Ambedkar’s Feminism: Debunking the Myths of Manu in a Quest for Gender Equality

This article focuses on the role of Dr B. R. Ambedkar in the empowerment of women through mobilization of the womenfolk against the subjugation meted out to them by the caste and gender hierarchy in order to maintain the existing caste structures. Ambedkar realized the need for women to become the torchbearers of the new reformed society which is both casteless and classless in nature. He therefore advocated a companionate relationship between men and women as opposed to the master–slave relationship that Manu propagated in Manusmriti. In order to achieve such a feat, the need of the hour was to free women from the bounds imposed upon them by the existing Brahmanical social order which treated them as subservient to men and wholly dependent on their male counterparts. Manu’s idea of a woman was of a subhuman being in need of stringent control by her male relations. This article seeks to answer the question—why it was imperative to control women thus? Women, owing to their reproductive potential, have the ability to dismantle the caste purity by reproducing outside of their castes. Hence, their ideological suppression becomes essential to the enterprise of maintaining caste purity. For this purpose, several ritualistic tools had to be put in place to extinguish the threat of women’s sexuality