Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men

B. R. Ambedkar spent his life battling Untouchability and instigating the end of the caste system. In his 1948 book The Untouchables, he sought to trace the origin of Untouchability. Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men is an annotated selection from this work, produced in a time when the oppression of and discrimination against Dalits remains pervasive.

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) was a radical thinker, economist, jurist, philosopher, and founder of a school of Buddhism. A prolific writer, he was the chief architect of the Indian Constitution and independent India’s first law minister. In 1935, he publicly declared that though he was born a Hindu, he would not die as one. Ambedkar eventually embraced Buddhism a few months before his death in 1956.

Alex George, a philosophy graduate from Birkbeck College, London, is an editor with Navayana, an independent anticaste press.

S. Anand is the cofounder and publisher of Navayana. He is the coauthor of the graphic biography Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability (2011) and editor of the annotated edition of Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (2014).

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, best known for Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture, and Political Economy, is a political thinker. His latest book is From a Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual: My Memoirs. He lives in Hyderabad.

Soumyabrata Choudhury, scholar:
I applaud the spirit of this project. It unlocks a new contemporaneity that signifies a particular relationship of desire to read Ambedkar’s original text in a new, writerly way. The urgency of the annotations is derived from questions, problems and passions that belong to our times.

Uma Chakravarti, historian:
Ambedkar makes a moving and completely original argument in this work to try and understand how untouchability came to be and what it became. This is enriched by the depth of the scholarship involved in setting up the critical notes.

V. Geetha, historian:
I marvel at the sheer labor put into Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men. There are two kinds of annotations here: one that places Ambedkar's remarks in context, pointing to where he departs from the source material, how he works with it, the slippages in his argument, and so on. And the other, which adds and expands on information in his text.

Vaibhav Abnave, Prabuddha Collective:
A huge intellectual endeavor. A labor of love! The editors’ essay on Broken Men Theory makes for a powerful and compelling argument (through Meillassoux) about Ambedkar’s fundamental critique of the sacredness of historical discourses as such, about Ambedkar’s speculative material method and his academically ‘untouchable’ hypothesis on the emergence of untouchability, about the absolutely contingent eruption of untouchability, the sheer unreason/madness of the untouchability as against the universalizable principle/truth of equality and every occurrence in history is equal and comparable to any other across time and space.

Anand Teltumbde, author of The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid:
Among the numerous sins of the Hindutva forces, the beef ban, which includes not only slaughtering of cattle but also possession of its meat, is the most calamitous. It is not the question of Muslims and Dalits alone, who are directly affected; it affects India’s very future. This selection from Babasaheb Ambedkar’s 1948 work, with a focus on beef eating and its implications, exposes the duplicity and falsehood of the civilizational argument on which the entire Hindutva superstructure stands.

Anupama Rao, author of The Caste Question: Dalits and Politics in Modern India:
B. R. Ambedkar rewrote the history of untouchability as the practice of social outcasting and historical violence that followed the defeat of Buddhism in ancient India, and by so doing he prioritized the social suffering and ongoing stigmatization of the Dalits, the Broken Men. This extensively annotated critical selection is a potent reminder of the audaciousness of Ambedkar's method and the insurrectionary power of his writings for our political present.

Wendy Doniger, author of The Hindus: An Alternative History:
Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men is that rare achievement, a work that combines meticulous historical scholarship (taking account of books like D. N. Jha’s The Myth of the Holy Cow, but sharply challenging many of their conclusions) with a passionate, persuasive call to action. It argues how the onus is now on non-Dalits to take a historical view of the consumption of beef and express solidarity with Dalits and other beef eaters in India today. The editors’ selections from B. R. Ambedkar’s 1948 work The Untouchables, along with the painstaking annotations, show to us the pressing relevance of this work to contemporary India. The brilliant introduction by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd reveals, among many eye-opening points, how Ambedkar already understood the forces that led to incidents like the suicide of Rohith Vermula in 2016. The essay by Alex George and S. Anand on Ambedkar’s theory of “The Broken Men” persuasively supports his ideas about the origins of the Untouchable caste. This is an important book that will give valuable ammunition to the forces that oppose the most glaring abuses of human rights in India today.