It’s an established fashion by now to venerate Ambedkar as a feminist and racialise Dalit Men and Women alike in order to achieve an obscene objectification of the Dalit Self.

Indian Sociology is suffering from a pepsis, a pepsis of always looking at the bottom. Where would one look, if not the bottom most ranks, if placed herself on the pinnacle of social hierarchy? Imagine being so high on the caste ladder that all you can see is what happens in the quarters that exist below your immediate social location, which is always kept hidden and veiled from research objectives.

There are umpteen examples of this racialisation of the Dalit being, being done with the help of new age vocabularies instituted by feminist studies mushrooming in Indian Universities like JNU, DU, TISS, SPPU being the prime suspects.

Here I would like to dissect one such piece by a stolid iniquitous academic Karin Kapadia, an Anthropologist at the London School of Economics, who has published a piece in the leading social science Magazine called EPW titled, “Ambedkar’s Feminism”.

The article begins with a universal appeal against violence faced by women as a universal homogenous category, which in India is always euphemistically used to present the upper caste women as the ideal victim and scores of atrocities and violence faced by Dalit women, by virtue of their caste, manifested against their gender are relegated to margins.

The point being that the typical problems of women or the women’s question when raised are more often than not invoked to talk about the women as a universal homogenous category, and the ideal image of such a woman is, as you suspected it right, an upper caste woman.

So, her article begins with the usual sordid tales of oppression faced by women as a universal homogenous category and then suddenly she jumps to Ambedkar and from thereon fixes her gaze on the Dalit Women.

She keeps Ambedkar’s speech which he delivered in front of the Dalit (read Mahar) sex workers of Kamathipura in erstwhile Bombay, as an object of her opinion on Dalit being.

She writes, “ He ( read Ambedkar) concluded that male control of women’s sexuality was essential to the reproduction of the caste system. Without it, inter caste marriages would ensue and caste identities would slowly wither away.”

Here she is making a reference to Ambedkar’s paper “Castes in India: Genesis, Mechanism and Development”.
And without a proper reading of Ambedkar’s paper, she is resorting to making generalised arguments on gender and sexual control while ignoring the central premise of Ambedkar’s paper.

If one reads Ambedkar’s paper, it is not the male control over female sexuality but Dwij Male control over not just their own female’s sexuality but a transgressive violation of sexuality of women of castes lower to them in caste order.

A cursory extrapolation of Kapadia’s understanding of Ambedkar’s ideation would be somewhat like this:-

“Each Caste’s men control their Women’s sexuality and thus the Caste system perpetuates as it doesn’t allow intermarriage.”

Firstly, Ambedkar has clearly espoused that It was the Brahmins who closed their doors first to enclose themselves into a caste and others found the doors closed, so they had to make their own doors.

Secondly, Caste and Gender in Indian Society doesn’t function in this near categorisation wherein, Each Caste’s men are concerned only with the control of their own women’s sexuality.

It is widely evident that upper caste men leave no chance to exercise their immoral control over Dalit women by violating their chastity and committing atrocities on the Dalit Men by demeaning their women.

Kapadia has gone berserk when she says that,

“Once we recognise the collusion of
Dalit men in the sexual trafficking
of their female kin as the unspoken
backdrop to Ambedkar’s speech.”

Here she is playing neatly into the tactics of Brahmanical Feminism, which puts Dalit Women against Dalit Men.

What can be more disparaging and disgusting for an academician to belittle an entire community by saying that their men are complicit in making their women indulge in prostitution and that too when there is ample evidence that this prostitution was forced in Dalit Women by the Upper Caste men.

In her entire article she has nowhere blamed Upper Caste Men for the control they exercise on their own women and women lower to them in caste hierarchy but berates Dalit Men and inspires Dalit Women to rise above their own ‘Dalit’ men in order to achieve liberation.

Isn’t this a deliberate act of absolving upper caste men of all the evils and mis deeds they commit on Dalit Women and Men alike?

Furthermore, Kapadia never dared to question her own Caste’s men but exhorts Dalit women to revolt against their own men.

So, the paper which is titled “Ambedkar’s Feminism” becomes a ghettoised manifestation of the already existing trope that Ambedkar was a leader of the Dalits, and His feminism is for the liberation of Dalit women from their own men.

Or is it the other way round? Is it that in the name of “Ambedkar’s Feminism”, the stories of oppression of Dalit Women are being used as a fodder to make way for an upper caste women’s feminism which is about restricting Dalit women to question for their oppression, only their own men and at the same time Dwij Feminist’s keep on absolving their own men from their acts of oppression against Dalit Men and Women, so that they can bargain with them to seek equality at par with their own men.