'Beyond Protective Discoloration: Ambedkar on Conversion' | A DOT Talks Online Lecture Series
Channel: Tetso College
Date: 2021-08-03

DOT Talks in collaboration with the Department of Political Science brings you an Online Lecture Series titled 'The Relevance and Significance of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar: Today & Tomorrow'. The event will be graced by internationally recognized academicians, thinkers, and also our students who will be delivering consecutive lectures.

The fifth lecture in the series is called 'Beyond Protective Discoloration: Ambedkar on Conversion' and was delivered by Prof. Soumyabrata Choudhury on 29th July 2021.

Abstract: The thesis I want to argue in this paper is the following: The distinctive contribution that B. R. Ambedkar made to the question of conversion, which hitherto had been dominantly presented as a politico-theological question, was to clarify it with a new tool of thought. This tool was a complexly articulated theory of names found in the essay “Away from the Hindus”. Ambedkar wrote this essay in the wake of the resolution passed in the 1936 Mahar Conference in Bombay that the Mahars henceforth were abandoning Hinduism and were open to converting to some other religion. I would like to argue that only upon a sufficient appreciation of this theory of names, in all its semiotic, paradigmatic and existential richness, will we be able to grasp the implications of this theory for the historical terrain upon which they worked their effects. Only then can we undertake the further more perilous, and surely more urgent, task of moving from Ambedkar on conversion to Ambedkar’s conversion. In the last part of the presentation I would like to briefly talk about Ambedkar’s conversion along with a large number of other people coming from erstwhile untouchable castes in 1956 Nagpur. I would like to discuss this event not just as a theological and religious affair but also as an attempt to create a new political subject but on the ground of emancipated religion. In this sense conversion was also meant to be emancipation. Finally I would like to examine the present day retreat from this ideal of emancipation towards a fear of conversion and return to religion as the theological alibi for social oppression.

About the Speaker: Soumyabrata Choudhury is Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has authored Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth, Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme and articles on ancient Greek liturgy, the staging of Ibsen, psychoanalysis, Phule, Nietzsche, Ambedkar and Hegel. His latest book is Now It’s Come To Distances: Notes on Coronavirus and Shaheen Bagh, Association and Isolation.