‘The Ambedkar–Nietzsche Provocations’: A new perspective on Brahminism for future scholars of caste

One of the major errors we make when it comes to the question of caste is that we localise it: we think of it as something either geographically situated in the Indian subcontinent or legitimised by one form of religion. Caste is not solely an Indian problem even if its exemplary form can only be found here. Caste functions as a name for a process, whether social or philosophical, that legitimises inequality on the basis of metaphysical claims. This can be best understood when we realise that perhaps one of the greatest advocates for this metaphysical basis of caste in modernity is not an Indian thinker but a European one: Friedrich Nietzsche.

It is Nietzsche, who with his theory of master and slave morality and the gospel of the Übermensch legitimised caste as a modern principle of rank. This might seem controversial, but Nietzsche’s value to the defenders of caste was much appreciated in India, with writers like Bal Gangadhar Tilak realising this as far back as the early 20th century. Thus, the goal of annihilating caste must also consider that with Nietzsche, we find one of the first modern theories that seeks to globalise caste as a metaphysical project. Ankit Kawade’s new book, The Ambedkar-Nietzsche Provocations: The Genius of the Chandala and the Gospel of the Superman seeks to do this through a speculative critique of Nietzsche by bringing him into conversation and confrontation with BR Ambedkar.

The important Third

As the German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued, the first number is neither one nor two, but three. Any comparative analysis has to take this into account before it begins. To try to bring together thinkers from Europe and India, we always need a third that both binds them together and simultaneously unbinds them. How do we conjoin Ambedkar with Nietzsche? Who is this mediating third that both comes in between them and lets them speak to one another?

The wager made in Kawade’s book is that this third is perhaps a much more familiar name in the Subcontinent than either Nietzsche or Ambedkar: Manu, the apocryphal author of the Manusmriti. Manu, the first legislator of caste, becomes the medium and the catalyst for an exploration of the aptly titled provocations that come up when we try to conjoin Ambedkar with Nietzsche.

Caste then becomes the central category by which we can both entangle and disentangle these two thinkers, both of whom spent their lives trying to destroy established religion. The differences are, of course, clear to us – Ambedkar was a public intellectual, perhaps the last of his kind, fiercely private in his life but public in his thinking, concerned entirely with the annihilation of caste. Nietzsche, on the other hand, remained an exile from public life, but his life and thought became politicised not long after his death – his sister Elizabeth turning his work towards ethnonationalism and even Nazism; Nietzsche is perhaps the only thinker who has been blamed for the horrors of not just one world war but two. Even today, after decades of attempted rehabilitation by scholars and philosophers in France and America, Nietzsche remains the figurehead of ethnonationalist, fascist, masculinist and white supremacist politics. But what Kawade’s book brings out is a more unseen version of Nietzsche – his engagement with the question of caste filtered through his reading of a dubious translation of the Manusmriti.

If Ambedkar quite famously refused to take on the title of Manu (he remarked during the Constituent Assembly debates: “I am not a modern Manu”), Nietzsche, on the other hand, is the one who gives a metaphysical basis for the modernity of caste, encapsulated in his term rangordung or ordering by rank. This new aristocracy would be based on the distance between masters and slaves, Brahmins and Chandalas – a metaphysical project which Nietzsche found encapsulated in the Manusmriti. In that way, if the metaphysics of caste has infected even the European philosophical tradition, then Ambedkar’s confrontation with Nietzsche has to take him as the modern Manu. And Kawade’s book stages this confrontation pellucidly.

Reconciling the irreconciable

In six chapters, two on Nietzsche and the Manusmriti, two on Ambedkar and Manu, and the final two on Ambedkar against Nietzsche, Kawade lays out the philosophical stakes at play in this conjunction.

In the first two chapters, Kawade reads Nietzsche as both a votary of Manu and his critic – someone who takes up the term Chandala and re-evaluates it. In doing so, he gives it new meanings and places it in a novel conceptual vocabulary where the mark of the Chandala sticks to the genius revolting against European modernity’s reduction of masters into slaves. In the next set of chapters, Kawade shows us how Ambedkar took on the ghost of Manu while at the same time disavowing his own status as a modern Manu as the architect of the Indian Constitution. And in the final set of chapters, Kawade reconstructs Ambedkar’s critique of Nietzsche, pitting the latter’s moral pluralism against the former’s moral universalism.

In the last instance, the provocative comparison between the two iconoclasts leads to the scales being firmly tilted towards Ambedkar’s moral universalism rather than Nietzsche’s moral pluralism. But this proceeds by a Nietzscheanising of Ambedkar and an Ambedkarising of Nietzsche. Brahminism, which was thought by Nietzsche as representative of a metaphysics of mastery, becomes transformed through this conjunction into slave morality. This reversal, through which Kawade demonstrates how Brahminism is not an ethics of mastery but instead an example of slave morality, is adroitly accomplished in the book. In doing so, Kawade provides a new and very useful perspective on Brahminism for future scholars of caste.

In my own work, I have been trying to map out a new field which I call Subcontinental philosophy – a categorisation of thinkers from the Indian subcontinent in the early 20th century as creatively trying to transform their inheritance of both European and Indian or Islamic philosophy through the method of conjunction or comparison. Ambedkar is certainly one of the exemplars of this method and Kawade’s book demonstrates how astute a comparativist he himself was – not someone invested in comparison for comparison’s sake but for a project of radical equality that could only come about through the destruction of the caste system, both in its ancient forms as well as its modern metaphysical avatars. In having demonstrated how Ambedkar is the archetypal Subcontinental philosopher, Kawade’s book can join the ranks of those of Aishwary Kumar’s Radical Equality and Soumyabrata Choudhury’s Ambedkar and Other Immortals (coincidentally, all books published or republished by Navayana).

It is to Kawade’s credit that throughout this analysis of two great thinkers, he never accepts a facile flattening of each into the other, nor does he pit them against each other in a pointless agon of good versus bad. Rather, he focuses throughout on an aporia – that the two are both irreconcilable and must be reconciled. And the shared “premise or promise” which can bring them together is what he calls an “authentic ethics of mastery”. A strange phrase, but one which captures the reconcilable irreconcilability of the two in their attempt to rethink what the human can be, beyond both premodern hierarchies and modern liberal platitudes.

In the end, both Ambedkar and Nietzsche are not negationists but affirmers of life, their tirades against religion always taking the form of a return to a religion of life, even if they speculatively refer back to historical figures as different as Buddha and Zarathustra. Both Christianity and Brahmanical Hinduism remain by their standards world-denying and life-denying forces. The “annihilation” of both is not nihilistic but an affirmation of life; a leap beyond the futility of the master-slave hierarchy and an entry into an authentic ethics of mastery, where each and every one can potentially be both master and mastered by the forces that constitute them.

The Ambedkar–Nietzsche Provocations: The Genius of the Chandala and the Gospel of the Superman, Ankit Kawade, Navayana.