War without End, or, Ambedkar, Time, and Stasis Notes

Ambedkar, Time, and Stasis

Introduction

  • B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956): revolutionary constitutionalist and moral philosopher.
  • Ambedkar's life can be seen as a continuous experience of borders and sanctions, much like "waiting for a visa".
  • The experience of waiting is not merely a metaphor, but a precondition for political judgment.
  • Ambedkar declared "I have no homeland" in August 1931 to M. K. Gandhi.
  • War and Time:
    • Ambedkar felt distracted from literary pursuits due to politics, which he saw as an affair with time.
    • He resonates with Thomas Hobbes' view in Leviathan that war isn't just fighting but a tract of time.
    • Hobbes: "war consists not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in tract of time … the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather."
    • War includes the disposition to kill, blurring the line between war and peace.
    • This disposition introduces both a cessation of internal strife during wartime and a perpetual practice of cruelty in peacetime.
    • The most modern name for this disposition of war with civilian deaths is "caste."
    • Political use and abuse of memory is key to the logic and structure of the disposition to kill.
    • Amnesia: saves a society from seeing its own cruelty, locking the polity in stasis.
    • Ambedkar gives the status of "armed neutrality" to this tacit war waged in the shadows of liberal constitutionalism.

Peace and Its Other

  • Memory of moving from cantonment towns became decisive details.
  • Waiting for a Visa: incomplete ode to Ambedkar's endless war with time.
  • Ambedkar lived in an urban "dungeon" after returning from New York, dedicating himself to reading.
  • The Buddha and His Dhamma (1956): treatise on passion, judgment, war, and friendship; warrior prince chooses exile over fratricide.
  • Mastery is the antithesis of finitude, boundary between judgment and accusation.
  • Mastery is not a stable state, but a threshold where political virtuosity tips into political cruelty.
  • Ambedkar refuses to use interiority for political gain, unlike nationalists who use autobiography to pour out details of personal and civilizational mastery.
  • Ethics of sharing and humility radiates from the incompleteness of the self.
  • The pain of burying his children indelibly marks Ambedkar's thought, creating an irreparable emptiness.
  • The word dalit refers to one ground down to the earth.
  • Juridical machine of caste carves out an exit to the state of nature and replaces it with an archaic, atemporal law.
  • Moral psychology of resistance makes Ambedkar a man of the dark times.
  • "The secret of freedom is courage, and courage is born in combination of individuals into a party".
  • Even The Buddha and His Dhamma is prefaced with the Mahabharata, a reminder of civilization's felony.
  • A passage on "His Sermons": "He who, of slender means, but vast ambition, of warrior birth, aspires to sovereignty—this is the twelfth cause of one’s downfall".

The Fratricidal Infraction

  • Ambedkar's archaeologies of penal reason (dandaviveka) examine the afterlife of ancient war on the body; examines the missing dimension that could have saved a civilization from self-lacerating war.
  • Missing: the possibility of amnesty.
  • Amnestia is not simply forgetting or repression of the past.
  • Amnestia is “an exhortation to not make bad use of memory”.
  • The foundational relation between war and state is mutedly commented on in nationalist commentary on the Mahabharata.
  • Bhagavad Gita: dutiful action rather than the fact and pact of killing appears as the supreme motif.
  • Fratricidal logic of religious obligation and political office runs through dharma and adharma.
  • Depoliticization of caste is a key element in nationalist amnesia.
  • The Gita marks the threshold between peace and hostilities with Krishna convincing Arjuna to fight his brothers.
  • The Mahabharata is self-lacerating and factional because the strife is unleashed for the right to be proven right.
  • Brothers satiate each other with blood to win the highest place in heaven.
  • Maryada dharma term is closest to the social and moral logic of the border - securing the rule of the limit.
  • Borders exist to vacillate, cut through, encircle the citizen.
  • The wrong is the haunting of democratic majesty by its own degeneration.
  • Gravest threat to the constitution issues from the majority that mistakes its constitutionality for sovereignty.
  • Ambedkar returns to the figure of force to give the unequal and untouchable bearers of the wrong an insurrectionary strike at equality.
  • Ambedkar uses a quote from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War to illustrate his idea of future constitutionalism in India.
  • Ambedkar returns scrupulously to the “spiritual war” that had triggered the decline of India’s greatest imperium and its replacement by Brahmanic stasis.
  • Indian history before the Muslim invasions is the history of a mortal conflict between Brahmanism and Buddhism.
  • Ambedkar chips away at nationalist interest that swamps the memory of India’s fatal stasis.
  • His account cannot merely be a historical reconstruction of ancient sovereignty or civic majesty alone.
  • At the center of his archaeology of self-determination is a sphere of juridical and moral absolutism that swerves between cruel legality and a hesitant lawlessness.
  • It’s not the city that goes to war, but the law itself.
  • The Buddha and His Dhamma is punctuated with motifs of exile and wandering.

Not a Very Civil War

  • Annihilation of Caste (1936): Ambedkar turns to stasis that runs through the civic peace of Indian nationalist politics.
  • Civility is compromised by prejudice sanctioned by mechanical silence and collective hesitation.
  • Hesitation is neutral and armed.
  • Ambedkar asks if liberalism's peace can be separated from its militarized truce running along lines of police power.
    • "For, their attitude to the problem of caste is not merely a problem of neutrality, but is an attitude of armed neutrality."
  • Ambedkar's hesitation is an instinctive response to the logic of civilizational immemoriality that thrives in nationalist injunction against truthfulness.
  • Under what conditions does the logic and apparatus of such a coercive and armed neutrality become the foundation of an enduring institution of society?
  • The chapter's purpose is not to appropriate Ambedkar for a global history of civil war.
  • Ambedkar engages with Latin terms from Roman jurisprudence and ancient Indian statutes composed in Sanskrit.
  • He conceptualizes political freedom as untranslatable and irreducible in the language of imperial masters.
  • Among the words that come close to