Encounter of the titans

What happens when BR Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi look down from heaven? Two brilliantly imagined soliloquies

The Flaming Feet and Other
Essays: Permanent Black,
254 pages, Rs595.

Two voices suddenly pipe up midway through The Flaming Feet, D.R. Nagaraj’s book of essays on the Dalit movement, and they turn out to be those of the principal protagonists of the book: B.R. Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi. For once, we see them not spoken about, but speaking in their own voices, as if restored to life.

It is 1997, the 50th anniversary of India’s independence—an independence about which both men were, from the very beginning and for different reasons, sceptical. Ambedkar and Gandhi occupy adjoining rooms in heaven, and look down somewhat disconsolately on an India that has moved on. Ambedkar speaks of his immense antipathy to religious superstition and myth-making, and acknowledges that “my intimate enemy, that Gujarati Bania Mr. Gandhi, also does not like these things”, even if Gandhi is always seen as a man of religion. Gandhi, meanwhile, is found contemplating “how Hind Swaraj would be if my nextdoor neighbour, the learned Babasaheb, had written it”, and thinks that Ambedkar, a trained economist and the quintessential rationalist, would have found an enormous array of statistics to improve the argument.

Full review here Mint