Theoretical Casteism || Azfar Hussain

The more I read B.R. Ambedkar's 1946 essay called "Caste, Class, and Democracy"--better known as "What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables" (I also keep thinking of Ambedkar's 1943 speech "Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah")--the more I see how the general critique of "nationalism"--feminist, leftist, subaltern, regionalist, all--has rendered the question of "caste" marginal, if not always totally absent. True, "nationalism" is no "unitary" thing, as Aijaz Ahmad rightly pointed out quite some time back; but there's the putative conflation of class and caste, instead of a dialectical relation between the two, in even some "Marxist" analyses. In other words, even when the question of caste surfaces, it either gets dissolved in class or it just becomes an addendum (as a result of an afterthought). Or caste is consigned to a blank, let alone being "organic" to their critiques of nationalism. Read in the light of Ambedkar's work, the entire theoretical and critical machinery mobilized in the critique of nationalism comes to reveal what might be called "theoretical casteism," so aggressively prevalent in South Asia, I reckon.