B DuBois and the Process of Liberation

In one of the essays, ‘The American Experience of B R Ambedkar’ included in her book, From Untouchable to Dalit, Eleanor Zelliot writes: “A direct comparison between the Negroes of America and Untouchables of India does not appear in Ambedkar’s writings.” She may be right, in a way, but Ambedkar does make comparison between slaves and untouchables, cites parallel cases and also shows how Hindus lack social and public conscience as against the white Americans.1 The reason why Zelliot finds no direct comparison between the two oppressed groups is that Ambedkar found no racial basis for untouchability. From this she deduces that Ambedkar was not influenced by the struggle of Negroes (they prefer to call themselves African Americans or Blacks) in America but used his “knowledge of American culture to analyse his own country’s social situation”. Thus, according to her, the American experience of Ambedkar “seems to be chiefly in developing his commitment to a pragmatic, flexible democratic system”. Zelliot seems to limit Ambedkar’s interest in America to the effort made by white American to create an egalitarian democracy.2 For her Ambedkar’s experience of Black Americans counts for nothing. Apart from the trappings of American democracy to which Ambedkar was exposed, there was another reality, the Black American reality, that was struggling to assert itself. I believe that the Black American component of his American experience has been glossed over or has not been sufficiently researched. Since Black struggle is integral to American experience, it is difficult to keep this part out of Ambedkar’s experience of America. The period of Ambedkar’s stay at Columbia University (1913-16) coincided with the most crucial period in Black American history. It was the period of Harlem Renaissance when Black American writers and thinkers were trying to separate those aspects of their existence that made them different from the whites. In fact, they were struggling to free themselves from the white imagination which had defined their existence for them. Their struggle did not end with the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment of the constitution of the US. It continued long after the period of Reconstruction both in the south and the north. Malcolm X, in the first chapter of his autobiography titled ‘Nightmare’ mentions the warnings and threats given by the Ku Klux Klan raiders to his family that they better leave the town. Malcolm’s father was a dedicated organiser for Marcus Aurelius Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The incident took place before Malcolm X’s birth.3 The struggle intensified in the 1950s and the 1960s moving from civil rights (non-violent struggle of Martin Luther King Jr) to human rights (violent struggle represented by Malcolm X). Black power movement bordering on separatism and Black Muslim movement were other manifestations of that struggle. As late as 1992 Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote that “racism has been a great national tragedy”.4 It is not surprising, therefore, that in India a large number of dalit writers, particularly in Maharashtra, compared their struggle with that of Blacks in America. The Dalit Panther Movement was modelled on Black Panther Movement. V S Naipaul writes in India: A Million Mutinies Now that Namdeo Dhasal’s career was like the career of a number of Black Power people in the US.5 Sharad Kumar Limbale, one of the prominent dalit writers, has written his PhD dissertation on Negroes and dalits. Even if it is conceded that the untouchables in India were of the same racial stock as the caste Hindus, although it has not been conclusively established as yet, it does not follow that the comparison between the two cannot be made. James Baldwin, while emphasising the uniqueness of Black experience in America, finds similarities between the Blacks and the oppressed groups in other countries. In a piece on James Baldwin, Stephen Spender writes: “If the Negro problem is resolvable, the only useful way of discussing it is to consider American Negroes in a situation comparable to that of workers and Negroes elsewhere (like dalits in India). To write as though Negroes do not exist anywhere except in America is to induce despair, to suggest that in America, white and black, cannot become integrated to the (rather limited) extent to which they have been, for example, in Brazil. It is in fact playing in the hands of black Muslims whose position is that America – world even – has to choose between having but black or nothing but white people by which it is meant that it would be undemocratic to have nothing but the black majority.”6 The comparison between the oppressed groups is natural despite different historical situations because the process of liberation is almost similar. Although the direct comparison between the Blacks and untouchables is rather limited in Ambedkar’s writings, the influence of America, including Black America, goes deeper than direct comparisons can show. I find marked similarities between W E B DuBois and B R Ambedkar in the process of liberation B R Ambedkar, W E B DuBois and the Process of Liberation