THIS is an essay about something which did not happen, yet within that absence fertile links, possibilities and premonitions exist. Martin Luther King and B.R. Ambedkar never met, although they most certainly would have known of each other’s existence. We can only speculate upon what would have happened had they met and what might have passed between them. But there are many hints and parallels between the two towering reformers, and exploring those illuminates the nature of struggles against racism, inequality and exclusion wherever it occurs, in the past or in the present.

It is well known that Martin Luther King Jr. came to India for a month long visit beginning in early February 1959 at the invitation of Nehru and with the support of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi (the Gandhi Memorial Fund) and Quakers in the US and India. His packed schedule (and that of his wife who accompanied him) included press conferences, dinner with Nehru, a visit to Rajghat where he prayed at Gandhi’s samadhi, on to Bihar where the couple toured the Buddhist sites at Bodhgaya, to Jayaprakash’s ashram at Sokhodeora, then Santiniketan, to South India and to a number of other locations including Bombay, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Gandhi’s ashram at Sabarmati. He could not have met Ambedkar who had died three years earlier on 6 December 1956, shortly after his public conversion to Buddhism. Had he been alive, would the two great figures have met?

What we do know is that a central purpose of King’s visit was to pay his profound respects to the memory and example of Gandhi about whom he said that he, ‘more than anyone in the world caught the spirit of Jesus Christ and lived it more completely in his life.’ An iconic photograph of King taken in 1966 shows him standing thoughtfully before the desk in his office, with a prominent portrait not of Christ, but of Gandhi, displayed on the wall behind him. King saw Gandhi as not only a Christ-like figure in his personal deportment, but perhaps even more importantly as the founder and promoter of non-violent resistance to oppression and marginalization and of satyagraha as a model of political resistance that had inspired his own campaigns of civil disobedience between 1956 and 1968. He saw, in other words, South Asian resistance to colonialism as crucial to promoting civil rights and struggles for equality in the US as much as in India.

 

King famously stated on arrival in India that he came not as a tourist, but as a pilgrim. Two particular events of his visit stand out that link him symbolically with Ambedkar. The first of these was the occasion on which, visiting a school for what would now be called Dalit children in Trivandrum on 22 February, he was introduced to the pupils as ‘a fellow untouchable from the USA’. It is reported that King was affronted by this designation, but that after his return to the States he stated in a sermon that, ‘Yes, I am an untouchable and every Negro in the USA is an untouchable.’

That King was aware of the nature of caste was evident from a lecture that he gave at Ramjas College of the University of Delhi on 12 February1959, when he discussed the subject and drew a parallel between caste in India and racial discrimination in the US. Indeed, in 1956, the year of Ambedkar’s death, he had compared such discrimination and ‘untouchability’ in India, and had spoken of people of colour around the world as dominated politically, exploited economically, and segregated and humiliated socially and culturally. Had he read Ambedkar on these issues? We do not know, but the parallels in their analyses of their respective societies are remarkable. Ambedkar too traced the subjection of Dalits and other depressed classes and castes precisely to the economic and political depredations of colonialism as well as to specifically South Asian religious factors.

 

In June 1945 Ambedkar had published his punishing analysis of Gandhi, Congress policies towards untouchability and the impossibility of reform within Hinduism towards these issues, religion being precisely the ideological basis of exclusion, in his book What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables. Gandhi, of course, did not want a split within Hinduism and had argued strenuously that ‘harijans’ (his term) were part of the total and totalizing Hindu family. For them to leave Hinduism would, for Gandhi, be to fracture the very cement that held the majority of Indians together. This position was slightly ingenuous given his subsequent, if reluctant, agreement to Partition.

Ambedkar deconstructed these arguments in his book and with the help of his American friend Mildred Drescher, a US edition was published under the title, People at Bay. I have not been able to discover if a copy was to be found in King’s library after his assassination, but the probability of his knowing about it was high. Ambedkar had, of course, studied in the US at Columbia University and had corresponded with the leading black American thinker, writer and activist W.E.B. Du Bois; it is equally unlikely that he was ignorant of the existence and work of King, although, again, he does not refer to him in his own voluminous writings in their collected form extending to seventeen volumes.

We have, then, an interesting case of parallel lives, Ambedkar in the States and well aware of the situation of black Americans at the time, and himself a ‘person of colour’ studying at an almost totally white, academically if not socially, elite institution. King at a slightly later date somewhat to the geographical South, had embarked on a programme of liberation not unlike that of ‘untouchable’ struggles in India of which he was clearly aware by 1956 – the theme had begun to surface in his sermons – and may well have been a motivating factor in his desire to go to India.

 

So why the studied silence? One would hate to invoke the idea of professional jealously, in particular because there is no evidence throughout his career that for his part, Ambedkar ever suffered from any such thing. A more likely explanation is, of course, Ambedkar’s relationship with Gandhi, and his vitriolic attack in his 1945 book. Given that it was Gandhi who was King’s hero, it makes more sense to assume that King would have avoided his Christ-like figure’s trenchant critic, despite Ambedkar’s huge influence and status within India.

There may have been other factors too: Ambedkar led a more conventional political movement, and was a founder of a number of political parties designed to carry the struggle for equality through the usual parliamentary and local assembly channels. While socially a revolutionary, politically he was not, working throughout his career through established political means and institutions. As such he lacked the charisma that Gandhi wore like an aura – for Ambedkar no dhotis and spinning wheels, no primitive ashrams, no going half-naked to London, no publically announced sexual continence.

 

On the contrary, Ambedkar is almost always depicted in a western suit and tie looking more like a banker than an Indian iconoclast. Immense energy poured into his political work but, unlike Gandhi, more into multiple scholarly volumes on subjects as varied as untouchability, Buddhism, the constitution, law, economics and currency reform, colonialism, politics, religion, irrigation and water problems. Certainly, he was a ‘workaholic’ in contemporary language, but one whose interests were enormously varied and whose reading and writing never stopped (he was found dead over his current manuscript).

But the parallels between Martin Luther King and Ambedkar are so strong that one can almost think of King as the US Ambedkar and Ambedkar as India’s King. One factor that clearly links them is their relationship to their respective constitutions. Obviously, King had no role in drafting the US Constitution, something that came into being long before he appeared on the scene and at a point in time when slavery as an extensive social and economic institution in the US was only just coming into being. But his immense respect for that document stems from its enshrining the principles of equality of all persons and before the law, and for envisaging a society of equal opportunity in which the principles of the individual pursuit of happiness and the guarantee of freedom were forever enshrined.

The US Constitution had, for King, something like the status the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has for many contemporary rights activists – a document that, while tragically honoured more in its breach rather than in its fulfilment, nevertheless provides a benchmark against which the behaviour of governments, institutions and individuals can be measured. Both the US Constitution and the UDHR have, as a result, immense moral power, and the humane principles that they contain can be invoked whenever those very principles are violated, especially by those who purport to uphold them. The Constitution for King, like the social justice principles of the scriptures that he constantly quoted in his sermons and writings, especially those of the (to a Christian) ‘Old’ Testament, such as the book of Isaiah, surely one of the most radical documents ever written, provided a definition of the minimal conditions of a civilized society.

 

That the United States of his time professed but did not practice those principles was in itself the right ground for political action, the more so when King and his fellow African Americans were the subject of systematic exclusion, marginalization, violence, racism and prejudice. Though spatially within the ‘Great Society’ they were in practice excluded from not only most of its economic, political and social benefits but denied basic human dignity, notwithstanding the fact that their ancestors had been brought there very much against their will and subjected to the life conditions of slavery, an institution out of which much of the wealth of the United States was created. It is worth noting in passing that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was inspired by a (white) American and drafted and passed in the halls of the newly minted United Nations Organization, in New York, not so very far from the southern states where slavery had thrived and which was the arena of King’s work.

The situation of ‘untouchables’ in India has many parallels, although the origins of the practice are very different. While not slaves in any formal sense, exclusion and violence flowing from ‘allegedly’ religious sources in Hinduism, and reinforced by the caste system in which they were paradoxically both rejected and integrated, meant and still means social and psychological deprivation on a huge scale. Ambedkar himself, indefatigable writer that he was, produced two books relating to the subject, although many contemporary historians would find his arguments contentious – one book being on the origins of shudras (Who Were the Shudras: How They Came to be the Fourth Varna in Indo-Aryan Society) and the other specifically on the Dalits – The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables (1947). In this way Ambedkar, unlike King, had worked out a full-fledged theory of social exclusion and, in the Indian context, its ancient roots.

 

In a sense, whatever the precise details of the contents of the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar would still be respected as one of its leading architects. But, of course, that Constitution is not simply a bland administrative document: it embodies the very principles of liberty, equality and fraternity on which the whole of Ambedkar’s political work is based. Despite his opposition to many policies and much of the ideology of the Congress, Ambedkar became Labour Minister and subsequently Law Minister, and oversaw the drafting of the Constitution and ensured that it contained provisions for reservations for Scheduled Castes in public service, for democracy, and in his final speech on the Constitution argued that while fraternity and liberty were not doing too badly, equality still had a long way to go, and in that sense India was still a nation in the making.

Yet, while arguing strenuously for the rights of the Dalit community, Ambedkar was certainly not deaf to the needs of other communities, and particularly women. His enormous (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to have the Hindu Code Bill passed demonstrates this very clearly – a bill that would have substantially enlarged the rights of women by creating the right to divorce, to inherit equally and to generally expand areas of individual rights of freedom for Hindu women. The Indian Constitution, as it still stands, is a monument to the values for which Ambedkar struggled throughout his life, and is, in effect, a bill of rights. Again, although Ambedkar makes little reference to it and never invokes it as applying to post-independent India, the UDHR was passed by the UN General Assembly, an organization in which India had played a major role, in 1948, only a year after India was finally free of the yoke of colonialism.

 

Here we find another parallel, for while King, unlike Ambedkar, had never lived in a formally colonized country, he did suggest the idea of what today might be called ‘internal colonialism’ in the US context. Though not quite as extreme as the South African case with not only apartheid as a general policy, but with the Bantustans which provided the ‘homelands’ (and pool of cheap and easily replaced labour) for much of the black population, it reflected, in a practical sense, many of the same outcomes – segregated education, public transport, housing and systematic exclusion from many social and political benefits. In a sermon as early as 1956 he did, however, link racism, cultures of subjugation and colonialism.

While Ambedkar did not provide a systematic theory of the relationship between colonialism and untouchability, he most certainly had experienced aspects of it. His father was a non-commissioned officer in the British Indian Army, a policy that was brought to an end in 1893, a policy that the adult Ambedkar later lobbied against. The army, of course, provided many opportunities and resources for Dalits and the end of the policy of recruitment as a result of a number of factors, including the decision that untouchables were not one of the ‘martial races’, and growing caste consciousness was a major blow.

It is notable that at the time of the great ‘Mutiny’ (as perceived by the British), a large proportion of the sepoys making up locally raised regiments were actually high caste Hindus, many from Bihar, despite the popular image of the mutiny as being a largely Muslim event because of the last Mughal emperor being on the throne at the time. It is significant that among the ‘native’ troops used to suppress the Mutiny, most were Sikhs, Gurkhas and Dalits. The retraction of the policy of recruiting the latter, despite the largely pro-British role that they had played, was perceived as both a huge injustice and a major loss of employment and opportunities for the Dalit community.

 

Gandhi, as is well known, was a fan of the Indian village; Ambedkar was not. He saw the village as a source of backwardness and ignorance, and the future of India to lie in industrialization and the creation of a modern and efficient economy. His views were in many respects closer to those of Nehru. He promoted the idea of what he called ‘state socialism’ – nationalization of land and of basic industries, the organization of collectives and a clear indication of the rights of workers, and a basically anti-capitalist position. It is here, and not only on the question of caste and Hinduism, that Ambedkar departs most fully from Gandhi and his followers, including the leading (and neglected) economist J.C. Kumarappa.

Inherent in his views of the necessity of industrialization for India to progress, was his belief that it was through industrial labour and trade unionism that many of the barriers of inequality could be broken down. In this respect, his ideas concur exactly with those of King who too saw incorporation into the industrial workforce as liberation from the oppression of what was still basically plantation labour, and trade unionism as one of the potentially most powerful forces for solidarity and political mobilization among the black population of the United States. As that country moved from being an agricultural to an industrial power, that potentiality could only increase in significance.

 

There remains one more significant point of contact – notably the faith factor. King was a very committed Christian – and while not a ‘fundamentalist’ in the sense that the word is now used, was in the original, religious, one who based his or her faith on the absolute truth of scripture and of the stories contained therein. He was after all a Baptist, a denomination renowned for its pretty strict adherence to Biblical principles – as Baptists interpret them. Whatever King’s lapses may have been, there is no doubt of his total commitment to radical Protestant principles, which again (the paradoxes of religion!) draw heavily on the Hebrew scriptures for their social message. It was clearly from this source that King (unlike, say, Nelson Mandela) drew his inspiration and strength. There can be little doubt that he never toyed with the idea of converting to some other faith. The bulk of his writings are his voluminous sermons, not directly political, sociological or economic analyses.

Ambedkar, on the other hand, had a much more ambivalent relationship to religion. To be a Dalit is itself an ambivalent condition: to be simultaneously contained within Hinduism and its social structure while excluded from it. The deprivations that Ambedkar experienced as a young man reinforced this recognition and lay at the basis of his other main argument with Gandhi. While Gandhi very much desired that Dalits, while being politically recognized, should remain within Hinduism, Ambedkar clearly saw that this was an impossibility, because Hinduism itself and particularly its Brahminical aspects made this impossible. After considering conversion to the Sikh religion (he never seriously considered Christianity, which in his view was seriously contaminated by colonialism), he finally decided on Buddhism, a religion (as he saw it) committed to equality and which itself in its historical origins, had broken away from the proto-Hinduism of its time and place.

 

What links King and Ambedkar in this context then is not the choice of faith (as far as I know, while Ambedkar knew a lot about Christianity, a faith into which subsequently many of his fellow Dalits passed, King knew nothing at all about Buddhism), but their commitment to faith as the source of an ideology of absolute equality. Both – King from the very beginning and Ambedkar only latterly – were aware of the social implications of religious choices. Both were seeking a ‘model’, transcendental in the one case, immanent in the other, that would provide the ultimate basis of their position in relation to the world, and the justification in devoting their lives to the pursuit of justice within it.

And what of the present? Most foreigners with the slightest knowledge of India would be familiar with the name of Gandhi, far fewer of Ambedkar, and even less of who he was or his role in modern Indian history. Yet within India, it might be argued that the name or certainly actual influence of Gandhi is in relative decline. While revered perhaps as an iconic figure, many young Indians know little of his actual life or teachings. Ambedkar, on the other hand, while less visible outside of the Dalit community, has increasingly become a source of inspiration for social justice activists, within the country and without. In particular, he has been rediscovered by black American scholars and rights workers, by whom he is invoked as a leading figure in the struggle against racism and for inclusion.

 

In July 2017 Martin Luther King III came to India to speak at a major conference on the work of Ambedkar, along with a vocal contingent of black American scholar-activists. In his speech he quite explicitly drew parallels between the work and teaching of his father and that of Ambedkar, arguing that their agenda was the same, one in the southern United States and one in South Asia – to proclaim and seek for the political and social embodiment of the values espoused by the French Revolution more than two centuries ago, notably the timeless ones of liberty, equality and fraternity, to which, on their respective continents, yet linked by time and common interests, the two men gave their lives.

Their legacy still remains to be fulfilled, but the shape they gave to the struggle for social justice pursued through reason, faith and non-violence remains, and those who work to that end will continue to invoke their names, the names of two men who never met: Martin Luther King Jr. and B.R. Ambedkar. They did not meet, but they certainly did speak to each other.