Buddhism in India

Navayana Buddhism and the Modern Age 253

as a Brahman or a farmer or a craftsman or scavenger. It was a

position he apparently maintained to the end of his life, and for

Ambedkar, it was unacceptable.

After 1936, Ambedkar never considered Gandhi a true reformer,

but rather a defender of caste-bound Hinduism, a romantic idealising

India’s villages and seeking simply a continuation of the status quo,

dressed up a bit, but without fundamental change. As he said in a

1939 lecture on ‘Federation versus Freedom’, ‘In my mind there is

no doubt that the Gandhi age is the dark age of India. It is an age

in which people instead of looking for their ideals in the future are

returning to antiquity’ (ibid.: 352).

Brahmanic Marxism

Apart from Gandhi, another strongly seductive opponent to the

fascination for Buddhism emerged in the 1930s. This was Marxism,

which was increasingly gathering strength as an ideology among

the younger and militant section of the nationalist elite. It offered

militancy and a mass force—the organised, factory-based working

class—to fight imperialism.

Marxism, as a philosophy, identified an ‘essence’ of humanity

which was as derived from the social relations of production. This

was its ‘materialism’; and because these relations were seen as

inherently contradictory, generating class struggle that would even-

tually lead to the overthrow of the ruling class and the relations of

exploitation that were inherent in the system, it was ‘dialectical’.

There was little room for individual choice in this system of thinking,

and little room for religion or spiritualism. The idea of controlling

the passions, the value of compassion, could all be characterised as

bourgeois illusions. Religion was simply looked upon as alienation,

as a projection of human exploitation onto an imagined world of

gods. It was causally irrelevant; not a solution to human exploitation

and sorrow nor even a cause of it, but simply a reflection. In

Marx’s early ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ he responded to the critique of

religion being made by radical Young Hegelians:

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, the

duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world and a real

one. His work consists in the dissolution of the religious world into its

secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work,

You must...destroy the sacredness and divinity with which Caste has

become invested. In the last analysis, this means you must destroy the

authority of the Shastras and the Vedas....You must take the stand that

Buddha took. You must take the stand which Guru Nanak took. You

must not only discard the Shastras, you must deny their authority, as did

Buddha and Nanak. You must have courage to tell the Hindus that what

is wrong with them is their religion – the religion which has produced in

them this notion of the sacredness of Caste (ibid.: 69).

This was not only an assessment of Hinduism, it was an assessment
of Buddhism and Sikhism: at that point he considered these to be
the only two indigenous religious traditions which had defied
Brahmanism in a thorough-going way. It seems that his thinking
was shifting away from conversion to Christianity and Islam to the
solutions offered by Indian tradition.
Gandhi’s reply came in an article written in his weekly, which he
called Harijanto symbolise his reformism. As a defence it was
simple: untouchability, Gandhi claimed, was not an essential part
of the Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, Upanishads, Smritis and
Puranas. He insisted that reason and spiritual experience were tests
for accepting anything as the word of God, but saw nothing essential
in the scriptures so defined to object to on the basis of his reason
and spirituality. Most significantly, in defending Hinduism, he also
defended an idealised version of caste:

Caste has nothing to do with religion...it is harmful to both spiritual and

national growth. Varna and Ashrama are institutions which have nothing

to do with castes. The law of Varna teaches us that we have each one of

us to earn our bread by following the ancestral calling. It defines not our

rights but our duties...it also follows that there is no calling too low and

none too high. All are good, lawful and absolutely equal in status. The

callings of a Brahman—spiritual teacher—and a scavenger are equal, and

their due performance carries equal merit before God and at one time

seems to have carried identical reward before man.... Arrogance of a

superior status by and of the Varna over another is a denial of the law.

And there is nothing in the law of Varna to warrant a belief in untouch-

ability. (The essence of Hinduism is contained in its enunciation of one

and only God as Truth and its bold acceptance of Ahimsa as the law of

the human family) (ibid.: 83).

Thus Gandhi reiterated not only his belief in the four varnas but
also in swadharma, following of the traditional caste duty, whether

252 Buddhism in India