Ambedkar's shifting legacy

No Laughing Matter: The Ambedkar Cartoons 1932-1956 Edited and selected by Unnamati 

Syama Sundar

Navayana

Pages: 407; Price: Rs 599

What is the representation of Dalits in India’s newsrooms? I have seen quite a few in the half-a-dozen newsrooms in which I have worked in nearly two decades in journalism. They clean the toilets and are entrusted occasionally with the upkeep of in-house canteens. I cannot remember having had a Dalit journalist colleague. If there were any, they may have thought it wiser to keep their caste identity concealed and never spoke on Dalit-related issues.

Constitution-mandated quotas in government jobs and public education have ensured Dalit representation in the bureaucracy and publicly-funded academia in the last 70 years. As Dalit activist Chandrabhan Prasad has reminded us over the years, the post-1991 liberalisation helped Dalits become entrepreneurs or get jobs as skilled work force in the private sector. A Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), a Delhi-based think tank, survey in 2006 found negligible representation of Dalits in mainstream English and Hindi newspapers and news channels. The situation does not seem to have changed much in the past 13 years since.

The lack of Dalit representation in the media is at the heart of No Laughing Matter, The Ambedkar Cartoons 1932-1956. These were the crucial years in Ambedkar’s public life and the book features 122 cartoons, arranged in seven chronological phases that collate how Ambedkar was depicted in cartoons in English language newspapers.

As the foreword by Suraj Yengde, a first generation Dalit scholar, points out, Ambedkar in the cartoons of these years “is shown as a child, a crying baby, a recalcitrant hooligan, at times literally dwarfing him in the company of other nationalist leaders”.

Mr Yengde, who has recently written Caste Matters, writes how Ambedkar is “shown shoeless (representative of the Mahar servanthood), as a woman prostituting her way up the social and political ladder”, “a trouble-maker and at times as someone whose sole purpose is to disturb the fecundity of other Indian leaders.”

Unnamati Syama Sundar spent over six years collecting these cartoons. The author has “taken to task” doyens of the Indian political cartooning fraternity of that era -- Shankar, Enver Ahmed, Vasu, R K Laxman, Earan, R Banerji, Oommen, Bireshwar and Ravindra. According to the author, of all the cartoonists of that era, Shankar was the “most erudite” and seemed to have a “grudging admiration” for Ambedkar.

If Ambedkar was ridiculed or largely ignored in the media during his lifetime, it forgot him quickly enough when he died. As Mr. Sundar writes, during his own school days and growing up, he was familiar with Bapu (Mahatma Gandhi) and chacha (Jawaharlal Nehru), or even Karl Marx and Lenin, but never Ambedkar despite studying in a college meant for Dalit and tribal students. Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) founder Kanshi Ram resurrected Ambedkar in the Dalit imagination in the 1980s. The V P. Singh government conferred on Ambedkar the Bharat Ratna posthumously and declared April 14, his birth anniversary, a gazetted holiday in 1990.

Ambedkarites are no fans of Gandhi, the communists and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). There are those among Ambedkarites who believe the razing of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 was no coincidence. The date was the death anniversary of Ambedkar, the architect of the Constitution. A couple of months before his death in 1956, Ambedkar rejected Hinduism and converted to Buddhism, along with half a million people, in Nagpur as a mark of protest against the caste system. This was to fulfil the vow he had taken over 20 years back, called the “Yeola declaration,” that while he was born a Hindu, he would not die as one. The book has quite a few cartoons from that era.

In his introduction, the author voices the Ambedkarite anger at Gandhi and communists. Few in the Ambedkarite movement forgive Gandhi for the Poona Pact of 1932, where he fasted to “blackmail” Ambedkar to agree to reject separate electorates for depressed classes. In 1933-34, possibly as a penance, Gandhi took a nine-month tour against “untouchability” covering over 19,000 km to visit every province. In his speeches, he implored Hindus to banish “untouchability”. Most in the Congress at the time felt Gandhi was wasting his time on a “religious issue” when the struggle to win independence should take priority.

The author has produced a cartoon from an edition of the Organiser, a publication inspired by RSS ideology, to underscore the irony of the Sangh lately publishing special editions on Ambedkar and its efforts to appropriate the Dalit leader’s legacy. On February 12, 1951, the Organiser published a cartoon to ridicule the Hindu Code Bill. The Bill’s prime backers were Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru, and among other things, it banned polygamy. The cartoon depicted Ambedkar and a woman on a donkey, riding towards a precipice with Nehru holding a banner that states “all clear”. “Ambedkar rides an ass of a Bill,” the caption stated.

When several Constituent Assembly members started calling Ambedkar a “modern Manu”, the Hindu lawgiver —rather incongruously since Ambedkar had burnt the Manu Smriti, —an article in the Organiser termed it “an instance of depicting a Lilliput as a Brobdingnag”. “It borders on ridicule [sic] to put Dr. Ambedkar on par [sic] with the learned and god-like Manu”.

By the 1970s, Madhukar Dattatraya ‘Balasaheb’ Deoras, the third RSS chief, included Ambedkar in the Sangh pantheon of epratahsmaraniya, or those remembered at the daybreak prayer, and the Organiser  calls him a champion of Hinduism. As the author points out Hinduism is “a religion he held in scorn, while he did not relent in trying to save savarana Hindus from themselves”. “At least an ass can count on consistency as a virtue,” the author adds.