The Right to Write

This chapter investigates the possibility of Ambedkar’s ability to articulate the living passion of a literary writer even while engaged in constituting forms of thought that make possible passionate and collective political demands for rights and justice. Using a wide range of B. R. Ambedkar’s works, treating them as literary interventions in discourses which comprise theologies of institutional religion, this chapter suggests that B. R. Ambedkar placed a certain exceptional premium on the demand for a right to write, not on part of the expert, but on part of the people including that part which was hitherto unlettered or uneducated. The right to write thus becomes a constitutive but never quite saturated possibility that opens a history of collective discussion, education and contestation of codified or enunciated rights. Even while the right to write itself can never be entirely codified or paradoxically made flesh by the word, it remains open to the historicity of a social existence whose measure can only be our common and shared capacity to becoming-uncommon, that is the measure of a literary community to come.