Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

232 I Ramnath
hierarchical structures of oppression and exploitation. The
greatest legacy of Ambedkar, Dalit leader, legal scholar, and
primary drafter of the Indian constitution, was as a republican
in the best Enlightenment sense of the word. His ideology
combined the values of the French Revolution with the
egalitarianism and rationalism of Buddhism. Hinduism, as
a dominant feature ofIndian culture, had to be judged like
any ideology or system by the "test of justice" and "test of
utility:' declared Ambedkar. It fa iled on both counts. Tr ue
liberty, he argued, required social equality, economic security,
and the availability of knowledge. After Ambedkar,
though, in Omvedt's regretful estimation the Dalit
movement tended to lack ideological content; while the
latter-day Panthers sorted themselves into Ambedkaritel
Buddhist, Marxist, and urban gangsterish ("we didn't read
the manifesto, we only knew-if someone puts their hand
on our sister, cut it off!") tendencies.36
Dalit movements did not necessarily see themselves as
part of an anticolonial struggle, unless in the implicit sense
that the Brahminic master narrative proudly claims the
mantle of conquest o.lcng \vith the identity of pljulordiai
Aryans, enshrining an origin myth in which they entered
the subcontinent from the northwest in ancient Vedic
times, bringing their dominion and civilizational advancement
to the primitive (and supposedly darker-skinned)
prior inhabitants. During the anti-British mobilizations,
Ambedkar and his followers were more apt to be British
loyalists, blaming Gandhi and the INC fo r the discrimination,
exclusion, and brutality they routinely faced within a
conservative Hindu-dominated society.