Making The Ideal Real: A South Asian Social Movement’s Construction of a Buddhist Cultural Identity
BY JEREMY RINKER
The tension and excitement were palpable. It was October 2, 2006 and thousands of disaffected youth wagged their fists towards the sky from atop the numerous light posts and vehicles that dotted the divided thoroughfare. Crowds of revelers packed the entrance to the giant stupa which marks the hallowed grounds where, in October 1956, their savior, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, led one of history’s largest mass religious conversions. Clearly many of the 50th anniversary celebrants were happy to be there not simply to revere Ambedkar’s embrace of Buddhism, but to show that they existed and had an identity.
Though not all present were Buddhists, all shared a common understanding that Dr. Ambedkar had given them a voice. So what is it that explains this sense of communal identity? What gives it meaning? Is it something about Buddhism, solidarity felt in the experience of oppression, or a postmodern camaraderie found in the attempt to redefine ‘justice’ that brought such a diversity of people and cultures together? As divergent religious and political narratives competed on this day in Nagpur1 , these questions seemed trivial. The archetype of ‘Babasaheb,’ as Dr. Ambedkar is affectionately known, superseded all other competing identities: caste, religious, or linguistic. This article presents the initial findings of research attempting to come to terms with the overlapping identity and social justice narratives of an important sub-group of the wider Dalit (literally ‘downtrodden’) movement in the Indian State of Maharashtra. The Trailokya Bauddha Mahasangha Sahayak Gana (TBMSG)—a loud, well-funded, and nonviolent movement of social change among predominantly Mahar ‘untouchables’ of the wider Dalit movement—provides an ideal case upon which to explore the intersections between Ambedkar’s legacy, pan-Buddhist interpretations of Dharma, and a juxtaposed identity of enemy ‘others.’ The volatile emotional atmosphere I witnessed on October 2, 2006 highlights a need to better understand the narratives driving Ambedkar Buddhist collective identity, and the wider meanings of this identity within the context of broader yet interrelated metanarratives of social justice, citizenship, and community.
The TBMSG movement is founded on a socially constructed identity that relies on a negative view of the ‘other’ and a strong sense of injustice propagated by the ‘other’ to ferment its legitimacy. This identity, while crucial to the social justice aspirations of Ambedkar Buddhists, is problematic in the sense that it empowers in-group self-categorization at the expense of out-group understanding. By refashioning the dharma as duty towards the downtrodden community, Ambedkar Buddhists of the TBMSG highlight the position of Dalits as sufferers of injustice while inspiring followers to reconstruct their identity and self-respect around a newBuddhist identity. The following reaction to the spate of celebratory conversions on October 2, 2006 by a keen observer of the Ambedkar movement underscores what is at stake if the connection between Ambedkar Buddhists’ collective identity and ‘glocal’ metanarratives of social justice, citizenship, and community goes unanalyzed:
“What do they mean: All India will become Buddhist?…These people need to live in a world with Muslims and Hindus and all the rest. Dr. Ambedkar wanted to reconstruct the Buddhist tradition so it met the needs of his time. But can the Ambedkarites do the same with Ambedkar’s own ideas? Nagaloka [TBMSG’s University] should be teaching comparative religion… They need to say what they are for, and leave aside what they are against.”
In short, the incongruence of TBMSG members’ identities as victim and as self-aware Buddhist leaves conceptions of social justice, citizenship, and community vague and unbounded.
In taking responsibility for their own liberation TBMSG followers are asked to shed their previous village identities as ‘untouchables’ and overcome the traumatizing nature of this identity by taking refuge in Ambedkar’s version of Buddhism (called Navayana or new vehicle by some). Ambedkar is positioned as the bodhisattva (an enlightened individual) who leads the downtrodden out of oppression and into a new existence filled with “liberty, fraternity, and equality.” In such a conception it is clear that TBMSG favors a pan-Buddhist identity over identification based on injustice. The question, thus, becomes how do these competing positions help the Ambedkar Buddhists of TBMSG achieve their ideals of social justice, citizenship, and community?
A constructed and dualistic Ambedkar Buddhist identity impedes the social conditions necessary for sustained coexistence by limiting conversational space with the ‘other.’ The positioning of Ambedkar as bodhisattva and his followers as self-aware Buddhists presents an offensive posture that is held in check by a less powerful, but equally evident, tendency to remain defensive as Dalits concerned about being revictimized. This dualistic identity represents the chief problematic for the social justice mobilization of Ambedkar Buddhists as a distinct community within the Indian polity. To effectively approach such problematic identities as they relate to conceptions of community, citizenship, and social justice, closer analysis of actors’ narrative positions is necessary.
People tell stories based on implicit and explicit knowledge about themselves, their community, and a desired projective future. These stories are representations of different versions of reality and projections of what it means to be a citizen in a community that respects a certain conception of social justice. “Personal stories are not merely a way of telling someone (or oneself ) about one’s life; they are the means by which identities may be fashioned.” These disparate identities can be linked through an understanding of positioning. As articulated by Harre and Langenhove, positions are “a complex cluster of generic personal attributes… which impinges on the possibilities of interpersonal, inter-group and even intrapersonal action through some assignment of such rights, duties, and obligations to an individual as are sustained by the cluster.” Placed within the context of India’s caste system, positioning theory can provide a logical model to assist in understanding identity’s relation to metanarratives of social justice, citizenship, and community. Positioning theory provides a model through which the “projective aspect of narratives” binds personal stories or accounts to collective identity, and, in the process, binds these collective identities to metanarratives.
Casteism pervades the modern Indian polity. Despite caste adapting well to changes brought on by globalization, it remains essentially unchanged in relation to the processes of social positioning and stratification. As a diverse culture in which there exists strong religious traditions of distinguishing purity from impurity, India is a seemingly perfect Petri dish for the growth of “a system of graded inequality.” Thus, through narrative analysis of caste discrimination one is provided with a storyline upon which to develop arguments about collective identity and the positioning of groups. Despite the complexity of the often misunderstood social institution of caste, understanding the role of caste in the TBMSG movement highlights crucial elements of both an often unheard social identity and the use of positioning.
Even though ‘untouchability’ has been outlawed in the Indian constitution (thanks to Dr. Ambedkar), the concept of caste has never been outlawed or much less eradicated from the Indian psyche. While many ‘haves’ in post-liberalization India see caste as synonymous with class ideology, and thus outdated, most ‘have nots’ actively experience casteism as an endemic part of their lives, especially within the Indian village. Further, while the positioning of castes may appear subtle in the modern private sector workplace it is evident in the communal politics of cronyism and nepotism so endemic in the largest civil service system in the world. Casteism, though subtle and insidious, is apparent to any South Asia observer.
The strength of the TBMSG movement provides proof that over two thousand years of caste discrimination has left a void in Dalit’s collective cultural identity. As Taylor, Bougie, and Caouette have argued, lack of a collective cultural identity is the most socially damaging and difficult to overcome aspect of a group’s identity: “The role of cultural collective identity is not merely for group members to have a shared cultural history…. It is a stable reference group against which the individual engages positioning processes on an ongoing basis in order to develop a healthy personal identity.” The identification of TBMSG members as Buddhist is an attempt to reestablish a stable position, a reference point upon which to establish the moorings of a healthy personal identity. This remooring process was reborn among ‘untouchables’ only in the colonial experience. As a result of British Raj attempts to develop a census system “castes immediately organized themselves and even formed associations to take steps to see that their status was recorded in a way they thought was honorable to them.” This early-modern positioning of a caste identity had a profound impact on both Indian politics and the reconstruction of a collective identity among low-castes in particular. By reclaiming a collective cultural identity within the British Raj, low-castes, discontent with the status quo, were able to reposition themselves within the caste system.
This historical process developed a paradoxical collective cultural identity that is simultaneously pluralistic and exclusive. Born of the nationalism of the pre-independence era, caste consciousness took on the plural narrative of independence, while at the same time championing an exclusive narrative of revenge. This, in turn, has caused some ‘schizophrenia’ in how Ambedkar Dalits conceptualize and emphasize justice, as well as how they define community and citizenship. Struggling with the degree with which to be inclusive of others, Ambedkar Buddhists are ‘trapped’ between a self-understanding that emphasizes their need for social justice and their desire for a legitimate collective cultural identity based on an Ambedkarite reading of Buddhism. The importance of this ambiguous identity cannot be overemphasized in attempting to understand the TBMSG movement’s role in modern India. These competing self and collective identities force Ambedkar Buddhists to question how their collective identity as ‘new Buddhists’ can be empowered while simultaneously avoiding a tendency to become too over-arching to allow the full expression of their feelings of injustice. Ambedkar Buddhists are projecting a collective identity as Buddhists that has the potential to reinforce inclusiveness, but this identity also threatens their broader social justice agenda by questioning the plural assumptions of social justice, community, and citizenship.
So what is the significance of Ambedkar Buddhists’ collective identity? While their identity is critical in mobilizing change and empowering a sense of self-help among Dalits, focusing attention solely on collective identity limits the ability of Dalits to position themselves as a legitimate voice for an inclusive version of social justice. In other words, while the need for a stable reference group is met through the reification of a collective identity, the ability to authentically express self-identities which are based on injustice become disempowered through this reification process. This, in turn, leaves Ambedkar Buddhists’ connection to larger cultural metanarratives unanalyzed.
Ambedkar Buddhists’ collective identity must be more deeply explored within a network of shared meanings that operate within a shared moral order. Only through analyzing the justice narratives of TBMSG movement members (i.e. the stories that social actors tell about fairness, equality, and injustice) can the full meaning of their identity be discerned. The process of positioning within a socially constructed moral order affords researchers the opportunity to both contextualize collective identity and understand its importance to competing definitions of social justice, citizenship, and community. Such a task is all the more important with our increasingly global understandings of the uses of identity.
Jeremy Rinker (jrinker1@gmu.edu) is a doctoral student at the Institute for Conflict Analysis & Resolution (http://icar.gmu.edu). This article was first published in print and citations have been removed due to space limitations, but are available from the author.
- This auspicious day (which based on the Hindu lunar-calendar fell on October 14th in 1956) fell, in 2006, on October 2. October 2nd happens to be the same day as Mahatma Gandhi’s Birthday and in 2006 marked the beginning of the major annual Hindu festival of Diwali. [↩]
