Urs Lindner gives a working paper on 'Imitation, Assimilation, Segregation. On B.R. Ambedkar’s Sociology of Caste'

Controversies on assimiliation are far from being an exlusively Western phenomenon. What is of particular interest in this regard is colonial India in the 20^th century, where assimiliation worked as a meta-narrative that could be mobilised accross the entire political gamut. This paper deals with the theoretical role of assimilation in B.R. Ambedkar’s sociology of caste. By a first step I will introduce three views on assimilation which are part of Ambedkar’s intellectual context, but of whom only the third one may be not far to seek: Sarah Simons’, Robert Park’s and Mohendras Gandhi’s. Subsequently I will turn to Ambedkar’s article on ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’ which elaborates on a paper presented in 1916 in the seminar of anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser at Columbia. This article is not only the sociologically most concise piece of Ambedkar’s critical analysis of caste; it also introduces assimilation as a counter-concept to imitation and segregation, as a ‘natural tendency’ that is blocked by the ‘unnatural institution’ of the caste system. By a third step I will trace the further development of the topic of assimilation in Ambedkar’s work and show how it was closely connected to the conceptualization and use of the metaphor of ‘social endosmosis’.