Ambedkar echoed colonial missionary language in describing Adivasis as savages

Evidence

Thirteen million people living in the midst of civilisation are still in a savage state, and are leading the life of hereditary criminals … The Hindus will probably seek to account for this savage state of the aborigines by attributing to them congenital stupidity. They will probably not admit that the aborigines have remained savages because they made no effort to civilise them, to give them medical aid, to reform them, to make them good citizens … Civilising the aborigines means adopting them as your own, living in their midst, and cultivating fellow-feeling—in short, loving them … — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 362

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: An uncomfortable echo of the reader’s earlier material on Gandhi and the Adivasis — a symmetry the book itself draws for critique.
• QUESTION: Worth exploring how Ambedkar’s Brahminical-Vedic modernization lens blinded him on the Adivasi question.

Related

• Ambedkar described Adivasis using colonial terms like savage and hereditary criminals (similarity 0.94)
• Ambedkar feared unconverted Adivasis could become an anti-Hindu bloc if non-Hindus converted them (similarity 0.84)
• Hindu civilization made no attempt to civilize its thirteen million aboriginal people (similarity 0.83)
• Ambedkar’s liberal-progress lens made him dated on the Adivasi question (similarity 0.81)
• Ambedkar himself drew on eugenics language to describe Hindus (similarity 0.81)
• Adivasi tribes were never conquered and now wage armed resistance against the Indian state (similarity 0.79)
• Adivasi tribes resisted assimilation and were never conquered by India (similarity 0.79)
• Thirteen million Indian aborigines remained uncivilized despite thousands of years of Hindu civilization (similarity 0.79)
• Ambedkar’s own protectionist logic toward Adivasis mirrored Gandhi’s paternalism toward Untouchables. (similarity 0.79)