Jai Bhim and Joy Bhim to all. Navayana is overjoyed that Ashok Gopal’s A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of BR Ambedkar has been awarded the New India Foundation’s Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize 2024. Till April 14, 2023, Ashok Gopal was un-Googleable. Today, if he is somewhat known, he owes it to his monumental work on Babasaheb Ambedkar. The NIF prize, to be given on December 14 at the Bangalore Literature Festival, earns him Rs 15 lakh. What did not make news was a major recognition that came his way when he was invited as one of the chief guests at a key function at Deekshabhoomi this year in Nagpur, to speak about Babasaheb’s understanding of sadhamma. A Part Apart will soon be out in Marathi and Tamil. A Hindi edition is also in the works. This award may open the doors to other language worlds.
A metaphor we have invoked before to describe our efforts in the publishing world is that of an anchovy. A tiny fish struggling to wade through a sea of caste, communalism and capital. We have survived for the past 21 years on the largesse of strangers and friends, readers old and new, who have found what we do valuable. Our books critique systems that are often seen in India as quotidian and natural. These attitudes are so ubiquitous that any book that challenges caste and capital with an annihilative force is seldom lauded and awarded. In 2022, Gita Ramaswamy’s memoir Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary made it to the shortlist of the NIF Prize. It is then a pleasant surprise – and some consolation – that Ashok Gopal’s sprawling biography of Babasaheb Ambedkar has been given this honour.
A Part Apart is the result of ten years of intense, singular, self-motivated and yet selfless research. Telling the story of a man who has been iconised to mythic proportions meant sifting through material that was often contradictory, fanciful, edited, adapted, redacted and polished. Gopal immersed himself in all the books published by Ambedkar and on Ambedkar in English and Marathi to write the most complete story of the man yet told. A Part Apart tells us obscure details about Ambedkar’s family history, unknown details behind the scenes of the Poona Pact, Ambedkar’s positive attitude towards Hinduism in his early days, the flurry of activity that filled his last days, and more.
Ashok Gopal started on this project because he wanted to tell the story of Ambedkar’s intellectual development – from the anti-caste ideas inculcated in childhood to philosophical pragmatism and socialism, from reformist Hinduism to Buddhism. When the first draft came our way just before the breakout of Covid in 2019, it focused solely on Ambedkar’s thought-world. As Ashok’s first readers and editors, we felt that the story of Ambedkar’s life was an integral part of Ambedkar’s development as a thinker. Over four revisions, the scope of the book expanded as did its size: All along, charting Babasaheb’s intellectual evolution remained the focus. Away from all the competing narratives about what constitutes Ambedkar-thought, A Part Apart provides an earnest, unbiased and thorough appraisal of the principles that guided Dr Ambedkar.
Ambedkarite publishing has long antecedents in India. It functions as a different world away from the mainstream, unacknowledged yet with its own dedicated readership. It is often driven by passion and moral commitment, and not by capital. Books published in these presses have never received nominations for awards; they rarely make it to mainstream bookstores. In this moment of glory, we recall the work of two pioneers in this field who, like Navayana, live and work out of Delhi, but from the peripheries of the megapolis: Samyak Prakashan founded in 1975 in Paschim Puri by Shanti Swaroop Baudh (1949–2020), who was also an artist and scholar; and the work of Gautam Book Centre in Shahdara. Hundreds like them function across India, unseen, unsung by the world of awards, lit-fests and glamour: often inspired by the example of Dr Ambedkar, who was a pioneering publisher and editor himself.
In this congratulatory moment, we also need to remember, that like with most awards, the NIF Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Award has not been given to a Dalit author in seven years (one of our greatest living writers, Manoranjan Byapari, did make it to the shortlist in 2019 for his Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit, published by another pioneering independent press, Samya from Kolkata). As some commentators have pointed out, Dalit and Adivasi authors seldom make it to longlists and shortlists: the exceptions are Tamil writer Bama winning the Crossword Award back in 2000, and Byapari who has won a clutch of awards since 2019. Like with most such affairs, neither the NIF Book Fellowships nor the juries that decide these matters reflect the diversity of India, especially when it comes to Dalits and Adivasis. We hope that one of the lessons from Ambedkar’s exceptional life and example is the need to recognise, address and redress such inequalities. Awards, residencies and fellowships – always issued by the intellectual classes who are often beneficiaries of birth-given savarna meritocracy – mirror the realities of our hierarchical society, quite like our publishing eco-system does.
At Navayana, in early 2020, we had suggested that Ashok apply for the NIF book fellowship since we did not have the resources to offer him an advance to cover his expenses and research. He refused, saying this book will solely be the result of his commitment to Ambedkar and what he had learnt from him, and that his own personal resources would suffice. So, it is all the more fulfilling that the NIF award has come his way.
Enhancing A Part Apart’s appeal are seventy-odd pictures that drive the narrative, helping us visualise key characters and bring a forgotten history to life. For most of these, we record our debt to the tireless archivist Vijay Surwade of Kalyan, near Mumbai, from whose phenomenal collection of photographs and documents this 864-page hardback benefits. We also wish to recall individuals and institutions who offered financial support to Navayana to subvent the production and keep the retail price down: Ambedkar Mission Society (Bedford), Akshat Jain, Alladi Uma, Deepak Srinath, Dilip Menon, Gary Tartakov, Meena Dhanda, Naheed Carrimjee, Nithila Baskaran, Rupa Viswanath, Shiva Shankar, Takshila Education Society and Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Thanks are also owed to the expert peer reviewers who read the manuscript at the draft stage and offered invaluable feedback: Umesh Bagade, Anand Teltumbde (who read it in Taloja Central Jail), Shailaja Paik, V Geetha, Sunil Khilnani and Christophe Jaffrelot.
It has taken 21 years for Navayana, working within the mainstream trade publishing world, to break through this glass ceiling despite the advantages afforded to us – it took an exceptional book, by an exceptionally meticulous author, about a personality as consequential as Babasaheb. Perhaps, this is the sign that Ambedkar’s spectre has finally caught on: He has become so unavoidable that even profit-driven family-run Daryaganj presses and the big MNCs are printing his works and works about him.
In times of high fascism, one can’t but turn to the one man who theorised uncompromising equality as a constitutional principle, the man who offered us a radical Buddha in a new light.
In this hour of joy, let us all recall the sorrow of Dr Ambedkar, when his request for Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s help to self-publish 500 copies of The Buddha and His Dhamma in 1956 was turned down. The incident is worth recalling in detail.
On September 14, 1956, a month before he embraced Buddhism with half-a-million followers in Nagpur, he wrote to Nehru from his 26, Alipore Road, residence in Delhi. Enclosing two copies of the comprehensive “table of contents” of his opus, Ambedkar swallowed his pride and sought the prime minster’s help in the publication of a book he had worked on for five years:
When Nehru replied to Ambedkar, he said that the sum set aside for publications related to Buddha Jayanti had been exhausted, and that he should approach S Radhakrishnan, chairman of the commemorative committee. The greatest exponent of Buddhism after Asoka had been kept out of this Buddha Jayanti committee. It was presided by Radhakrishnan, then vice-president of India, and a man who embarrassingly believed that Buddhism was an “offshoot of Hinduism”, and “only a restatement of the thought of the Upanishads from a new standpoint”. Radhakrishnan is said to have informed Ambedkar on phone about his inability to help him.
Nehru also offered some business advice: “I might suggest that your books might be on sale in Delhi and elsewhere at the time of Buddha Jayanti celebrations when many people may come from abroad. It might find a good sale then.”
We have come a long way since then but not enough.
From the beginning, Navayana has obsessively brought out books related to Babasaheb. In November 2003, our first book was Ambedkar: Autobiographical Notes, a reissue of his Waiting for a Visa where he recounts various incidences of untouchability he faced in his life. This eventually gestated and evolved into one of India’s highest-selling graphic books, Bhimayana, with art by Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam. (This book played a crucial role in Durgabai Vyam being awarded the Padma Shri in 2022.)
Apart from A Part Apart, we have also published other classic studies of Babasaheb’s life and movement, like Eleanor Zelliot’s Ambedkar’s World, and high-quality annotated critical editions of Ambedkar’s writings: Annihilation of Caste, Riddles in Hinduism, Against the Madness of Manu and Beef, Brahmins & Broken Men. We did a simple, reader-friendly edition of Annihilation of Caste earlier this year, along with a limited edition EverBlue series that included the essential writings of Babasaheb and other anti-caste thinkers.
A collected edition of Dr Ambedkar’s speeches, A Stake in the Nation (2019), compiled by the pioneering Bhagwan Das, is a reissue of a title we had published in 2010 as Thus Spoke Ambedkar. Unnamati Syam Sundar’s No Laughing Matter compiles a selection of cartoons on Ambedkar published in the nationalist press from 1932 to 1956, and offers a history like no other, asking you to consider what you are laughing at. Some books have fictional representations of Ambedkar like playwright Premanand Gajvee’s The Strength of Our Wrists.
We have published memoirs and writings of people who closely worked with Ambedkar: Bhagwan Das’s In Pursuit of Ambedkar, Namdeo Nimgade’s In the Tiger’s Shadow and Ambedkar: The Attendant Details. We have also produced theoretical works that borrow from and build on Ambedkar-thought: Soumyabrata Choudhury’s Ambedkar and Other Immortals and Aishwary Kumar’s Radical Equality. Not to mention the scores of other authors who have been directly influenced by Ambedkarite thought.
We began our publishing journey with Babasaheb in 2003. Our very name, Navayana, is a tribute to the wheel he reinvented and set formally into motion in 1956. The Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2024 is a testament to this manic pursuit, both on our part and on the part of author Ashok Gopal. Another book, Yamini Narayanan’s Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India has made it to the 2024 Crossword Book Awards shortlist. But championing such aberrant ideals is not a profitable enterprise. In a world so awry, sound reason often looks like madness. We continue to work hoping that the world is healed one day, so our efforts will look justified. Till then, we will go on with the ministrations.
On this festive occasion, we wish to share news of two major multi-volume projects that A Part Apart led us towards: an edited four-volume translation, helmed by Abhishek Uchil, of the twelve-volume biography of Babasaheb Ambedkar written by CB Khairmode in Marathi (from 1951 to 1999); and a major two-part encyclopaedic work by Vijay Surwade showcasing his lifelong obsession with one man, Ambedkarnama: A Day-to-Day Chronicle of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Life and Movement, 1891–1956, being translated by Avadhoot Dongare from the Marathi. These books demand resources.
To help Navayana continue our work and to reward our present and future readers with these riches, we are calling out for financial help to see these massive projects through. For all the glory we appear to bask in, we remain an anchovy in the belly of a whale.
The lines of poetry interspersed here are from “Ode to Ambedkar” (1978) by Namdeo Dhasal, from A Current of Blood, in Dilip Chitre’s translation.
Alex George is an editor and Anand, the publisher at Navayana.