This panel features three papers that consider the ways in which Ambedkar’s theory of South Asian historicity—rooted in the problematic of caste—provides scholars with a new set of hermeneutical tools for rethinking our approach to the study of Buddhism. Much of Ambedkar’s thinking is predicated on a dialectical view of South Asian history, in which Buddhism and Brahmanism were engaged in a long durée tug-of-war, with each seeking to supplant one another on a philosophical, institutional, and political level. Ambedkar’s oeuvre toggles between a modernist secular reading of Indian history, on the one hand, and a conceptually distant early Buddhist (final centuries BCE) scriptural lens on history, on the other. Ambedkar’s historicization of this dialectic presents scholars with a new set of conceptual tools for rethinking the relationship between Buddhism and caste. Each author will tackle the question of how we should conceive of this Ambedkarian view of history.
This paper paper uses ideas from Orlando Pattersons theory of death and from people who study the caste system to say that the caste system is a way to slowly take away a persons humanity. This affects who people are how communities work and how people belong to a religion. The paper explores "The Buddha and His Dhamma" and tries to map how Ambedkars Buddhism is a big change in how we think about things. It redefines the teachings of Buddhism as a way to make society more democratic and to get practical applicable principles for making a casteless society. The paper also looks at how the caste system affects communities, in other countries and how it intersects with racism and migration. The caste system is not an Indian problem it is a problem that affects Buddhist communities all over the world.
This paper broadly examines how Anticaste thought and Anticolonial thought remained separate domains of political thought in the context of India and, more broadly, South Asia. These two sets of thoughts did not converge over the long history of British Colonialism in India, primarily because they were unable to develop radical/collective thinking in the domain of secularization.
In scholarship on postcolonial South Asia, the discussion of secularization often focuses on interreligious thinking. The politics of knowledge and historical domination allow the expert on religion to have expertise on the case. Still, the expert on caste is not considered an expert on religion. It is a situation of both caste and castelessness in determining the fluidity of movement between them. It is not the castelessness but caste that seems to be paving the path from society to politics, particularly during the anticolonial struggle in India.
History has been a contested domain for knowledge and claims regarding diverse interpretations of the past. Who governed whom, whose contributions were recognized, and who’s not? Indian History has been viewed from a positivist lens as ascertain and universal. However, Ambedkar critiques the Brahmanical positivist interpretation of Indian history and provided alternative methods to engage with the social history of caste. He highlighted the epistemological violence done by Brahminical scholars who used “politics of appropriation” to mis-represent the Dalit-Bahujan resistance. In similar capacity, Kaivarta revolt against the Pala King Mahipala ll and Rampala ll (Buddhist regime) in Bengal is testament to this paradoxical relation between the caste, Buddhism and political appropriation by Brahminism. By using Ambedkar’s historical method, critical caste studies framework and archival resources, this paper aims to understand the political-economy of socio-political mobility of Nishad caste in the context of Pala regimes' policy of non-violence and heavy taxation.