinker. One can see the proof for this within the reconstructed Buddhism that he superior in his ultimate years, coalescing in his rewritten ‘Buddhist Bible’, The Buddha and His Dhamma, which was accomplished simply earlier than his demise on 6 December 1956. On this book, Ambedkar reconstructed the narrative of the Buddha, de-emphasising conventional formulation such because the 4 noble truths, and foregrounding poverty, injustice and the build up of social communities. Briefly, he reconstructed the Buddhist custom and its myriad texts to indicate the way it may operate as a social gospel, or an engaged philosophy that would even meet the rising waves of these impressed by Karl Marx and Russian communism in the Nineteen Fifties.
The intersections of Ambedkar’s political activism and his philosophical acumen have been vividly displayed earlier in his life. The Nineteen Thirties was a interval marred by Ambedkar’s battle with the highly effective image of the Indian independence motion, Mahatma Gandhi. Having misplaced religion within the Hindu custom as amenable to social reform, Ambedkar grew so disillusioned that, by 1935, he proclaimed in a speech that, though he was born a Hindu, ‘I solemnly guarantee you that I can’t die a Hindu.’ By 1936, he was very loudly criticising Hinduism and its holy texts, and imploring his fellow Dalits to transform away from Hinduism to flee their oppressive standing as ‘untouchables’. In an notorious speech – undelivered due to its explosive criticisms of sacred Hindu shastras (holy texts) – Ambedkar argues that the caste system is dangerous not solely as a result of it’s oppressive, however most significantly as a result of it destroys the unity and respect amongst members which might be important to democracy. Ambedkar’s activism on the precise subject of caste oppression was underwritten by a full-throated philosophy of democracy.
Ambedkar (center row, far proper) with colleagues on the London College of Economics and Political Science, London, 1916-17. Courtesy Wikipedia
His thought was inventive and highly effective. However no thinker springs totally fashioned onto the mental scene. The place did Ambedkar discover the inspiration for the picture of democracy he was going to assemble – after which make use of – in his battle for social justice in India? Ambedkar was one of the well-read Indians of his interval, possessing a private library of round 50,000 books on the time of his demise. However he was additionally one of the extremely educated Indian leaders of his day, with tutorial and authorized credentials from establishments akin to Columbia College, the London College of Economics, and Grey’s Inn. Some of the intriguing issues about Ambedkar is that he pursued a lot of his Western training within the US, and never simply within the well-known universities so lots of his Indian (and upper-caste) compatriots frequented. Ambedkar went to Columbia in 1913-16 and was uncovered to one-of-a-kind progressive intellectuals bent on utilizing tutorial analysis to alter societies and practices for the higher. At Columbia, Ambedkar would research intensively with the US economist and taxation specialist Edwin R A Seligman; the Russian-born financial historian, ornery anti-Marxist and beginner gardener Vladimir Simkhovitch; and maybe probably the most spectacular thinker of the day, John Dewey.
In his later years, Ambedkar remembered all these figures however Dewey and his pragmatism stood out. Whereas Ambedkar was making his manner again to Columbia in 1952 to obtain an honorary diploma, Dewey died of pneumonia. Distraught, Ambedkar wrote to his spouse Savita from New York lamenting the truth that he missed the prospect to see his beloved instructor: ‘I used to be trying ahead to fulfill[ing] Prof Dewey.’ Ambedkar’s letter then revealed what Dewey had meant to him: ‘I’m so sorry. I owe all my mental life to him. He was a fantastic man.’
The programs Ambedkar took from Dewey gave the younger Indian reformer a strong overview of pragmatism
Ambedkar had completed a lot, each within the hundreds of thousands of phrases he wrote or spoke to mental or normal audiences, and within the political and social activism he pursued. However what kind of mental debt did he owe Dewey? Whereas many have famous this intriguing letter, none have actually explored the historic and mental relationship between Dewey and Ambedkar. This can be a disgrace, since each are mental giants in their very own rights, and their confluence can present us what Ambedkar noticed as invaluable in Dewey – and the way Ambedkar’s personal pragmatism extends the pluralistic custom of pragmatism. Ambedkar was not simply an activist – he was additionally a thinker. The philosophy he advocated was a type of pragmatism fitted to the considerations of democracy amid social divisions akin to these of caste.
Whereas taking lessons at Columbia College, Ambedkar stumbled into Dewey’s classroom. He shouldn’t have been there – the younger Indian had signed an settlement in 1913 with the Maharaja of Baroda, his monetary supporter, that he would research solely finance and sociology at Columbia. However Dewey had a profile that might have been troublesome for Ambedkar to withstand in his coursework. The US pragmatist was on the high of his recreation within the 1910s, engaged within the philosophical work that might inform his book Democracy and Training (1916). Dewey was additionally arduous at work creating establishments such because the American Affiliation of College Professors in 1915 – with figures akin to Ambedkar’s advisor, Seligman – devoted to defending tutorial freedom at US universities.
Dewey’s philosophy was additionally making its mark on the US scene. By the point he had joined Columbia’s school, he had already gained fame together with his early writings from his time on the College of Michigan and his operation of the ‘Laboratory College’ on the College of Chicago, an instance of how Dewey’s sensible experiments knowledgeable his philosophical writings. By the point Ambedkar heard Dewey at Columbia, Dewey had left his older philosophically Idealist vocabulary behind and was engaged in exploring the interplay of group and expertise in human life. Resisting the older emphases in a lot European philosophy towards the unchanging and sure, Dewey revelled in an ever-changing and unsure world.
Dewey’s thought emphasised this essential nexus of expertise. It merged his two guiding lights – G W F Hegel and Charles Darwin – right into a imaginative and prescient of philosophy as doing justice to the lived qualities of expertise, in addition to the human capability for reflection or enquiry. Our powers of purpose weren’t godly or divine, however they got here from and returned to programs of expertise that referred to as for our engaged consideration to reconstruct them. Dewey’s philosophy dovetailed together with his work on training and pedagogy, as they each noticed the human as a habit-bearing being that would deliver these habits to bear on expertise that supplied extra issues than assets. He noticed the ability in our capability to intelligently change the habits of self and different to turn out to be higher tailored to our social and pure environments. Dewey’s philosophy aimed to theorise the world in order to allow us to higher modify to it or to adapt it to our wants. His thought was oriented at reconstructing ourselves and our communities, extra so than merely to explain the truths of the world.
The programs that Ambedkar took from Dewey in psychological ethics and political philosophy gave the younger Indian reformer a strong overview of pragmatism. He noticed Dewey as extending and enlarging the custom of philosophy that William James (1842-1910) and Charles S Peirce (1839-1914) had helped to form, and that modern figures akin to Jane Addams (1860-1935) and Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch (1867-1951) have been each theorising and placing into observe within the social sphere. There are various tales to be advised about Ambedkar, however there may be one which has but to be totally explored. It’s a story of affect, creativeness and emancipation. It’s the story of Ambedkar as a pragmatist.
What does it imply to contemplate Ambedkar as a pragmatist? Does it imply we’re someway capturing his essence, and excluding the opposite essential labels usually hooked up to him and his life story? Briefly, no. Simply as Ambedkar will be described as a Buddhist and as a politician, he can be described as a pragmatist. Every of those labels provides us a manner of understanding and foregrounding sure information and themes in his life story; no label captures the whole lot or is the ‘ultimate’ descriptor of who one is.
It’s on this spirit that Ambedkar will be talked about as a pragmatist, which means that he and his thought developed to some extent in response to different pragmatists akin to Dewey. Interested by Ambedkar as a pragmatist highlights sure themes in his method and his thought that we might not have appreciated earlier than. It additionally is smart of the newly found archival evidence that I discover in my book The Evolution of Pragmatism in India (2023), indicating that Ambedkar sought to mix Dewey’s views on democracy with Buddhism as early as 1914.
Ambedkar’s reception of Dewey in forming his personal philosophy – his personal pragmatism, as I see it – is complicated. Dewey impressed Ambedkar to evolve a type of pragmatism that focused caste oppression, however which constructed up a imaginative and prescient of democratic social programs that allowed people to matter.
Dewey gave Ambedkar concepts, beliefs and even strategies to experiment with and even resist. He noticed within the philosophy espoused by his American instructor a supply of novelty and creativity. Via his programs with Dewey, and within the many books by Dewey that he continued to buy and annotate into the Nineteen Fifties, we will see how Dewey’s pragmatism was an essential touchstone or inspiration for Ambedkar. It was not one thing he would blindly copy or duplicate. As an alternative, it turned a useful resource and a supply of motivation to do sure issues in sure methods as soon as he returned to India. In a methodological sense, it confirmed him the worth of reconstruction. Dewey had issues with the search for certainty amongst philosophers starting from Plato to Immanuel Kant to lots of his contemporaries; Ambedkar felt the same constriction when it got here to the claims to timelessness and divine certainty made on behalf of the sanatan (everlasting) custom stemming from the traditional Vedas. Ambedkar noticed this identical custom as underwriting the customs of caste that had divided Indian society and oppressed people like him for 1000’s of years.
There was nothing Ambedkar may do on this lifetime to take away the stain of untouchability within the eyes of others
The pragmatist dedication to philosophy as a manner not simply to know the everlasting truths of the world and maintain on, however as an alternative to purposefully change or reconstruct it, struck a chord in Ambedkar. One widespread thread throughout all of the disparate components of his mental and sensible life was the concept he shouldn’t stay content material with the world as obtained by him or his surrounding tradition. He felt the command to alter this world, and to alter people who may need energy over it, by means of his activism, his political manoeuvres, and even his impassioned speeches. The world for Ambedkar was what we may make of it, and he noticed a path to reconstructing it in a extra simply method that might erase the type of hate and struggling he felt as an ‘untouchable’.
However reconstruction should goal for one thing. What did Ambedkar’s selective and inventive pragmatism goal for as its targets or ends? What kind of ethical beliefs did it try to understand? One of many recurring themes in Ambedkar’s harsh criticisms of caste all through his life was that this graded social system suppressed the ‘human persona’ of these in ‘decrease’ castes. It restricted the occupations that people may pursue, the garments they may put on, and even the paths they may journey, to start standing. It was at start that one obtained one’s particular mixture of traits or potentialities from previous lives, as Ambedkar noticed the caste system play out in his life. He was an untouchable due to his start placement, one which resided on the very backside of the graded hierarchy of caste teams, and one that the majority different ‘greater castes’ noticed as ritually polluting. There was nothing that Ambedkar may do, not less than on this lifetime, that might take away the stain of untouchability within the eyes of others enraptured by these customs.
For Ambedkar, this was an affront to the price of the person. Drawing from Dewey’s early works – particularly his essay ‘The Ethics of Democracy’ (1888) – Ambedkar got here again from his training within the West and argued that caste customs harm the ‘progress of persona’ and developed solely ‘the persona of the few at the price of the numerous – a end result scrupulously to be averted within the curiosity of Democracy.’ Every individual was distinctive of their mixture of impulses, drives and pursuits, and one of the best type of society would assist people create and recreate themselves with their social engagement. All he noticed with caste was a restraining and limiting of what roles and skills a person may develop. Ambedkar would usually seek advice from his battle towards the caste system – epitomised by his hatred for the observe of untouchability – as ‘a battle for the reclamation of human persona, which has been suppressed and mutilated by the Hindu social system.’ For Ambedkar, in addition to for younger Dewey, society labored greatest when it supplied freedom and alternative for every particular person to develop as a valued member of a group. Democracy turned the philosophy that facilitated this evolution of every individual past strictures of separated lessons or castes.
Ambedkar’s philosophy orbits round one other recognisably pragmatist dedication – the concept communities matter in each science and ethics. Certainly, Ambedkar would preserve that very important senses of democracy went past the overtly political. Democracy was a behavior for Ambedkar, in addition to for Dewey, and never only a formal manner of decision-making amongst elected officers. All through his writings, Ambedkar was keen on echoing Dewey’s phrase from Democracy and Training, saying that:
Democracy isn’t merely a type of Authorities. It’s primarily a mode of related residing, of conjoint communicated expertise. It’s primarily an perspective of respect and reverence in direction of fellowmen.
Later in his life, Ambedkar would seek advice from democracy as a lifestyle. All of this pointed to the central concept that social democracy was a really perfect to be achieved in our on a regular basis expertise.
But what can we make of social democracy as a behavior or a lifestyle? For Ambedkar’s pragmatism, democracy turned extra about how we work together with our fellow group members or residents than about constitutions and voting workouts. Political establishments and legal guidelines are essential, in fact, however what was of major significance for Ambedkar – and his instructor, Dewey – have been the customs and habits that animated us in our myriad interactions with our buddies and foes in social expertise.
A part of Ambedkar’s philosophical genius lies in how he reworks this concept of deep democracy right into a normative framework used to critique caste. He noticed caste as each a gaggle customized and as a person behavior of how one reacts to others. It was inherently and primarily divisive. Caste habits, and caste labels, advised Ambedkar and his fellow group members how they need to worth and act towards one another. In his personal case, it led others to exclude or restrict contact with him. If democracy meant the formation of teams the place every particular person mattered, caste was, Ambedkar surmised, inherently antidemocratic. However on what customary ought we decide programs and communities as an entire?
This was an issue for the type of philosophy that younger Ambedkar heard in Dewey’s programs. Dewey would advise that beliefs and ethical values got here from inside a historic or group context. He was reluctant to attraction to sources of transcendental certainty, like God or pure purpose, to settle issues. Ambedkar appreciated this instinct, however he wanted one thing greater than an attraction to tradition or a convention. For him, the issues of India have been inherently linked to a millennia-old stratification of its communities right into a hierarchy of occupation and value-determining lessons primarily based upon start. As he would put it in an early publication, Indian society underneath caste was a tower with many flooring however no stairways upon which one may ascend.
He criticised Russian communism for reaching equality by means of violent implies that sacrificed the freedom of many
Ambedkar knew that a lot of this caste superstructure was grounded on claims to ‘timeless’ or divinely revealed issues in holy texts. Like Dewey, he couldn’t attraction to ethical certainties to counter different divine truths. However his pragmatic method turned speckled with fixed appeals to 3 values – liberty, equality and fraternity. These have been the values of the French Revolution that Ambedkar heard in Dewey’s course in March 1916, maybe for the primary time. Later in his life, Ambedkar would make overt efforts to translate these phrases into Buddhist ideas. However the trichotomy remained. These phrases weren’t tethered to 1 tradition – together with French – however as an alternative turned semi-transcendent values that might be used to critique any group as to its adherence to the democratic superb and the worth of creating the persona of every particular person. Justice was the tense stability amongst these three valued features of particular person and communal expertise.
The facility of those values, seen throughout Ambedkar’s speeches, in addition to the preamble to the Indian structure he took a heavy hand in drafting, was that they revealed the issues with caste and with potential options akin to communism. Ambedkar would deliver these values to bear to indicate how caste customs functioned to destroy the freedom and equality of these judged ‘untouchable’. He would additionally, later in his life, criticise the communism he noticed in Russia for reaching equality by means of violent implies that inevitably sacrificed the freedom of many and the sense of fraternity among the many opposing teams in society. The way in which to make people matter should deal with their equal therapy and their capability to freely direct their lives. It additionally should end result within the creation of a group characterised by shared pursuits and mutual respect, a state of affairs so central to the often-overlooked worth of fraternity.
Ambedkar’s philosophy is an anti-caste philosophy however, in drawing upon the pragmatist superb of deep democracy, it turned one thing much more encompassing – a philosophy of democracy. Speaking of Ambedkar’s pragmatism is a manner of highlighting a constellation of essential concepts and beliefs from Dewey, retasked for the Indian context. It additionally permits us to see Ambedkar as a world thinker, one involved with caste and with different issues that undo the seek for democratic communities. What outcomes is one thing completely distinctive within the pragmatist custom: an evolution of social democracy that brings new insights into the issues of oppression and division, and a inventive option to reconstruct society by means of a tense and ever-changing stability of freedom, equality and fellow-feeling amongst all those that share a typical destiny collectively.
