Conversion As Liberation
Why Ambedkar argued the primacy of conversion for freedom from HinduWorld
“Even though I was born in the Hindu religion, I will not die in the Hindu religion.” - B.R. Ambedkar, 1956
Few non-deities are as highly venerated as Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. It’s not uncommon to meet people identifying as “Ambedkarite,” boasting his images in their altars, cars, and bedrooms, or declaring “Jai Bhim!” (Long live Bhimrao) as a salutation. His statues cover countless streets in India. He’s a jurist, economist, and social reformer who authored the Indian Constitution, and his name is synonymous with the movement against caste. To Americans, he’s often compared with Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X—for their renown and virtue, probably—but it’s difficult to capture the ethos and sainthood that Ambedkar represents to his people.
Ambedkar’s politics had a soul. Like Gospel-inspired civil rights leaders of the 1960s, Ambedkar advocated a theory of liberation that advanced the primacy of spiritual change along with social change. He’s known for brazenly critiquing Hinduism, publicly burning the Manusmriti (a Hindu text sanctioning untouchability), and facilitating mass conversions to Buddhism. Conversion, as Ambedkar famously described in What Path to Salvation?, was the heart of social change in India. It represented a holistic, free, and dignifying rejection of Hinduism and proclamation of new morality and identity.
Today, fewer leaders champion the nexus of social and spiritual change in pursuit of progress. Yet the spiritual dimensions of change—like trauma and healing—have only become more obvious. In The Trauma of Caste, Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundarajan describes caste as a “soul wound” that stubbornly escapes our intellectual interventions. Taking Ambedkar’s model of change seriously begs the question: does conversion still matter for social change in a caste society?
HinduWorld
As a general principle, it’s important to remember that all interventions—religious, political, and otherwise—react to the status quo. In India, the status quo is broadly Hindu. Hinduism—or Brahmanism, the foundational religious tradition behind Hinduism—has enjoyed a lengthy, ubiquitous influence over much of Indian society, institutions, culture, and psychology. Let’s call it HinduWorld. To Ambedkar, HinduWorld is far from neutral. He calls it a domain of enslavement over mind, body, and society. All of Ambedkar’s proposed interventions respond to HinduWorld. (It’s important for us of the diaspora to consider how our religious and ideological choices, too, react to the centuries-old influence of HinduWorld.)
Given the tricky terrain of religion, concerned onlookers often analyze and address caste as a merely material phenomenon. Caste has a million material markers, but the theological origin and sanction of caste is indispensable to its survival. Dalit Christian theologian Joseph Prabhakar told me, “Caste survived for 3,000 years on theological grounds.” Ambedkar is among the only voices raising a full-throated critique of the Hindu religion as a root cause of the caste problem.
Ambedkar understands caste as an edifice erected with Hindu theology and tradition. In his view, ‘Untouchables’ never voluntarily chose to be Hindu, but were enslaved into it. In a recent interview, Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde paraphrased Ambedkar: “If somebody’s not [allowed] in your house, how can you claim that person belongs to your house?” Even upper-caste Hindus underwent their own process of Sanskritization, abandoning traditional beliefs, values, and customs in allegiance to Brahmanism.
In a book titled Why I Am Not a Hindu, political theorist Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd calls Hinduization a process of conversion in itself, where pre-Hindu, indigenous Indian spiritualities, economics, and imaginaries have been deliberately “converted” into Hindu versions of themselves. To Ambedkar, Hinduism is irreparably corrupted, and there is only one way out of untouchability: “to throw away the Hindu religion and Hindu society in which you are groaning.” He writes, “For annihilating castes and untouchability from among the Untouchables, change of religion is the only antidote.”
The Primacy of Conversion in Social Change
In the West, religious conversion is usually considered an individual expression of faith. While this is also true elsewhere, conversion additionally represents a more complex social and cultural signal. To Hindu nationalists, conversion from Hinduism indicates rebellion against the Hindu order; conversion has even been criminalized in at least nine Indian states. On political, communal, and interpersonal fronts, converts endure violence and shame. While Hindu religious intolerance thrives on irrational fears about social upheaval, there is something to say about the social consequences of conversion.
In 1956, Ambedkar famously led nearly a half million Dalits to renounce Hinduism and convert to Navayana Buddhism—a reinterpretation of Buddhist philosophy focused on social equality. Year after year, similar mass conversations have taken place. As recently as last October, 250 Dalits in Rajasthan protested caste violence by renouncing Hinduism, publicly throwing Hindu idols into the Bethli river and accepting Buddhism. In 2020, close to 3,000 Dalits in Coimbatore converted en masse to Islam after a “wall of discrimination” fell and killed 17 of their community. Conversion is a common reaction among Dalit communities in the wake of caste atrocity or injustice.
One 2020 survey found that Dalits were more likely to convert than upper castes, often in order to enhance their social status, to be freed of the clutches of Hinduism, and to inculcate the principles of other religions in their lives. Ambedkar’s intervention of conversion continues to resonate with Dalit communities decades later. More than any other group—perhaps ever—Dalits understand conversion as an act of liberation. But does conversion, indeed, provoke positive change for the Dalit condition?
In psychological terms, there are many ways to interpret conversion, but nearly all have to do with a change in identity. Conversion, almost always, involves a reconstruction of one’s internal identity from contact with a religious truth, experience, or narrative. Ambedkar posits the root of liberation within religious conversion, because it induces a change in one’s self-identity—which is the primary scourge of those declared Untouchable, Unseeable, and Unapproachable (sub-categories of untouchability). He doesn’t mince his words:
“Why do you remain in a religion which does not treat you as human beings? Why do you remain in a religion which prohibits you from entering temples? Why do you remain in a religion which prohibits you from securing drinking water from the public well? Why do you remain in a religion which comes in your way for getting a job? Why do you remain in a religion which insults you at every step?”
By converting, Dalits declare to themselves and others a new identity: they are whole persons and not Untouchable, rejecting their placement in HinduWorld. This new self-concept is liberating—but also dynamic in how it takes shape. In researching Dalit Christians, theologian Anderson Jeremiah finds that they often switch between Dalit and Christian identities: “As Dalits they continue to conceive their status in terms of their local norms, but challenge it with their Christian identity as and when required… Thus with their religiously predetermined outcaste status Dalit Christians negotiate their livelihood using multiple religious belonging without capitulating to either of them.”
This self-perception is reaffirmed, in part, by the religious community that Dalit converts inhabit. In Tamil Nadu, some Dalit Christians practice a version of Communion called Oorulai, where congregants bring food in pots to church and pour them into a single vessel to remember Christ’s sacrifice and unity as one Church body. To promote this concept of unity, Christian evangelist Bakht Singh famously held ‘Love Feasts’ that “smashed through caste, religious, and ethnic barriers.”
Among Dalit Buddhists in Chhattisgarh, converts are “creating a new religious tradition” that replaces Hindu recitation of the Ramayana with poetry, song, and storytelling about the Buddha (Buddhayana) and Ambedkar (Bhimayana). Dalits also gather under the mantle of Buddhism to protest caste violence and train for social activism. Across these collective experiences and identity shifts, Dalits use religious conversion to forge a post-caste world.
The Palm Leaf Is (Still) Torn
Yet—as much as these post-conversion communities inculcate ways of being free, they share their own caste ceilings. Caste has reliably permeated the practices of Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, and Buddhism. Dalits in these groups endure segregation of worship centers, toilets, and burial grounds, barriers to leadership, and verbal and physical harm. One 2000 study found that caste-oppressed Christians constituted 70 percent of churchgoers but only 25 percent of clergy—compared to the 10 percent of dominant caste Christians, who comprised of 42% of clergy. Though Buddhism was popularized as an ideological challenge to HinduWorld, it’s been largely constrained to particular [Mahar] castes and even reappropriated by Hindu Nationalists as a political tool. In anthology Dalit Theology in the Twenty First Century, this inevitability of caste is captured in a proverb: “The palm leaf is torn, whether it falls on a thorn or a thorn falls on it.”
Still, Ambedkar acknowledges the distinction between caste among Hindus and others, arguing, “it is not the chief characteristic of their body social” and “castes in other religions have no sanction of their religion.” He goes on, “Hindus cannot destroy their castes without destroying their religion.” Muslims and Christians, he says, can—and can even find substantial religious support for such reformations. Expressed in movements like Dalit liberation theology, Dalit adherents labor within their religious communities for justice.
Dalits also face some economic penalties for conversion. India’s reservations (affirmative action) program allocates professional and educational opportunities for “Scheduled Castes and Tribes” (Dalits are included in these), but Christians and Muslims do not qualify. Consequently, many Dalit Christians and Muslims face the fraught choice of identifying themselves by faith or by caste. Ambedkar acknowledged the costs of losing such political safeguards, but argued these were never meant to last anyway. Rather, he argues that conversion precedes economic and social progress, because the curse of untouchability follows the educated and affluent.
For all his stress on religious conversion, Ambedkar didn’t fancy the typical character of religion all that much. He judged religions on their social consequences rather than professed ideals, and his own brand of Buddhism was largely interested in class struggle—scholar Martin Fuchs calls it a “post-religious religion.” But Ambedkar’s primary objective in conversion is freedom. He argues that the essential Dalit responsibility is to free oneself from HinduWorld, and he finds religious conversion to be best chance at doing so. So long as HinduWorld and other such hegemonies exist, there ought to be a theological and moral intervention—not merely a political one.