The Tank and the Grammar

by B.R. Ambedkar, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

On why the man who led the march to the Chavdar Tank told the Constituent Assembly to give up satyagraha

by B.R. Ambedkar, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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I am told I have contradicted myself, and I would like to answer the charge. A man who has spent his life telling a whole people that their sacred books are wrong owes it to them to show that his own record is not.

The charge goes like this. On the 20th of March 1927 I led some thousands of the Depressed Classes through the streets of Mahad, a small town in the Kolaba district, to a public tank called the Chavdar Tank. We drank from it. It has been called the Mahad Satyagraha ever since, and on the face of it the name fits: a body of people, unarmed, deliberately doing what custom forbade them to do, in order to make the forbidding visible. Twenty-two years later, on the 25th of November 1949, I stood up in the Constituent Assembly on the day before the Constitution was adopted and said of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha: "These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us."

My critics put these two dates side by side and draw one of two conclusions. The kinder one is that I grew old, became Law Minister, and began to love order the way men in office always do. The less kind one is that I never believed in mass action at all. On this view I used it while it suited me, when I had no seat at the table, and condemned it once the table was mine.

Both conclusions are wrong, and the reasons are worth setting out. The question is not about me. It is about what a law is for, and what a right is, and what a people may do when a right exists on paper and nowhere else.

I. What the law already said

Begin with a fact that is usually left out of the story. When we marched to the Chavdar Tank, we were not breaking any law. We were obeying one.

On the 4th of August 1923, Mr. S. K. Bole moved a resolution in the Bombay Legislative Council recommending that the untouchable classes be allowed to use all public watering places, together with public schools, courts, offices and dispensaries, where these were built and maintained out of public funds. The Council passed it. In January 1924 the Municipality of Mahad passed a resolution of its own declaring the tank open to all. So by the spring of 1927 the legislature had spoken and the municipality had spoken. The tank was a public tank kept up from public money. Under the law of the Province of Bombay, any untouchable in Mahad who was thirsty could walk down its steps and drink.

None of them did. For three years after the municipality's resolution the Depressed Classes of Mahad went on drawing water where they had always drawn it. The law had moved and they had stayed where they were. This was not because anyone had repealed the resolution or because a policeman stood on the steps. It was because every Mahar and Chambhar in the town knew that a touchable man would stop him if he tried. No court had ever ordered it and no statute required it. It was the Hindu social order, which has never needed a court or a statute to enforce what it believes.

That was the first lesson of Mahad. A right that the right-holder dare not use does not exist, whatever the gazette says. The march of the 20th of March was not a rebellion against the law of Bombay. It was the first time anyone had acted on it.

Was that satyagraha? Call it so if you like. I would rather call it what a lawyer calls it: the exercise of a right that had been granted and not delivered. The distinction matters. The man who walks into the sea to make salt in defiance of the salt laws is breaking a law in order to change it. The man who walks down the steps of a public tank after the legislature and the municipality have both opened it is not breaking any law. He is breaking a custom that the law has already condemned. The first of these is civil disobedience. The second is something the Hindu calls insolence and the jurist calls the ordinary use of a legal right.

II. What the Brahmins did

What happened next is the part of the story people like to tell, because it is vivid, and they generally misread it.

After we had drunk and gone, a rumour went through the town that we meant to enter a temple, and there was violence against our people. Then the caste Hindus of Mahad declared the tank polluted and set about purifying it. Earthen pots were filled with the products of the cow, its dung and its urine among them, and a hundred and eight of these pots were emptied into the water while Brahmins recited mantras. When it was finished the tank was declared fit again for those who had always used it.

Reformers tell this as a story of prejudice: ignorant men, frightened by a crowd, doing a foolish thing. I do not accept that reading. The men who poured those pots knew exactly what they were doing and why. They were carrying out a rite, the rite was prescribed, and the prescription was in their books.

This is the point I have made again and again, and I will make it once more because Mahad proves it better than any argument. The Hindus do not observe caste because they are inhuman. They observe caste because they are deeply religious. The purification of the Chavdar Tank was an act of piety, and that is what makes it so serious. A cruel man may be shamed out of his cruelty. A pious man doing his duty cannot be shamed, because by his own lights he has nothing to be ashamed of. You may pass a resolution against him in the Legislative Council every year until the end of time, and while he believes the shastras are sacred he will go on purifying the water after you have touched it. The legislature had made the tank public. The shastras had made us polluting. When the two collided, the town of Mahad obeyed the shastras.

So the second lesson of Mahad is this. The enemy was not the men with the pots. The enemy was the authority they obeyed. A reformer who scolds the men and leaves the books alone has understood nothing.

III. What we did in December

We called a second conference at Mahad for the last week of December 1927. Before it could meet, certain caste Hindus of the town filed a civil suit. They claimed that the tank was not public at all but private property, and that by long custom the untouchables had never had any right to it. On the 14th of December the court granted a temporary injunction restraining me and my people from using the tank while the suit was pending.

Here my critics ought to stop and look carefully, because this is the hinge of the whole matter, and it falls in 1927, not in 1949.

The conference met. Thousands came, many of them on foot from long distances, and plenty of them were ready to go down to the water whatever any court had said. There was a strong party among us for doing exactly that. Here was the classical case for satyagraha: an order, as we saw it, unjust; a crowd assembled and willing; the moral argument entirely on our side. I decided that we would not go to the tank while the suit was pending.

Why not? Not out of fear. The dispute had passed into a court of law, and a court of law was a forum in which we could win. Whether the tank was public or private, and whether custom could keep a man from water maintained by the public purse, are questions of fact and of law, to be argued with evidence before a judge bound, at least in form, to hear the untouchable's evidence on the same footing as the Brahmin's. For the first time in the history of that tank, our claim and the Brahmin's claim stood equal before a tribunal that would decide between them on reasons. To walk into the water over the court's order would have been to tell the court that we did not want its decision. We did want it. We had waited a very long time for somebody to be obliged to give us one.

So we did not take the water that December. We did something else, and it was not a softer thing. On the 25th of December 1927, at that conference, the Manusmriti was burned.

People have treated that burning as a gesture of rage, and I suppose it had rage in it. But it was also strictly logical. The court could decide whether the tank was public. No court could decide whether the shastras were sacred. We submitted the dispute over the tank to the court, which had jurisdiction over it. We took the dispute over the book to the only court that had jurisdiction over that, which was the conscience of the Hindus, and we laid the charge in the plainest language we had.

At that same conference I said to the people who had come: "It is not as if drinking the water of the Chavdar lake will make us immortal. We have survived well enough all these days without drinking it. We are not going to the Chavdar lake merely to drink its water. We are going to the lake to assert that we, too, are human beings like others." I meant every word. The water was never the point. If the point had been thirst, we could have dug a well.

The suit went on for ten years. It went from the court at Mahad up through appeal and finally to the High Court at Bombay. In 1937 the High Court confirmed that the untouchables had the right to use the tank. Ten years to establish in law what the Legislative Council had resolved in 1923. That is how fast the constitutional road moves. I want nobody to think I am sentimental about it.

IV. What I said in 1949, read whole

Now set the speech of 1949 beside all that. Do not quote one sentence of it; quote the argument. I said:

"If we wish to maintain democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, what must we do? The first thing in my judgement we must do is to hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives."

And then, a few sentences on, the sentence that my critics always leave out: "When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods."

Read it as a lawyer reads a statute. It is a conditional. It does not say that satyagraha is always wrong. It says that its justification depends on whether a constitutional method is available, and that once one is, the justification is gone. It is not a condemnation of what the Depressed Classes did when they had no vote worth having, no seat in any legislature they had not had to beg for, and no fundamental right that any court was bound to enforce. It is a statement about what they and everyone else must do now that they have all three.

And this is exactly the rule I followed at Mahad in December 1927. While no tribunal would decide our claim, we went down to the water. As soon as a tribunal had the question in front of it, we stayed off the steps and argued the case. The speech of 1949 makes no new doctrine. It is the practice of Mahad, put in general terms and offered to a whole nation.

There is a second reason I distrusted satyagraha by 1949, and I will not hide it. Satyagraha as the Congress practised it was not always the case I have just described, the case of the excluded asserting a right that the law had granted and society refused. Very often it was the strong putting moral pressure on the weak. A fast is coercion with a saint's face on it. It does not argue; it puts a life on the scale and dares the other side to let it be lost. I have been on the receiving end of a fast, in the autumn of 1932, when the question was whether the Depressed Classes should have separate electorates, and I know what it is to be told that a great man will die unless you give up what you came for. Call that what you please; persuasion it is not. It is a hostage-taking performed in public by the hostage himself. In a nation where one man is worshipped, such methods do not test whether a claim is just. They test how far the multitude loves the man who is fasting. That was why, in the same speech, I quoted Mill's warning against laying our liberties at the feet of even a great man, and said that "in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship." The grammar of anarchy and the grammar of bhakti are closely related. Each asks the crowd to obey a feeling instead of a reason.

V. The tank in the Constitution

There is a fact here which has escaped notice.

Turn to Article 15 of the Constitution of India. Clause (2) provides that no citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them, be subject to any disability, liability, restriction or condition with regard to "the use of wells, tanks, bathing ghats, roads and places of public resort maintained wholly or partly out of State funds or dedicated to the use of the general public."

Wells, tanks, bathing ghats. Those words were not chosen because they sounded well. The framers at Philadelphia never needed to write that a citizen might drink from a public pond, because no American was ever made to believe that his touch fouled the water. We needed to write it. The Chavdar Tank is in the Constitution of India, set down in the language of a fundamental right, enforceable against the State. And Article 17 goes further than any resolution of the Bombay Council ever did: "'Untouchability' is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of 'Untouchability' shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law."

So the constitutional road the Bole resolution only pointed to has now been built. What took ten years of litigation to establish for one tank in one town is now the supreme law for every tank in the Republic. That is precisely why I said what I said in November 1949. The methods of the excluded are justified only while the excluded have no other road. We had just built them one, and I had spent the better part of three years building it. I would have been a strange engineer to tell people to walk beside the road in the mud.

VI. What the Constitution cannot do

Do not take any of this to mean that I think the Constitution has solved the problem. I said the contrary in the same speech, and I meant that too.

"On the 26th of January 1950," I said, "we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality." In politics we shall recognise the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In society we shall go on denying, by the whole structure of caste, the principle of one man one value. And I asked how long we could go on living that life of contradictions.

Go back to the hundred and eight pots. Article 15 can open the tank. Article 17 can punish a man who stops an untouchable on its steps. But can any article in the Constitution forbid a Brahmin to purify the tank afterwards in his own mind? Can it stop him carrying his water from somewhere else, or bathing again when he gets home, or teaching his son that the water is fouled whatever the High Court says? It cannot. The law can say who may stand on the steps. It cannot reach the belief of the man standing next to you. The purification at Mahad would be no less complete today for being invisible. Caste is not a wall of bricks that a decree can knock down. It is a notion, a state of the mind, and no court has ever had jurisdiction over a state of mind.

That is why I said, a year before, on the 4th of November 1948, borrowing the thought from Grote, the historian of Greece: "Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize that our people have yet to learn it." And that is why I called democracy in India "only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic." Top-dressing is good. A field needs it. But it does not change what is underneath. You can manure the surface for fifty years, and if the subsoil is caste, caste is what will grow.

And here is the question my critics should have asked me, instead of asking whether I had betrayed Mahad. If constitutional methods are now open, and if constitutional methods by their nature cannot reach the notion on which caste rests, what is left?

VII. What is left

Satyagraha is not what is left. I have explained why: it appeals to the conscience of the very people whose conscience the shastras have formed. It asks the pious man to be moved by suffering that his religion tells him the sufferer deserves. Fasting at the gate of a man who believes in karma is a waste of a good fast.

What is left is the burning, not the tank. The work of December, not the work of March. The constitutional method settles the question of right. The question of belief has to be settled where it lives, in the Hindu's relation to his own books. I have said, and I say again, that people will not change their conduct until they stop believing in the sanctity of the shastras on which that conduct rests. There is no constitutional procedure for that and there never will be. A man must be brought to see that the Manusmriti is not the word of God but the code of a class, written by people who benefited from it to keep in place those who did not. He must be brought to see that a religion which grades men from birth like grain in a market is not one a free citizen can hold. And if he cannot be brought to see it, those who are graded at the bottom are under no obligation to stay in his religion and wait. They may leave it and find one in which a man is a man.

None of this is anarchy. Argument is not anarchy, and nor is the burning of a book in public. Leaving a religion is not anarchy either, for the Constitution guarantees the freedom of conscience that makes it lawful. These are the methods of a citizen who has accepted the constitutional road for every question the law can decide, and who will not let the law's silence on the rest be taken as consent. Let me put the two sides of my position as plainly as I can. Where a tribunal exists, I go to the tribunal; I did so in 1927 and I tell the nation to do so now. Where no tribunal can exist, because the dispute is not about a tank but about a belief, I go to the people who hold the belief, and I do not go on my knees.

I come back, as I always do, to the difference between the division of labour and the division of labourers. Every society needs someone to keep the tank clean. Only one society on earth decides at birth who that person will be, forbids him to drink from the water he cleans, and calls the arrangement a religion. A constitution can forbid the second half of that sentence. It can do nothing about the first part or the last until the people who live under it decide they want nothing more to do with them.

VIII. The charge answered

So: did I contradict myself between the tank and the grammar? No. In March 1927 there was a right in law and no use of it, and we went down to the water. In December 1927 there was a court with the question before it, and we kept off the steps and burned the book that no court could try. In November 1949 there was a Constitution with the tank written into it, and I told the nation not to leave the road it had built. And about the notion underneath, which no law has reached, I have said the same thing throughout: it must be fought directly, by argument and by refusal, until those who hold it let it go or are left alone with it.

The young men who were at Mahad will remember the day differently from the way I have told it. They will remember the heat, and the long walk from the villages, and the crowd at the top of the steps, and how they felt going down. They will remember the first of us bending and cupping his hands in the water, which was only water, green and warm in March. Then the next man, and the next, thousands of them, until the whole edge of the tank was crowded with people of the Depressed Classes drinking. Nobody died of it, and nobody was made immortal by it either. Afterwards they walked home.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Bhīmrāō Ambedkar per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

B.R. Ambedkar, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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