Ambedkar and Annihilation: Towards a Theory of Transformative Praxis

On the one hand, upper caste political parties and scholars have arguably dominated the discourse around Ambedkar in the last decade. On the other hand, writings by Dalit Bahujan scholars on everyday existential problems proliferate with anti-caste phraseology: Important as these are, they lack conceptual justification for transformative justice. This article argues that contemporary scholarship and politics around Ambedkar lack his seminal transformative idea of annihilation, emergent from Annihilation of Caste (1979). Annihilation aims to end old wounds and foster the ontological beginning of an egalitarian moral dialogue. As a predictive concept of justice, it explicates truth embedded with timeliness and timelessness that could offer an immanent critique of the historical and metaphysical existence of caste injustice, facilitating therefore the formulation of new political and moral enquiries.