Mahatma Gandhi & Boddhisattva Ambedkar had great political salience during the British Raj. However, after Independence they came to be seen as crackpots because the fundamental plank of their respective political strategies- Hindu-Muslim unity in Gandhi's case & a Dalit- Muslim alliance against the Hindu majority for Ambedkar- was proven to be utterly foolish.
Over time, precisely because their political legacy was ludicrous, both reappeared as symbolic figures at opposite ends of a philosophical (i.e. worthless) spectrum. Thus⁰ Gandhi is now deemed to represent 'Universality' or 'Absolutism'- which is the view that all relativist perspectives converge on an independent, absolute, Truth- while Ambedkar is considered an exponent of 'Pragmatism', as represented by C.S Pierce's maxim- "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object." This is pretty much the same thing as 'Yoneda Lemma' or the Structuralist program. There is no reason why we can't 'factorize' Gandhi's and Ambedkar's trajectories and thus arrive at a Gandhi-Ambedkar synthesis which in turn would shed light on the dynamics of their actual interaction.
Generations of Indians preparing for the Civil Service exams have done something similar for the so called 'Gandhi Nehru' ideology. One is tempted to speak of a Hegelian Aufhebung, or sublation, in this context. William Lawvere's work might be a point of entry for mathematical economists in this context.
Sadly, there are some Indian origin 'psilosophers' (the word means 'having slender wisdom') who- having signally failed to understand Continental philosophy (which, admittedly, is mad)- write bizarre, illiterate, garbage about both Gandhi and Ambedkar. It is the task of Socioproctology to point a finger at these assholes. The same point may be made about elderly Indian origin savants representing other schools- e.g. Bilgrami from the analytical tradition, or Sorabji who is a Classicist and an expert on Stoic philosophy. In the former case, 'Parikh's theorem', properly understood, could have killed off an ubiquitous kind of stupidity while, in the latter, a better grasp of mutual influences during the Indo-Greek period would have been illuminating.
Could there be a worthwhile scholarly literature on Gandhi or Ambedkar's thought? Sure. In fact the thing would have appeared instantly, had Gandhi and Ambedkar jointly conceived a program which was genuinely useful to India in the inter-war years. In that case, we would speak of a Gandhi-Ambedkar philosophy. Sadly, the opposite happened. Thus, whereas one can easily speak of a Gandhi-Nehru ideology of Indian Secular Nationalism, or a Nehru-Ambedkarite conception of the Constitution, Gandhi and Ambedkar remain at opposite poles though both explicitly embraced Indic Religion and the one is known by the Hindu title 'Mahatma' (usually applied to a monk) whereas the other went one step higher and is known as 'Boddhisattva' (reincarnation of the Buddha who delayed his own 'Nirvana' so as to bring salvation to others).
In practical terms, in the last decade we have seen attempts to resurrect Gandhian politics- the anti-corruption movement of Anna Hazare is the leading example- as well as to revive Ambedkarism by bringing about a Dalit-Muslim alliance which would defeat Narendra Modi's BJP.
Both of these movements failed dismally. Anna Hazare helped dig the grave of the Congress Party and thus helped Modi rise to power. Dalits, it turned out, have been the victim of Muslim violence and- in the recent elections in West Bengal- voted for Modi. Ambedkar himself contributed to this. His close ally, J.N Mandal, decided to thrown in his lot with the Muslim League. Ambedkar became Law Minister in India, while Mandal became Law Minister in Pakistan. So far so good. But then Mandal and his 'Namasudra' community had to flee Pakistan and cross over to India where they languished miserably. At a later point, the Communists massacred some of these refugees in Marichjhapi where they had been invited to settle. The Left continually pretended to favour Dalits but yearned to be accepted by the culturally superior Ashraf Muslim. This was a factor in the Left's slow suicide in North India. Kerala took a different tack and has a competent Communist government as well as a meritocratic Muslim League.
Parallel to these ill-conceived political interventions, Academia has been building up Gandhi as a great philosopher while Ambedkar- who certainly had the academic qualifications to be some such thing- has been depicted as a crazy fool by Indian academics infatuated with French philosophers like Deleuze whom they don't appear to understand.
It would certainly be possible to give a philosophical account of both Gandhi and Ambedkar. In the former case, we can use Hindu and Jain philosophy as well as the narrower tradition of judicial hermeneutics (Mimamsa and Navya Nyaya) to specify Gandhi's trajectory and explain how it could have been repaired. Since these branches of Indian thought have parallels in Western philosophy, it would be relatively easy to give a scholarly account of Gandhi's thought and to explain how it might be further developed. Sadly, there seems to be no interest in Academia or elsewhere in doing anything of the sort. Gandhi is simply treated as some sort of shaman or miracle worker and then linked to whatever bee the savant in question has in his bonnet.
With Ambedkar, because he was trained in both Economics and the Law, it would be relatively easy to incorporate more recent advances so as to get to an Ambedkarite Social Science, based on group-level mimesis, whose pragmatic underpinnings involve open problems in mathematics and the behavioural sciences. Once again, no one is interested in doing any such thing- because it would actually be useful to India.
Since much of the interest, among younger savants, in Gandhi and Ambedkar is linked to a desire to see a revived and intellectually vigorous Left and since Marxism now has mathematical representations of increasingly realism and practicality, I wonder whether it would make sense to take up William Lawvere's insights into Hegel and thus give a coherent, perhaps category theory based, account of whatever it is savant's find attractive about these two very dynamic figures. The alternative, as my Socioproctological Investigation has shown, is everybody talking utter nonsense under the rubric of praising Gandhi or pretending Ambedkar wasn't a sensible and pragmatic politician and thinker.
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