American rhetorical theory has long admired John Dewey, the twentieth-century American philosopher and author of The Public and Its Problems (1927). Scott Stroud’s The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction introduces rhetoric scholars to a student of Dewey’s—a student who surpassed his teacher. It explains how Dewey and his philosophical pragmatism strongly influenced the works of Bhimrao Ambedkar, the man popularly known as the father of the Indian Constitution. Born into a Dalit (untouchable) Hindu caste, Ambedkar rose to a position of singular influence in twentieth-century India, where he worked as a politician, reformer, anticaste activist, and religious leader. He adapted Dewey’s ideas to his own conditions and his own country, greatly extending Dewey’s ideas about meaning, communication, and persuasion. In so doing, he became one of Dewey’s most rhetorically accomplished students as well as a significant philosopher of rhetoric.The Evolution of Pragmatism in India is primarily concerned with the relationship between Ambedkar and Dewey, who was Ambedkar’s teacher at Columbia University. However, as Stroud argues, rhetoric is a central part of Ambedkar’s adaptation of and improvements on the pragmatism that he learned from his teacher. Ambedkar’s deployments of Dewey’s philosophy in his own works take rhetorical form. Likewise, rhetoric was integral to Ambedkar’s advocacy for his fellow caste members. As Stroud argues, his Navayana Buddhism foregrounds the dynamic relationship between mindset and persuasion to the point that it is fair to consider the “rhetoric of reorientation” (179) one of its main religious processes.The chapters of Stroud’s book follow the course of Ambedkar’s career. After an introduction, the book’s first chapter describes the courses of Dewey’s that Ambedkar took at Columbia University in 1914 and 1915–16. From the beginning, Stroud argues, Ambedkar worked to adapt Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy to problems of religion, law, and reform in India. Dewey’s courses emphasized reform, reflection, and ethical development, on the one hand, and force and persuasion, on the other. Ambedkar would engage both these themes over the course of his long life and work as a public intellectual. As Stroud maintains, it is not that Dewey’s teachings determined the shape of Ambedkar’s later interventions. Rather, they shaped some of the key themes and problems to which Ambedkar repeatedly returned.In its second chapter, The Evolution of Pragmatism in India explores how Ambedkar used Dewey’s ideas in his earliest writings on reform. Focusing on Ambedkar’s review of Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), Stroud explains how Ambedkar worked through Dewey’s distinctions between violence, coercion, and force. Specifying Dewey’s recommendations for intelligent force, Ambedkar conceptualized “uses of language that were forceful, and that did not simply reconstitute the group as it was” (95). Borrowing from Russell, he advanced Dewey’s conceptualization toward lived, practical specificity. He was sensitive to coercive kinds of rhetoric—and particularly to the “ridicule, humiliation, and shame” that were “central parts of the practice and enforcement of untouchability in Ambedkar’s world” (95). Nevertheless, even at the earliest stages of his career as a reformer, he saw intelligent force epitomized in eloquent speech and writing.Ambedkar got the chance to put his rhetorical theory into practice, Stroud argues, in his 1919 testimony before the Southborough Committee, which the British had charged with deliberating constitutional reforms for India. He argued that a significant proportion of seats on the Bombay Legislative Council should be reserved for Dalits. In chapter 3, Stroud demonstrates how Ambedkar’s speech and writing in this instance “uses, changes, and resists . . . Dewey’s philosophy” (108). Analyzing the use of Dewey’s words in the testimony Ambedkar submitted to the Southborough Committee and in some of his later writings, Stroud traces his reconstruction of his teacher’s ideas. “Echoing” Dewey, Ambedkar wove “Deweyan terminology and Dewey’s own way of putting things into his own texts addressing the Indian context” (115, 107).Throughout The Evolution of Pragmatism in India, Stroud’s method is textual. Working with Ambedkar’s own writings and his annotations of Dewey’s books, the book’s fourth chapter shows this method to best advantage. Ambedkar’s surviving library is spread across multiple archives, and he did not mark all his books. Stroud collected his annotations in the books of Dewey’s that Ambedkar did own, and he builds his account from that sure evidence of engagement. In particular, he argues that Dewey’s writings profoundly influenced Ambedkar’s writings about caste: “In Ambedkar’s reconstructive use of Deweyan terms, caste is the malady that destroys the fellow feeling that is so vital in creating and sustaining a free interchange or communication between various groups in a society” (164). Moreover, he explains, Dewey’s teachings and writings helped Ambedkar appreciate caste, importantly, as a habit of attitude. On the basis of this insight, Ambedkar’s reform program focuses on rhetoric as a means of changing mindsets: “The diagnosis of caste as mindset or orientation is vital for Ambedkar’s rhetoric of reorientation.” And mindset “is what persuasion will target, what religious conversion will attack, and . . . what the forceful agent will change” (179).Ambedkar was a religious as well as a political leader, and Stroud describes his public conversion to Buddhism in 1956 as the “culmination” (183) of his pragmatist philosophy. In the chapter “Education, Force, and the Will to Convert,” Ambedkar’s conversion also appears as his culminating rhetorical act. It was integral to his anticaste activism. In leading thousands of Dalits across India to convert to Buddhism with him, he was following through on his radical rejection of the caste idea in Vedic thought.Rhetorical studies have usually approached Dewey’s legacy in political terms, but Ambedkar’s use of his teacher’s thinking points toward pragmatic accounts of identity and identity formation. Ambedkar waded directly into questions about organized religious experience that Dewey himself avoided. He also recovered the ethical ideal of personality that Dewey had developed in his early, idealist period. Discarding Dewey’s neo-Hegelian emphasis on organicism and organic structure, in his advocacy for Buddhism Ambedkar placed a special “emphasis on the point that each of us should control the path of our lives, since such projects implicate a unique set of values and interests that we each know best for ourselves” (209). Conversion “not only promotes the conditions wherein one’s personality can further develop”: “It is an act of the strong personality that Ambedkar wants his audience to realize in their own experience” (213).Rhetoric appears in Ambedkar’s works as a religious leader, Stroud argues, “in arguments, textual revisions, and meaningfully embodied actions,” all of which cultivated “creative reflective agents who intelligently surveyed their habits and the customs of the society that affect the formation of more satisfying forms of community.” This is his “reconstructive rhetoric” (235). Throughout his life, Ambedkar called for reflection on caste, its exclusions, and its humiliations. Through his rhetoric, he advocated for the rejection of caste and its pernicious hierarchies. In his calls for Dalits to convert to Buddhism, and in his own highly public conversion, he deployed persuasive force toward a different kind of end. He made use of his highly developed skills as an orator, writer, and leader to invite his followers to the work of self-liberation. Changing one’s own mindset or orientation is the means by which this process of self-liberation proceeds; its goal is the development of one’s own personality with others.Mindset is the key rhetorical concept that links the philosophies of Dewey, Ambedkar, and Stroud himself. Stroud’s John Dewey and the Artful Life (2011) focused on orientational meliorism, or growth pursued through the artful cultivation of one’s own mindsets. The Evolution of Pragmatism in India identifies the mindset at the center of Ambedkar’s lifelong interest in persuasion and social change. How can everyday mindsets and orientations to the world become, in persuasion, “a performative rhetoric that bestows a newfound sense of self-worth and respect for human personality” (229)? That is the kind of question around which Ambedkar’s work revolved. In John Dewey and the Artful Life, rhetoric looms at the margins of Stroud’s focus on orientation and aesthetic experience. In The Evolution of Pragmatism in India, rhetoric is the ground from which the mindset concept emerges, and mindset is also rhetoric’s primary target.The Evolution of Pragmatism in India explains how the idea of mindsets functioned at the center of Ambedkar’s lifelong interest in persuasion and social change. From his testimony to the Southborough Committee, through his public speeches, and into his public conversion to Buddhism, Stroud correctly depicts Ambedkar as a champion persuader. He also portrays him as a philosopher whom contemporary students of rhetoric cannot afford to ignore. In almost every case, the topics in philosophical pragmatism that Stroud discusses are relevant to problems in rhetoric. Ambedkar’s reconstruction of Dewey’s teachings is always relevant to rhetoric. Dewey’s original distinction between violence, force, and coercion—to take one important example—was not directly concerned with persuasion or communication. Ambedkar’s reconstruction of this distinction adds this context and this emphasis. From Dewey’s ruminations on morality and law, Ambedkar created his own “reconstructive” rhetorical theory, or, in other words, “his attempt to fashion and refashion problematic habits, customs, and institutions in readers or publics through acts of persuasive speech and writing” (70). In this way, he enlarges on Dewey’s pragmatism in a way that is more directly relevant to rhetorical scholarship than Dewey’s original thinking. Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon both followed similar paths.For students of rhetoric, the most obvious difficulty in The Evolution of Pragmatism in India is its emphasis on philosophy, not rhetoric. Although it finds rhetoric everywhere in Ambedkar’s pragmatism, the book foregrounds his works’ philosophical significance. Its conclusion acknowledges the duality of those works, remarking that Ambedkar “was committed to both rhetoric and philosophy.” Calling this duality both fascinating and frustrating (238), Stroud nevertheless privileges the latter over the former. He depicts rhetoric as an appropriate and effective means to Ambedkar’s ambitious ends. Nevertheless, in summarizing the complex story he tells, he sacrifices a detailed accounting of rhetoric on its own terms. Through The Evolution of Pragmatism in India, Ambedkar provides rhetoric specialists with new approaches to questions about caste and reform, new ways of thinking through force, violence, and persuasion, and new insights into the rhetoric of religion. Stroud explores none of these things in rhetorical breadth or depth.Deweyan pragmatism has real limitations for students of rhetoric. Dewey loved communication but seldom described persuasion. His advocacy for democracy did not emphasize the intersectional exclusions that are built into its fabric, and he kept quiet about the communicative and orientational aspects of organized religion. Where Dewey demonstrated an abiding interest in communication and persuasion, Ambedkar delved deeply into rhetorical problems and rhetorical concerns. Indeed, Stroud explains, he outdid his teacher. He focused on—and excelled in—persuasion, thinking about and practicing rhetoric at an expert level. He centered his thinking about democracy in attention to caste exclusion and discrimination. He embraced religious experience, dwelling deeply and with wisdom on its links to rhetoric and persuasion. For these reasons and many more, contemporary students of rhetoric have much to learn from him. The Evolution of Pragmatism in India provides a groundbreaking introduction to his works as well as a compelling stimulus to further study.
Jeremiah Dyehouse (Mon,) studied this question.
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