NINETY YEARS AGO TODAY, on May 15, 1936 –– the undelivered speech, ‘Annihilation of Caste’ –– was published. It was a seminal text on anti-caste literature, but also introduced a new term – ‘annihilation’ – that could unfold the generational injustice of the sacredness of Brahminical supremacy. The text was unacceptable to caste Hindus when Dr B. R. Ambedkar was invited to deliver the keynote address to Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal at Lahore.
Even after nine decades, the life of this text is not acceptable to the caste Hindus of the Indian subcontinent. The speech was to address the reformist caste Hindus, who were, even though, were interested in inter-caste dining and marriage and abolition of untouchability, understandably could not digest the cure offered by Dr Ambedkar against the genetical pathology of caste. Its impregnant character exists in the microscopic form; sometimes it is invisibly exercised, its constituent power regulating the materiality of life despite a modern constitutional mechanism. On the contrary, caste annihilation has never been considered a national importance in its ninety years of existence.
The increasing significance of Annihilation questions the genealogical root of caste origin in South Asia. It equally critiques the presence of its global wretchedness. The insoluble and invincible power of caste continues to be grounded in terms of disjuncture or rupture. That a construction of a Hindu temple in the city of New Jersey can enslave two hundred Dalit labourers in 2026 is evidence of that. Ninety years after its first publication, the text remains unequivocal and unprecedented and has upheld uncompromised moral and transformative power to reject the cosmological morphology of caste – the caste that unites and divides by the law of a hierarchical Hindu social order, yet perpetually produces a majority.
