The Library Committee is organising a book talk on Ankit Kawade’s The Ambedkar-Nietzsche Provocations: The Genius of the Chandala and the Gospel of the Superman (2026) published by Navayana.

Discussants: Dr Vanya Bhargav and Mr Jai Brunner

The event is open to the public. Register here.

About the book 

How did the Manusmriti bind Nietzsche and Ambedkar in a tangle?
In the late 1880s, Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and the greatest egalitarian thinker of inequality, termed Christianity a “Chandala religion”. In the 1940s, B.R. Ambedkar, the champion of civil rights in India and an unequalled thinker of equality, called Hinduism “the gospel of the superman”. The two world-historical figures became entangled in a unique interchange of terminology. What was the “Chandala”—a generic name that refers to the Untouchables of caste society—doing in Nietzsche’s writings? What was the “superman”—Nietzsche’s coinage for a human who exists beyond good and evil—doing in the writings of Ambedkar?

In The Ambedkar–Nietzsche Provocations, Ankit Kawade tells the story of the multiple and conflicting interpretations and misinterpretations that connect these two thinkers in a historical knot. At the center of this tangle is the Manusmriti, the ancient Brahmanic code that devised forbidding rules and sanctioned the most heinous forms of caste and gender oppression. This is the first book-length study of the provocative similarities and irreconcilable differences between Ambedkar and Nietzsche.

About the author

Ankit Kawade is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He works broadly in the field of comparative political theory, and he is mainly interested in modern Indian, European, and American political thought. He completed his MA and MPhil from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is also a Graduate Associate at the Association for Global Political Thought, Harvard University. He was a recipient of the Navayana Dalit History Fellowship 2021 for The Ambedkar–Nietzsche Provocations.