Spontaneity in Ambedkar: Beyond the Passivity of Popular Dalit Discourse

Lenin's criticism of evolutionary frameworks in social transformation was never simply a rejection of classical Marxism, but a radical shift toward an idea of spontaneity—not in the vulgar sense of impulsive, chaotic uprising, but in the Kierkegaardian sense of returning again and again to the beginning with undiminished passion and fidelity. In Notes of a Publicist (1922), Lenin wrote: "Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility 'to begin from the beginning' over and over again in approaching an extremely difficult task, are not doomed." Zizek interprets this not as a retreat to a prior stage, but as a radical insistence on descending back to the foundational point of rupture—a repetition of the beginning, a fidelity to the origin of the struggle.

This concept of repetition as fidelity—in Kierkegaard's terms, repetition as an ethical act of commitment—bears striking resonance with Ambedkar's political vision. While it may appear far-fetched to parallel Ambedkar with Lenin or Kierkegaard, what connects them is not ideology but method: a rejection of historical gradualism, and a firm belief that revolutionary transformation cannot wait for the "proper moment." For Ambedkar, like Lenin, the task of the oppressed was to act, fail, and begin again—not to theorize endlessly or await the ideal conditions dictated by the orthodoxies of history.

Caste, for Ambedkar, was not a phase in the evolution of society. It was an unnatural, theologically-justified stratification that corrupted every domain of Indian life. Unlike Marx's faith in the historical obsolescence of capitalism through successive stages of class struggle, Ambedkar saw no historical inevitability in the end of caste. The ideology of caste does not decay with time; it is reproduced actively by those who benefit from its order. Thus, the annihilation of caste required not a patient unfolding of history but a ruptural force—a blast of ethical spontaneity that destroys its very ideological foundations.

Ambedkar's political and spiritual journey was one of conscious re-beginnings. From satyagraha to Samata Sainik Dal, from forming the Labour Party to launching the Scheduled Castes Federation, from constitutional authorship to religious conversion—each moment was not simply tactical, but existential. Each was a return to the origin of struggle, refusing passivity, refusing to wait. Ambedkar did not trust time; he trusted action.

Contrast this with the post-Ambedkarite Dalit discourse—particularly its academic and bureaucratic variants—which has become entangled in the pathology of passivity. It has elevated Ambedkar into a constitutional saint while defanging his radical spontaneity. This discourse, dominated by government employees and elite scholars, rarely responds to the actual social trauma faced by Dalits—be it student suicides, institutional harassment, or caste violence. Instead, it produces a liberal consumption of Dalit pain, endlessly theorizing without any corresponding political militancy.

This tendency, this internalized temporality of inaction, reflects what Kierkegaard called the sickness of the age: the desire not to act. It is not nihilism but a resigned historicism—an idea that "this is not the right time," that the future will fix what the present cannot. But the oppressed cannot afford such temporality. Kanshi Ram understood this well when he broke from BAMCEF's government-servant-led passivity and launched a direct confrontation with the upper-caste hegemony, laying the groundwork for a Bahujan political subjectivity.

Ambedkar's own praxis also emerged from this disruptive spontaneity. He saw through the colonial state's accidental benevolence and the duplicity of caste Hindu reformers, recognizing that no genuine annihilation of caste would come from either. At the Round Table Conference in 1930, he declared that the untouchables must have political power in their own hands. His demand for separate electorates was not a sectarian move, but a structural strategy to shift Dalits from passive subjects to political actors.

Gandhi's opposition to this, culminating in the Poona Pact, was a tragic moral blackmail. Ambedkar had to give up the demand under the threat of communal violence, yet he never surrendered his political imagination. He founded the SCF and earlier the ILP, both of which were organized not simply around class or caste but around political spontaneity and self-respect. Ambedkar's ILP was not Marxist, but it was more radical than Indian Marxism of its time—it recognized that class consciousness in India was mutilated by caste.

Even the Republican Party of India, though it faltered, carried the vision of converting Dalits from a minority into a ruling oppressed majority. This vision was later taken up by Kanshi Ram's formulation of the Bahujan—a majoritarian identity that united SCs, STs, OBCs, and minorities.

Seen this way, Ambedkar's strategies—his shifts from legal to political to spiritual resistance—echo Kierkegaard's idea of repetition: revolutionary change is not linear but a cyclical renewal, a constant return to the ethical beginning. Each time, the stakes are different. Each time, the fidelity must be renewed. Each time, you begin again.

But what has happened today is the totemization of the Constitution. Among marginalized communities, it has become the ultimate normativity—a sacred object to which one appeals for justice. But this is precisely the pathology. The Constitution has failed to transform the primitive cognition of caste Hindus, who continue to treat caste as a sacred law even while constitutional morality treats it as taboo. The result is a dialectic of dysfunction: caste remains sacred while the Constitution becomes impotent.

Ambedkar foresaw this. In his later years, disillusioned with the state of Indian democracy, he remarked that the political democracy handed to caste Hindus had become a justification to preserve inequality under the guise of constitutionalism. Had he been alive today, witnessing the continued caste atrocities and Dalit suicides, he might have burnt the Constitution once more—not out of contempt for democracy, but as an act of ethical repetition, a return to the beginning. Not celebration, but confrontation.

It is time to reclaim spontaneity in Ambedkar—not as romantic immediacy, but as a radical rupture from the historicist sleep that has gripped Dalit discourse. Ambedkar's legacy is not to be theorized in isolation but to be lived again, begun again, in acts of political, ethical, and spiritual rebellion.

This is not the time to wait.

This is the time to begin—from the beginning.

Spontaneity in Ambedkar: Beyond the Passivity of Popular Dalit Discourse

DR. Rahul Sonpimple

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