A couple of weeks back, many of us – but far, far too few of us really – commemorated the Mahad satyagraha. On March 20, 1927, B R Ambedkar had led thousands of ‘untouchables’ to the Chavadar tank in Mahad to defiantly drink water from the well. Despite the water tank being public, Dalits were prohibited from accessing it. This radical defiance, what Anand Teltumbde has dubbed ‘the first Dalit revolt’, was likely also the first massive civil rights campaign of the modern world. We have, all of us, benefited from it, as we do when basic human rights are established and preserved anywhere.
Himself a rights activist, and also the author of the magnificent comprehensive history of Ambedkar’s campaign, Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt, Anand Teltumbde currently languishes in jail – as many of us know, but far, far too few of us do anything about. Hardly a single day passes by when I do not think about Anand and the brazen, egregious injustice he continues to suffer. And on the 20th of March, while reading his book about Mahad, I thought about him even more than usual.
That same day, I had the chance to watch the recent film One Night in Miami, about the eventful evening that Muhammad Ali spent with Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke in Ali’s Miami motel room. The film crescendos with Sam Cooke singing his poignant, soulful masterpiece, A Change is Gonna Come, a song he partly composed while in jail for ‘disturbing the peace’; that is, for the crime of being black and audaciously expecting equality. As Cooke captures it in his lyric, even a humble request for rights and recognition are met with hostility and violence:
‘Then I go to my brother /and I say brother, help me please/
But he winds up knocking me/back down on my knees.
It’s been a long time coming/but I know/
a change gonna come.’
This week, we shall all enjoy the declared national holiday of Ambedkar Jayanti, although only a fraction of us will actually celebrate it. Talk about ‘a long time coming’, this is the 130th birth anniversary of Ambedkar. Even under the impact of one of human history’s most dynamic and influential social reformers and civil rights activists, after a full 130 years, not enough change has come about. In fact, given that Anand Teltumbde, Ambedkar’s ‘grandson-in-law’ was imprisoned on April 14, 2020 (that is, on the 129th Ambedkar Jayanti), we might even observe that we are witnessing the change going in the opposite direction from what we want and from what Sam Cooke’s lyrics intended.
On the eve of his imprisonment without bail, Anand penned an open letter addressed to all of us:
“Under the draconian provisions of the UAPA, a law that renders a person defenceless, I am being jailed…The jingoist nation and nationalism have got weaponised by the political class to destroy dissent and polarise people…As I see my India being ruined, it is with a feeble hope that I write to you at such a grim moment…I do not know when I shall be able to talk to you again. However, I earnestly hope that you will speak out before your turn comes.”
Speaking out is dangerous, as the paradigmatic lives of a Muhammad Ali or a Malcolm X well illustrate. It can get you jailed, and it can get you killed. But if there is any day that we should find the courage to speak out for rights, for justice, for ‘liberty of thought, expression, belief’, then the natural day for that is Ambedkar Jayanti. We can honour Ambedkar’s legacy by demanding change.
‘It’s been a long, a long time coming/but I know/
a change gonna come/Oh, yes it will.’