Anand: Navayana is a necessary mistake

Publishing house Navayana celebrates 20 years of books on caste injustice

The independent publishing house Navayana was born out of a desire to address a silence. Hardly anyone was touching the subject of caste in English language publishing. In an interview, founder Anand explains why he linked Ambedkar’s call to educate to the idea of publishing, and what has changed in the two decades of Navayana. There’s much to celebrate as the independent publishing house has won the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Prize, 2024, for a biography of B.R. Ambedkar, A Part Apart, by Ashok Gopal. Edited excerpts.

A range of historical forces and contemporary pulls and pushes caused me and Ravikumar [then a bank clerk and now a politician and two-time Member of Parliament] to found Navayana. To claim individual agency here is utterly fallacious. In August 2003, as a reporter at Outlook newsmagazine in Chennai, I did a feature on what kind of Dalit writing was getting published. The interviews I did for this story became a slim book called Touchable Tales by November 2003. So in two and a half months, a publishing house was born with four slim titles.

By the 2000s, we saw a range of independent presses emerge in English. Each was focused on communalism, feminism and the women’s movement, environment, the Left, on translations, and so on. Hardly anyone touched caste in English language publishing. Navayana was born out of the desire to address this silence. Gail Omvedt’s book Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste had just been published. She used the term Navayana for Ambedkarite Buddhism. I decided on this word for our venture.

It literally means a new vehicle, the new path. It was only much later that I learnt it was a term Ambedkar used but once. At the press conference a day ahead of the massive religious conversion ceremony in Nagpur in October 1956, Ambedkar was asked by a reporter if the ‘nava bouddha’ or new Buddhists follow the traditional Dhamma of the Buddha or a Dhamma aligned with contemporary conditions. Ambedkar replied that the new practice will return to the essence of the Buddha’s teaching and not be aligned to Vajrayana and Mahayana and other credos that emerged later. In that sense, he says you could call it ‘Navayan’. Ambedkar’s 22 vows for his half a million followers begins with a series of negations: vowing not to worship Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, nor to accept the Brahmin, the Gita or the Vedas. And one vow finally affirms: that they’ll abide by equality. No prophet or religious thinker has ever said this. Ambedkar reconstitutes the Buddha’s message — it’s both a turn and a return. Unlike brahmanic Hinduism, Buddha Dhamma is not sanatan [an eternal fixity]. It’s in our embodied selves that history comes to be. For me, Navayana as a publishing venture is a spoke in this wheel. It is a mistake which is slowly correcting itself.

Not just that. It’s about how caste impinges on everybody. As a child, I saw my mother ostracised for four days every month for having menstrual periods. In earlier times, menstruating Brahmin women had to stay in the cowshed. That’s untouchability too — like Ambedkar says in his 1916 paper “Castes in India”, control over women’s sexuality and agency is at the root of the caste system. Which is why child marriage flourished in this land. I’ve inferred through Ambedkar that one of the reasons for malnutrition in this country is this: for a the longest time, we were all children born to children because of the caste system. My mother’s mother was married at twelve, and birthed sixteen children of whom ten made it to adulthood. Ambedkar too is a child born to another child, and is married off as a child to another child. So Ambedkar never treated the problems of caste as a Dalit issue alone. He wrote Annihilation of Caste, Riddles in Hinduism and scores of works to enlighten all Hindus, all savarnas, including Gandhi and Tagore. Ambedkar’s call is to educate, agitate, organise. For me, this call to educate is directly linked to the idea of publishing.

As a journalist, I felt I was both failing and flailing. My benevolent, liberal editor at Outlook did not consider Dalits being force-fed human excreta in Thinniyam [Tamil Nadu] in 2002 a story. I was forced to write about this for Himal in Kathmandu. In 2003, Navayana was born. Why publish a book? Because it lasts or it appears to last. The Hindi word for publisher prakashak — meaning, the one who throws light — is more beautiful. You see, Ambedkar is forced to self-publish Annihilation of Caste in 1936. He was alone. And 70% of his writings were not published till he died. Whom did he write for? Who all were willing to publish or read Ambedkar? Even today, very few. That’s because you don’t even acknowledge caste to be an issue even if it surrounds us.

Exactly. But why is this? What Ambedkar says may hurt Hindus but he captures it so well in Annihilation of Caste: ‘There can be a better or a worse Hindu. But a good Hindu there cannot be.’ If you’re a Hindu, you have caste. That’s why he says let’s put a dynamite to the Vedas and Shastras. He wants all of us out of caste.