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1In conveying anticaste political positions to academic and public audiences outside of South Asia today, scholars and activists often find themselves trapped in a narrow conceptual and linguistic bind. The distinctiveness of caste has not permitted an easy delineation and co-option of its “essence” into the standard theoretical vocabulary of the social sciences, a point that has been highlighted over decades of debate in postcolonial historiography and anthropology. Scholars working with the empirics of a caste society thus straddle a thin boundary. On the one hand, they must actively describe the incredible complexity, detail, and specificity of caste along with its various modern manifestations in a reasonably nuanced manner, while on the other hand also attempting to insert anticaste debates into a wider humanistic conceptual pantheon that refines and expands the way we conceive of human freedom. Scott R. Stroud, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, tackles this important and pressing intellectual challenge in a new book from the University of Chicago Press entitled The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction. By embedding Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s brilliant, scathing, and context-specific rhetorical strategies within a broader universe of humanistic debate, it seeks to bring anticaste views to bear on expansive and pluriversal conceptualizations of knowledge, society, governmen,t and the use of force.

2Stroud goes about this task by attempting to frame Ambedkar’s contributions as a specifically “Indian” manifestation of pragmatist philosophy, a body of ethico-political thought most associated with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American thinkers, such as John Dewey. Here, the author is quick to add caveats against any possible misreading of the text as one that might either reduce or restrict an analysis of Ambedkar’s philosophy and rhetoric to a sealed discursive tradition solely identifiable with the school of pragmatism. Stroud is clear that “just as calling Ambedkar a ‘Buddhist’ does not preclude exploring him as an ‘activist’ or a ‘lawyer’, discussing him as a ‘pragmatist’ does not close off other ways of telling his story” (p. 20). This caveat establishes a range of theoretical flexibility, allowing Stroud to make the case for understanding Ambedkar as a rhetor who “adapted, reconceptualized, and reimagined what a pragmatist philosophy could mean for a social democracy” (ibid).

3The book consists of five chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion. In chapter 1, “Ambedkar and Dewey at Columbia University,” Stroud sets the stage by transporting the reader to the intellectual landscape of early twentieth-century New York, contextualizing the encounter between Ambedkar and Dewey by offering detailed descriptions of the latter’s lectures in the years between 1914-1916. Here, we are introduced to some of the key tenets of pragmatist philosophy that Stroud attempts to subsequently trace across the arc of Ambedkar’s oeuvre. The chapter provides an important contribution to situating canonical twenth century Indian thinkers within a corpus of “global intellectual history” (Moyn and Sartori, 2013), emphasizing the important influence of Columbia, New York, and, more broadly, the United States on Ambedkar’s thinking. Given the overwhelmingly British formations of most of India’s postcolonial intellectual elite, the emphasis on the impact of this American experience on Ambedkar’s life is particularly relevant and cannot be overstated. More specifically, an industrialized postcolonial nation such as the United States, with its large population and (at the time) enormous inequalities of status and graded hierarchies of citizenship, produced a different base from which theorists like Dewey could produce foundational political and economic philosophy. The effect of this on a brilliant thinker from a marginalized place in caste society is a fruitful topic for rumination that Stroud deftly explores through a rigorous fabulation alternating between historical detail and speculative musings about the questions that “likely” occurred to the young Ambedkar (p. 60).

4In this first chapter, Stroud succinctly summarizes the essence of the pragmatist position embodied by Dewey’s lectures, contrasting his approach from other dogmatic forms of thinking that dominated (and, in some quarters, continues to dominate) social theory. Stroud writes, “Instead of seeing philosophy as issuing pronouncements in the form of ‘universal principles,’ young Ambedkar heard his teacher postulate the pragmatist alternative: ‘One could easily make as his most general principle this fact that any social philosophy is bound to be closely connected with the troubles, needs of the times and to be propounded and promoted as an ideal and method for remedying the more present and urgent defects of the present’” (p. 51). Here, he also introduces the reader to two major themes that run throughout the book: first, the necessity to adopt an ethical and political approach drawn from specific empirics, situations, and needs rather than to produce universal proclamations; and second, a distinctly individualist thread that runs through all of pragmatist philosophy and which Ambedkar adapts into a suitable idiom for an Indian context.

5Over the course of the book, Stroud delineates a conceptual framework situating Ambedkar within the pragmatist pantheon. He first advances the argument that Ambedkar was a meliorist—i.e.,“a thinker dedicated to giving a theoretical account of some matter that strives to actually improve future experience” (p. 82). This is a provocative and interesting claim that merits further scrutiny, particularly with regard to how it might square up against views that have sought to situate Ambedkar within a much broader and older pantheon of utopian anticaste thinking (for example, see Omvedt, 2008). Although there is much to be reconciled in Stroud’s and Omvedt’s diverging genealogies and readings of Ambedkar’s approach to political economy, the core tension between a pragmatist and a utopian reading of his thought is a productive tension with which anticaste scholars must grapple. Overall, one might argue that Stroud’s emphasis on Ambedkar’s meliorism is of incredible relevance at a moment in which much anticaste scholarship seems to have veered away from the empirical and material considerations of political economy and become somewhat too comfortably ensconced in a world of aesthetic identitarian discourse sealed off from the messiness of the everyday.

6In particular, the implications of this meliorative reading of Ambedkar on one of the oldest moral questions, the means-ends relationship, is worth noting. Stroud argues that integral to the Ambedkarite pragmatist project is a view that “ends and means are not binary or separate, but instead they are closely connected and fall into different shades of synthesis. They imbue each other with meaning, and their value is interlinked” (p. 84). He also relates Ambedkar’s thinking to Dewey’s pragmatism through an important meditation on the relationship between past and present, arguing that “Ambedkar is extending Dewey’s point about thinking of the past: it matters for the present, but only insofar as we can make it matter given our present needs and interests. We should not, however, revere or preserve the past blindly” (p. 121). This reading brings to mind an evocative distinction made by Kapur, Prasad, and Babu (2014) between the dynamism they witnessed among Dalit entrepreneurs on the one hand and the forms of theorization they feared inhibited much Dalit scholarship on the other hand, arguing that “while Dalit intellectuals continue to focus on the past to make sense of the present, Dalit entrepreneurs look at the present to create opportunities for new futures” (p. 12).

7Stroud’s book not only establishes some of these positions through close readings of Ambedkar, but usefully places them in dialogue with the works by Dewey that preceded them. Here, Stroud suggests that Ambedkar’s use of uncannily similar words, phrases, and formulations to those of Dewey should be interpreted as a form of “echoing,” a reconstruction (to use the title of the book) that reflects the extent to which he embodied the pragmatist ethos and appropriated it in order to tackle the situations closest to him. This is an expansive and generous reading of the two thinkers’ similarities, one that takes into account the holistic conditions of different forms of speech rather than enter into parsimonious nitpicking over proprietary questions of authorship. Moreover, one of the book’s richest facets is its slow, close, and considered reading of not only of Ambedkar’s work, but also of Ambedkar’s own annotations of his copies of Dewey’s books. Ambedkarites and well-wishers of the anticaste movement will undoubtedly be endeared by Stroud’s details of Ambedkar’s own use of red and gray pencils to highlight and mark core precepts that are then traced to his own later proclamations and writings.

8Through an examination of this reading style, Stroud convincingly suggests that Ambedkar “engaged texts and ideas like a pragmatist, with a purpose and with forethought as to how they might be usable in his own endeavors or struggles. If a book did not look worth his time, or if reading it in its entirety offered diminishing intellectual returns compared to the time he would have to invest, Ambedkar was not afraid to cut his losses” (p. 135). Stroud also offers a crucial methodological suggestion regarding the need to approach and interpret Ambedkar’s corpus in a way that has often been ignored in more contemporary scholarship, writing that “Ambedkar’s published works are only part of his story as a thinker. His reading and study habits are a vital way to see what material conversations Ambedkar took seriously, before and beyond writing his works” (p. 136). This point is particularly crucial given the recent proliferation of a generalized style of citing Ambedkar’s writings across blogs, popular media, and even some areas of academic discourse, one that displays limited intellectual interest in grasping both the micro and macro details of his work and which often borders on the tokenistic. Such anachronistic readings mired in presentism also tend to weaponize Ambedkar’s words in favor of ideas, concerns, or frameworks on which he may have held completely views throughout his life. This hinders a fuller understanding of his priorities, insights, and evolving genius in diagnosing and responding to the events of his time and stops people from attempting to reconstruct his initial principles and thought-process around notions of justice. Stroud’s examination of Ambedkar’s textbooks offer a much-needed glimpse into Ambedkar’s own methods of learning and improvement, a lesson that all scholars could do well to learn from.

9Stroud’s last chapters spend much time focusing on Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism, his belief in the maxims of “liberty, equality and fraternity,” and the complex ways in which he adapted but fundamentally stuck to a Deweyan belief in the importance of individuals as ends in themselves. Here again, Stroud’s deft and skillful act of reading against the grain provides a deeply rigorous and insightful set of interpretations of the place of conversion as an act of rhetoric and persuasion in Ambedkar’s praxis. Stroud reads Ambedkar’s act of conversion as an act of “invitational” rhetoric, one that respects the autonomy of the individual in making choices that best suit their own interpretations of their situations and desired outcomes. This is a particularly important point in light of an increasing spate of literalist readings of Ambedkarite thought, as well as the recent weaponization of Ambedkar’s choice of Buddhism as a means to deny affirmative action to disenfranchised Dalit Christian and Muslim groups. The book’s conclusions spend time reemphasizing the main points, in particular stressing Ambedkar’s deeply individualist commitments—which Stroud suggests must be at least partially, if not largely located within his pragmatist roots.

10As a work of scholarship, the book provides an excellent overall combination of nuance, rigor, and interpretive creativity and depth. Nonetheless, as a work of public education and as a tool for wider anticaste discourse, it may at times be hard to follow for those unfamiliar with the facts, details, and contexts that inform the global connections between Ambedkar and Dewey. Bringing the American piece of the puzzle back into Ambedkarite thought is an urgent and necessary project. However, given the lacuna of information that most South Asians—including academics—have about the early history of the United States, few are likely to leave with a richer understanding of the full implications of the extraordinary providence that a figure like Dewey was in such close proximity to Ambedkar. Equally, the concern remains that, in the absence of a more systematic description of the turbulent events of early twentieth-century India, many Western readers might also not fully grasp the significance of Ambedkar’s “Indian” pragmatism, particularly in relation to the much better-known (if widely misinterpreted) strategies of Gandhi. These concerns undoubtedly remain outside the scope of the book’s focus, but nonetheless remain central to the unfinished project of embedding anticaste thought more firmly in a pantheon of global humanistic discourse.

11In conclusion, however, it may suffice to say that Stroud’s greatest contribution to the Ambedkarite discourse might well be a timely resuscitation of Ambedkar’s intellectual nimbleness, freethinking, and doggedly nonideological assessments of problems—a facet of his brilliance that is at increasing risk of co-optation by both the Indian left and right wing, as his political salience has become increasingly unavoidable. Stroud engages in a brilliant speculative exercise, deftly parsing out from within Ambedkar’s oeuvre a willingness to change opinions, strategies, and persuasive techniques when presented with new information. In an age when social media contributes to hardening the divisions between ideological camps and deprives many thinking people of the ability and space to discreetly change their opinions, positions, and ideas to evolve as human beings without being policed, harangued, or badgered, Stroud’s book serves as a gentle reminder of a politics that must constantly reinvent itself in order to stay true to its principles.

12Ambedkar’s mind was sharp, dynamic, and ever-evolving, playing chess against a caste system that had the ability to adapt and transform quite quickly and subtly. To the current moment of anticaste scholarship Stroud adds a powerful reassertion of its individualist dimension, a facet that has been somewhat downplayed through the rise of increasingly collectivist orientations in defining, fixing, and making the problem of caste static. In other words, an anticaste politics—as Stroud reminds us through Ambedkar’s works—is not simply about equalizing distributive outcomes across discreet and rigidly defined caste groups, but about helping the capacity for individual choice to flourish away from the unfreedoms perpetuated by communities of birth. In this respect, Stroud’s book provides an excellent anticaste alternative of pragmatism and meliorism to the eternal question of “what is to be done?” iherent in all social and political theory.