Anand: Navayana is a necessary mistake

A publishing house celebrates 20 years of books on caste injustice

The independent publishing house Navayana was born out of a desire to address a silence. Hardly anyone was touching the subject of caste in English language publishing. In an interview, founder Anand explains why he linked Ambedkar’s call to educate to the idea of publishing, and what has changed in the two decades of Navayana. There’s much to celebrate as the independent publishing house has won the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Prize, 2024, for a biography of B.R. Ambedkar, A Part Apart, by Ashok Gopal. Edited excerpts.

It’s been a pretty singular journey of Navayana over 20 years. The obvious question first: why publish this genre of literature?

A range of historical forces and contemporary pulls and pushes caused me and Ravikumar [then a bank clerk and now a politician and two-time Member of Parliament] to found Navayana. To claim individual agency here is utterly fallacious. In August 2003, as a reporter at Outlook newsmagazine in Chennai, I did a feature on what kind of Dalit writing was getting published. The interviews I did for this story became a slim book called Touchable Tales by November 2003. So in two and a half months, a publishing house was born with four slim titles.

By the 2000s, we saw a range of independent presses emerge in English. Each was focused on communalism, feminism and the women’s movement, environment, the Left, on translations, and so on. Hardly anyone touched caste in English language publishing. Navayana was born out of the desire to address this silence. Gail Omvedt’s book Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste had just been published. She used the term Navayana for Ambedkarite Buddhism. I decided on this word for our venture.

What does Navayana mean?

It literally means a new vehicle, the new path. It was only much later that I learnt it was a term Ambedkar used but once. At the press conference a day ahead of the massive religious conversion ceremony in Nagpur in October 1956, Ambedkar was asked by a reporter if the ‘nava bouddha’ or new Buddhists follow the traditional Dhamma of the Buddha or a Dhamma aligned with contemporary conditions. Ambedkar replied that the new practice will return to the essence of the Buddha’s teaching and not be aligned to Vajrayana and Mahayana and other credos that emerged later. In that sense, he says you could call it ‘Navayan’. Ambedkar’s 22 vows for his half a million followers begins with a series of negations: vowing not to worship Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, nor to accept the Brahmin, the Gita or the Vedas. And one vow finally affirms: that they’ll abide by equality. No prophet or religious thinker has ever said this. Ambedkar reconstitutes the Buddha’s message — it’s both a turn and a return. Unlike brahmanic Hinduism, Buddha Dhamma is not sanatan [an eternal fixity]. It’s in our embodied selves that history comes to be. For me, Navayana as a publishing venture is a spoke in this wheel. It is a mistake which is slowly correcting itself.

Do you mean the mistake of silencing the voice of the Bahujan?

Not just that. It’s about how caste impinges on everybody. As a child, I saw my mother ostracised for four days every month for having menstrual periods. In earlier times, menstruating Brahmin women had to stay in the cowshed. That’s untouchability too — like Ambedkar says in his 1916 paper “Castes in India”, control over women’s sexuality and agency is at the root of the caste system. Which is why child marriage flourished in this land. I’ve inferred through Ambedkar that one of the reasons for malnutrition in this country is this: for a the longest time, we were all children born to children because of the caste system. My mother’s mother was married at twelve, and birthed sixteen children of whom ten made it to adulthood. Ambedkar too is a child born to another child, and is married off as a child to another child. So Ambedkar never treated the problems of caste as a Dalit issue alone. He wrote Annihilation of Caste, Riddles in Hinduism and scores of works to enlighten all Hindus, all savarnas, including Gandhi and Tagore. Ambedkar’s call is to educate, agitate, organise. For me, this call to educate is directly linked to the idea of publishing.

But why publishing?

As a journalist, I felt I was both failing and flailing. My benevolent, liberal editor at Outlook did not consider Dalits being force-fed human excreta in Thinniyam [Tamil Nadu] in 2002 a story. I was forced to write about this for Himal in Kathmandu. In 2003, Navayana was born. Why publish a book? Because it lasts or it appears to last. The Hindi word for publisher prakashak — meaning, the one who throws light — is more beautiful. You see, Ambedkar is forced to self-publish Annihilation of Caste in 1936. He was alone. And 70% of his writings were not published till he died. Whom did he write for? Who all were willing to publish or read Ambedkar? Even today, very few. That’s because you don’t even acknowledge caste to be an issue even if it surrounds us.

It’s also like fish swimming in water and asking about the water.

Exactly. But why is this? What Ambedkar says may hurt Hindus but he captures it so well in Annihilation of Caste: ‘There can be a better or a worse Hindu. But a good Hindu there cannot be.’ If you’re a Hindu, you have caste. That’s why he says let’s put a dynamite to the Vedas and Shastras. He wants all of us out of caste.

What have you been able to accomplish through Navayana that gives you the greatest pride and joy?

With a small publisher, the question often becomes about the big books. To me each little book we do gives joy. Often many get left behind, unnoticed. So when we had to choose 10 books for our 20th anniversary set called Everblue, it featured great books that had lost their way. For instance, when I printed 1,500 copies of Bhagwan Das’s memoir In Pursuit of Ambedkar in 2010, it took 10 years to sell. We have now revived it.

Tell us more about Bhagwan Das.

Bhagwan Das was an Ambedkarite who met Babasaheb at the age of 16. His father called Ambedkar ‘Umeedkar’ — the harbinger of hope. Das went on to serve as a researcher in his last years in Delhi. After Ambedkar’s passing, Das along with L.R. Balley of Jallandhar, published Thus Spoke Ambedkar — four volumes of Ambedkar’s speeches starting in the 1960s. It’s the first such effort in the English language.

Bhagwan Das spoke a delightful British accent he had picked from a family that taught him English in Shimla. Ambedkar was impressed by his intellect and tells us of how was not afraid of questioning Ambedkar, even on Buddhism. In his last years, suffering from dementia, he remembered only six or seven things in his life, all centred around Ambedkar.

What other titles stand out?

Books that are so important and dear to me often didn’t work in the market. Premanand Gajvee’s set of translated Marathi plays called The Strength of Our Wrists has a play on Gandhi and Ambedkar. Both of them cut sorry figures in it. In contrast, take Bhimayana, our biggest success, with powerful art by Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam. When it appeared in 2010, few gave it a chance. Savarna reviewers, serious PhD scholars, harped on the madness of putting Adivasi art and Ambedkar together — I was shattered. I thought of it as another flop until it picked up slowly and turned into a bestseller.

When you put Ambedkar with the Adivasi there’s a problem; likewise controversy erupted when you worked with Arundhati Roy for a fine annotated ‘Annihilation of Caste’...

That’s why I said Navayana is a historical mistake because the question remains: why is a Savarna doing all this? Of course the social capital I have helps. I can keep quiet, or wallow in my identity and die. But I’m an Ambedkarite. I define myself and think of myself as an Ambedkarite. I’m not going to deny that. Ambedkar says in 1935, “I had the misfortune of being born with the ‘Untouchable Hindu’ stain; that was not in my hands... [but] I will not die as a person who calls himself a Hindu!” To echo him: I had the misfortune of being born a Brahmin, and I will not die as one.

I think that’s profoundly important because if you’re saying the accident of your birth determines your consciousness, then you’re...

You’re going back to the caste system. You’re affirming caste. I totally understand when a Dalit person says I get all these chances. That’s why I treat Navayana as a necessary mistake. When it becomes unnecessary, we would have liberated ourselves from caste.

What did this journey do to you as a person?

It has taken me years to understand that I have been transformed completely by this process. When I sing what I sing today through Dagarvani Dhrupad, I think of it as a Bhim Bani. It is Ambedkar who gives me the freedom to pursue beauty fearlessly, he gives me the framework to yoke politics and beauty. Ambedkar says he had a very spiritual upbringing. He had to recite the verses of Tukaram, Kabir and various sainted poets before he got his dinner. The mastheads of Ambedkar’s newspapers were adorned with verses by Tukaram and Jnaneshwar. He loved the Jnaneshwari, and it was composed by a Brahmin. How do we reconcile all this? Arundhati Roy and me doing what we did [with the annotated Annihilation of Caste] is indeed a problem. All of us are problems because we are culpable of being on the side of the line of silence. After 2014, I shut up and started singing. I let my work do the talking.

You said radical equality is a kind of convergence with poetry and music on the one hand and with aesthetics on the other.

To find refuge in poetry and music may appear like a reversal from politics. First, I was following an activist template by disavowing aesthetics and beauty. Educate, organise, agitate — yes. But also contemplate, which I think Ambedkar’s life was equally about. It’s a privilege and honour to be able to love Ambedkar so much despite the accident of my birth. I am proud of it.

Last question. What next?

These days I only think of how to pass the baton. Navayana needs to thrive so others can take it over. I’m keen to start an anti-caste children’s list helmed by Dalits.

The interviewer is a human rights worker, writer and teacher.

Published - November 29, 2024 09:02 am IST