The little-known story of Gandhi’s reluctance to challenge the caste system, and the man who fought fiercely for India’s downtrodden. Democracy hasn’t eradicated caste, argues bestselling author and Booker Prize–winner Arundhati Roy—it has entrenched and modernized it. To understand caste today in India, Roy insists we must examine the influence of Gandhi in shaping what India ultimately became: independent of British rule, globally powerful, and marked to this day by the caste system. Roy states that for more than a half century, Gandhi’s pronouncements on the inherent qualities of black Africans, Dalit “untouchables,” and the laboring classes remained consistently insulting, and he also refused to allow lower castes to create their own political organizations and elect their own representatives. But there was someone else who had a larger vision of justice—a founding father of the republic and the chief architect of its constitution. In The Doctor and the Saint, Roy introduces us to this contemporary of Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, who challenged the thinking of the time and fought to promote not merely formal democracy, but liberation from the oppression, shame, and poverty imposed on millions of Indians by an archaic caste system. This is a fascinating and surprising look at two men—one of whom has become a worldwide symbol and the other of whom remains unfamiliar to most outside his native country. Praise for Arundhati Roy “Arundhati Roy is incandescent in her brilliance and her fearlessness.” —Junot Díaz “The fierceness with which Arundhati Roy loves humanity moves my heart.” —Alice Walker

B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution, and M.K. Gandhi, the Indian nationalist, two figures whose thought and legacies have most strongly shaped the contours of Indian democracy, are typically considered antagonists who held irreconcilable views on empire, politics, and society. As such, they are rarely studied together. This book reassesses their complex relationship, focusing on their shared commitment to equality and justice, which for them was inseparable from anticolonial struggles for sovereignty. Both men inherited the concept of equality from Western humanism, but their ideas mark a radical turn in humanist conceptions of politics. This study recovers the philosophical foundations of their thought in Indian and Western traditions, religious and secular alike. Attending to moments of difficulty in their conceptions of justice and their languages of nonviolence, it probes the nature of risk that radical democracy's desire for inclusion opens within modern political thought. In excavating Ambedkar and Gandhi's intellectual kinship, Radical Equality allows them to shed light on each other, even as it places them within a global constellation of moral and political visions. The story of their struggle against inequality, violence, and empire thus transcends national boundaries and unfolds within a universal history of citizenship and dissent.

गांधी और आंबेडकर पर अनेक छोटे-बडे़ अध्ययन हुए हैं; किंतु अस्पृश्यों की सामाजिक स्थिति में परिवर्तन की दृष्टि से उनके विचारों और कार्यों का अध्ययन आंशिक रूप से ही हुआ है। प्रस्तुत अध्ययन का उद्देश्य अस्पृश्यता के परिप्रेक्ष्य में गांधी और आंबेडकर का समग्र रूप से तुलनात्मक विवेचन करना है। इस पुस्तक में इन दोनों महान् व्यक्तियों के जीवन-संदर्भों; विचारधाराओं; स्वतंत्रता-संग्राम के समय की सामाजिक-राजनीतिक प्रक्रियाओं का विश्लेषण करते हुए; भारत की वर्तमान परिस्थितियों में दोनों के विचार और कर्म की भूमिका तथा दलितों की वर्तमान स्थिति में इनकी प्रासंगिकता की खोज की गई है। Gandhi Aur Ambedkar by Ganesh Mantri delves into the ideologies of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Explore their perspectives on social justice, equality, caste system, Dalit rights, and Indian nationalism. Understand their contributions to the Indian constitution, social reform, and nation-building for a transformative vision of a just society. Gain a deep understanding of the ideologies that shaped the Indian freedom movement with Gandhi Aur Ambedkar by Ganesh Mantri. This thought-provoking book explores the lives and philosophies of two iconic figures, Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Discover their contrasting perspectives on social justice, equality, and nation-building, and how their ideas continue to resonate in contemporary India. Gandhi Aur Ambedkar, Ganesh Mantri, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, social justice, equality, caste system, Dalit rights, Indian constitution, social reform, political philosophy, emancipation, socio-political vision, nation-building, ideological perspectives, transformative leaders

Views of Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948, and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, 1892-1956, Indian statesmen; on the removal of untouchability in India.

This book reconstructs the philosophical issues informing the debate between the makers of modern India: Ambedkar and Gandhi. At one level, this debate was about a set of different but interconnected issues: caste and social hierarchies, untouchability, Hinduism, conversion, temple entry, and political separatism. The introduction to this book provides a brief overview of the engagements and conflicts in Gandhi and Ambedkar's central arguments. However, at another level, this book argues that the debate can be philosophically re-interpreted as raising their differences on the following issues: The nature of the self, The relationship between the individual self and the community, The appropriate relationship between the constitutive encumbrances of the self and a conception of justice, The relationship between memory, tradition, and self-identity. Ambedkar and Gandhi’s contrary conceptions of the self, history,itihaas, community and justice unpack incommensurable world views. These can be properly articulated only as very different answers to questions about the relationship between the present and the past. This book raises these questions and also establishes the link between the Ambedkar--Gandhi debate in the early 20th century and its re-interpretation as it resonates in the imagination and writing of marginalized social groups in the present times.