B. R. Ambedkar and the Study of Religion at Columbia University: Castes in India, Gender and Primitivity
By Rohini Shukla
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar arrived at New York in the July of 1913 to pursue graduate studies at Columbia University. He was 22 at the time. He told his biographer, C. B. Khairmode, that he thoroughly enjoyed himself for the first few months in New York. Compared to his experiences in India, things were pleasantly different--Ambedkar played tennis and badminton, went dancing and sledding, and attended classes with men and women from across the world. He shared dormitories with other students and spent long nights conversing with friends. Sayajirao III Gaekwad, the Maharaja of Baroda and an avid supporter of library reform and higher education in India, had sponsored Ambedkar’s international graduate study.[i] One night around 3 a.m., as Ambedkar hung out in his dormitory, he thought to himself, “What am I doing? I left the loving members of my family thousands of miles away and came here to study—and I am just side-lining my studies and amusing myself—and that too, on the Government’s money!”[ii] That night Ambedkar decided that he would be more focussed in his intellectual explorations at Columbia.
As a researcher for the digital project ‘Dr. B. R. Ambedkar: his life and work,’ headed by Professor Frances Pritchett, I spent some time in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML) at Columbia exploring what it may have been like for Ambedkar to be a graduate student in the 1910s. How were disciplines organized at the time? What kind of intellectual conversations was he part of? Who was he in conversation with? Which concepts, methods, and questions were discussed in classrooms and other public forums? Joanna Rios at the RBML patiently guided me through the archived bulletin announcements and information catalogues of academic years 1913-14, 1914-15, and 1915-1916, and the summers of 1913, 1914, and 1915, enabling me to begin exploring these questions about a small but foundational part of Ambedkar’s intellectual history.
Prior to 1957, all graduate studies at Columbia were organized into three Faculties: Political Science, Pure Science, and Philosophy. The Faculty of Political Science included Economics, History, Mathematical Statistics, Public Law and Government, Sociology, and Anthropology. Pure Science included Astronomy, Botany, Geology, Geography, Mineralogy, Mathematics, Physics, Zoology, and Psychology. The Faculty of Philosophy included Classical Philology, Chinese, English and Comparative Literature, Germanic Languages, Indo-Iranian Languages, Japanese, Linguistics, Philosophy, Religion, Romance Languages, Semitic Languages, and Slavic Languages. The early and middle years of the twentieth century was a period of crisis for Philosophy as a discipline, or more specifically, metaphysics as a branch of Philosophy. It was losing credibility as a foundational “science,” and this eventually led to a reorganization of disciplines at universities.[iii] At Columbia, although Philosophy continued to have a place of pride, its crisis took institutional form in 1946, when Psychology moved from the Faculty of Philosophy to Pure Science, and Anthropology to Political Science. Ambedkar studied at Columbia before the Faculty of Philosophy was thus demoted. The 1910s were, therefore, years of relative inter-disciplinarity, and this seems to have matched Ambedkar’s own wide-ranging interests.
The RBML has a record of all courses Columbia offered in the 1910s. Several years ago, Frances Pritchett transcribed an exhaustive list of courses Ambedkar took from a dark and blurry xerox. Using that list, I researched and compiled corresponding course descriptions that were drafted by the respective faculty members. Some descriptions include mandatory readings and course objectives, some include broad themes, questions, and concepts that the courses explored. When Eleanor Zelliot delivered a speech at Columbia University in 1991, she rightly expressed a careful and measured scepticism about being able to understand the exact nature of Columbia’s influence on Ambedkar’s thinking. She was working primarily with Ambedkar’s own writings that explicitly refer to his study at Columbia, letters he exchanged with some professors, and the list of courses Frances Pritchett had transcribed. Today, I think it is possible to move towards relatively greater clarity on the question of the exact nature of Columbia’s influence on Ambedkar’s thinking with the help of these course descriptions.
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar with Wallace Stevens at Columbia University after receiving an honorary doctorate from the University for his service as “a great social reformer and valiant upholder of human rights”, on June 5, 1952. Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons
In the beginning of Ambedkar’s coursework, he seemed more focused on the study of economics in the Faculty of Political Science. During his later semesters, however, he took fewer courses in Economics and instead gravitated towards Anthropology, Sociology, History, and Philosophy, all of which were grouped together in the Faculty of Philosophy. Importantly, this disciplinary cluster had a shared interest in the study of Religion and seems to have provided an important draw for Ambedkar.
As Horace Friess has argued, the 1910s were important for the study of Religion at Columbia and the institutions with which it was closely allied. Two figures strike as significant--Raymond Collyer Knox (1876-1952) the first resident chaplain, and Wendell T. Bush (1866-1941) a professor of Philosophy. In as early as 1908, Knox proposed that Columbia College offer courses on “the historical study of the Bible, with the full aid of modern critical scholarship.”[iv] Knox firmly believed that the critical study of the Bible is an important part of liberal education, but the university administration had reservations about courses that might potentially infringe on the students’ religious freedom. Friess suggests that these reservations may have delayed instituting such a course at Columbia College, but Knox did, significantly, offer it in the women’s division of Columbia--Barnard College, until 1915. “If courses in Bible study with critical, historical methods are now embodied in the curriculum of most liberal colleges, one should not forget that this ground had to be won, against both religious and secular resistance.”[v] Knox was the pioneering figure who began this process in the early 1910s at Columbia.
Around the same time, W. T. Bush, who was influenced by William James and George Santayana at Harvard, and by John Dewey at Columbia[vi], began teaching religions from across the world with a pedagogic focus on empirical science.[vii] Between 1911 and 1938, Bush used all kinds of artifacts to aid his teaching. He believed that religion was an important aspect of how humans imagined and saw beauty in reality, and it was in tangible objects that this imagination and beauty are captured. Given his experimental ways, he “introduced his students in the ‘philosophy of religion’ to a wealth of historical and anthropological literature-also, to photographs and objections of ceremonial art.”[viii]
Around the same time, cultural modernism was emerging as a critique of evolutionary theories of race, ethnicity, gender, and primitive religion in the study of Anthropology at Columbia .[ix] The evolutionary framework, pioneered by E. B. Taylor in Primitive Culture (1871), came to be vehemently critiqued during Franz Boas’ appointment at Columbia starting 1896. While Boas did consider primitive religion or primitivity in general to be incompatible with modernity, “the consequential point for Boas was that the difference between primitive and civilized was not one of intelligence or biology but of cultural inheritance”[x] where “different levels of cultural achievement could be explained as products of environment and historical experience rather than any universal evolutionary process.”[xi] This was a pivotal shift in American anthropological theory about the many societies of the world and their systems of differentiation vis-à-vis one another. Boas suggested that humans made the rules that bound and divided the societies they live in, and that these rules had to be studied without tracing them to the supposed biological truths that undergirded racial, gendered, religious, and ethnic variation. Anthropology at Columbia was thus animated by the theoretical ambition of establishing why and how “a science that seemed to prove that humanity had unbridgeable divisions had to be countered by a science that showed it didn’t.”[xii]
The nature of this ambition and the problems, conundrums, and questions related to it were discussed and debated in the vibrant community of anthropologists of which Ambedkar was certainly a part. Ambedkar was a student of A. Goldenweiser, who was a student and colleague of Boas. Specifically, Ambedkar took a series of courses offered by Goldenweiser called ‘General Ethnology: Technology and Primitive Man,’ ‘General Ethnology: Types of Primitive Religion and Mythology,’ and ‘General Ethnology: Types of Primitive Religion and Social Organization.’[xiii] Boas and Dewey simultaneously conducted a joint seminar in Philosophy on the “examination of the evolutionary and historical methods in the study of the intellect.”[xiv] Goldenweiser ran a bi-monthly colloquium that seems to have been associated with this seminar. He also taught a course called ‘Primitive Religion’ in which he specifically explored theories on religion by Spencer, Tylor, Frazer, Lang, Lévy-Bruhl, Durkheim, Hôffding, and James, with ethnographic illustrations of animism, fetishism, ancestor-worship, mana, totemism, and mythology.[xv]
This milieu contextualized the Ambedkar’s essay ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanisms, Genesis, and Development,’ which he presented on the 9th of May, 1916, for the course ‘General Ethnology: Types of Primitive Religion and Social Organization.’ Ambedkar begins this essay by likening the student of ethnology to a guide who takes foreign visitors around historic sites because the two display “social institutions to view, with all the objectiveness humanly possible, and inquire(s) into their origin and function.”[xvi] “Many of us,” he says, “have witnessed local, national or international expositions of material objects that make up the sum total of human civilization. But few can entertain the idea of there being such a thing as an exposition of human institutions.”[xvii] Intent on performing his oratory skills, Ambedkar thus set the stage to display the human institution of caste in front of a community of scholars that was most likely familiar with the critical study of the Bible and Bush’s experimental pedagogy, and certainly familiar with ideas relating to Boas and Goldenweiser’s cultural modernism.
In this essay, which is as much about primitivity, social evolution, and modernity, as it is about caste, Ambedkar says that “no civilized society of today presents more survivals of primitive times than does the Indian society.” What are these primitive survivals according to Ambedkar? The institution of caste may seem like a likely candidate to us today, but Ambedkar had a fairly counter-intuitive answer. He states the main premise of his essay as follows: “One of these primitive survivals, to which I wish particularly to draw your attention, is the Custom of Exogamy. The prevalence of exogamy in the primitive worlds is a fact too well-known to need any explanation.” Deeming the primitive custom of exogamy a fact--a self-evident fact that, Ambedkar argued, eventually transformed into endogamy--fit well with his intellectual milieu. Ambedkar suggests that caste distinctions are reified and sustained because the essentially “unnatural” practice of endogamy is imposed on exogamy by the highest rungs of the caste hierarchy. He thereby establishes that, one, customs of caste and gender violence (sati, child-marriage, and enforced widowhood) are fundamentally imbricated, and two, these customs are not undergirded by biological tendencies that naturally extend into social differences. As Sharmila Rege poignantly puts it in her analysis of Ambedkar’s use of crude terms such as “surplus man” and “surplus woman” in this essay, “Ambedkar was (in fact) laying the base for what was, properly speaking, a feminist take on caste.”[xviii] At this very base is a speculatively argued but key dissociation of caste-gender violence and biological essentialism, and this, to my mind, is one of Ambedkar’s take-aways from critical discourses on primitivity emerging in the Faculty of Philosophy at Columbia. This dissociation marks the beginning of Ambedkar’s longstanding theoretical explorations of caste.
Ambedkar published this essay in Indian Antiquary soon after his presentation and remained proud of it till as late at 1944. In the preface to the third edition of his monumental work The Annihilation of Caste, he said, “A new edition has been in demand for a long time. It was my intention to recast the essay so as to incorporate into it another essay of mine called "Castes in India, their Origin and their Mechanism," which appeared in the issue of the Indian Antiquary Journal for May 1917. But as I could not find time, and as there is very little prospect of my being able to do so, and as the demand for it from the public is very insistent, I am content to let this be a mere reprint of the Second Edition.”
While scholars often refer to Ambedkar’s essay ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanisms, Genesis, and Development,’ with an apologetic tone (he was only 25), his graduate study and experience at Columbia continues to be of utmost importance for at least two reasons. The first reason pushes one to reflect on the politics of knowledge production in American Universities—what happened after the 1910s, after and despite Ambedkar? Indeed, Ambedkar’s pioneering presence at Columbia marks the early stages of a long history of Dalit scholars’ experiences in American Universities and Dalit scholarship on social difference produced in English and vernaculars from these Universities. And secondly, which ideas and what about them stayed with Ambedkar across the interim years—from being a young graduate student to becoming a leading anti-caste figure, the primary architect of the Indian constitution, a prolific writer during India’s nationalist struggle, and the leader of a mass conversion campaign--remains to be explored holistically. In this essay, with special attention to ideas, questions, and methods central to the study of Religion in the Faculty of Philosophy, I have tried to explore Ambedkar’s study at Columbia.
Rohini Shukla is a Ph.D. student in South Asian Religions at Columbia University. Her primary research interest is on gendered labor and literary production in early and medieval Marathi literature. Her other research interests are B.R. Ambedkar's intellectual history, medieval Indian philosophy and hagiographies, gender and sexuality studies, and community formation. Before joining Columbia University as an M.A. student (2016-18), she taught logic (2015-16) at the Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts, Pune. She also did an M.A. (2013-15) in Philosophy from the Manipal Center for Philosophy and Humanities, and a B.A. (2009-12) in Philosophy from Savitribai Phule Pune University.
The author would like to thank Professors Anupama Rao, Elizabeth Castelli, Frances Pritchett, Jack Hawley, and Rachel McDermott for their encouragement, help, and valuable feedback. She also thanks all participants in the ‘World Religions’ and ‘Transmission’ seminars offered at the Department of Religion, Columbia University. Most importantly, the RBML staff for helping her through the university archives and Nikhil Ramachandran for discussions on the field of cultural anthropology.
Notes:
[i] For more on Gaekwad Maharaj see Murari Lal Nagar, Shri Sayajirao Gaikwad: Maharaja of Baroda the Prime Promoter of Public Libraries (MO: International Library Center, 1992).
[ii] C. B. Khairmode, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar Vol 1 (Mumbai: Sugava Prakashan, 1952), 79. My translation, edited by FWP..
[iii] For a summary of how Philosophy as a discipline came to be in crisis, see Michael Lackey, "Modernist Anti-Philosophicalism and Virginia Woolf's Critique of Philosophy," Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 4 (2006): 76-98. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831881.
[iv] Horace Friess, ‘Growth in Study of Religion at Columbia University, 1924-1954.’ The Review of Religion 19 (1954), 14.
[v] Ibid., 14-15.
[vi] Despite Eleanor Zelliot’s careful skepticism, she ascertains that Ambedkar was highly influenced by Dewey’s pragmatism. Scott Stroud has done extensive and thorough work on the relationship between Ambedkar’s political thought and Dewey’s pragmatism. See Stroud, Scott R. (2018) "Creative Democracy, Communication, and the Uncharted Sources of Bhimrao Ambedkar’s Deweyan Pragmatism," Education and Culture, Vol. 34 (1); https://www.forwardpress.in/2019/06/pragmatist-riddles-in-ambedkars-riddles-in-hinduism/; Stroud, Scott, What Did Bhimrao Ambedkar Learn from John Dewey's 'Democracy and Education'? (2017). The Pluralist, Vol. 12(2), p. 78-103, 2017. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2994265. It is beyond doubt that Ambedkar considered Dewey an intellectual mentor and was influenced by his ideas. In this paper, however, my objective is to paint a much broader picture of Ambedkar’s intellectual milieu--a picture that encompasses several disciplines that were part of the larger Faculty of Philosophy at Columbia University, and several professors in addition to Dewey.
[vii] I am refraining from using the term World Religions because, based on Friess’ work, it seems that the World Religions paradigm was not clearly instituted at Columbia in the 1910s.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 59-94.
[x] Ibid., 75.
[xi] Ibid., 74.
[xii] Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (New York: Doubleday, 2019), 12.
[xiii] For the intellectual history of ‘ethnology,’ see chapter 3 of Gods of the Upper Air.
[xiv] Columbia University Graduate Faculties, Columbia University Bulletin of Information Division of Philosophy, Psychology, and Anthropology Announcement 1915-1916 (New York: Columbia University, 1915), 19.
[xv] See Columbia University Graduate Faculties, Columbia University Bulletin of Information Division of Philosophy, Psychology, and Anthropology Announcement 1915-1916, (New York: Columbia University, 1915); Columbia University Graduate Faculties, Columbia University Bulletin of Information Division of Philosophy, Psychology, and Anthropology Announcement 1914-1915, (New York: Columbia University, 1914).
[xvi] Ambedkar: 1993, 5.
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Sharmila Rege ed. Against the Madness of Manu: B. R. Ambedkar’s Writings on Brahminical Patriarchy (New Delhi: Navayana, 2013), 61.