“Now the first thing that is to be urged against this view is that the caste system is not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers.” B.R. Ambedkar wrote that in 1936, in a speech he was never allowed to deliver — the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, the reformist Punjabi organization that had invited him, cancelled the event rather than let him say it aloud, and Ambedkar self-published the text as Annihilation of Caste instead. Nearly eighty years later, when the Dalit-focused publishing house Navayana reissued it as an annotated critical edition in 2014, the sentence a new reader was most likely to encounter first still wasn’t this one. It was Arundhati Roy’s.
Roy’s introduction, commissioned by Navayana’s editor S. Anand, runs 128 pages against the roughly 100 of Ambedkar’s own text — later published on its own as a separate book, The Doctor and the Saint. A reader picking up the single most consequential recent edition of Ambedkar’s foundational argument meets a prominent non-Dalit writer’s framing before they meet the argument itself, in an introduction long enough to outrun the book it introduces. The imbalance isn’t only length. Reviewing the edition in South Asia Research, Anindya Sekhar Purkayastha and Mursed Alam found the introduction gives Gandhi’s record on caste more sustained attention than it gives Ambedkar’s own reasoning — a strange outcome for a book whose entire purpose was to argue that Gandhi’s caste politics were a dead end. The Hyderabad-based collective Dalit Camera made the identical finding directly to Roy, in an open letter published the same year: “Your essay reads more like an essay on re-appraisal of Gandhi. Ambedkar is merely used to introduce Gandhi.” Two independent readings, an academic one and an activist one, arrived at the same complaint from different directions: whatever Roy’s introduction is doing, explicating Ambedkar’s own argument is not the largest part of it.
Yogesh Maitreya, a Dalit writer and founder of Panther’s Paw Publication, made the structural version of the same objection when the edition came out: “Dr. Ambedkar needs no introduction, not even for Brahmins, if they keep their eyes and ears open to face the truth spoken by Dalits.” He went further, calling the framing an attempt
“to gain philosophical royalty by usurping the ‘epistemology of subaltern castes’ and sidelining subalterns from the platform of caste debates.” This isn’t a complaint about the quality of Roy’s prose. It’s a complaint about institutional structure: who gets positioned to explain Ambedkar to a general readership, before that reader ever reaches Ambedkar’s own sentence about caste being a division of labourers as well as labour, is a structural question. It would be worth asking even if every individual choice inside that structure were made in good faith.
Roy herself has never claimed otherwise. Replying to Dalit Camera’s letter, she wrote plainly: “I am not a Dalit, I am not a Hindu, and I am not an authority on Ambedkar, though I have, unlike many people, including many Dalits, taken the trouble to read him.” She called her own essay “just one more introduction — not the best, not the greatest and certainly not the last — to one more edition,” and rejected the premise that only Dalit writers are entitled to introduce Ambedkar’s work.
That defense is worth taking seriously rather than waving off, because it’s also the standard case made for the whole project: Roy’s name and reach put Ambedkar’s text in front of readers, in India and internationally, who would very likely never have opened a self-published 1936 pamphlet otherwise. Wider circulation of Annihilation of Caste is not a trivial good, and treating Roy’s stated modesty as false modesty doesn’t engage her argument. But the reach argument and the structural argument are answering different questions, and the first doesn’t resolve the second. Whether more people read the book because of Roy’s name is a question about circulation. Who those new readers meet first, and whose frame they carry into Ambedkar’s own sentences, is a question about interpretive authority — and circulation numbers don’t touch it. A book can reach more readers and still teach those readers, on its very first pages, that a Dalit thinker’s foundational argument requires a savarna writer’s permission slip to be legible. Both things can be true of the same edition at once.
Ambedkar’s own text doesn’t need that permission slip to land. Caste, for him, wasn’t a set of prejudiced attitudes sitting on top of an otherwise neutral economic order. It was the division of people, sorted and graded, built into the order itself — a structural claim about the organization of labour and life, not a moral appeal for better attitudes. That argument doesn’t require translation into someone else’s frame to be understood; it was written, and delivered, in the plainest terms Ambedkar had. The 2014 edition’s contribution, extensive annotations situating the text’s references and debates for a contemporary reader, didn’t need a 128-page introduction to accomplish it, and doesn’t answer the question of why Roy’s framing came first anyway.
Eighty years after a reformist organization cancelled the one event where Ambedkar might have delivered this argument in his own voice, the question worth sitting with isn’t whether Roy’s introduction is well written. It’s what a reader meets first the next time this text gets reissued — and whether that choice, made again, will still need defending on the grounds of who it reached rather than who it centered.
Edition referenced: Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, ed. S. Anand, introduction by Arundhati Roy (Navayana / Verso, 2014).
