ABSTRACT
In the first decades of the twentieth century, when Indian anticolonial nationalists were loudly proclaiming the glories of an Indian cultural heritage that drew on Hinduism, B. R. Ambedkar, a civil rights activist, principal author of postcolonial India’s constitution—and also a member of a so-called untouchable caste—made the bold and counterintuitive claim that Hindu society simply ‘does not exist’ (Ambedkar 2014 [1936]). This chapter will allow us to understand why Ambedkar made this remark, as well as what makes it so important to Indian society today. Put simply, Ambedkar considered the constitution he helped draft to be only the first step in promoting a just and egalitarian society. As he saw it, whatever the constitution might say about equality, it could not in fact ensure that all of India’s citizens received the same treatment at the hands of the law, government officials, and society more generally. The root of the problem lay in the differences between groups of Indians, which in Ambedkar’s opinion did more to inform the way Indian society operated than values, customs, or traditions those groups might share. In Ambedkar’s diagnosis, the principal problem was caste. It was caste that stood in the way of India’s progress toward becoming a democratic society characterized by genuine fellow feeling. Hence, he argued that there was no Hindu society if by that one meant a group of people who shared common values and interests; such commonalities were shared only within castes.
