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India's encounter with the West happened in a discursive framework that has come to be known as orientalism, thanks to Edward Said's vastly influential book. To give a thumbnail sketch of a substantial body of research, British and German scholars, such as William Jones and Max Müller, were greatly fascinated by the ancient texts of Sanskrit and propagated the glories of an ancient civilization which, unfortunately, had lost its vitality through old age and such misfortunes as the invasions of the Islamic armies and one thousand years of Muslim rule. They claimed that India needed to be revitalized by the vigour of the newer and more masculine civilization of the Anglo-Saxons.
High caste Indians eagerly absorbed this discourse, whose most famous example perhaps is Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's 1882 novel, Anandmath, which provides a blueprint of a reinvigorated Hindu nation that will arrive after the Hindus have learned modern sciences from the British. 1 Few Indians besides B. R. Ambedkar challenged this discourse that glorifies a Brahminic corpus of ancient texts while totally ignoring its hierarchization of human beings into touchables and untouchables. He saw the world through a different lens, the one provided by his famous teacher, the American pragmatic philosopher John Dewey. This paper looks at the influence of Dewey on Ambedkar and Ambedkar's refashioning of Deweyan thought into a tool for his own investigations of Indian history and culture. I suggest that studying this unique relationship can help us abandon the old racist and hierarchist ideologies, an absolute necessity in this era of globalization. As the tourism advertisements of the Government of India that use slogans such as "Incredible India!" and "five thousand years of unbroken civilization" demonstrate, the orientalist discourse of the glorious India is alive and well, just like the "manifest destiny" discourse of the United States of America. If living together in the global village has to be harmonious and peaceful, then such discourses of national uniqueness will have to be abandoned as so much dead wood. This was the project that both Dewey and Ambedkar embarked on, and studying their work together can help us learn about how to live as equals in this global village.
Despite seven decades of marginalization by India's political and intellectual elite, B. R....