Ambedkar Again

In my previous post(which is work in progress still) I have started putting together the material I have gathered and am still gathering from different sources on B.R. Ambedkar's exposure to the Cosmopolitan Club movement and ideas of cosmopolitanism.It is very much a work in progress and I welcome critical comments and suggestions.The following tracks are emerging in the course of my investigation: 1. Ambedkar stayed at New York's Columbia University Cosmopolitan Club in late July/early August 1913.This was at a time when hectic discussions were going on at this club regarding the diverse ideas on cosmopolitanism and the club's role in the international students peace movement led by the Association of Cosmopolitan Clubs(ACC).At around this time the ACC was holding its 8th students congress whose culmination was in a function at New York at the end of August 1913.Indian students were present as delegates at this function.This was the context for Ambedkar as he arrived at the Columbia university and stayed at its Cosmopolitan Club.The university newspaper, the Columbia Spectator is emphatic that both foreign and American students fervently participated in the ongoing discussions at the time about the ACC and the cosmopolitan peace movement.Ambedkar's participation in or exposure to these discussions then cannot be ruled out.These evidences are from Columbia University's newspaper Columbia Spectator and the New York Times of that period.Dhananjay Keer's work on Ambedkar is the source for the latter's stay at the Cosmopolitan Club. 2. With the outbreak of world war 1 the situation changed in the Columbia university.The peace movement came under attack and even George Nasmyth the former President of the ACC argued that now there was a need for studying the society and the causes of war within it rather than becoming a peace hustlers(C.Roland Marchand,American Peace Movement and Social Reform,1973).The debates on cosmopolitanism and peace within Nasmyth's Polity Club at the Columbia university and at the the Teachers College(where a large number of students were members of the Cosmopolitan Club) indicate that the students took this seriously.Ambedkar in this context took up the the study of society seriously indeed and offered courses with the eminent anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser and the famous educationist John Dewey amongst others. 3. At the Columbia university teachers such as John Dewey,Alexander Goldenweiser and Franz Boas engaged extensively with various strands of thinking on Cosmopolitanism.In fact we have evidence from the Columbia Spectator that Franz Boas often spoke at the Cosmopolitan Club meetings.Goldenweiser too was billed as an important contributor to the ideas on Cosmopolitanism.Ambedkar engaged with these teachers at the Teachers College(with John Dewey) and with Goldenweiser and Boas elsewhere in the university.Years later Ambedkar was still corresponding with Boas on issues of race and caste as is evident from the letters he wrote to Boas. 4. Most of Ambedkar's papers of that period are not available so it is difficult to precisely delineate his contribution to the debates.An important contribution of Ambedkar in this period is on 'Castes in India'which was written up as a dissertation under the supervision of Goldenweiser which was published later in Indian Antiquary and is available to us.This gives us some pointers. 5.The dissertation drew upon the famous anthropologist Gabriel Tarde who in his work 'Laws of Imitation'(1903) explicitly makes arguments about cosmopolitanism. 6.The Cosmopolitan Club movement and various strands of cosmopolitanism were based on the idea of being open to the stranger.For example the stranger as a foreign student or an immigrant was to be welcomed.In fact Franz Boas explicitly states in his writings(eg.An Anthropologist's view of War,1912), that in contrast to the closing off of the stranger in premodern societies, being open to the stranger will make the cosmopolitan universal law of peace between modern nations possible.Ambedkar himself experiences this hospitality at the Cosmopolitan Club and in his ideational and other engagements with his teachers like Boas,Goldenweiser and Dewey. 7.In fact this notion of the interplay of openness and closure becomes a conceptual underpinning of his article on caste in India written under Goldenweiser's supervision and published in Indian Antiquary.(p.18,Castes in India,Collected Works of Ambedkar,MEA) 8. Ambedkar in fact draws upon this notion of openness to point to an 'open door character' of the class system of the society in India(a point which I had raised at the seminar given by Christophe Jaffrelot at IGNOU last Friday).The Indian society points out Ambedkar then turned in to social groups of self enclosed units of caste system through imitation and ex-communication.Ambedkar though retained this notion of openness as an underpinning in his analysis of caste in the rest of the article too.Interesting here is his argument that caste as a singular unit is an unreality.(p.20,Castes in India,Ambedkar Collected Works).A caste unit he says has to be viewed within the caste system which has castes in plural again formed by imitation of superior caste. Perhaps Ambedkar is here pointing too to the unreality of closure against the singular individual-the stranger and so is arguing for openness?It is significant that Ambedkar takes the example of stranger and interactions with him to demonstrate a sociological point in this very article.(p.19) Further updates on this theme will be posted on this blog.Again comments are welcome!