Annihilation of Caste

An undelivered speech, written in 1936 as the presidential address for the annual conference of the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, a Hindu reform group in Lahore. When the organisers objected to its content and cancelled the event, Ambedkar published it himself. He argues first that political reform cannot succeed without social reform, because caste divides Indians too deeply for them to act as one people. He rejects the defence of caste as a division of labour, calling it instead a division of labourers into graded, hereditary groups, and dismisses claims that it preserves racial purity. Caste, he argues, has destroyed public spirit and any sense of a shared Hindu society. Reformers who hope to replace caste with the four varṇas will fail, because the system rests on the religious authority of the śāstras, which people obey as sacred. Real change therefore requires rejecting that authority and building a society on liberty, equality and fraternity. Later editions add Gandhi's reply, which defended varṇa while condemning untouchability, and Ambedkar's response.

It is the classic critique of caste in modern India, and a lasting argument that political democracy cannot stand without a social democracy built on liberty, equality and fraternity.