Dr. B. R. Ambedkar on the Aryan Invasion and the Emergence of the Caste System in India
Birks Professor of Comparative Religion in the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3A 2A7
The advent of the Aryans in India in the second millennium B.C.E. has long been considered a pivotal event in the history of the subcontinent, a view now under contestation academically (as well as politically by the Hindu Right). It has gone unnoticed in this context that one of the earliest coherent critiques of this regnant paradigm was offered by an opponent of the Hindu Right, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1892–1956). His views on the Aryan invasion and the emergence of the caste system in India—the subject of this article—far from being preciously esoteric, speak on at least three conceptual registers: (1) their biographical significance when compared to the views of B. G. Tilak (1856–1920), Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), and, Ambedkar’s predecessor, Mahatma Jyotiba Phule (1827–1890); (2) their political significance in the role of Ambedkar, first as an opponent of the Brahmanical vision of the Hindu nation represented for him not only by the Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) but the Gandhian Congress as well, then as the proponent of constitutionalism after the attainment of Indian independence in 1947, involving a simultaneous commitment to majority rule and minority protection, and later as the exponent of the exercise of Buddhist option out of Hinduism for the Dalits in 1956, and (3) finally, posthumously, as relevant to the current academic debate around ethnogenesis in South Asia.