Fraternity and Resistance: Anti-Caste Solidarities in Ambedkar and Mangoo Ram’s Political Thought

Abstract

Dalit resistance in South Asia has been shaped by intersecting yet regionally specific articulations of anti-caste consciousness. This paper examines Ambedkar’s fraternity and Mangoo Ram’s Ad-Dharm movement as divergent yet complementary anti-caste strategies. In the writings of Ambedkar and Mangoo Ram, there is an acknowledgment of solidarity within the parameters of emancipatory thought despite differences in their trajectory of life, regions, languages, and struggles. This paper seeks to interrogate this convergence in thought and praxis through these two figures who were working towards a transformative and reformative intellectual cosmopolis. Drawing on Émile Durkheim’s view of religion as a social fact and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power, we argue that both movements transformed religion into a lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1989), using myths, memory, and rituals to reframe Dalit agency. Following Axel Honneth’s Recognition Theory, we interrogate whether Dalit solidarity is a transformative ethic or a contingent mobilization. Dalit intellectual thought from Punjab reveals how subaltern religions create polynomic solidarities—fractured yet interwoven struggles—where fraternity emerges through historical resistance. By theorizing religion as an epistemic and political site, this paper repositions anti-caste thought as a multidimensional praxis, assembling new axioms of equality against entrenched caste hierarchies.