Why Ambedkar dismissed bhakti saints—they allowed Brahmins to silence Dalits demanding equality

The ‘Notbook of Kabir’ is the story of how author S Anand loses himself in the pursuit of the saint.

S. Anand

n The Notbook of Kabir: Thinner than Water, Fiercer than Fire, Anand, the poet-translator-musician-publisher, offers translations of fifty songs of Kabir that you rarely find in books. The Notbook is also interperspersed with annotations, reflections, dilations, digressions, meditations and illuminations occasioned by a song, a phrase, a word or an idea. In this excerpt, we see Anand try to come terms with the idea of bhakti and the problems in seeing a rebel like Kabir tamed under the bhakti label.

Now, about bhakti and my unease with it, which is the same as my vexation with caste and hierarchy-seeking Hinduism. As such, it is an idea to consider. Bhakti is meant to convey devotional love for a personal god experienced without the mediation of a priest/ guru (read Brahmin) or ritual. The seed of this idea was sown in the southern part of the subcontinent in Tamil with the song-poetry of the (Vaishnavite) alwars and (Saivite) nayanars from the seventh to tenth centuries who followed the earlier tradition of love (often erotic) poetry of the two-millennia old Sangam era but replaced the lover, patron and king with god.

Often, the songmakers were from the working castes. By the twelfth century, this style of speech-as-song found its way into the Kannada world as the vachana movement. A vachana is remembered speech, word, promise, poem, song. It is a form of speaking in rhymed metrical verse in Kannada, a movement in which a range of working caste poets, men and women, took part.

In all, some three hundred poets across caste, class and gender, shook up the twelfth-century Deccan with the reverberations reaching parts of the Tamil country and the nascent language-worlds of Marathi and Telugu. The poets became literary heroes, worthy of love, adoration, respect.

The echoes were felt among the many varkari poets who made abhangas in Marathi from the twelfth century on to the seventeenth, with a corpus of poems by the tailor Namdeo, the Brahmin Dnyandeo, his sister Muktaai, the maid Janabai, the farmer-turned-moneylender Tukaram, the prostitute Kanhopatra, the village guard Chokhamela, his wife Soyrabai, their son Karmamela, and many more. Often entire families were involved in the pursuit of poetry.

Bhang means a break. The verse form abhang, or abhanga, means unbroken, absolute, eternal, unending, or simply a poem without a caesura—an exuberant or exalted utterance (quite like the udana attributed to the Buddha we encountered in “In the seen and the unseen”, p.116). A varkar is a pilgrim, and the varkari tradition revolves around the god Vithoba or Vitthal/ Vitthala/ Pandurang/ Panduranga in Pandharpur (by the Bhima river in today’s Solapur district, Maharashtra). Vari is the annual pilgrimage that is undertaken by the devout, who on their way to see Vitthal sing the song-poetry of the sants who have both praised and upbraided him.

In popular lore, Vitthal has come to be regarded as a form of Krishna and this tradition is seen as Vaishnavite: all post-facto definitions and labels that suit the needs of those who have the power to define. The varkari cult inaugurates the Marathi literary tradition, according to most scholars. Vitthal could have had origins in Saivism or Buddhism, but more importantly among pastoral and nomadic tribes. Over centuries we see the Sanskritization, Vedicization and Vishnu-ization of Vitthal. According to the anti-caste scholar Gail Omvedt, the deity, who oddly has his arms akimbo, could have been originally female (‘wide hips, narrow waist, busty, long hair, straight though harsh face’). Poets who have sung his praises often address him as ‘Mother’.

In The Notbook of Kabir, Anand, the poet-translator, musician-publisher, offers translations of 50 songs of Kabir that you rarely find in books | Photo: By special arrangement

In The Notbook of Kabir, Anand, the poet-translator, and musician-publisher, offers translations of 50 songs of Kabir that you rarely find in books | Photo: By special arrangement

From the fifteenth century, this idea of a god unmediated by a priest or guru, spread to the working-class poets of the northern region: Raidas the tanner, Kabir the weaver, Gora the potter, Savata the gardener, and so on. Like Ramanujan says, a fuse was lit. Bhakti became post-facto pan-Indian generalization, created by the nineteenth–twentieth century nationalistic project mostly, and it contained a multitude of distinct idioms. There are scholars and historians who do not see this omnibus bhakti phenomenon as really ‘anti-Vedic’. They think it ultimately performs the function of incorporating the non-Brahmin, non-Aryan population into the Vedic hierarchy.

Often those regarded the most ideal bhaktas or devotees have a radical edge that gets blunted by history. We are asked to see how despite being Untouchable and not being allowed to enter the temple or behold the god they sing praises of, such bhaktas were beholden to the deity. One attentive scholar of the Marathi bhakti movement, Jayant Lele, advocates the art of suspecting and listening to the symbols simultaneously. Bearing this in mind, let us turn briefly to Chokhamela, the fourteenth-century Marathi poet of the Untouchable Mahar caste. Gandhi and his ilk saw him as the perfect ‘harijan’, the child of god: The ideal suffering pilgrim who will never make it but shall not lose faith, singing of the lord in matchless metre and peerless rhyme. In contrast, Ambedkar dismisses Chokhamela and most bhakti saints for not forcefully questioning the order of chaturvarna.

According to him, this gave the Brahmins one more reason to silence or coopt Dalits demanding equal treatment. They could tell the Dalits, ‘We will respect you when you become bhakts like Chokhamela.’ While top-ranked musicians like Kumar Gandharva, Kishori Amonkar, Bhimsen Joshi, Jitendra Abhisheki and others were happy to sing abhangs in their concerts to draw in the crowds, the Dalit Panthers in the 1970s, led by the iconoclastic literary icons Namdeo Dhasal, Raja Dhale and J.V. Pawar, shared Ambedkar’s distaste for what they perceived as an abject, submissive surrender. Yet, we have songs by Chokhamela that must have needed immense courage and conviction on his part to sing to an unheeding audience, for whom he was forced to toil, and from whom he was forced to beg for leftovers. Here’s Abhang 283 (in my translation), where he curses all gods and scriptures:

vedaasee viTaaL saastraasee viTaaL

puraanen amangaL viTaaLaanchee

jivaasee viTaaL shivaasee viTaaL

kaayaa amangaL viTaaLaanchee

brahmiyaa viTaaL vishnusee viTaaL

sankaraa viTaaL amangaL

janmataam viTaaL marataam viTaaL

chokhaa mhane viTaaL aadi-antee

Vedas are tainted, shastras tainted

Puranas are tainted, so tainted

The self is a taint, the spirit tainted

The body is a taint, soul tainted

Brahma is a taint, Vishnu tainted

Shankara a taint among the tainted

Birth is a taint, death is tainted

Says Chokha, taint to taint tainted

In this damning abhang that no savarna musician sings, Chokha, as he signs himself, uncannily prefigures both Kabir’s downside-up idea of ulaT ved (that we see in the song, “In the bustling market, stand empty”), and Ambedkar’s views in Annihilation of Caste. In this 1936 undelivered speech, which his reform-minded Arya Samaj hosts found ‘unbearable’, Ambedkar says without ambiguity: ‘If you wish to bring about a breach in the system, then you have got to apply the dynamite to the Vedas and the shastras, which deny any part to reason; to the Vedas and shastras, which deny any part to morality. You must destroy the religion of the shrutis and the smritis. Nothing else will avail.’

Now picture Chokha in his town Mangalvedha (in modern-day Solapur district), a bhikkhu of a kind at a time when Buddhism was fighting for survival, singing this early in the morning and begging for leftovers, and the effect it had on his savarna benefactors. There was neither dynamite nor a suit-clad Ambedkar then. However, even at his radical best, Chokha remains tainted. Moving beyond the binary of tainted and untainted, Chokha chooses one side. He says all is tainted, from beginning to end, from the Absolute (brahman) to the lowliest (that is Chokha himself). This is very dialectical, and reaches a truth. Ambedkar, then, is the bhang—the break—from this mode of thinking. His idea of annihilation of caste means freedom: from tainting or being tainted. We may fittingly add a coda to Chokha’s abhang:

Baba is the bhang, nothing’s tainted

Unning taint, he’s attained it

Today, the official, dominant narrative is that the presiding deity at Pandharpur, Vitthal (known also as Pandurang, Vitthu and Vitthoba), is a Vishnu/ Krishna figure. Chokhamela, in his time, may well have witnessed the earliest days of the deity’s conversion from a Buddhist to Vishnuized figure. Ambedkar contends that Vitthal was none other than Buddha. Dhananjay Keer, in his biography Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Life and Mission, reports a speech in Pune in 1954 where Ambedkar

told the gathering of 20,000 men and women that he was writing a book on Buddhism explaining its tenets in simple language to the common man. A year might be needed to complete the book: ?on its completion he would embrace Buddhism. Ambedkar also told his audience that the image of the god Vithoba at Pandharpur was in reality the image of the Buddha. He intended writing a thesis on the subject, and after completing it, he would read it before the Bharatiya Itihas Sanshodhan Mandal at Poona. The name of the god Pandurang, he observed, was derived from Pundalik. Pundalik meant lotus, and a lotus was called Pandurang in Pali. So Pandurang was none other than the Buddha.

Raised by a father, who Ambedkar says (in an unpublished essay, “Who is Pandurang?”) was ‘like a Roman patriarch, desirous of exercising in the most rigorous manner his patria potestas on his children,’ Ambedkar grew up learning and reciting Marathi abhangs:

I was at one time a student of the classical Marathi literature and had to read the writings of Dnyaneshwar, Eknath, Mukteswar, Namdeo, Tukaram, Shridhar Swami and Moropant. … My father who was a Kabirpanthi had made the reading of their works compulsory and I could not take my daily food without the fulfilment of this obligation. This compulsory routine continued till my father’s death. I therefore grew up as a youth with a deep spirituality very seldom to be found among my contemporaries.

A photograph taken in 2013 of the first page of Ambedkar’s unpublished undated essay “Who is Pandurang?” from the collection of Ramesh Tukaram Shinde, archivist, Mumbai

A photograph taken in 2013 of the first page of Ambedkar’s unpublished undated essay “Who is Pandurang?” from the collection of Ramesh Tukaram Shinde, archivist, Mumbai | By special arrangement

This means Ambedkar was raised on good poetry that was regarded as sacred literature. In his adulthood, despite having declared in Yeola in 1935 that ‘I will not die as a person who calls himself a Hindu!’, Ambedkar dedicates his important work of 1948, The Untouchables: Who were they and why they became Untouchable? to ‘Nandnar, Ravidas, Chokhamela—three renowned saints who were born among the Untouchables and who by their piety and virtue won the esteem of all.’ There’s something irresistible here even for Ambedkar who turns his face away from all forms of Hinduism, including the seemingly protestant bhakti mode that involves two kinds of hero worship—the worship of god with the charged words of the poet, and the consequent worship of such a poet.

How these figures appear to us surely affects and alters our perception, and we are all creatures of perception. Raidas the tanner is often seen with his anvil even when in a sahu’s robes; Kabir is always beatific with his loom; and Namdev the calico printer/ tailor and his cohorts with an ektara or a tanpura are lost in song. All of them survive attempts on their life by kings and Brahmins. Chokhamela dies doing ‘Mahar work’, while repairing the wall of Mangalvedhe, a town near Pandharpur, when it collapses, burying him and the other Mahar workmen alive. The virtuous and pietistic iconography of all the sant-poets, Namdev to Chokha, Kabir to Mira, were imagined first in the ‘nationalist’ period, quite like Raja Ravi Verma’s oleographs made up many Hindu gods. Like the scholar Parita Mukta shows in her work, not just their images, the words of these poets were edited and adapted to service Brahmanism, patriarchy and nationalism.

A Mira bhajan that ‘hit at the very raw nerve of widowhood’ by using the word randavu (prostitution) was edited by Gandhi at his ashram, says Mukta in “Mirabai in Rajasthan”, an essay in the now-defunct journal Manushi. Mira, for him, was a ‘paramount satyagrahi’. All references to widowhood in the song were expunged since Gandhi’s message to widows was: ‘Look upon your widowhood as sacred and live a life worthy of it,’ similar to his message to the scavenging castes to do their work with love and selflessness. He had a fetish for spiritualizing inequality and for this he became a saint.

While Gandhi in his fifties sought to desexualize free-spirited women, at the age of twenty-five, Ambedkar, in a seminar paper simply called “Castes in India”, delivered at an anthropological seminar in Columbia University, New York, in 1916, spoke of how enforced widowhood and child marriage formed the bedrock of the caste system, solutions likely devised by Brahmin men to deal with ‘surplus women’.

Around the same time, in 1919, Gandhi commissioned the artist Kanu Desai to offer for posterity a series of images of a docile, domesticated Mira, each image eventually calendarized and reproduced a billion times, creating the definitive cinematic image-text of a bowdlerized Mira (1945) played by an intensely wooden M.S. Subbulakshmi, feeding into distorted conceptions of woman as supplicant, dancer-singer, pliable lover. Such re-packaging of both words and images happened with all the rebel sant-poets (with ‘Hindu nationalist’ cinema playing a key role). And yet the radical core of a Kabir or Mira has survived through Dalit performative traditions and in cultural memory insomuch as we know these stories.

This excerpt from S Anand’s ‘The Notbook of Kabir: Thinner than Water, Fiercer than Fire’, has been published with permission from Penguin Random House India.

Courtesy : The Print

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