Congress’s 1917 anti-untouchability resolution coexisted with its leader endorsing caste segregation

Evidence

To woo its second major constituency, the Untouchables, the Indian National Congress passed a resolution in 1917 abolishing untouchability. Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society, a founding member of the Congress, presided over the meeting. Ambedkar called it “a strange event”. He republished Besant’s essay published in the Indian Review in 1909, in which she had made a case for segregating Untouchable children from the children of ‘purer’ castes in schools … Their bodies at present are ill-odorous and foul with the liquor and strong-smelling food out of which for generations they have been built up; it will need some generations of purer food and living to make their bodies fit to sit in the close neighbourhood of a school room with children who have received bodies trained in habits of exquisite personal cleanliness and fed on pure food stuffs. We have to raise the Depressed Classes to a similar level of purity, not drag the clean to the level of the dirty, and until that is done, close association is undesirable. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 161

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior interest in ‘complaints about immodesty’ as class/identity signaling and moral panics — here purity rhetoric masks caste hierarchy. Also recalls A Very Minor Prophet’s themes of reformer hypocrisy.
• SHARE: The Annie Besant contradiction — presiding over the abolition of untouchability while publishing an essay justifying segregated schooling on bodily-purity grounds — is a striking single fact to share with anyone working on Indian reform history.