This year marks the beginning of the centenary of the Mahad Satyagraha led by Dr B.R. Ambedkar in 1927. Along with fighting for the rights of the “untouchables” to carry water from the Chavdar tank in Mahad, Ambedkar also publicly burnt a copy of the Manusmriti, one of the most influential legal texts of Hinduism. Over the years, this episode has been etched in public consciousness. Yet, it is intriguing to note that the popular memorialising of this episode of Ambedkar’s fierce denunciation of the Manusmriti has seldom translated into understanding his granular critical engagement with the text. Ankit Kawade’s deeply insightful book, The Ambedkar Nietzsche Provocations: The Genius of the Chandala and the Gospel of the Superman, seeks to address this long overdue gap in the existing literature on Ambedkar studies.

For Ambedkar, the Manusmritiwas not so morally repugnant that he dismissed it entirely; instead, he engaged with it critically. In fact, as Kawade subtly observes, the burning of the text was preceded by Ambedkar’s close reading of the text. More importantly, this book is much more than a gap-filler. Ambedkar’s critique of the Manusmriti is brought in a creative entanglement with an unlikely interpreter of the text: Friedrich Nietzsche. Kawade introduces a refreshing contrapuntal reading of the text where the heretofore underexplored aspects of the text are amplified by “reading with” and “asking our questions” to Ambedkar and Nietzsche, instead of merely “reading about” and “understanding their questions”.

This is a key methodological apparatus for Kawade as the idea is, to follow Derrida’s “community of question”, to bring together thinkers separated by time and space in an interrogative communion. In Kawade’s own words, “the student who compares also joins this community, by identifying with the question that these thinkers share.” For Kawade, the central premise of critical exploration is: how did Ambedkar and Nietzsche read the Manusmriti? The purpose is not to observe striking similarities, but to show how working through the conflict between their interpretations of the text provides novel means to explicate the moral substance of their thought.

This comparative investigation of how Nietzsche and Ambedkar interpreted the Manusmriti explores why Nietzsche identified the rigid hierarchies of the caste system as a source of strength against what he called the “slave morality” of Judeo-Christian values and how Ambedkar’s engagement sought to exhume the buried violence within the Manusmriti. An equally important endeavour along the way for Kawade is to explore the larger oeuvre of the key concepts belonging to both these thinkers.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section deals with Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Manusmriti, focussing on values central to his thought, namely revenge, value, and genius. The second section deals with Ambedkar’s critical reading of the Manusmriti, which, even after it loomed large over his intellectual interventions on Hinduism as compared with the Bhagavad Gita, has received scant academic attention. The final section engages with Ambedkar’s critique of Nietzsche’s reading of the Manusmriti. In Kawade’s words, “Ambedkar’s refutation of Nietzsche’s reading of the Manusmriti in his later writings gives us reasons to think through the multiple and contradictory intellectual and political consequences of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian thought outside Europe.”

Kawade begins the first section by asking: “Can the Manusmriti shed light on the unforeseen aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking and conversely, can Nietzsche illuminate unforeseen aspects of the Manusmriti?” Kawade observes that Nietzsche was informed by certain inaccurate interpretations of the Manusmriti transmitted through the readings of the Manusmriti of a French barrister, Louis Jacolliot. These included claims such as how the Chandalas were forbidden from writing left to right and how they were not allowed to use their right hand for writing. The Manusmriti has no mention of such injunctions.

Kawade is not concerned with these inaccuracies. For him, what is more important is what Nietzsche’s misinterpretation reveals about the fundamental aspects of his thinking. Kawade seeks to explore this dimension through Nietzsche’s use of the term “Chandala”. Why did Nietzsche use the term “Chandala” in his 1895 text, The Antichrist? As Kawade elucidates, Nietzsche’s usage of the term Chandala has a generic usability, not limited, or defined by the Manusmriti. In this sense, the Chandala is used for slaves, mobs, socialists, anarchists, and Christians alike.

The “hotch-potch” man

For Kawade, this decontextualised deployment of the Chandala is philosophically thought-provoking. Instead of historical comprehension, Nietzsche engages in creative transformations. Chandala, for Nietzsche, is nothing but a “no-caste man” or a “hotch-potch” man. He stands for a common name that harbours attributes of slave morality such as envy, revenge, resentment, hatred, and pessimism. Nietzsche invokes the Chandala to identify him as the major impediment to the realisation of what he termed the “order of rank”. Nietzsche found the theoretical formulation of caste useful to underscore his belief in a system of social hierarchy, which for him was fading because of the egalitarian impulses inaugurated by Christianity. In this schema tilted towards conferring legitimacy to rank, the Chandala represented the deterioration of rank. The Chandala is also a hotch-potch, being a result of the mixing of classes, a human folly.

As Kawade explains, “For Nietzsche, society needs a body of definite classes for orderly functioning—the figure of the Chandala makes the ‘society’ impossible.” At the same time, Kawade issues a caution against any simplistic equivalence between Nietzsche’s thinking and Brahmanism. Over here, the Chandala is indeed contemptible, but contempt is the “necessary fate” of every genius, something geniuses suffer in pursuit of their greatness. As Kawade explains, “Contemptible genius is revalued and redeemed in the revelation of their inner truth and greatness only to posterity.” Kawade provokes by suggesting that Nietzsche recognises glimpses of his own self within the construct of the Chandala character and how this kind of usage is unthinkable in the Manusmriti.

In a similar vein, Kawade provides many more insightful provocations like how enmity, for Nietzsche, is situated within the realm of thinking, by which he means that the place of the Brahmin is philosophically important for the generative gift of thought.

In the second section, Kawade deals with how Ambedkar deploys “historicizing myths” as a method of reading Brahmanic literature. More specifically, Kawade is interested in how Ambedkar decodes the “puzzles” and “riddles” posed by the Manusmriti. Kawade begins this exploration by engaging with Ambedkar in The Philosophy of Hinduism where he wrote, “The unacknowledged element of fratricidal conflict in India is the willful design of its social structure: class war has become the genius of the Hindus.” For Kawade, the genius lies in the ideologically distorting presentation of class war as an exemplary instance of peace, harmony, and friendship between classes.

This point of class war is important as Ambedkar’s interpretation of the Manusmriti addresses the anxiety of the later Vedic society of Buddhism’s challenge to its social, as well as its ritual economy. Strikingly, Ambedkar argued that Brahmins lived as a “depressed class” for 140 years, the duration of the Mauryan empire. As Kawade notes, the Manusmriti was then used by this depressed class of the Brahmins to textually defend and restore the authority of Brahmanism over Buddhism. For Ambedkar, the Manusmriti was composed after this regime change which was brought to fruition by a regicide. Put simply, the murder of Brihadratha Maurya by Pushyamitra Sunga was not about the Sunga dynasty succeeding the Maurya dynasty but how the Brahmins overthrew the rule of Buddhist kings.

This context and reasoning are crucial as Kawade argues that this new emergence of Brahmanism required a sacred text to justify their transgressions. This entitlement of transgressions enjoyed by the Brahmins is similar to the exceptional place accorded to the Brahmins in the Manusmriti. More than focussing on the number of rules and regulations placed on the body of the Brahmin in the Manusmriti, Kawade acutely reminds us that what matters more is how Brahmins enjoy the relative freedom to not follow these rules.

Shudras and untouchables cannot exercise this kind of freedom. Kawade also explores Ambedkar’s views on the ambiguous exegesis of the relationship between Brahmins and Kshatriyas. For Ambedkar, Manu does not acknowledge the war between them and seeks to resolve the conflict in favour of the Brahmins. More importantly, Manu redirects the class war towards the Vaishyas and Shudras. As Ambedkar observes, “To Brahmanism, the possibility of suppressing the Kshatriyas was very remote and the danger of being overtaken by Vaishyas and Shudras very real.”

Kawade’s exploration of Ambedkar’s critical engagement with the Manusmriti is particularly important with regard to the question of “foundations”. If the Manusmriti emerged as the founding law of the new regime, Kawade highlights how Ambedkar was deeply suspicious of the category of law itself. The Laws of Manu govern all walks of life, and never leave anything for chance encounters. In order to reverse this foundational violence, Kawade argues that Ambedkar’s constitutionalism sought to legally undo the public legitimacy granted to violence against the most vulnerable social groups in Indian society. If the Manusmriti engineered regicidal violence to become the constitution of the counter-revolution, Ambedkar’s constitutionalism necessarily had to be non-violent, since “violence is the ‘police power’ that was a feature shared by the mechanism of caste.”

It is not difficult to surmise as to why and how Ambedkar would convincingly demonstrate Nietzsche’s philosophical parallels with Manu. A couple of examples will suffice from the book. Firstly, Ambedkar accuses Nietzsche of misinterpretation, arguing that the noble classes, the philosophers, and the warriors guard and guide the masses. Ambedkar argues that the superman, i.e., the Brahmin of the Manusmriti, has rights against the common man but he has no duties towards the common man. Similarly, Kawade’s reading of Ambedkar’s critique of the political ideal of aristocracy, from Manu to Nietzsche, illuminates Ambedkar’s staunch belief in the ontological equality of human beings.

In Kawade’s words, “Ambedkar finds that Nietzsche’s idealization of the real distorts real human plurality into an idealized class or caste difference.” Even as Kawade provides multiple such examples, his genius lies in showing the tantalisingly intimate connections between these two thinkers. For instance, Ambedkar’s interpretation of Nietzsche involves him appropriating the term Übermensch—Superman—as he finds didactic value in this term for his own analysis.

Ambedkar uses this to argue that the centre of the religious ideal of Hinduism is neither individual not society, but class, and how this is a class of Supermen called Brahmins. As Kawade explains, this gives Ambedkar a new axe with which to grind the philosophy of Hinduism. Intriguingly, Kawade observes that Ambedkar finds Manu more loathsome and odious than Nietzsche, and explains the difference between the two notions of the “Superman”.

For Ambedkar, Nietzsche was genuinely interested in creating a new race of men, as opposed to Manu who was interested in maintaining the privilege of a class. Nietzsche’s “newness” is deemed to be praiseworthy as opposed to the “infectious imitation” propounded by the caste order. More importantly, Ambedkar’s praising of Nietzsche over here must be understood in the context of how this helped him in intensifying his own criticism of Hinduism.

There are times when ideational indulgence seems to be getting the better of a more grounded analysis. However, this could only be posed as a minor quibble, especially if the reader is unfamiliar with the central texts that Kawade deals with for both Ambedkar and Nietzsche. Indeed, one of the strengths of this book is that it invites readers to participate not only as bystanders, but in an interventionist mode encourages the readers to formulate and pose their own questions. This book will serve as the new benchmark for doing comparative studies of seemingly irreconcilable figures. Kawade’s bold assertions, at times speculative but on most accounts discerning perspectives, provide not just creative interpretations of the Manusmriti but also underscores the significance of constantly expanding the intellectual contours of our existing methodological frameworks.

Surajkumar Thube is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Political Science Department, Ashoka University.

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