TRANSCRIPT BY KATHERINE VANDERMEL

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Introduction

Duration: 20:04

KH: [00:00:00] | Hi, I'm Khadija. I am a rising senior at Barnard College and I study history. I'm here with Professor Rao, who teaches at Barnard and Columbia and is trained as a historical anthropologist, focusing on issues of race and caste in South Asia. Professor Rao works on the Ambedkar Initiative. I'm also with Priya Pai, a recent 2020 Columbia College graduate who doubled-majored in computer science and English literature, specializing in post-colonial narratives. Priya was a board member of South Asian Feminisms Alliance during her time at Columbia.

 So I first want to ask you, Professor Rao, if you can just tell us a little bit about the Ambedkar Initiative and what you hope to achieve with the project.

AR: [00:00:40] | Thanks, Khadija. I'm happy to say a little more about the Ambedkar Initiative, which we started in 2018—about a century after B.R. Ambedkar studied at Columbia University. This is a project of critical commemoration, which thinks about the distinctive legacies of a figure who stretched ideas of democracy and equality in fundamentally new directions, who exerted enormous influence in shaping and imagining the structure of the world's largest democracy, India. And so we want to think about reverberations between the world's largest democracy and the world's oldest democracy, the United States. 

But we also want to think about how Ambedkar's own intellectual formation might open up new ways to understand the history of the University, ways to turn the University inside out, if you will, to open up the University to novel gaze, to rethinking its relationship with its neighbors. For instance, with Harlem, but also the links between the University and the world and the ways in which the figure of Ambedkar might allow us to do so. And so the Initiative is really thinking through projects of public humanities and critical and collaborative pedagogy, as a way in which to mark this extraordinary figure, and the ways in which he begins to allow us to create new sets of linkages—to understand new intellectual formations and forms of political solidarity, and allyship that really function as a kind of bridge between the past and the present, if you will. 

K [00:02:26] | Can you tell us a little bit more about the significance of the interwar period? What opportunities for action and thought were created by the various transnational currents of this period? And then could you tell us a little bit about the links between race and caste today? How do we see this kind of cross-border solidarity and globalism taking on new forms? I think especially given the Black Lives Matter movement and the globalization of anti-black racism and resistance to it.

A [00:02:33] | So let's think about the interwar period, but also go back maybe a little bit before that. Now, the interwar period was preceded by 1905, the Russo-Japanese war, which was really absolutely crucial for people in the colonized world. Because this was the first time that we actually had an Asian power that had defeated a European one—this was the way that the 1905 Russo-Japanese war was cast in people's imaginations. We also have 1917 and the significance of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Revolution, which opens up an altogether new understanding of political subjectivity. The capacity for mass action, added, in fact, brings to the fore a completely new political subject. Right? The so-called working classes, the proletariat as actually the ones who make history. Right? They're ignored. They're unseen. And yet it is their labor and it is their actual work in the world that is capable of transforming it. 

So, I think the interwar period was this very important moment where we were beginning to see anti-colonial movements creating connections between each other. We're seeing a period where people are really on the move. People are mobile. They are moving in fugitive ways. They are moving because they are interested in fomenting revolution. And then we also have this movement of new political ideas and the time, new ideas, whether of social democracy or Marxism. 

But we're also beginning to have very important arguments, for instance, coming from the perspective of Black Thought, anti-caste thinking and so forth, where the question of minority rights, the rights of subaltern peoples who actually are the world's majority but are dispossessed, but are marginalized, really comes to the fore. Right? And this is also a period of enormous experimentation. We could think about even someone like Gandhi and his experiments, the ashram experiments, the idea of re-ethicizing of the self, the performance of degraded labor. We have people exploring what today we might think of as experiments with lifestyle. So new ways of being, questions around sexuality, around gender, new ways of creating social collectives. So this is really the great significance of the interwar period, more broadly speaking. 

You know, today we are in the middle of a protest, global protests against anti-black racism. The Black Lives Matter movement has become absolutely crucial as a global force, especially, I think, for young people. So your question about what do we take away from the past? What does that tell us today? I think what we can take away from this past that I've been speaking about is a history of affinity, of comradeship, of solidarity and really of unexpected connections. Very often the connections were awkward. They were contradictory because people are contradictory in both their political proclivities, but also how they understand movement building. But I think we have the history of the Black Panthers who inspired the formation of the Dalit Panthers in 1972. We're seeing connections at the level of human rights. Ambedkar writes 1946 to Du Bois and says, "Hey, share with me the letter and the request, the demand that you've placed before the U.N. about, you know, black racism, about American racism and a global response to it." Something which was kind of, you know, a “name and shame” on Du Bois's part. And Ambedkar says, "I'd very much like to see that letter, please, because we would like to make a similar argument about India's untouchables."

K [00:07:04] | So you've given us some really great historical framing and contextualization. I want to shift the focus now to think a little bit about the process of creating this project, which brings together an incredibly diverse and cross disciplinary group of students. And I know you prioritized democratizing the process of knowledge production in doing this project, and so I want to hear a little bit about how as a collective, you facilitated new ways of teaching and learning. And then I also want to think a little bit about how, at the same time as the pandemic has limited our ability to be physically together, it has also limited our access to the physical archive.

A [00:07:41] | To my mind, the initiative is only so good as the students who participate in it, right? I can enable, I can bring people together, but each iteration of this initiative is going to have a different force, a different flavor, a different rhythm. And I think that really depends on the students who constitute it. So very briefly, there were two kinds of students that I see who came into the project. One, students who were very interested in South Asian history. They wanted to know more about modern South Asia. And as a consequence of that, they got exposed to a number of figures that they perhaps would not have been exposed to. And they got to see the history of modern South Asia in a distinctive way, i.e. by thinking about the question of caste and democracy and not merely thinking about Gandhi as a heroic figure. They thought about the complicated and fraught and really politically charged histories of Partition, and what that meant. And so for the student in the classroom who is thinking about South Asian history, thinking about this part of the world, the world's largest democracy, but also a place that in the consequence of the war on terror, had become newly politically salient. I think rethinking South Asian history was one way to enter this project.

The second has been students who have been very interested in thinking about Ambedkar together with scholars like Fanon or Gramsci. Or, you know, Du Bois and other really radical figures, Phule and others. You know, people who've been interested in global histories of democracy, but also social theory. 

So we all came together, and I want to say it's a kind of beautiful dance in many ways that, you know, people came together and we decided in some sense to both collaborate around the figure of Ambedkar. But each of you brought very particular skills and interests to bear on how you saw the interwar, what you understood of the relationship, let's say, between caste and Black thought, and distinctive interests in minority histories. So where was gender? Where was the question of sexuality? Where were women in this project? And so on. And so each iteration, as I'm saying, will bring out a different aspect of Ambedkar's time at Columbia, but also the relationship between the University and the world at large.

So the democratization of knowledge has also happened with a pandemic. The pandemic has actually democratized lack of access. So we are all, in a sense, without access to the archives we want to enter. In the context of that, we did, I think, two kinds of things as part of our working together. One, we, of course, looked at the significant online resources that exist. We made great use of diasporic archives, resources that were cataloging and memorializing the South Asian diaspora in the kind of alternative ways that I've been speaking about. So the South Asian American Digital Archive is one, but there is also a site called Radical Desi. There are sites in India called Dalit Camera, that take on interviewing important activists and intellectuals who otherwise would not come into the mainstream at all. So there's really been a kind of proliferation of social media as a consequence of not having access to the physical archive. So we've seen social media, we've seen online archives, but we're also seeing something that I believe we're doing, which is people are beginning to create their own archive. They are beginning to signify or create a significance to the ways in which different kinds of material, different kinds of evidence can be pulled together to create both archival importance, but also archival regularity. 

And so I should just end by noting that I think any act like this of creating or self-making the archive means that it forces us to also think about questions of ethics and responsibility. And so we have to think about what we're using, where it comes from, and how we put material out into the world.

K [00:12:13] | So you've spoken a little bit about this kind of turn to the digital that has been necessitated by the challenges raised by the pandemic. And I think that's something I want to hear a little bit more about, especially given that, for most of us doing this project, the podcast is a very new way to do this kind of historical and academic work.

 A [00:12:32] | Absolutely. This is where you catch me, the teacher, becoming the student, because, you know, I got very interested in questions of spatial mapping, of digital humanities, I suppose, ways in which one could think about accessing hidden histories, hidden archives, dark archives and so forth. I got exposed to this through colleagues of mine who were much more facile and familiar with the world of digital humanities. But I think I also began to think a few years ago, three or four years ago really now, about the fact that students in my classroom—and Priya is a perfect example of it—that I was beginning to see students in my classroom who had a deep commitment to social thought or historical work or at the graphic work. But they were also coming with these fantastic technological skills. They knew how digital humanities worked. They had an altogether different way of making sense and even seeing things because they had been in that space of let's say, computational science, too. So this was really where for me, the Initiative, the Ambedkar Initiative, was so rich and significant because I found myself relying on my students and the knowledge that they brought. I wanted to get into their brains, and say, how do you see this? What can we do with this material? 

And so I think I want to turn to Priya, who, as I said, was one of the students in the classroom who brought those skills to bear. I found out about it late in the day and she can say a little bit about how she then got pulled into some of the organizing work on campus and also the [digital humanities] work that she's been doing and how she was able to help us with it. But really, I want to, you know, gesture to and give over to Priya to actually speak about the specifics of this.

PP: [00:14:30] | So, you know, on the one hand, we are creating podcasts or creating a finding aide of archival materials. This will give access to people who aren't able to physically come to Columbia and we'll give access to these materials, to communities who these materials would mean most to. I really do see this digital project as a way to challenge the power dynamics of the archive and, you know, to digitize the historical record and completely rethink the way history is made and preserved and even thought about because new voices can be heard and make themselves heard because of this project. But, you know, like I said, as I studied computer science and when we're thinking about, you know, designing websites and creating materials, we have to make sure that we're not replicating the barriers that modern issues in history and theory have. 

So what we're creating and finding is a podcast at the Ambedkar Initiative, where we're making sure we're creating a low tech site, that won't advance flashy plug-ins and, you know, advanced technologies because our main point is not to necessarily make this flashy technological thing, but rather to have an entry point into access and giving access to materials that have previously been kept in the confines of a university and have been only accessible to Columbia students. 

So, you know, I can give a few examples of the way we're trying to manifest this idea of access, you know, specifically with our podcast for example, we are trying to provide transcripts because, you know, we imagine that this is going to allow for the opportunity for translation, for people to engage with our words, and phrasings, and ideas. And actually, you know, talk with us. We encourage, you know, collaboration. And we're trying to actively engage  the archive with the public and with communities who can now add to the digital historical record. Another example is we're going to be publicizing annotations of various texts and providing options for the public to add to our annotations. This will be moderated, of course. But, you know, we're really trying to manifest this idea of adding to the cumulative knowledge-making process online. And I think that's the beauty of the digital space, because we can now engage our work and engage with materials with people we don't have to be geographically tied to. And it allows us to connect with a host of ideas and concepts that we haven't maybe even heard of otherwise.

 So, as you know, my grounding in both fields kind of allows me to help us find new modes of presenting history and presenting the archive. And, you know, as scholars and students, we can now engage with materials and go about learning in a completely different way. So, you know, we are thinking about different types of space and how we can represent this type of space in the digital world. 

*So, you know, we have the geographic space on one level, where we can kind of, you know, have this mapping right? Where scholars who, you know, briefly collided in the same space and time and, you know, had this one conversation, but it sparked a whole idea of like collaboration and intersectionality of ideas: we kind of represent that on a map. We can track people's voyages. 

*We also have the theoretical space. We can create a map of ideas and  a timeline of ideas, too, and see which one came from another. What stemmed from what? What are offshoots? We're able to completely think about theory and think about concepts in a more interrelated way.

 *But we also have the imagined space. Right? So we can imagine things that never even happened. So what if Du Bois and Ambedkar had met earlier than they did and represent that somehow on the Internet, and really allow this space for just pushing the bounds of history of what is available in the physical and transcend those dimensions, transcend what we've previously thought was possible in this new digital space.

K [00:19:36] | Okay. Thank you so much for this really brilliant introduction to the podcast series. As we've heard, the Ambedkar Initiative is embarking on a really exciting project, one that's fundamentally collaborative and multidisciplinary, seeking to democratize knowledge production and think really seriously about the intersection of digital humanities and history creation. As Priya and Professor Rao made clear, this is at its heart, a public-facing project, one that we hope you'll all engage in over the next weeks and beyond.

 

EPISODE ONE

A [00:00:01] | Welcome to the Ambedkar Initiative Podcast Series, in which students at Columbia University discuss the research on B.R. Ambedkar, a Columbia alum and one of the twentieth century's foremost thinkers on caste and democracy. I'm Anupama Rao, Director of the Ambedkar Initiative and Professor of History. In this episode, Layla Varkey speaks with Yosan Alemu about one of Ambedkar's great texts, "Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development", which was written in 1916 as a seminar paper for a course in anthropology. Layla is a master's student studying international and global history, and Yosan is an undergraduate studying comparative literature. 

L [00:00:47] | So I think for the first question, I just want to start off with asking you to speak a little bit about your own scholarly interests, and how you came to this Initiative and how your interests relate to the particular issues that you are trying to better understand in "Castes in India".

Y [00:01:04] | Thank you, Layla, for the introduction. I am currently studying comparative literature in the College, and within that I focus on the African diaspora and Blackness as a category for thought and thinking. I first came across Ambedkar in a course I took in the fall of 2019 and it was here that I began to really admire his work and writings.

Most of my academic study has been in African and Black studies and as such, when I was reading Castes in India for the first time, I was initially drawn to how he identifies both caste and race. And later on, I was drawn to his thinking on the question of gender and sexuality. I would say these were among the first things that stuck out to me and still do. I am not an Indianist whatsoever, and I think that actually allowed me to better understand his project because I was like an outsider looking into his world and into the world of caste more generally.

L [00:02:04] | Definitely. It's really fascinating to hear you speak about how you approach this text as a textualist, especially with your background in comparative literature. I'm kind of curious about, especially in the time of the pandemic, how we are doing this research from our homes. Can you say more about what the technique of annotation actually looks like for your work this summer?

Y [00:02:28] | Yeah, of course. So, for instance, my annotations for the texts are heavily focused on this question of gender and sexuality, as well as this notion of surplus woman and man that Ambedkar introduces. As someone with my background in comparative literature, I am familiar with this idea of surplus in regards to certain populations and peoples that are rendered disposable in certain social and political frameworks. 

And what Ambedkar is doing with surplus is, I say, so important in thinking about caste and the relations of marriage and desirability found within its systems. I'm also particularly fond of how he thinks about history and ideology together, and how ideology in a way is performing that history and letting history unfold. And this is something I often think about—this question of history and ideology— in relation to Blackness.

L [00:03:27] | Thank you so much. That's really fascinating, and I think the background and skills that you bring to this product are so useful and illuminating. So thinking about this, or Ambedkar's writings, I know that he chose to publish this text in the journal Indian Antiquary. I'm curious about this publication. Can you tell us a little bit about why you think he chose to publish here? And what did this choice of publication have to do with what he hoped to accomplish with the work?

Y [00:03:57] | Yeah, that's a really good question, because Indian Antiquary is a really interesting journal. It was founded by Dr. Burgess in 1872 and it was later acquired by Sir Richard Temple. And the journal focused on epigraphy, ethnology, and folklore, and it took a leading part in the recording of Indian history. Also, a lot of Indian scholars progressively dominated the journal, whereby more works were written by Indians and read in English, whereas at the beginning of the journals founding, it was mainly British and European scholars writing about India. And then Ambedkar, he was the youngest scholar published in Indian Antiquary, as well as, I believe, the only Dalit scholar. I would think he chose to publish in this journal because of its wide range and influence regarding Indology, or the study of India. Also, what's more interesting is that Ambedkar's own intellectual approach to the history and ideology of India is rather different from what else is published in the Journal.

L [00:05:05] | It's really fascinating, thank you for this history. Yeah, I guess I'm just wondering what kind of particular issues you had in mind as you were approaching "Castes in India" and why? Like what angle did you choose to enter this text with?

Y [00:05:21] | So in my reading, I approached the text by focusing on the sexual and social relations found in the caste system. And before going into that, I think it would be helpful to mention that Ambedkar stages his arguments in the text by a flow of different concepts that are all interrelated. Very much like his title suggests, he focuses on the mechanisms and logic, genesis, and development of caste and within those three main categories, he weaves in different arguments that all aid and providing his final analysis and argument of caste being forced endogamy through sexual and gendered practices. 

L [00:06:02] | Thank you. It's really, really interesting to hear a little bit about your reading of the text. And I know you've noted that there are places in the text where you see Ambedkar kind of addressing how to explain the distinctiveness of caste through an argument about gender and sexuality. I'm interested in this in this argument here. Can you speak a little bit more about these moments and their relevance to the text as a whole?

Y [00:06:27] | Yeah. Yes, I can. So Ambedkar, what Ambedkar does in trying to explain caste is to bridge Indology [together] with the new social sciences, for instance, like that of anthropology. He received his doctorate at Columbia University and although he was studying economics, he was also a student of Alexander Goldenweiser, who himself was a student of Franz Boas. So it's safe to say that both of those professors influenced his thinking to an extent, and "Castes in India" was originally given as an anthropology lecture at Columbia. So you can see all of these connections being made. 

But yes, in regards to explaining the distinctiveness of caste, Ambedkar highlights that although it was a followed social practice, Indian society was initially exogamous, meaning they married outside of social groups like other primitive or ancient societies at the time. So in that sense, endogamy, or the practice of marrying within certain social groups or castes, was forcibly laid on top of exogamy, which made caste a social formation and practice of social power that was fundamentally tied to the control of women and their sexuality.

L [00:07:41] | Mm hmm. Thank you. Yeah, really interesting. And it's really interesting to locate the beginning of some of these texts at Columbia. I didn't know that "Castes in India" started as an anthropology lecture at Columbia. And in my research as well this summer, I've been looking a lot at a book that grew out of a dissertation that was written at Columbia. So I'm really fascinated by these moments as well. Thank you for this explication of the text. It's really such a fine-grained reading that you've done. And I guess, I'm wondering if it might make sense to actually turn to a few specific places in the text so we can get a sense of some of the actual words that you've been working with or view into the really textual work you've done this summer.

Y [00:08:26] | Yeah, of course. I would say one crucial moment in the text itself was when Ambedkar was explaining exogamy and endogamy. And you can find this on page 84 in the "Castes in India," that was published in the Indian Antiquary, and so on that page 84, he writes, "however, an original exogamous population and easy working out of endogamy, which is equivalent to the creation of caste, is a grave problem. And it is in the consideration of the means utilized for the preservation of endogamy against exogamy that we may hope to find the solution of our problem. Thus, the superposition of endogamy on exogamy means the creation of caste.” And here this is a really important passage because here Ambedkar questions how a society, once exogamous can become endogamous. And as such, it is this tension that can provide a possible answer to the problem of caste. To him, this is the problem of caste, what it is and how it works.

L [00:09:35] | Thank you. Really fascinating. So, really interested to hear the way that you've read this text. So it's this moment, I guess, where Ambedkar's trying to translate caste. So how does this translation work? Can I ask about this a little further and ask, I think I'm also really interested in, Ambedkar's relationship to Indology, which you mentioned before. So isn't this literature of ethics and etiquette or so-called Dharmashastra literature? There's a lot of discussion about permitted and prescribed sexual relations. Can you talk about that a little more?

Y [00:10:09] | Yeah, I think it's really a fascinating question. So as a Dalit scholar, Ambedkar was prohibited from reading the Dharmashastra, as well as reading Sanskrit. For reference in "Castes", he cites Ketkar, who was a Brahmin sociologist trained at Cornell and as such, Ketkar was allowed  access to the Dharmashastra, among other things, due to his caste position. 

And like Ambedkar, Ketkar also investigated the question of caste. But unlike him, he was not able to render a certain reading of caste and its history that would be able to see and connect sexual relations as a fundamental reproduction of caste as such. So in that sense, Ketkar's relationship to Indology is completely different to that of Ambedkar, who, like I mentioned earlier, is attempting to bring Indology to the new social sciences. And part of this is due to his academic training, but also maybe more importantly, is the fact that he was not given access to the so-called literature of ethics and etiquette. And in thinking of his translation of caste, this is seen by how he clearly outlines that endogamy was forcibly laid upon exogamy. And as such, gendering and sexual reproduction maintain caste.

L [00:11:30] | Okay. Thank you. That's really, really fascinating. Especially what you were saying about Ambedkar not having access to certain kinds of text makes me think about like other connections we've been making this summer. And I was thinking a lot about how Du Bois also didn't have access to a lot of the libraries and resources he wanted to use in the writing of Black Reconstruction. So it's really fruitful here, I think. 

And also thinking about, you know, these what you're saying about like the realm of intimate. And thinking about the home and the domestic and the regulation of intimate association is in many ways being like at the heart of the experience of citizenship, or what it means to be part of a nation state, or a state, or colonial state. So I know these issues had already become like really hot button issues for colonial scholar administrators like John Stuart Mill, who measured civilizational aptitude by the status of women in India. And so does Ambedkar also seem to focus on these so like ethics, scandalous issues as well? 

Y [00:12:36] | Yeah, but he addresses these as essential to the reproduction of caste. And this is where he does something totally innovative. Ambedkar tells us that endogamy was about a particular form of marriage, signaling that caste is a social institution that regulates sociality as well as sexuality. He draws on this idea of surplus to speak to how caste maintains its hierarchy, how caste as a system reproduces itself. This is especially seen in what is done to the surplus man and woman in a given caste. And how does this idea come about? It comes about because caste operates as patriarchy. That is, it is implied here that men, women do not come into caste equally.

Men have power. And in this case, their power is the power to enforce restrictions on women, restrictions that are focused on female chastity and purity. Once a woman becomes a widow, she poses a significant threat to the caste for the question of control and controllability are brought into its purview. She can either be offered up through Sati, or widow immolation along with her deceased husband, or she can be subjected to degraded widowhood. However, burning at the funeral pyre, for example, does not always work as Ambedkar states, because it's a hard realization and practice to commit to. And as such, widowhood becomes a more practical and viable option for lack of a better word, for the surplus woman.

L [00:14:12] | Wow, fascinating. Thank you for this reading. I see in your annotation that you are really drawn to the term surplus. What do you make of that? Why? Why do you think this is kind of fruitful for your work? 

Y [00:14:26] | Yeah. So when I was reading "Caste in India", as you said, I really took notice with Ambedkar's use of the word surplus, which I might add, he mentions it 22 times and Ambedkar makes a critical move in transforming the idea of surplus value into surplus persons. In caste society, the figure of the woman is always tied to her potentiality to be both wife and mother insofar as much as she can sexually reproduce and sustain her caste. This is where her value is derived and as Ambedkar writes, once her husband dies, she's thrown into this category of surplus for her aforementioned value ceases to exist once her husband passes. Although Ambedkar does point out a husband can become surplus, he's only surplus in that he is no longer married. And as such, for the sake of the caste, he's not disposed of but continues to be integrated into the systems of value needed for the preservation of his caste. 

This is why the question of caste is one of endogamy. Which is just to say one of gender and sexuality, particularly the positionality of women. Thus, Ambedkar's writings on the creation of surplus man and woman and how the question of surplus, which is always tied to the question of gender and sexuality, is also tied to disposability of who or what is rendered disposable.

L [00:15:57] | Really interesting. Thank you again for this reading. It's really fascinating. Hearing you speak about disposability and what populations are made disposable or made waste, in a way, I am brought back to what you said about your background in African and Black studies and the thinking that's being done on disposability in those fields. Can you speak a little bit more about how these ideas are connected here in your research on Ambedkar and caste? And maybe how does disposability have a particular life within the caste system?

Y [00:16:31] | Yeah, thank you for this question. So I would say with my background or study within African and Black studies, I see disposability and the idea of who or what is rendered disposable through I would say like transatlantic slavery and the afterlife of slavery as such, in relation to specifically, I would say, U.S. continental Blackness as well as African Blackness more generally, and what it means to be Black in the world and what it means to be human. And with Ambedkar, he uses disposability and surplus like I said, in a really interesting way. Here, the surplus woman is rendered disposable while the surplus man is always already seen as a productive force, for he ensures the continuation of a patriarchal lineage. And so, caste is essentially also the name of the father. So endogamy is a gendered practice and the position of wife, mother, woman, girl serves as a means for caste sustenance. And as such, true liberation for women, I think I believe, cannot come from caste, but only in its abolition. And I think reading with him, [with] Ambedkar, that he follows these same sentiments.

L [00:17:59] | Yeah. Thank you so much. Yosan, I wish we could go on. It's been really wonderful to hear about your work this summer. So thank you for coming to speak to me about it.

Y [00:18:09] | Thank you.

EPISODE TWO

A [00:00:01] | Welcome to the Ambedkar Initiative Podcast Series, in which students at Columbia University discuss their research on B.R. Ambedkar, a Columbia alum and one of the twentieth century's foremost thinkers on caste and democracy. I'm Anupama Rao, Director of the Ambedkar Initiative and Professor of History. In this episode, Tommy Song speaks with Augustus O'Connor about one of Ambedkar's important texts, “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis, and Development,” which was written in 1916 as a seminar paper for a course in anthropology. Tommy and Gus are recent graduates of Columbia College, where Tommy studied history and Gus studied English.

T [00:00:46] | So first of all, Gus, how did you find out about Ambedkar and why do you find him so interesting?

G [00:00:53] | Hey, Tommy. I first encountered Ambedkar through a seminar with Professor Gayatri Spivak, where we examined the work of Du Bois, Gramsci, and Ambedkar, all of whose work was invested in the role of imagination and particularly the inability to imagine the subaltern subject. And so we were also interested in questions of the local versus the national. So that includes slavery, the Southern question and caste, respectively. And the seminar was deeply invested in globality and comparative work, as well as with a focus on reading practice.

And so I approached Ambedkar through these two lenses, initially thinking about the ways in which he is in conversation with other thinkers and writers in his texts, and how exactly the text is performing and demonstrating certain arguments formally rather than just informationally with content. So I've been working on annotating for this Ambedkar essay, the 1916 “Castes in India,” paying particularly close attention to the ways in which social biology and social anthropology have affected his thinking, particularly in the “Development of Caste” section, along with some related questions, which I can get into in a bit.

T [00:02:19] | Okay, yeah, that would be fantastic. So you have been annotating the “Castes in India” essay, which is complex and interdisciplinary in so many ways. And so in that essay, who exactly is Dr. Ambedkar addressing and who is he writing for, do you think? Who is he writing to? 

G [00:02:40] | Yeah. So I think speaking of comparative work and reading practices, audience is incredibly important and Ambedkar's writing in “Castes” is no exception. We should keep in mind the original context of this essay as well, which is the seminar on “Primitive and Modern Society” with Alexander Goldenweiser, who is an anthropology professor, who himself was a student of Boas who was, as you know, the sort of founder of the modern anthropological tradition in some ways. And you would agree with that? 

T [00:03:15] | Yes. Yes, absolutely. I would say so. Yes, definitely because, you know, Boas basically founded the discipline of cultural anthropology in America at a time when many scholars thought that biological race was real and could explain social difference. And Boas really challenged this, which, you know, during that time was revolutionary in many ways.

G [00:03:36] | Absolutely, and I think that context is really important for this essay in particular. Ambedkar delivered this essay at Columbia University in 1916 to a group of university students who we can presume to be largely white, male, and Columbia intellectuals. And so these fellow students, as his original audience, have a profound effect on the way he delivers his argument. 

In the introduction to his paper, Ambedkar makes a few moves that keys us into the framing of the text. One move includes drawing a comparison between the "glib tongue" of the guide, who takes visitors around an exotic site and his own project. So this accomplishes two things. First, he asserts his credibility as a “native guide to the exotic institution of caste.” And second, Ambedkar inserts himself into the larger academic genealogy of ethnographers and students of caste. He specifically references this genealogy a bit later in the essay, where he not only brings in some contemporary ethnographers and students of caste, but also refutes their theories. 

And the subtext, which is of utmost importance, is that the author himself is a central part of the story, despite the fact that Ambedkar never approaches the system of caste from a personal or anecdotal standpoint. But you know, what is the "glib tongue" of the guide good for if not his intimate personal knowledge of his exhibit? So Ambedkar himself becomes a part of the narrative and he himself becomes exhibit A. And so this paper is also formed as a form of entertainment, which adds another level of nuance to the way we can understand the essay. And it's important in this sense and relevant to his being the native guide of the institution of caste.

T [00:05:37] | So considering all the different categories of evidence that Ambedkar uses in his essay, it seems like there are so many layers. It's not simply anthropological, and it's not simply historical. So could you maybe say a little more about the broader implications of Ambedkar's position as, you know, the exhibit A or native guide or expert on caste?

G [00:06:03] | Yeah, of course. So Ambedkar, who is coming from an untouchable background, is approaching the issue of caste as an insider, but also through the broader field of academia. And so what he's doing is conquering a field that he himself cannot make his own. Identity is hugely important then to his essay, though not in ways we might imagine in our contemporary moment. Ambedkar never, for example, says, ‘As an untouchable, I can tell you so on and so forth.’ Rather, there is a muffling of his identity within the anger and the visceral nature of his argument. And this move will fully blossom later in his Annihilation of Caste in 1936. But it is still present here, and it begs the larger question, how do subalterns subjects access the universal? And this question is made all the more complicated as we keep in mind that the subaltern subject itself is never generalizable.

T [00:07:09] | Right. So it's almost as if Ambedkar the writer, or Ambedkar the person, is taking the back seat here. But it's almost like you can always sense him despite the fact that he's being silent on it. And Ambedkar seems to do this by making a rigorous theoretical argument. 

G [00:07:30] | Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

T [00:07:31] | And it's interesting because Ambedkar also does not have access to the archives. So could we maybe talk about form and how Ambedkar's text demonstrates or performs something in its very construction?

G [00:07:47] | Yeah, of course. So Ambedkar constructs his essay in these three parts: mechanism, genesis, and development. And he spends a great deal of time on mechanism and development, but hardly any time—only about one page out of the total fifteen—on the genesis of caste. So the genesis section is really just a suturing of the other two sections together. It's where the bottom drops out. Yosan Alemu is working on the mechanisms section, and for this project, I'm really focusing on the development section, which I've mentioned earlier. And so I found that there is a distinct vocabulary being used in the “Development” section of caste. So Ambedkar starts the essay by museumising caste, using the glib tongue comment and the language of the fossil to establish the institution of caste as worthy of inquiry. And as he makes his way to the development section, Ambedkar uses the vocabulary of the social sciences, specifically social biology, to further his argument. And so some key vocabulary to understand Ambedkar's adoption of a social biology includes “mimesis,” “imitation,” and “invention.” 

T [00:09:01] | Right. So you mentioned that he is using the vocabulary of the social sciences, specifically social biology. And so do you have a sense of where he is getting this vocabulary from? So he is linking social science with social biology?

G [00:09:13] | Yeah. And so these terms that he took from French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, who championed the idea that society formed through a series of interpersonal inventions. Tarde wrote in his famous, or his most well known text, Laws of Imitation, that the social psychology of people's interactions bring about the social structures and change of that society. And so these interactions and inventions were specifically a rejection of Durkheim's theory of a division of labor. And so Ambedkar claims that at some point in this hoary institution of caste, the Brahmins made the decision to close themselves off to the system of endogamy, at which point every lower strata of society imitated the Brahmin custom, eventually resulting in the massive and complex institution of caste. 

The reason why the lower strata of society imitated the Brahmins brings us back to the idea of mimesis, a term taken from biology to mean mimicry by one species of another toward the ultimate goal of protection and self preservation. And so caste becomes, then, a sort of camouflage and imitation, and a form of “protective discoloration” for vulnerable communities. And so caste is a machine that then is constantly innovating and reproducing itself, adhering to an organizing logic that conscripts everyone. And in this way, caste is itself a social organism. 

And so Ambedkar's embrace of Tarde is really significant for two reasons. First, it frames caste as a human-constructed institution rather than a religious maxim imposed and inherited from above. Second, it allows for the possibility that the institution can be changed. And so these two aspects of Ambedkar's thinking, which originate in this essay and also play a much larger role in his later Annihilation of Caste, are hugely important.

T [00:11:29] | Right. So he is really commenting on the fact that, as you said, caste is a social organism. Yet it is also something that there is artificiality.

G [00:11:41] | Yeah, absolutely. Those two exist in tandem.

T [00:11:45] | Right. And Ambedkar sounds really ahead of his time by using the language of social biology and mimesis. Could you maybe comment a little bit more on that?

G [00:11:57] | Yeah, and he totally is ahead of his time. I mean, this whole idea of imitation anticipates the later idea of Sanskritization popularized by a man, Srinivas, who devotes the process of lower castes imitating rituals and practices of higher castes to achieve social mobility. But in Srinivas's theory, he never thinks of the psychic life of caste and the resulting violence done to the mind as a result of caste. But Ambedkar always does. We can see that the psychic life of caste is actually demonstrated in Ambedkar's writings. 

And so by the time he writes Annihilation of Caste, this idea will be fully elaborated. And this sort of practice as well, particularly in reference to his theory of the “ascending scale of reverence and descending scale of contempt” within the caste system. And we also have to understand that Ambedkar’s making a claim on knowledge production and that there is an insurgent nature of the machine that he himself is building. And that he is also, you know, an innovator of thought, and he's melding content and form in a way that not only tells you about this infamous institution, but actually brings you to hell and back. And so it's really incredibly important stuff he's doing, needless to say.

T [00:13:28] | Absolutely. And I definitely agree with that. And even today, his texts are so powerful and relevant because he asks us to see caste as a form of power. And yeah, that was such a great conversation. Thank you so much, Gus. I really appreciate it. I wish we could do this some other day again. 

G [00:13:52] | Thanks for having me Tommy.

EPISODE THREE

A [00:00:01]  | Welcome to the Ambedkar Initiative podcast series in which students at Columbia University discuss their research on B.R. Ambedkar, a Columbia alum, and one of the twentieth century's foremost thinkers on caste and democracy. I'm Anupama Rao, director of the Ambedkar Initiative and Professor of History. In this episode, Kyle Zarif speaks with Rohini Shukla about Ambedkar's relationship to the idea of religion, as well as the experience of Indian students at Columbia University in the interwar period. Kyle is a master's student studying international and global history, and Rohini is a Ph.D. candidate in religion. Here's Kyle. 

K [00:00:43] | Hi Rohini. How are you?

R [00:00:46] | Hi, Kyle. I'm happy to be here. How are you?

K [00:00:49] | Yeah, I'm well, thank you. Could you start first by just saying a bit about your own scholarly interests?

R [00:00:57] | So when I came to Columbia, I knew that America's first academic reflection on caste was written here. His essay “Castes in India: Their Mechanisms, Genesis and Development”, that's the title of the essay. So I became interested in understanding the world he was informed by at Columbia in the 1910s. So questions like what did he read? Who did he talk to? What concepts and methods did he engage with and think about? What captured his imagination and what filled up his curious mind when India was at the cusp of post-coloniality?

K [00:01:39] | Could you say a bit more about the discipline of religion and study in general at this time?

R [00:01:45] | Sure. So the university has been one of the many important public spaces for the study of religion, and to a large extent, the study of religion in universities is and was animated by the really big questions that have always kept philosophers and theologians busy. So questions like what is a good life? What keeps people together? What keeps them apart? So on and so forth. So at Columbia, the faculty of philosophy engaged most explicitly with religion. So the first resident chaplain, Raymond Knox, for instance, advocated for the study of the Bible to be part of liberal education in as early as 1988. So this is the critical study of the Bible. This opened up questions about the relevance and irrelevance of one's faith or religious identity to the academic study of religion, as opposed to, say, the study of religion in a theological setting. Then, of course, there are spaces outside the university. So Nonconformist Christian missionaries and practitioners have been especially important for the study of religion as it relates to western India. They had different visions of what the religious practice and participation are. And this heterodoxy, as opposed to the orthodoxies of Brahminical practice, were very important for anti-caste intellectuals such as Ambedkar. And interestingly for me, the Burke library here hosts a bunch of archival material of the American Marathi mission that engaged in all sorts of philological, printing, educational and proselytizing activities in Maharashtra in the 19th century. So I'm hoping to actually explore these once the libraries start opening up.

K [00:03:44] | Hopefully they do soon. And on that note, is there something distinctive about the history of the discipline of religion at Columbia?

R [00:03:54] | So religion as a field of knowledge cut across disciplines here in the 1910s especially, and in the 1910s and after. So this led to some of the most influential and experimental debates about social difference, social and political organization, Protestant Christianity as the implicit vantage point in studying religion. And also a more philosophical question about meaning, signification, and representation. So there was a growing interest in studying religions from all over the world, or "the Orient" with a methodological emphasis on the empirical science and the Philosophy Department. Primitive religion was studied using ethnology and ethnographic methods in the Anthropology Department. Giddings laid emphasis on quantitative, sociological analysis. So I wouldn't say that these trends were only at Columbia, but what is important from my perspective is that Ambedkar was deeply informed by these debates and disciplinary formations. 

K [00:05:02] | OK, so zooming out a bit from there, I assume that Ambedkar was just one of many Indian students who were coming to the U.S. and to New York at this time.

[00:05:13] | Yes, that's correct, Ambedkar was one of many. He was one of many when Sayajirao Gaikwad at Baroda granted Ambedkar a scholarship. As far as I know, he was accompanied by three or four more Indian students. A lot more research needs to be done on who these people were, and what they went on to do. Also, interestingly, in his essay, “Castes in India”, Ambedkar refers to another Indian's work on caste. His name is Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar, a Brahmin student also from western India who did his PhD at Cornell from 1906 to 1911. Ketkar was interested in placing Manusmriti in historical context. He was also interested in the ancient history of Maharastra, whereas Ambedkar, particularly in that essay, was interested in making a more totalizing argument about the workings of caste based on the idea of endogamy, and Yosan Alemu talks more about this in her podcast in the series. So essentially, Ketkar and Ambedkar were trying to make caste legible in the American academie, because they were basically academics. But recent scholarship has looked at many more Indians who either visited or moved to America for politically radical reasons to do with global anticolonial struggles. So Taraknath Das, for instance, who was vocal and wanted for his anti-British activism in Bengal, came to Seattle in 1906 to seek asylum. He remained an anti-British voice among expatriate Indians living on the West Coast through his activities in the Ghadar party. New York became an important space for conversations between other academic and activist Indians like M.N. Roy, S. L. Joshi, who were spread across the West and East Coast, and Lala Lajpat Rai was an especially important figure who later connected with Ambedkar at Columbia University and also with Du Bois, Seligman, Ovington and through them, even with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP], and then eventually also Booker T.. And all of this is happening with New York as its central location. So in addition, in New York itself, in Harlem, right next to Columbia University, another Indian man named Hucheshwar Gurusidha Mudgal was publicly engaging with issues of anti-black racism in Harlem, much closer to home in America and the South Asian American Archive, Saada, has covered him recently and a wonderful article in 2018.

K [00:08:05] | Could you maybe talk a bit more about Mudgal? He sounds like a pretty complex figure. So what about Harlem or institutions within Harlem might have mudgal been plugged into?

R [00:08:20] | Mm hmm. So Mudgal is indeed a very fascinating figure. He is best known as the editor of Marcus Garvey's newspaper Negro World. His editorship of the Foreign Affairs column and vocal public presence showed that he was in the very thick of debates about racial politics in Harlem and Brooklyn in the 1920s and 30s. And these activities were all part of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. Mudgal also wrote a pamphlet biography of Garvey in 1932 called Marcus Garvey: is he the true redeemer of the Negro? 

He traversed the same circles of activists and intellectuals that the likes of Du Bois and George Schuller did. In fact, his work at UNIA had garnered severe criticism from the left, particularly from Du Bois. And to me, these years of Mughal's career are important because they exemplify one very fascinating instance of how Indians maneuvered in and took public spaces outside universities where race, diaspora, and immigration, and global anti-imperial politics mattered to everyday life. 

The racial politics were extremely complicated and heterogenous, to say the least. So in Mudgal's case, for instance, he argued vehemently against communist anti-racism represented by Edward Welsh while representing Garvey's Pan-Africanism, as I have, I think already mentioned. So Mudgal is also important not just for his own interests in race and academic life, but also because it has been hard to find Columbia and Harlem connections, even though they're physically right next to each other.

K [00:10:10] | So what was his career trajectory, Mudgal? Was it anything like the other Indians that you've mentioned so far?

R [00:10:18] | So we know a few things about Mudgal's life when he was in New York. We already know that anti-racist discourses and activism and the potential for solidarities against global forms of fascism and racism were incredibly influential in both Ambedkar's life and then in Mudgal's editorialship to public and public debates. We also know that both Ambedkar and Mudgal corresponded with Du Bois through personal letters. 

Unlike Ambedkar, however, Mudgal's entry to America and exit from America was not straightforward. He seems to have come from a bunch of places: Trinidad, South Africa, Cuba, and maybe perhaps more places, and very little is known about his life and journeys right after he left New York. 

Importantly, though, like Ambedkar, we know that he studied at Columbia. He was an MA and PhD student in the 1920s studying comparative politics and literature. His M.A. thesis of 1924 was called “Fascist and Soviet Dictatorship Compared”. And this text was written after some of his early pieces appear in the Negro World. So it seems like his life as a student was directly plugged into the racial politics that I have mentioned above. 

And this is slightly different from what sources about Ambedkar's life at Columbia tell us, the limited sources that we have. He continued to write and publish. He published a book on the Indian National Movement called Human Order in 1943, a little bit before he was charged with allegations of bribery and that ended his political career in India. So basically, you know, minor figures, minor fugitive figures like Mudgal are important for exploding the diverse perspectives and politics that Indians brought along with them to America, and then they took back with them to India. And in these respects, a lot more work has to be done on Mudgal, and Columbia University's the common denominator between Ambedkar and Mudgal, and maybe perhaps other interesting figures that we haven't had a chance to look at, so Columbia University is a good place to begin this work.

K [00:12:45] | So, so fascinating. I'm interested to see how this work and comparable work on, you know, what you call fugitive figures and their role in these sort of exchanges. I'm interested to see how about maybe develops moving forward. But thank you so much for joining me and speaking about your research, Rohini.

R [00:13:08] | Thank you, Kyle. This was fun to do. Happy to be here.

episode FOUR

A Welcome to the Ambedkar Initiative podcast series in which students at Columbia University discuss their research and on B.R. Ambedkar, the Columbia alum and one of the twentieth century's foremost thinkers on caste and democracy. I'm Anupama Rao, Director of the Ambedkar Initiative and Professor of History. In this episode, Layla Varkey, a master’s student studying international and world history, speaks with Rohini Shukla, a Ph.D. candidate in Religion. 

R [00:00:34] So let's get straight into this. Can you tell us a little bit about your scholarly interests and what brought you to the Ambedkar Initiative?

L [00:00:42] Yeah, so I came to this research initially through my interest and my current research on caste and communism in Kerala, a place where we see a radical response by organized Marxism to the questions of untouchability and caste. I've also been thinking a lot about the institution of the matrilineal household in Kerala and then the destruction of that matrilineal household as an important prehistory for how communism would unfold in Kerala. Historical research on Kerala is so rich to me because it is such a particular region for not only caste and communism, but also for the particular histories of domesticity, gender and sexuality in India. And for me, Ambedkar deals with all of these issues, caste and endogamy, as well as Brahminical patriarchy. And he also has a contentious and really fascinating relationship with Marx's ideas. So these kind of glimmers of Ambedkar that I see in my work on Kerala drew me to researching more about his legacy and the life that his ideas come to take on. 

R [00:01:49] OK, thank you. I'm really interested in your exploration of how Gandhi is received in the United States, which we've spoken about a little bit before. So can you tell us more about how you came to be interested in Gandhi in this context and how we might trace what happens to Gandhi and ideas in black American intellectual circles? 

L [00:02:13] Yes, definitely. And I think that the reception of Gandhi is particularly interesting in light of the fact that this kind of dyad between Ambedkar and Gandhi is in some ways the classic organizing agonism in Indian historiography. And there we see Gandhi most clearly as a kind of social conservative figure, as a kind of reactionary figure. And we can see that he you know, we know that he views caste reform as the responsibility of the upper castes he names them the “Harijan” just as Ambedkar is moving towards thinking about them as “broken men,” or as Dalits. And of course, what's important now, too, is that the earlier Gandhi in South Africa is really read as a figure who in fact precluded any possibility for a race-caste unity, particularly when we think about the significance of Indian indentured labor in South Africa. So in this context, he was still an imperial subject who never really supported race-caste unity and preferred the idea of trusteeship to any kind of broad-based mass class action. So given all of this history, it's actually quite surprising, and, for me, really important, that something different happens when Gandhian principles are taken up by Black intellectual circles in the early and mid-twentieth century. 

[00:03:34] And I think that the American Gandhi really takes on a new life, particularly through the Black church and the idea of a radical Christ or a liberatory Christ. And in my research, I really wanted to trace this creative interpretation of Gandhi and nonviolence as a practical philosophy which becomes possible through the proximity of Gandhian ideas and Christian ideals as these join in enabling Black liberation. So nonviolence here was really a tactic of the weak, and radical protest was a way to make a spectacle of racist violence and the long standing dispossession of black people in the United States. 

R [00:04:13] So I would like to know more about what you think, what you have in mind about the American perception of Gandhi. Like you said, there seems to be — I think we've spoken about this before — there seems to be a prevailing idea that it was really King that took up Gandhi in the United States. So did you find that there is actually a prehistory to this movement? Are there other figures involved in the American perception of Gandhi? 

L [00:04:39] Yeah, that's a really good question, and an important point you bring up about the transmission of Gandhi in the United States through Martin Luther King, but also before. I always think about the story of King's trip to South India in 1959, where he actually went to visit a children's school in Kerala, in Thiruvananthapuram. And for the first time, he was introduced as someone who was an untouchable in America, and I think he's written about feeling really hurt or confused by this name. And all of this is really kind of the late or the radical King. And we can see his radicalization in the last decade of his life with the history of the Poor People's Campaign, as well as his time as a staunch anti-war activist against U.S. militarism in Vietnam, as well as the way he dealt with questions of Black poverty and access to education, housing and health care. 

[00:05:40] But King himself was actually introduced to Gandhi much earlier by an important group of African-American intellectuals and I think important Black Christian and pacifist activists really laid the groundwork for this, from organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality as well as the Fellowship of Reconciliation. And there's also a long history of of people like Howard Thurman and Benjamin Mays, who were involved with Morehouse and Howard, respectively, and met Gandhi and were also important influences on King, as well as Edward Carol, who becomes the first Black bishop of the United Methodist Church, and Channing Tobias, who would become the chairperson of the NAACP in the late ‘50s. All of these people met with Gandhi and were important people in King's career. So, yes, circling back to the Fellowship of Reconciliation and these Christian Quaker pacifist groups, people like James Farmer, A.J. Muste and Bayard Rustin were all using nonviolent methods of direct action, and they're organizing in the 1940s already. And the important thing is that all of these figures were trying to influence King's reading of Gandhi. But actually what I found really interesting in this research, especially since we're conducting it at Columbia, is that the most important influence on King's reading of Gandhi, but also on Gandhi and Black intellectual circles more broadly, was a book written by Krishnalal, Shridharani, a Columbia alum, in 1939, called A War Without Violence. And this book actually started as his doctoral dissertation in sociology at Columbia. And it was a study of Gandhi's methods as well as its accomplishments. Shridharani also translated many of Gandhi's writings into English. And I really see him as a catalyst for this newly politicized reading of Gandhi in the United States that I'm talking about here. 

R [00:07:41] OK. Wow. That's a really rich history. A lot of important figures and a lot of connections. Since we are interested in America's world in New York, maybe you could tell us a little bit more about the nine years in Harlem. 

L [00:07:58] Yes, definitely. And I think what you say about Ambedkar’s world in New York is important because it highlights that, I think, there's really a spatial logic to this history and one that is very situated in New York and in Harlem in particular. So that only arrived in New York to study at Columbia in 1934, where he got a master's degree in journalism, as well as a Ph.D. in sociology. So before Columbia Shridharani had participated in Gandhi’s salt march in 1930. And he was also a student at Tagore's Visva-Bharati university in West Bengal. He spent over a decade in the U.S. as a student, as an activist, as well as a popular interpreter of Gandhianism. So yeah, as I said, his dissertation at Columbia actually grew into a quite widely read book called War Without Violence, where he kind of explicate the tenets of nonviolence he learned at Gandhi's feet. So I think the intervention, or what Shridharani really does here, is to take the mysticism out of Gandhianism and to instead provide a Gandhi of pragmatic action or realpolitik. And so here Gandhi is really a philosopher of action. In 1941, it's interesting, Shridharani wrote that he wrote that, quote, American pacifism is essentially religious and mystical, unquote. And what Shridharani hoped to provide instead was a reading of Gandhian ideas that would form what he called the “blueprint for a bloodless revolution.” And later, War Without Violence would eventually become what Rustin calls the “semiofficial Bible of the Fellowship of Reconciliation,” which instituted a series of workshops on nonviolent techniques in Harlem, as well as a series of Gandhi Memorial Lectures at which Rustin spoke. 

R [00:09:48] Very, very fascinating. Layla, thank you for all of this information. And I'm particularly interested in your mention of Harlem. You already flagged it as an important spare's, so can you tell us a little bit more about the importance of Harlem for your research? 

L [00:10:06] Yes, definitely. And this is really exciting for me because I think one of the most important reverberations of this form of Shridharani’s Gandhianism in the United States is actually the Harlem Ashram, which was an experiment in interracial pacifist living at 125th Street and Fifth Avenue that existed from 1940 to 1948. And it was founded by two white Methodist missionaries who had gone to India and come back. So Shridharani was involved in this experiment, and Bayard Rustin also lived nearby and is said to have visited the ashram often. What I find really fascinating about this ashram is that it was really an experiment in enacting ahimsa and satyagraha in Harlem, but also deeply influenced by Christian teachings and philosophy. The ashram had initiatives like helping recent black migrants find housing and work, as well as investigating police violence against striking workers. The ashram, also planned for a credit union run by and for the Black and Puerto Rican communities in Harlem.

[00:11:12] This ashram really exemplified a kind of international and interreligious worldview as it draws from Christianity as well as Hinduism. And this worldview would kind of form the basis of what Bayard Rustin would later call the “classical phase of the civil rights movement.” I also think that the ashram highlights some really generative connections between Black and South Asian intellectual circles and political movements in the 1940s. There's something here, too, for me about Shridharani, his time at the ashram at Visva-Bharati, and the through-line of these kind of experiments in vocational living that somehow make their way to Harlem that I find really interesting. 

R [00:11:55] Absolutely. It's extremely interesting to see the ways in which these histories come alive in Harlem. I am interested a little bit more in hearing about the specific ways in which Black intellectuals around Harlem come to take up Shridharani’s reading of Gandhi. How did it come about that they found his thesis so influential? Or in other words, what was it that primed their reception to Gandhian action. 

L [00:12:25] Yeah, that's a really important question. Thank you, Rohini. The historian Vijay Prashad has a really nice argument about this, about the importance of disentangling the complex ways in which Gandhi’s ideas travel to the United States, not just to King, but through an intervention by a number of ordinary activists who felt that nonviolence as a method could play a really crucial role in the struggle for freedom in the United States. So by 1942, most leading activists in the Fellowship of Reconciliation were disciples of Gandhi. As I mentioned, AJ Muste, Rustin, George Houser, Glenn Smiley and the Reverend J. Holmes Smith. All of these activists, religious leaders and intellectuals saw Gandhi as a philosopher of action and not as a kind of religious, essentially religious and mystical figure the way that the broader American pacifist movement did, I think. And in the United States, Black intellectuals and organizers were particularly able to recognize the material political consequences of Gandhi's thinking and to recognize his genius for the politics of transgression and gesture, but also its commitment to as well as its necessary reliance on the democratic creation of a mass movement. So at the beginning of the 1940s, all these civil rights activists, but in particular, A.J. Muste, A. Philip Randolph and John Haynes Holmes all met to discuss Shridharani’s book and its possible application to the racial conditions in the United States. 

[00:14:00] Glenn Smiley described the book as a tiny pebble thrown into a pond, but that it's a resulting ripples and waves would have an extraordinary influence upon the future of civil rights activism in America. So through Black intellectual circles, we really see an opening where a radical Gandhi becomes possible. A radical Gandhi meets a radical Christ. And here poverty philosophy, I think, really meets organized mass action. King himself actually put it very succinctly when he said much later in 1960 that, quote, Christ furnished the spirit while Gandhi furnished the method. 

R [00:14:38] It's absolutely fascinating to see the impact of a project that began as a dissertation at Columbia. And in thinking about these figures, I'm thinking that Rustin is quite well known in his own right. I have always heard that Rustin was radical. Are there any sort of more minor figures that came up in your research this summer and what other connections did you find? You've already told us some, but I'd like to know more. 

L [00:15:06] Yeah, thank you for this question, Rohini. I think it's a really important one. I mentioned before that most of the figures I'm thinking about in this research are men. But there are some important women who approach this world and this moment at a sort of angle to hetero or patriarchal frames. So one of them is Pauli Murray, and I'll just mention her. She's a queer figure, she dresses like a man, and she really sort of tempts interstate bus integration through practices of satyagraha. And so here Murray is a figure who embodies a queer kind of sexuality, but and is at the same time an anti-racist activist. Another woman that I've been thinking a lot about this summer is Merze Tate. She was one of the most accomplished scholars of international relations at Howard and one of the strikingly few women in her field. And she lived an amazing life. She was the first Black woman ever to attend Oxford, and she was the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in government from Harvard. And Tate, so she's a sociologist, she's committed to this race caste question. And for her, India really opens up a space of emancipation and political possibility. And there's an amazing resource to use to to learn about her life, it's a series of tapes at Harvard through the Black Women's Oral History Project, taped interviews with women, including Merze Tate, that really formed an oral historical archive for this work that I'm doing in the time of the pandemic. So it's been immensely useful. And so in the period of the 1940s, when everything else was going on that I've talked about, Tate was also closely Shridharani’s writings and his translations of Gandhi. A decade later, Tate would in fact take a Fulbright year from 1950 to 1951 in India, and she taught geopolitics at Tagore's Visva-Bharati College, the same place from where Shridharani had graduated. And I thought it was really interesting, when she returned to the United States, she pushed really hard for the creation of an Asian Studies department at Howard. Yeah, and her time in India also really changed the direction of her work and her research. It turned her to thinking more globally about race and questioning it as a universally valid analytical category. Robert Vitalis makes a really nice argument about this, and we can imagine the shift brought about in her thinking through her exposure to this kind of prime anticolonial site or anticolonial nation in India, as well as the relatively early decolonization of India compared to many other parts of the world. I was really struck by years later, Tate would recall her time at Visva-Bharati quite similarly to the way that Alain Locke described or remembered Paris. She said, quote, That period that I spent in India, I felt more like a human being valued for my worth than any other time in my life, unquote. And Robert Vitalis also points out, Tate was perhaps reflecting not only on her experiences as a Black person in the United States, but also on her experiences of marginalization as a woman at Howard, so I think these kind of institutional histories that we've been doing the summer are also really fascinating.

R [00:18:29] Right, right. Absolutely. So from what I hear you say, it sounds like Tate has her own kind of internationalism. How does Merze Tate’s life help us think differently about the other figures important to our research? So that's Ambedkar, Du Bois and so on? 

L [00:18:49] Yeah, that's a great question. I think that Tate’s life really is very important and so interesting for thinking about some of these other figures as well, especially as I said, as we think about making connections between these different elite institutions and Black institutions across the US. So just like how we have Ambedkar and Du Bois kind of framing the institutions of Columbia and Harvard for us, Shridharani and Taylor also reconnect us with a kind of subaltern or more minor history of these institutions, Columbia and Harvard, as well as thinking through the kind of belatedness of Oxford as well in her life. I think it's really fascinating and important to think about figures like Tate and how they moved through these elite spaces of places like Harvard and Oxford, and then the way that they take knowledge back to Howard, back to the Black institution, much like Du Bois did with Harvard and then coming back to Atlanta University. And I think that what you say about Tate’s own internationalism is so striking and so true. She really writes about her life and speaks about her life as an expedition. Like as an adventurer, she speaks about the research she undertook across Fiji, Samoa, Jerusalem, Burma, Damascus, Beirut, Istanbul, Vienna, Paris, so much more so this is truly an extraordinary life. And it really is the kind of itinerary that we also see with Du Bois and Ambedkar. So, you know, these are the truly extraordinary intellectuals of their time, the most decorated kinds of thinkers. And Tate is someone who does something really comparable to these men. So it's been fascinating to uncover her history as well.

R [00:20:36] And it has been fascinating to listen to you speak. I really wish we could go on having this conversation. Thank you so much for your time. 

L [00:20:45] Thank you so much. It was really fun. It was fun to talk about this research. 

Episode 5

A [00:00:01] Welcome to the Ambedkar Initiative podcast series, in which students at Columbia University discuss their research and on B.R. Ambedkar, the Columbia alum and one of the twentieth century's foremost thinkers on caste and democracy. I'm Anupama Rao, Director of the Ambedkar Initiative and Professor of History. In this episode, Thomas Song speaks with Augustus O'Connor. Both are recent graduates of Columbia College, where Tommy studied History and Gus studied English.

G [00:00:36] I wanted to start off by asking you if you could tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into the Ambedkar Initiative.

T [00:00:43] So, I graduated from Columbia University this past May with a Bachelors in history and political science. And during my first year at Columbia, I took the Columbia University & Slavery seminar, which exposed me to the university archive at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library—what we call the RBML. And I had done a little archival research before the seminar, but CU & Slavery really inspired me to pursue it deeply, which brought me to my current research areas, which are the conceptual history of race and racism and the global intellectual history of anti-racist and democratic thoughts. 

The history of Ambedkar's thought here aligns well with these interests. So the first paper I wrote for the CU & Slavery seminar was on William Dunning and his influence on the white supremacist scholarship of the Dunning School, among other things, which brought me within the range of Professor Rao's radar since Dunning was an important point in the time and space of Ambedkar's studies at Columbia. And I was ultimately introduced to the world of Ambedkar by Professor Rao, owing to our shared interest in the intellectual history of interwar America. So for an Americanist like myself, the Ambedkar Initiative was a perfect pathway toward studying the more global and often more readily overlooked facets of intellectual histories.

G [00:02:14] Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And you mentioned Professor Rao's interest in Dunning and also the Dunning school as an important point of connection. Could you say a little bit more about that?

T [00:02:26] Yes. So the Dunning school refers to a highly influential group of Southern historians in the U.S. and, you know, historians and political theorists in the early twentieth century who all studied under two Columbia professors, William Dunning and his predecessor, John Burgess. And Burgess is often called the father of political science in America.

G [00:02:51] Okay, I see.

T [00:02:52] Yes. So while Ambedkar was a student at the School of Political Science at Columbia that Burgess founded, Dunning was one of the key scholars who not just redirected American social sciences, but also molded the white understanding of Afro Americans as second-class citizens in need of white control. So while the works of Dunning, Burgess and the so-called Dunning-ites were largely responsible for legitimizing what I deem to be white supremacist theories and histories, they also were influential in popularizing source-based or ‘science-based history writing,’ as well as historical approaches to the history of constitutions.

G [00:03:38] And so it seems that Dunning and his followers really exemplified both the regressive and ‘progressive’ elements of the twentieth century. They broke new ground in some areas of history and theory as well as source-based historiography, but they still largely produced prejudiced research and writing. Am I right in that?

T [00:04:01] Yes, absolutely. So Dunning and Burgess were important points in the ‘map of ideas’ at Columbia’s School of Political Science. They were at their apex at a moment of great ferment and division in America, which is precisely when Ambedkar attended Columbia, in the 1910s. So even the university faculty here was divided, according to, you know, divergent ideas on social democracy, equality and civility, with Dunning standing in for an ideological school that ruled the academy for nearly three generations. 

G [00:04:39] I see. And so because of your knowledge about this history of ideas flowing from Columbia in the interwar period, you were given the task of archiving Ambedkar—particularly, Ambedkar the student. And so here I want to ask you, how did your experiences in and knowledge gained from the CU & Slavery seminar inform your research process? 

T [00:05:04] So underlying the CU & Slavery seminar, at least since its 2016 iteration, is this idea of writing history from the ground up or what historians call history from below. Voluntarily or, you know, through mutual discussion, professors and alumni of the seminar have been emphasizing the need for amplifying the voices of those silenced" in the archive, especially the Black and Brown people who are at one time voluntarily or involuntarily part of the university.

[00:05:41] The notion of silences in the archive has been an important one for my development as an amateur historian and critical thinker. I first encountered this concept through the writings of Professor Saidiya Hartman in my first CU & Slavery seminar. And writing what she refers to as “impossible histories” in order to reduce silences in the archive is something that I deeply revere, since I have come to believe that there are too many silences in U.S. history as well as Columbia University's history, and this initiative has been empowering in many ways, partly because I think we are doing exactly that, reducing silences or near-silences in the archives surrounding the world of Ambedkar.

G [00:06:36] And what do you mean by silences or near-silences? And do you believe that there is a spectrum of silence? And finally, what are some examples of what Professor Hartmann calls impossible or hidden histories?

T [00:06:54] Yeah. I should have clarified. I guess the short answer to that is that I do believe there is a spectrum. Silence, I think, arises from the complete nonexistence of historical data. So silence here would be one end of the spectrum, a spectrum of how loud voices in the archive are. If no data exists, there is complete silence, which can happen if records were lost, destroyed, overlooked or never created in the first place. In the history of American slavery, owing to complete silences, there are impossible histories to be written through the nonexistent voices of enslaved people who never got to tell others like you and me today about their life stories, their names, their birth dates, their families, their interests, and more. So in so many categories of history there are impossible histories as well as hidden histories to be written in order to reduce complete and near-silences. 

G [00:08:09] And would you say that the RBML has these complete silences and near-silences? And is the Ambedkar initiative, you know, working toward reducing these silences and near-silences by creating impossible or hidden histories?

T [00:08:26] Absolutely. So the RBML is full of papers, records and collections of those administrators and academics deemed most important to the university history, such as Nicholas Murray Butler, Seth Low, John Burgess, Frederick A.P. Barnard, etcetera. And the RBML has little to no records of people of so many categories, like the enslaved people who constructed Columbia's first campus, the assistants and servants whose labor sustained the careers of star academics for centuries. The maids, the butlers, and staff whose hands kept all the students fed—all the students, you know, get out of bed. You know, the lives of students of color, especially Black students whose times at Columbia remain unknown. And, you know, there are so many other categories to this list. And in the case of the initiative, we have silences and near-silences as well, as Dr. Ambedkar was never considered, you know, ‘most important’ among university community members until really only recently. Yeah.

G [00:09:49] Mm hmm. And so you said that these silences and near-silences in the archive exist because historical records are either lost, destroyed, overlooked, or, you know, never created in the first place. And I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about that and why such a reputable archive like the RBML has these silences and near-silences. What is it about the archive that leaves room for silences in the first place?

 T [00:10:22] So we usually think of archives as repositories of historical data. The archive, in that sense, is a mere container of information. But that's not really the case at all. The archive itself is history or historical data. The more I do archival research, you know, on Ambedkar's time at Columbia, the more I think about this fact.

So each and every archive has its history, right? An archive is a collection of collections, one that is compiled and created by people we call archivists who themselves should be considered as creators and managers of history. With time, different archivists, you know, come and go, meaning the archive itself is created, shaped, recreated and reshaped by different archivists. So as such, the archive at one point in time is not and cannot be the same archive from another point in time. So that means the organizing logic of the archive is different at different points in time. The archive is not stagnant. While it preserves peoples of the past, the archive is organic in that it is constantly molded and remolded by different people throughout time.

G [00:11:56] So I'd like you to say a bit more about the organizing logic of the archive. What does that mean and how does that relate to Ambedkar?

T [00:12:07] So with different archivists leading an archive at different points of time, the archives, logic or logics of organization change, too. So while there are certain similarities, consistencies, and traditions in different archives, inevitably different archivists prioritize or favor different materials produced by different people. So, for example, Columbia's archivists today are not the same as those from the 1910s.

[00:12:38] Thai Jones, my mentor at the RBML, for example, is a labor historian and deeply invested in the 1960s, among other periods. He brought the papers of Yuri and Bill Kochiyama to the RBML because he deemed them to be important for the RBML to have. 

Now, think of archivists of the RBML of U.S. history who came before Thai—say, in the 1930s or 1910s. They had different priorities and different ways of organizing the archive and its collections. So while Dr. Ambedkar and his papers have recently been considered by today's archivists of the RBML, those of the past, they didn't care too much about the papers of someone who they deemed to be on the margins of the university's intellectual field.

G [00:13:24] Okay, I see. And so does that mean that Ambedkar's papers were not kept? 

T [00:13:30] Well, luckily, we have found many letters and essays written by Dr. Ambedkar. The funny thing is that dozens of his letters were all in one of hundreds of boxes of Edwin Seligman's papers. That box was supposed to be completely cataloged, but that was done sometime in the twentieth century and nobody bothered to list the name “Ambedkar” in the catalog—you know, because he was not, I guess, deemed important enough to be included in the catalog. And his letters were simply overlooked, likely because of the fact that the archivist didn't seem to care too much. And then, you know, that mistake by some archivists in the early twentieth century was repeated in the online catalog. That was obviously created after the Internet. Yes. So we basically just did not know where these letters by Dr. Ambedkar were until just the past two years. We only had secondary source accounts of the fact that these letters existed in the RBML. 

G [00:14:40] Mm. And so what will you be doing with these letters and essays?

T [00:14:48] So as I said before, I think one of the unspoken missions of the Ambedkar Initiative is to reduce as many silences and near-silences surrounding the world of Dr. Ambedkar during his time at Columbia and beyond. So we are, in essence, making the inaccessible as accessible as possible. So in order to do so, we are currently working on creating a digital archive of Dr. Ambedkar's papers and more, all open to the public, so that anyone with Internet can access the documents for their research, writing, activism, and more. I think the project in many ways mirrors Dr. Ambedkar's thoughts and beliefs, considering, you know, we are using documents by and of him in order to democratize his voice and stories for all of us today and beyond, not just the university.

G [00:15:43] Well, Tommy, this has been such a fascinating conversation. And I want to thank you for being here today and also thank you for the incredibly important work that you're doing.

T [00:15:52] All right. Thank you so much, Gus.

Episode Six

A [00:00:00] Welcome to the Ambedkar Initiative podcast series, in which students at Columbia University discuss their research and on B.R. Ambedkar, the Columbia alum and one of the twentieth century's foremost thinkers on caste and democracy. I'm Anupama Rao, Director of the Ambedkar Initiative and Professor of History. In this episode, Sam Needleman speaks with Augustus O'Connor. Sam is a junior in Columbia College studying history, and Gus recently graduated with a degree in English.

G [00:00:34] So first off, tell me a little bit about yourself and what specifically about urbanism interests you.

S [00:00:44] Sure. I am a junior studying history in Columbia College, and I've become really interested in the history of urban inequality as a specific framework for studying the history of cities. So I really, you know, work across sort of the last 500 years or so—I guess I'm keeping it broad—thinking about European settler colonialism, everything up through segregation and redlining in the twentieth century, ghettoization and carcerality, gentrification and racial banishment in the 21st century, as well as speculation and financialization. So New York is my focus for most of the above, but I try to bring in as many global comparative cities as I can. I'm also really intent to keep things interdisciplinary. So as focused as I am on history, I'm also always looking to sociology and anthropology and economics and other fields to sort of inform this inherently interdisciplinary subject that I'm interested in.

G [00:01:56] And could you tell me a little bit about the mapping project you're working on for the Ambedkar initiative?

S [00:02:03] Sure. Because of my interests, Professor Rao and other members of the Ambedkar initiative and I discussed creating a spatial map of New York and a few other places, mostly in the interwar period, but in a few other time periods as well, broadly speaking, in the first half of the twentieth century. So what I did this summer was drew work from other researchers at the Ambedkar Initiative, like Layla Varkey, Kyle Zarif, and Rohini Shukla, and used their research on what was happening in the first half of the twentieth century in New York, specifically in Black radical circles and in South Asian diasporic circles, to think about a kind of intellectual history of what's happening in New York. And I used a tool from the Northwestern School of Journalism, the Knight Lab. They've created all of these incredible open-source tools that you can use to create these maps with your own academic research.

G [00:03:10] Could you describe the map for us?

S [00:03:12] Sure. The map includes 16 very carefully selected locations. The vast majority of them are in New York. Some of them are in London and even Atlanta. And they cover essentially the interwar period, with a few exceptions in other parts of the first half of the twentieth century. And these locations all pertain to some important event in radical Black and South Asian diasporic thought at this time. We especially wanted to focus on Harlem as this neighborhood that Columbia is adjacent to—because we're right across Morningside Park, we have all these archives, but so often we're missing information about, you know, these rich intellectual histories that took place right nearby.

G [00:04:13] Yeah. And so what led you specifically to create this map? And why do we need it? I mean, I think my intuition is that, you know, spatial mapping tells us something specific that maybe a textual analysis cannot. So maybe if you could speak on those topics as well.

S [00:04:35] So the idea for the map, I guess, stretches back to my work in the archives of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library for the Initiative, where I was looking at Hubert Harrison, who lived in Harlem in the first half of the twentieth century. He was a member of the Socialist Party and active in various radical circles. And what became clear relatively quickly was that the archives that the Ambedkar Initiative researchers have to look in are really incomplete for the kind of thinkers and the kind of history that we want to create. So this sort of leads us to think about new methodologies for thinking about this history or these histories that might open up doors that the traditional archival method would not allow us to open. Priya Pai and Khadija Hussain spoke about this with Professor Rao in the Introduction to this podcast series.

And so here we're following Saidiya Hartman—who you and I have read together, Gus—who proposed this idea or invented this methodology called critical fabulation, where she looks not only at what's in the archive, but focuses on the gaps in the archive. Specifically for her, at least where she started, was the lack of Black women whose accounts are represented in the archives of the Atlantic slave trade. And so this idea  that Professor Hartman would fabulate this history or partially fabulate this history to bring to the fore subaltern voices, voices that have been lost in the history of archive creation, voices that have been violently erased, I think is really sort of integral to our methodology. And so one of the themes that the Ambedkar Initiative that I'm working with is the idea of missed connections, right? So we have all of these important radical, extremely influential figures who are living or working or lecturing in New York in the same general periods. But we can't find archival connections between them, which is a little bit curious. So this map is about hypothesizing new possibilities, pushing boundaries of these histories so that more capacious definitions of twentieth century New York history and of twentieth century radical history can emerge. Does that answer your question?

G [00:07:02] Yeah, of course. And I think I share that interest in missed connections. And the idea that the sort of foundation upon which these thinkers are pursuing their work is just as important, the sort of social fabric upon which they are working is just as important to understand their work as sort of the work itself. So I think that's totally fascinating. Something you said led me to a more blunt question, which is, is this a subaltern archive?

S [00:07:49] Sure. It's a good question. It's also a complicated one, and I'm going to give you a yes and no answer. For the reasons I just explained, I think the thrust of the map makes it part of a subaltern archive or a contribution—or the opening of doors toward a contribution—to a subaltern archive, voices that the archive left out, violently erased, right? At the same time, a lot of the figures on the map are pretty well-known. So, you know, Marcus Garvey, for example, the histories have been written. Now, we might want to question, you know, the histories of who he's interacted with and how those histories have been written. And we might want to add something to it. And I guess there's, you know, a dimension of subalternity there. But yes and no, because many of the figures on the map are certainly integral to histories that already exist.

G [00:08:46] And I know that there are so many avenues to take when creating this type of spatial map. So I was wondering if you could speak about curatorial decisions you made in constructing the map.

S [00:08:58] Sure. So there were a few ways that I tried to use my role not only as a researcher, but as a curator of a creative map to open these doors that I'm talking about to hypothesize something new. One thing I did was in the creation of the 16 different points on the map, most of them in New York, I paired them by theme, and I specifically chose pairs that I thought would create interesting themes. And these themes run the gamut from ARRIVAL to COLLECTIVISM to DWELLING to THE ARCHIVE. So I'm trying to draw connections that we might not immediately draw when we're thinking through standard dimensions of space and time, right? So I'm not just pairing based on locations that happen to be close to each other or things that happened to happen in the same year. I'm trying to open up more capacious definitions of what these connections might have looked like and then, accordingly, what our history can then be written as. 

So take the example of ARRIVAL, which I just mentioned. The first location under this theme is Ambedkar’s first residence in New York, which was Hartly Hall, a dorm at Columbia. He lived there briefly in 1913 and then he had to leave because the dorm’s cafeteria served beef, which he couldn't eat. So he then moved to different dorms. The second location is where Haridas Mazumdar arrived when he came to New York. This was the intellectual home that he arrived at, the People's House, also known as the Rand School of Social Research, which was not only a locus for the Socialist Party, but also happened to be a place where many Columbia professors taught—where they kind of rebelled against the stifling academic culture uptown. So the connection between these two places might not be immediately clear, right? I mean, they're seven years apart on the timeline. One is uptown, one is downtown. But I think when we look at the map and we see that sites are paired together, these two sites, I think this opens a whole host of questions that maybe we wouldn't have otherwise asked if these sites weren't paired together thematically.

For example, how did Ambedkar and Mazumdar’s arrivals inform their whole experience in New York? What is it about these anecdotes that shaped the intellectuals they were to become? What were they thinking about when they got here? What do budding, radical intellectuals in general think about when they arrive places? And how did these new places shape what they're thinking about? You know, the power of the first impression. So on the one hand, it feels a little bit vague at times. But I think, on the other hand, opening up these new possibilities can potentially be really fruitful.

G [00:11:55] And so thinking about these sorts of connections that you've created, what's the connection between, you know, places that maybe surprised you throughout your work?

S [00:12:08] It's a good question. One theme that I came to late in the game or invented late in the game was COLLECTIVISM. And the last location I added to the map came to me from one of my fellow researchers, Layla Varkey, and that was the Harlem Ashram, which was founded on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue, kind of in the heart of Harlem, by two Methodist missionaries who returned to New York from a visit it India in the ‘40s. And this became a really interesting and unique experiment in what you could call collective justice work. These people did things like investigate police violence against striking workers. They assisted Black migrants who were new to Harlem with finding housing and work. They developed a credit union run by and for the Black and Puerto Rican communities of Harlem. And I paired this with a very different side of COLLECTIVISM a few blocks uptown—Liberty Hall, on 138th and 7th, which was kind of the locus for the United Negro Improvement Association, which Marcus Garvey founded (the UNIA). And I found through Rohini Shukla's research that Muzumdar delivered two lectures about Gandhi at the UNIA in 1922. And then Dusé Muhammad Ali had been there a year before delivering a lecture called “The First Great Civilization of the World Came Out of Egypt and Was Found by Black Men.” So both of these places, the Harlem Ashram and Liberty Hall, contributed to the political life of Harlem and New York. And I think it's so important right now to think about the ways that collectivism, whether it's collective living or collective work or collective organizing and activism, can shape a political culture in very different ways.

G [00:14:10] Yeah, absolutely. And so what theories and thinkers helped you create this project?

S [00:14:18] I think like a lot of fellow students, I spent a lot of quarantine reading work by prison abolitionists, and one abolitionist that appealed to me in particular as I was making this map was Ruth Wilson Gilmore, because she's a geographer, so her approach to mass incarceration and everything else that she studies is fundamentally spatial. That's the dimension that she's approaching things through. She pushes for a shift from what she calls carceral geography to abolition geography. And she thinks that spatial analyses are really a key part of getting there. To me, this is a pretty brilliant idea, and I've tried to follow Professor Gilmore in my own very small way in proposing that we think of New York in the first half of the twentieth century as a space full of radical Black and South Asian thinkers who are imagining a huge variety of ways to change the world—to build the societies they want to build, to sort of adopt the language of abolition, right? Building something new. This doesn't mean that we need to erase or neglect histories of redlining and ghettoization and all these other horrific spatial manifestations of racial capitalism that, you know, ran rampant in New York in this period, but that we're also going to tell histories of radical thinking against capitalism and against imperialism. And I think Professor Gilmore gives us a very loose framework for how to do that.

This is something that you and I thought about a lot in Subaltern Urbanism—this conflict between wanting to tell and recognize these horrible histories of racial capitalism and imperialism and at the same time wanting to rewrite simultaneous histories of all of the radical organizing and thinking and doing that's happening.

G [00:16:20] Absolutely. And I think you're right that both of these avenues of thought, the sort of violent histories that come with this time period, but also the radical thinking against imperialism, capitalism, as you mentioned, can and should go hand-in-hand. So I think that's totally fascinating. So, Sam, thanks so much for this fascinating conversation. And also thank you so much for the incredible work you're doing for the Ambedkar Initiative.

S [00:17:07] Thanks for speaking with me, Gus.

Episode SEVEN

A| Welcome to the Ambedkar Initiative Podcast Series, in which students at Columbia University discuss their research on B.R. Ambedkar, a Columbia alum and one of the twentieth century's foremost thinkers on caste and democracy. I'm Anupama Rao, Director of the Ambedkar Initiative and Professor of History at Columbia. In this episode, Yosan Alemu speaks with Kyle Zarif about his work on Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, as well as the affinities between Pan-Islamic and Pan-African anticolonial projects in interwar London and New York. Yosan is an undergraduate studying Comparative Literature, and Kyle is a Master's student in International and World History.

 

Y [00:00:00] Hello, I'm Yosan Alemu, and I'm sitting here today with Kyle Zarif. So Kyle, could you say a little bit about your work and how you came to be interested in Ambedkar?

 

K [00:00:12] Yeah, so I am a second-year Master's student in the dual M.A. in International History at Columbia and LSE. My research interests lie mostly in intellectual and labor history, specifically in histories of radical political thought in the twentieth century Middle East and the kind of global history of labor solidarity and trade unionism. I became interested in Ambedkar and his place in global intellectual history after encountering his work in a course I took with Professor Anupama Rao at Columbia titled History and Theory, where we read “Castes in India” and Annihilation of Caste.

 

[00:01:02] And what interested me about Ambedkar's work, especially “Castes in India,” were these comparisons he made even at this much earlier period between the position of the Dalits in India and that of Black people in the United States and his attempts to historicize caste, which I saw as similar to, you know, that of many early Pan-Africanists in relation to race and Blackness. And I also found these parallels and comparisons interesting in light of the later correspondence in 1946 between Ambedkar and W.E.B. Du Bois, in which he points out, or makes explicit, rather, the similarity between Black and Dalit struggles for emancipation. And I wanted to think a bit more about the history of this interaction. And more specifically, I wanted to think about, you know, Du Bois's own conception, his own shifting conception of Black people within a global framework, but also how his own ideas of African history and those of other Black leaders informed these kind of debates around the shape of a Black polity and in turn, how those debates shaped Du Bois's own, you know, conception later of Pan Africanism.

 

Y [00:02:30] That's so interesting. Could you speak more about the intellectual world of Harlem at this time? And what were the broader debates within Black politics that caught your attention?

 

K [00:02:42] Yes. So the early twentieth century sees an explosion in Black intellectual production and the emergence of multiple modern projects of Black politics, many of which were centered around Harlem as this kind of Black Mecca.

 

[00:03:02] And of course, this is also the period of the Harlem Renaissance and of Black modernist literature. When I looked at the debates, the political debates in Harlem at this time, one that really caught my eye was the conflict between Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, which I think sheds a light on these broader debates within Black politics on these questions of history, globality and anticolonialism. While the conflict between Garvey and Du Bois is explicitly around these questions of mass politics and leadership, it also has so much to do with the relation of the past and the present, and also between Black people in the diaspora and on the African continent. Of course, those two are profoundly linked.

 

Y [00:03:55] Could you speak more about that link and how did people like Garvey and Du Bois connect historical arguments about African civilizations to contemporary Black politics?

 

K [00:04:06] So Du Bois was involved in, you know, early Pan Africanist organizing and in this sort of rethinking of the precolonial African past. But, you know, throughout his career, he was also grappling with the possibility of an, you know, untranslatability, in an absolute severance between Africa and African-Americans. This can be seen more explicitly later on in a work like Black Reconstruction and, during this time, in his engagement with Alain Locke's notion of the New Negro and, you know, Black modernism more broadly. For Garvey, his idea of this political transnation of Black people and his quasi imperial political framework is the product of his assertion of a Black historical unity and a redemptive claim on the part of the diaspora to the continent of Africa. And in fact, that idea draws on a distinct conception of history, informing it of a diverse set of engagements with other anticolonial movements and intellectual currents within a broader British imperial space, of which he's clearly a product, and in my opinion, you know, especially modernist Islamic projects, you know, Pan Islam.

 

Y [00:05:36] And what kind of links exist between Islam and African-Americans?

 

K [00:05:42] It's interesting to look back, I guess, to who is thought of as the father of Pan Africanism, Edward Wilmot Blyden. So Blyden was an early theoretician of an African race or people as a unified group, which included the diaspora. And Blyden's idea of Black nationality was influenced also by European Zionism’s attempts to forge a Jewish nation by partial way of historical revisionism and modern vocabularies of race and nation in the late 19th century, turn of the twentieth century. In a lot of his work on religion, specifically, he argued that Christianity was an alien religion for Black people unable to incorporate or respect African cultural practices. In 1887, he published one of his most important and influential texts, Christianity, Islam and The Negro Race, in which he, you know, expands this argument and makes an argument about Islam as an organically African religion and one which does not contain the sort of racial hierarchies in Christianity or that he sees in Christianity. And he thinks about that kind of horizontal nature through this idea of the umma, or the Islamic community.

 

[00:07:16] Garvey was exposed to Blyden in London, where he lived between 1912 in 1914, so before his kind of more prominent political activity. During this time, he found employment at the African Times and Orient Review, an anti-racist and implicitly anti-imperialist journal run by Duse Mohamed Ali, an Egyptian Sudanese writer and activist. Ali there served as the kind of link between Garvey and Blyden, who was on his own exploring the connections between a Black nationalist politics, political Islam and anticolonialism.

 

Y [00:08:00] Could you speak more about Duse Mohamed Ali? He sounds like an interesting transnational figure.

 

K [00:08:07] Yeah, he definitely was. Duse Mohamed Ali was born in Alexandria, in Egypt, in 1862 and went to England as a child to be educated. He later attended and dropped out of King's College, preferring to pursue a career as an actor and playwright. He also worked as a columnist for the Fabian Socialist journal, The New Age, and would establish the Anglo Ottoman society. He was very active in kind of pro-Ottoman politics in the early twentieth century. His journal, during its run from 1912 to 1921, would feature writing from Egyptian nationalists, figures in what would become the Khilafat movement in India, and figures in the African-American Civil Rights Movement like Booker T. Washington. And so his kind of ambiguous identity as an Egyptian, an Ottoman subject, someone who perceived themselves as Black, also a British subject, kind of helped him explore these different movements in a more kind of cosmopolitan space.

 

Y [00:09:23] Thank you for that. And so much of our research as a group thinks about these movements in South Asia and in the United States. But what about London and why is London so important to your work?

 

K [00:09:38] And so in the same sense that Harlem would serve as the intellectual capital of Black life, you know, for African-Americans in the early twentieth century, London here served as a kind of meeting point and cosmopolitan space for anti-colonialists from across the empire. So beyond the journal, Ali was connected to the Woking Mosque, the first mosque established in Britain right outside of London, and the Ahmadiyya movement, you know, this kind of heterodox movement of South Asian Muslims who at the time controlled the Woking Mosque and would be an advocate for the cause of Indian Muslims in particular, and against their minoritization within India and the British Empire. And for the kind of transnational umma in general.

 

Y [00:10:33] That is such a rich history. Could I take you back to Garvey and how did he come in touch with you, Duse Muhammad Ali? Exactly.

 

K [00:10:43] Yeah. So Garvey began working for the African Times and Orient Review in 1913 as an assistant to Ali. And he published one article in the Journal about giving a sort of history of slavery and emancipation in Jamaica and the British West Indies in general. Also in 1913, Duse Muhammad Ali helped Garvey gain a temporary reading past to the British Library, writing him a letter of recommendation to read Blyden's works.

 

[00:11:17] You know, and that temporary reading pass would prove to be pretty important for Garvey, as Blyden would obviously be a huge influence on him. But biographies of Garvey would also note that it was at the British Library that Garvey first encountered Booker T. Washington reading his book Up from Slavery. Washington, of course, as I said, contributed to the first edition of the African Times and Orient Review was a huge influence on our Ali, who would later, after moving to America, visit the Tuskegee Institute and deliver a series of lectures on African history. Booker T. [Washington] would also prove to be an enormous influence on Garvey as well, especially on his business ventures.

 

Y [00:12:03] So how does Garvey get from London to New York and how does his time in London influence his political activity and this conflict with Du Bois?

 

K [00:12:15] That's a good question. So Garvey would establish the Universal Negro Improvement Association or the UNIA in Kingston immediately upon returning to Jamaica from Europe in 1914. Garvey moved to New York to Harlem in 1917, and it was there that it really formed into this mass movement as people know it. He also maintains the relationship with his mentor, Ali, who moved to America in 1921 and worked at the UNIA as a foreign affairs columnist. And, you know, he also lectured at different UNIA events. And if you look at his lectures from that time, you know, you can see him making an argument about ancient Egypt as a Black civilization, an argument he would also make in his journal earlier. That would be an enduring history for later Pan-Africanists, one which I think is more familiar now. And this idea of African history was also really important for Garvey's arguments about the greatness of the Black nation and his ideas about Black pride and self-regard. Part of Garvey’s critique of Du Bois would claim that integration would never work in the United States because Black people did not have a government of their own and could never achieve full citizenship under white rule. His concept of Black nationhood or of Africa for Africans was rooted in the notion that the Black diaspora could not be free until Africa was free and that an independent African nation or empire would be the guarantor of the rights of all Black people around the world.

 

Y [00:14:15] That is so fascinating. And could you tell us more about the UNIA and Harlem, for example?

 

K [00:14:23] Yeah. So the Harlem branch of UNIA was the main branch after 1917, but there were hundreds of UNIA branches throughout the United States and the Caribbean, in addition to branches in Latin America and West and South Africa. The UNIA newspaper, The Negro World, was distributed all over the world and published in both English and Spanish. By the early 1920s, the organization had grown immensely from its beginnings, was holding annual parades throughout Harlem and uptown Manhattan, running a number of businesses throughout the neighborhood, laundromats, textile, textile factory, grocery stores, etc., drawing thousands of delegates to its annual conferences and huge crowds to lectures and other social events at Liberty Hall, I think on 138th Street, and on street corners throughout Harlem. The conflict with Du Bois comes during that period of ascendence for the organization. So if you look through Du Bois's correspondence at this time, you can see a lot of NAACP members writing to him, expressing concern about the popularity of Garvey's movement. And Du Bois would publish two articles in crisis in 1920 and 1921 profiling Garvey and the UNIA, mostly criticizing his business practices. But there was also a real discomfort with Garvey's charismatic, if authoritarian personality. You know, other things that he was criticized for included, you know, his organization's real authoritarianism, its insistence on racial separatism, the use of titles like “knight” for its members in this kind of adoption of imperial aesthetics and the idea of a unified African empire with Garvey at its head.

 

Y [00:16:35] Right. And what were Garvey's criticisms of Du Bois and how are you thinking about this conflict more broadly?

 

K [00:16:43] So I think that there existed this perception more broadly that Du Bois and the NAACP were seen to represent an elite current of Black society. So we find Garvey definitely drawing on the perception and also critiquing the proximity of Du Bois and the NAACP to progressive white circles, always contrasting this with his all Black organization. Though Du Bois attended conferences on African unity during the early 1900s, Garvey's movement was explicitly transnational, both in terms of his own concept of Blackness and in the actual structure and reach of the organization. So I think of their conflicts in terms of a broader struggle over the form of Black politics at the moment of birth for a kind of global Black polity, with this backdrop of European colonialism, and nascent, anticolonial movements throughout the British Empire. The development of the UNIA into a project of mass mobilization, you know, real mass movement is, I think, a product in part, at least, of Garvey's exposure to a global anticolonial movement in London.

 

Y [00:18:10] It is so interesting to think about these debates in the U.S. within a broader international context. And I think your research and your insights have helped me tremendously in thinking about that once again. Thank you, Kyle. This brings our conversation to an end, and yeah, thank you.

 

K [00:18:32] Thank you.

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