The great historian C. Vann Woodward, author of The Strange Career of Jim Crow, a book that Martin Luther King, Jr. described as the “historical bible of the civil rights movement,” recount not just as an icon for ‘untouchables’ bus in his autobiography how the writing of the book came to be shaped by an unusual encounter: A new and extraordinary foreign perspective came my way during the Second World War, while I was on duty as a naval officer in India. With a letter of introduction in hand, I sought out Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, acclaimed leader of India’s untouchables and later a figure of first importance in Indian constitutional history. He received me cordially at his home in New Delhi and plied me with questions about the “black untouchables” of America and how their plight might be compared with that of his own people. He also took time to open to me the panorama of an ancient world of segregation by caste to show me how it appeared to its victims. That Woodward sought out Ambedkar was not surprising. For years preceding his visit, there had developed a lively intellectual and political tradition in both the United States and India comparing and contrasting caste oppression in India with racial oppression in the United States. This conversation involved major figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois and the Indian nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai. Woodward correctly remarked upon Ambedkar’s larger status, not just as an icon for “untouchables.” He noted that Ambedkar was not just as an icon for ‘untouchables’ but also a major constitutional figure, as if he were DuBois and Madison rolled into one. But the intellectual distinctiveness of the problem that they discussed was not simply the analogies that might exist between how race and caste functioned as systems of oppression. The originality of Woodward’s book on Jim Crow was that it argued that the mechanisms of racial exclusion persisted and were reinvented after the Emancipation Proclamation. Ambedkar was also keenly attuned to the fact that while India was embracing political democracy, the mechanisms of exclusion and subordination of “untouchables” would not be overcome simply by granting formal political rights. So this encounter was not just about a comparison of two systems of oppression. It was about that haunting question: Why do the two grandest experiments in democracy, India and the United States, find it so difficult to overcome the original sin that marks their founding, race in the United States and caste in India? A part of the answer, of course, is that a commitment to equality is always a grudging compromise at best, subordinate to other values. In his book, What Gandhi and the Congress Have Done to Untouchables, which appeared in 1945, Ambedkar offered this biting judgment: Mr. Gandhi’s attitude towards Swaraj [self-governance] and the Untouchables resembles very much the attitude of President Lincoln towards the two questions of the Negroes and the Union. Mr .Gandhi wants Swaraj as did President Lincoln want the Union. But he does not want Swaraj at the cost of disrupting the structure of Hinduism, which is what the political emancipation of the Untouchables means, as President Lincoln did not want to free the slaves if it was not necessary to do so for the sake of the Union. Just a few sentences earlier he had written of Lincoln, “Obviously the author of the famous Gettysburg oration about the Government of the People, by the People and for the People would not have minded if his statement had taken the shape of the government of the black people by the white people provided there was Union.” And with some relief Ambedkar added, “Lincoln was at least prepared to emancipate the Negro slaves if it was necessary to preserve the Union. Mr. Gandhi’s attitude is in marked contrast. He is not prepared for the political emancipation of the Untouchables even if it was essential for winning Swaraj.” This caustic assessment of Lincoln and Gandhi may not be entirely fair. But it took a bracing moral clarity and intellectual self-confidence to be able to make such a judgment at all. If one looks at history through the eyes of those who were enslaved, marginalized, or oppressed, there is only one inescapable conclusion: that justice is the last thing on men’s minds, the weakest passion that moves their souls. Even great leaders, let alone ordinary men and women, would readily sacrifice justice for pretty much any other value: God, country, success, custom, privilege. The most consolation that history affords is that occasionally there arises a leader, a Lincoln, who will not stand in the way of justice. But even he went down the path of justice only after all other options had been exhausted. In Ambedkar’s view, for Lincoln it was Union first, justice second; and for Gandhi, despite his personal sacrifice and courage, it was Hinduism first, justice perhaps not at all. For justice, humanity would need an altogether different kind of emancipator — someone for whom justice was the first virtue, never subordinate to any other value. In a tribute to one of the few Indian leaders he admired, the social reformer Madhave Govind Ranade, Ambedkar reflected on what makes a great leader. After a critical survey of different conceptions of greatness, he proposed a test: “A Great Man must have something more than what a merely eminent individual has. What must be that thing? A Great Man must be motivated by the dynamics of a social purpose and must act as the scourge and the scavenger of society. These are the elements which distinguish an eminent individual from a Great Man, and constitute his title deeds to respect and reverence.” And with those words Ambedkar described himself. Ambedkar was one of the most important emancipators of the twentieth century. He is most well-known as an unrelenting champion of the rights of Dalits. Ambedkar popularized the use of the term “Dalit” — literally, “broken people” — to give a new political identity
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