This study attempts to probe the differences in the ideologies of Jotirao Phule and Bhimrao Ambedkar, the two most significant ideologues of lower-caste movement, while reviewing the formation of counter-discourse of lower castes with its interrelation with the mainstream discourse. It suggests us the meaningful clue to understand not only the early context of lower-caste movement but the contradictory factors in its contemporary developments as well.
The counter-discourse of lower caste has been forged mainly through forming their identity and probing their origin and history. Jotirao Phule, the nineteenth-century Non-Brahman activist and ideologue, argued the ‘original-dwellers’, and thus ‘owners-of-the -land’ identity by reversing Aryan theory widely circulated among the British and the Indian intellectuals. Bhimrao Ambedkar, the twentieth-century late colonial politician and national leader of lower-caste movement, established unique historical identity of Dalits as ‘Buddhists’ and ‘beef-eaters’, which could not be dissolved in the all-inclusive Hindu identity. At the same time, Dalits were set to be an equal entity of independent India by sharing the concept of Aryan and the Indian identity with the mainstream Hindu nationalists.
Phule-Ambedkar ideology, the pivotal axis of the contemporary lower-caste movement, shares the common aims of annihilation of castes, the oppressive and exploitive social system, and the improvement of status of Avarna and Shudra. The combination of two ideologies has dissimilar and contradictory factors, however. Phule and Ambedkar developed the distinct lower-caste identities from the different points of view on their origin and history. These dissimilarities seem to be resulted from the difference of social context of their periods and the mainstream discourses each period had produced-the Aryan theory to support the colonialism in the late nineteenth century and the Hindu nationalism to advocate the independence of India in the early twentieth century.
Counter-discourses produced by Phule and Ambedkar articulated the voices of lower-caste groups, therefore functioned as ideologies of the resistance against the mainstream social strata and their discourses which exerted the considerable influence over both the upper-caste intellectuals and the mass. But the contents of counter-discourses were not entirely opposite to those of mainstream discourses, rather somewhat overlapped with them. The lower-caste ideologues produced their counter-discourses in the context of and as a reaction to the contemporary mainstream discourse as we have reviewed the identity formation of lower castes by Phule and Ambedkar.