One of twentieth-century India’s great polymaths, statesmen, and militant philosophers of equality, B. R. Ambedkar spent his life battling Untouchability and instigating the end of the caste system. In his 1948 book The Untouchables, he sought to trace the origin of the Dalit caste. Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men is an annotated selection from this work, just as relevant now, when the oppression of and discrimination against Dalits remains pervasive.
Ambedkar offers a deductive, and at times a speculative, history to propose a genealogy of Untouchability. He contends that modern-day Dalits are descendants of those Buddhists who were fenced out of caste society and rendered Untouchable by a resurgent Brahminism since the fourth century BCE. The Brahmins, whose Vedic cult originally involved the sacrifice of cows, adapted Buddhist ahimsa and vegetarianism to stigmatize outcaste Buddhists who were consumers of beef. The outcastes were soon relegated to the lowliest of occupations and prohibited from participation in civic life. To unearth this lost history, Ambedkar undertakes a forensic examination of a wide range of Brahminic literature. Heavily annotated with an emphasis on putting Ambedkar and recent scholarship into conversation, Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men assumes urgency as India witnesses unprecedented violence against Dalits and Muslims in the name of cow protection.
- Table of Contents
- Introduction: No Democracy Without Beef: Ambedkar, Identity, and Nationhood, by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd
- Fool’s Errand: A Note on the Notes to and Selection from Ambedkar’s The Untouchables, by S. Anand and Alex George
- Selections from B.R Ambedkar’s The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables?
- Preface
- Part IV: New theories of the origin of Untouchability.
- Chapter 9: Contempt for Buddhists as the root of Untouchability
- Chapter 10: Beef-eating as the root of Untouchability
- Part V: The new theories and some hard questions
- Chapter 11: Did the Hindus never eat beef?
- Chapter 12: Why did non-Brahmins give up beef-eating?
- Chapter 13: What made the Brahmins become vegetarians?
- Chapter 14: Why should beef-eating make Broken Men Untouchable?
- Part VI: Untouchability and the date of its birth
- Chapter 15: The Impure and the Untouchables
- Chapter 16: When did Broken Men become Untouchables?
- The Broken Men theory: Beginnings of a Reading, by Alex George and S. Anand
- References
- Acknowledgments
- Index
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