Think of it as an extension of the tussle unfolding between India’s political blocs, and the social blocs they represent on the ground. The figure in contention is B R Ambedkar, legal scholar, historian, social messiah, trenchant critic of the dharmashastras that underpinned the traditional Hindu society and above all, the prime author and guiding spirit of our Constitution.
If Manu was the lawgiver of classical India, it’s an abiding poetic justice that it fell upon a man who would have been deemed beyond the pale of society in ancient India to write the law for the modern, democratic nation. But who holds the legal rights to the lawgiver and his words? The Centre has announced its intention to reprint the collected works of Ambedkar. The old copyrights would have lapsed since over 60 years have passed after Ambedkar’s death, it says.
Ambedkar’s ideas do need a wider circulation for a generation that is familiar with him only as an iconic presence, not as a living mind who dissected the unique workings of power in India and offered ways out of the morass. But any entity or institution arrogating to itself the right to do so, by virtue of Ambedkar’s specific value for the Dalit movement, also makes a power statement. To say Ambedkar is more than a Dalit messiah and a true national thought leader is accurate, but to use that argument in a proprietorial way may be fraught with risk. Recently, after all, we saw Ambedkar statues in UP being clad in saffron.
The Hindutva ideological stream has some natural incongruence with Babasaheb’s thoughts, and is internally pulled apart by a dual tendency: one away from caste, one towards its default savarna position. Prakash Ambedkar, the holder of his grandfather’s intellectual estate, insists the rights are with Maharashtra state and, since the collected works came out only in the 1970s, the copyright has not lapsed. A bitter fight over the legacy may be inevitable, but more than anything else it’s the right to interpret Ambedkar that is being claimed. Babasaheb may himself have had an opinion on that, and we may guess at it.