The King Of The Mountain

One of twentiethcentury India’s great polymaths statesmen and militant philosophers of equality B. R. Ambedkar spent his life battling Untouchability and instigating the end of the caste system. In his 1948 book The Untouchables he sought to trace the origin of the Dalit caste. Beef Brahmins and Broken Men is an annotated selection from this work just as relevant now when the oppression of and discrimination against Dalits remains pervasive. Ambedkar offers a deductive and at times a speculative history to propose a genealogy of Untouchability. He contends that modernday Dalits are descendants of those Buddhists who were fenced out of caste society and rendered Untouchable by a resurgent Brahminism since the fourth century BCE. The Brahmins whose Vedic cult originally involved the sacrifice of cows adapted Buddhist ahimsa and vegetarianism to stigmatize outcaste Buddhists who were consumers of beef. The outcastes were soon relegated to the lowliest of occupations and prohibited from participation in civic life. To unearth this lost history Ambedkar undertakes a forensic examination of a wide range of Brahminic literature. Heavily annotated with an emphasis on putting Ambedkar and recent scholarship into conversation Beef Brahmins and Broken Men assumes urgency as India witnesses unprecedented violence against Dalits and Muslims in the name of cow protection.