Ninety Years of ‘Annihilation of Caste’: The wait for a democratic conscience in India

NINETY YEARS AGO TODAY, on May 15, 1936 –– the undelivered speech, ‘Annihilation of Caste’ –– was published. It was a seminal text on anti-caste literature, but also introduced a new term – ‘annihilation’ – that could unfold the generational injustice of the sacredness of Brahminical supremacy. The text was unacceptable to caste Hindus when Dr B. R. Ambedkar was invited to deliver the keynote address to Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal at Lahore. 

Even after nine decades, the life of this text is not acceptable to the caste Hindus of the Indian subcontinent. The speech was to address the reformist caste Hindus, who were, even though, were interested in inter-caste dining and marriage and abolition of untouchability, understandably could not digest the cure offered by Dr Ambedkar against the genetical pathology of caste. Its impregnant character exists in the microscopic form; sometimes it is invisibly exercised, its constituent power regulating the materiality of life despite a modern constitutional mechanism. On the contrary, caste annihilation has never been considered a national importance in its ninety years of existence.  

The increasing significance of Annihilation questions the genealogical root of caste origin in South Asia. It equally critiques the presence of its global wretchedness. The insoluble and invincible power of caste continues to be grounded in terms of disjuncture or rupture. That a construction of a Hindu temple in the city of New Jersey can enslave two hundred Dalit labourers in 2026 is evidence of that. Ninety years after its first publication, the text remains unequivocal and unprecedented and has upheld uncompromised moral and transformative power to reject the cosmological morphology of caste – the caste that unites and divides by the law of a hierarchical Hindu social order, yet perpetually produces a majority. 

This graded inequality of caste puts everyone in a ladder that satisfies someone as superior to one, and the other is defaulted as a victim to the superior. The cultural and political economy of the force of caste persecutes people who live with hunger and humiliation and gives privilege by birth to others who live with respect and wealth. The body politic of caste is an entrenched regulatory mechanism that functions as a sacred norm and its internalised practice remains unquestionable, as caste is the soul of Brahminical spirituality. Therefore, in the history of caste, it has never been understood as a common problem. In the emergence of nation and nationalism, it has never been regarded as a national problem. 

‘Abolition’ and ‘Annihilation’

Caste is often considered in terms of abolition of untouchability as a cure against the genealogical disease of caste. This proposition is based on a false premise. The Constituent Assembly Debates in 1947-49 never took interest in debating on the question of caste. Rather, the conversation in the Debates was relegated to abolition of untouchability initiated by Hindu social reformers. The ‘abolition of untouchability’ is not only misinterpreted but also misunderstood in terms of its historical legacy. 

The word ‘abolition’ has had a significant utterance in fighting against slavery, racism and capitalism in Europe in general and U.S.A in particular. The word ‘abolition’, as was first majorly discussed in criticisms to racism in the United States, led scholars and thinkers globally to conceptualise the inhumanity of racial segregation, wherein humans were divided and categorised racially. The abolitionist movement in the 1860s questioned the racial white supremacy that manufactured peculiar, segregative and discriminatory forms of law, democracy, State and capitalism – popularly referred to as the Jim Crow laws. It was a modern law that sanctified racial segregation –  that treated the Black people as property, object and commodity. 

The lineage of the abolitionist movement in America is as revolutionary as ‘Annihilation’ in India. Ironically, the abolition of the untouchability movement in India is reduced to purifying the guilt of Savarnahood, understood in a Gandhian sense, because it is a sin. If untouchability is a sin, how is it reproduced and who maintains it? Is this an offence against religious moral law? Or is the form and existence of untouchability a product of the Brahminical mythology of Karma, that produces an untouchable body to intact the metaphysis of caste? 

It is not a sin, but it is a divine origin of God that creates Chandala and Brahman ––the ‘impure’ and ‘pure’ bodies. The repugnant notion of ‘abolition of untouchability’ as seen in the Constitution, is often credited to Ambedkar, it must be noted, belonged to the tradition of the abolitionist movement, which he rearticulated in the language of ‘Annihilation’. He not only learned, inspired and participated in the abolitionist movement of Black African Americans, but shared a common global struggle against injustice of race and caste. 

Materiality of Caste and how courts fumble Atrocities cases

The materiality of caste is operated through the exclusionary reasoning that a human exists against another human –– that foregrounds a set of foreclosures into a fixed boundary that erases all humanness which is ontologically present in a person. In other words, the materiality of caste manifests in  power dynamics that is multifaceted in the form of multiplicity vein through private and public spaces, time, food, dress, language, occupation, name, house, smell, body, mustache, ringtone, wrist-thread, sacred thread, Tilak and so on. These are not just signifiers of caste, but equally indicators of power and powerlessness. It is a reiterative power produced through social phenomena. 

In a Foucauldian sense, caste is a discursive power infested in the phenomenon of materiality. When a Tenth class Brahmin man chants a Sanskrit mantra in a marriage ceremony, or Hindu festival or a death funeral, it shows a symbol of reiterative power. But when a Dalit groom rides a horse for his marriage procession on a public street, under police protection, he gets beaten – showing the materiality of how domination through caste operates. It shows where freedom lies in the seventy eight years of the Indian republic. 

On the one hand, the critique of caste through state mechanism often plays a protective role against the perpetrator. The irony is that verbal abuse or using slur against a lower caste person never gets evident to prove its intent. On the other hand, in the justice system, several court decisions gamble with atrocities cases –– they manipulate, erase and foreclose. For example, recently, the Supreme Court, in Gunjan @ Girija Kumari v. State (NCT of Delhi) (2026), noted that casteism or casteist attitude of a person in a private place cannot be punished through the mechanism available through the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 (‘SC ST Act’). However, the privileged caste, by intent, always sees the lower caste with a casteist eye, whether in private or public setting, because it has social sanction. The violation of the discipline of caste is a social and religious punishment. But when it comes to filing a complaint against casteist behaviour in a private space, the SC ST Act becomes incapable of addressing that atrocity. To elucidate the example of another recent Supreme Court decision, it has been held that if a Dalit converted to Christianity, they cannot access remedy under the SC ST Act, even if they experience caste oppression in everyday life.