Radical Equality

B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution, and Indian nationalist M.K. Gandhi, the two figures whose policies and legacies have most contributed to Indian democracy, are typically considered antagonists who held irreconcilable views of empire and political and social reform. As such, they are rarely studied together. This book reassesses their complex relationship, focusing on what it identifies as a mutual commitment to unconditional equality as inseparable from the struggle for sovereignty. These two major nonwestern thinkers inherited the concept of equality from Western humanism, but their ideas mark a radical turn in secular and humanist conceptions of politics. This history of their encounter traces the philosophical foundations of their thought in Indian and Western traditions, both religious and secular. But more than a study of an encounter, "Radical Equality" explores the paradoxes and risks of democracy in modern political thought. It is particularly attentive to slippages whereby their militant demands for egalitarian justice are compromised or contradicted by their own moral practices, and where the language of nonviolence lapses into that of force or sacrifice. Excavating the intellectual kinship of Ambedkar and Gandhi, Aishwary Kumar allows them to shed light on each other, even as he places them within a global constellation of moral political thinkers (Rousseau, Dewey, Marx, Nietzsche). The story of their struggle against inequality, violence, and empire thus transcends national boundaries and unfolds within a broader twentieth-century history of ideas.