Malavika Prasanna - Week 3

RESPONSE PAPER

Reading Title: Seeking Begumpura by Gail Omvedt (Chapters 10 &11)

Submission Number: 2/10

Chapters 10 & 11 of ‘Seeking Begumpura’ are a reflection on Periyar’s and Ambedkar’s views on the problem of caste in India. While Marxism and Socialism were recently up and coming in India at the time of their writing, both Periyar and Ambedkar differed from the Marxist-Socialist vision on two counts:

1.     Caste is a bigger issue than capitalism. Periyar, coming from a small town in Tamil Nadu, stressed excessively on the issue of caste as a bigger one than the issue of capitalism. Ambedkar too, along similar lines, was convinced that caste was the most significant enemy of a harmonious Indian State.

2.     Marx was not a believer in the idea of organized religion. He called it the opium of the masses. Both Periyar and Ambedkar were concerned with reforming Hindu religion and cleansing of its caste violence, but they did not altogether condemn religion.

·  Periyar’s ideal of a Dravidanadu or a nation of the Dravidan race in South India was in influenced significantly by the tenets of Islam as propounded my Mohammed Iqbal.

·   Ambedkar, when he chose to leave the Hindu fold as a sign of protest against its inseparable caste politics, later went on to embrace Buddhism.

Thus it can be inferred that both Ambedkar and Periyar saw caste as a peculiar problem of Hinduism alone, and were open to adopting other religions that were not do distinctly divided on the basis of caste.