B. R. Ambedkarडॉ. भीमराव आंबेडकर

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (14 April 1891 – 6 December 1956), revered as Bābāsāheb, was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer, political leader and philosopher, born into the Mahār caste, then classed as “untouchable”. Against every obstacle that caste society could put in his way, he became one of the most educated men of his time, with doctorates from Columbia University and the London School of Economics; led the movement of India’s untouchables — now known as Dalits (“the broken”, “the oppressed”) — for dignity, rights and political power; became independent India’s first Law Minister; and, as chairman of the Drafting Committee, was the principal architect of the Constitution of India, which abolished untouchability and guaranteed equality before the law. He was the most radical critic of the caste system and of the Hindu scriptures that sanctioned it — publicly burning the The Manusmṛti in 1927 and arguing in Annihilation of Caste (1936) that caste could not be reformed but only destroyed, by destroying the religious authority of the Śāstras. He clashed repeatedly with Mahatma Gandhi, whose defence of Hinduism he regarded as a defence of caste. And in 1956, weeks before his death, he converted to Buddhism with some half a million followers, founding a modern, socially engaged Buddhism that has become the faith of millions of Dalits. Once marginalised in official history, he is today perhaps the most revered figure in Indian public life after Gandhi — and, for the Dalit movement, far more.

Life

Childhood under untouchability

Ambedkar was born at Mhow, a British military cantonment in central India, the fourteenth child of Ramji Sakpal, a subedar (non-commissioned officer) in the British Indian Army, and Bhimābāī. The family were Mahārs from Ambadawe in the Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra, a caste of village servants, labourers and soldiers, treated as untouchable. His father was a devout follower of Kabīr and a disciplined man who insisted on education.

Ambedkar’s childhood was a schooling in humiliation. At school he and his brother had to sit apart on a gunny sack they carried from home; they could not touch the water tap, and could drink only if a peon poured water into their cupped hands — “no peon, no water”. Teachers would not touch their notebooks. A famous episode: travelling with his siblings to visit their father, the children were thrown out of a bullock cart when the driver learned they were Mahārs, and spent a day without water because no one would give them any. Later, in Baroda, as a highly educated officer of the state, he could not find lodging; when Parsi landlords discovered his caste, he was thrown out of an inn by a mob. “Untouchability,” he wrote, “is not a simple matter; it is the mother of all our poverty and lowliness.”

Education

The family moved to Bombay, and Ambedkar became the first untouchable to enter Elphinstone High School and then Elphinstone College, graduating in economics and political science in 1912. A scholarship from the progressive Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda took him to Columbia University in New York (1913–16), where he studied economics, history, sociology and philosophy, was taught by the philosopher John Dewey — whose ideas of democracy as “a mode of associated living” deeply influenced him — and wrote a paper, Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development (1916). He went on to the London School of Economics and Gray’s Inn; after a forced return to India, he completed an MSc (1921) and DSc (1923) in economics at LSE — his thesis was The Problem of the Rupee — and a PhD from Columbia (1927). He was called to the bar in 1922.

The movement

Back in Bombay, he began the struggle for the rights of the “depressed classes”. He founded newspapers — Mooknayak (“Leader of the Voiceless”, 1920), Bahishkrit Bharat (“Excluded India”, 1927) — and organisations, and gave evidence to British commissions demanding political representation.

In March 1927 he led the Mahad Satyagraha, in which thousands of untouchables marched to drink water from the public Chavdar tank at Mahad, from which they were barred despite a legal resolution opening it to all. Caste Hindus attacked them and then “purified” the tank with cow dung and cow urine. In December 1927, at a second conference at Mahad, Ambedkar and his followers ceremonially burned the Manusmṛti, as the code of caste oppression. In 1930 he led the Kalaram Temple entry satyāgraha at Nashik.

He coined the slogan “Educate, agitate, organise” (śikṣit bano, saṅgharṣ karo, saṅgaṭhit raho) and founded schools, hostels, colleges (the People’s Education Society, 1945) and political parties — the Independent Labour Party (1936), the Scheduled Castes Federation (1942).

The clash with Gandhi

At the Round Table Conferences in London (1930–32), Ambedkar demanded separate electorates for the depressed classes — that they should elect their own representatives — arguing that otherwise caste Hindu voters would choose compliant untouchable candidates. The British granted this in the Communal Award (1932). Gandhi, in Yerwada prison, began a fast unto death against it, arguing that it would permanently separate untouchables from Hinduism. As Gandhi weakened, the pressure on Ambedkar became immense — he was warned that if Gandhi died, untouchables would be massacred. He signed the Poona Pact (September 1932), accepting a larger number of reserved seats within a joint electorate instead. He regarded it as coercion and never forgave Gandhi. His book What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945) is a bitter indictment.

“I will not die a Hindu”

In 1935, at Yeola, Ambedkar declared: “I was born a Hindu because I had no control over this, but I solemnly assure you that I will not die a Hindu.” He studied the religions of the world for twenty years before choosing.

In 1936 he wrote Annihilation of Caste as the presidential address for the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal, a Hindu reform society in Lahore; when the organisers saw the text and asked him to remove the attack on the Hindu scriptures, he refused, and the conference was cancelled. He published it himself. Gandhi replied in his journal Harijan; Ambedkar answered in later editions. See Annihilation of Caste.

The Constitution

In 1947, despite his long opposition to Congress, Ambedkar was invited by Nehru to become independent India’s first Minister of Law and was elected chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly. The Constitution of India, adopted on 26 November 1949 and in force from 26 January 1950, bears his stamp: it abolishes untouchability (Article 17) and makes its practice an offence; guarantees equality before the law and prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth; provides reservations (affirmative action) in education, government jobs and legislatures for Scheduled Castes and Tribes; establishes universal adult suffrage; and creates a framework of fundamental rights and an independent judiciary.

In his final speech to the Constituent Assembly (25 November 1949), he warned:

On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality… How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? … If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.

He also warned against hero-worship in politics — “Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship” — and against the “grammar of anarchy”, including civil disobedience and satyāgraha, once constitutional methods were available.

He resigned from the cabinet in 1951 when his Hindu Code Bill — which would have given Hindu women rights of inheritance, divorce and property — was stalled by conservative opposition. (Its provisions were passed in separate acts in 1955–56.)

Conversion

On 14 October 1956, at Nagpur, Ambedkar and his wife Savita took the Three Refuges and Five Precepts from the senior Burmese monk Chandramani, and then Ambedkar himself administered conversion to some half a million followers — one of the largest mass conversions in history. He prescribed twenty-two vows, including: “I shall have no faith in Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Maheśa, nor shall I worship them”; “I do not believe that the Buddha was an incarnation of Viṣṇu”; “I shall believe in the equality of man”; “I renounce Hinduism, which is harmful to humanity and impedes the advancement of humanity because it is based on inequality”. He died in his sleep in Delhi seven weeks later, on 6 December 1956, having just completed The Buddha and His Dhamma. Millions attended his funeral in Bombay.

Thought

The anatomy of caste

Ambedkar was a sociologist of caste. In Castes in India (1916) he argued that caste is fundamentally a system of endogamy — marriage only within the group — maintained by customs that controlled women (child marriage, enforced widowhood, satī). In Annihilation of Caste he argued that caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers, and not a natural division but an artificial, hereditary hierarchy that prevents individuals from choosing their occupation according to their capacities. Its most insidious feature is graded inequality: each caste looks down on those below it while being looked down upon by those above, so the oppressed are divided and can never unite against the system — unlike a simple two-class system, where the oppressed form a solidarity. Caste “has killed public spirit, destroyed the sense of public charity, made public opinion impossible”.

The scriptures

Why does caste persist? Because, Ambedkar argued, it is not merely a social custom but a religious duty, sanctified by the Śāstras — the Vedas, the Smṛtis, the Gītā. Hindus observe caste “not because they are inhuman or wrong-headed… but because they are deeply religious”. Therefore the reform of caste requires destroying the authority of the Śāstras: “You must not only discard the Shastras, you must deny their authority, as did Buddha and Nanak… You must have courage to tell the Hindus that what is wrong with them is their religion.” He also wrote historical studies, Who Were the Shudras? (1946) and The Untouchables (1948), arguing that the Śūdras were originally Kṣatriyas degraded by Brahmin hostility, and that untouchability arose among “broken men” who remained Buddhists and ate beef after the Brahmins gave it up.

Democracy

For Ambedkar, democracy was not merely majority rule or elections but, following Dewey, “a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience… essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellow men”. It requires liberty, equality and fraternity together — and he insisted that he took these ideals not from the French Revolution but from the Buddha. Fraternity — fellow-feeling across castes — was the hardest, and without it, liberty and equality would be “no deeper than coats of paint”. He coined the phrase constitutional morality: respect for the forms and limits of the constitution, which he said “is not a natural sentiment; it has to be cultivated”.

Economics

Ambedkar was a trained economist who wrote on public finance, the rupee, land and labour. He advocated state socialism in agriculture and key industries, the rights of workers, and the independence of the central bank; his evidence to the Hilton Young Commission influenced the creation of the Reserve Bank of India (1935).

Women

He argued that “I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved”, campaigned for women’s rights, and fought for the Hindu Code Bill.

The Buddha and his Dhamma

Ambedkar’s Buddhism — sometimes called Navayāna, “the new vehicle” — is a radical reinterpretation. In The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957), he presented the Buddha as a social reformer and rationalist who taught a religion of morality, reason and equality, not of supernatural belief. He rejected the traditional story of the Buddha’s renunciation (the sight of an old man, a sick man and a corpse), arguing instead that the young Siddhārtha left home over a dispute about war with a neighbouring clan. He reinterpreted karma as not inherited from past lives and rejected the idea that suffering is deserved; he reinterpreted the Four Noble Truths and nirvāṇa as a righteous life free of greed and hatred, here and now. “Religion is for man, and not man for religion.” See Buddhism.

Critique of the Gītā

Ambedkar read the The Bhagavad Gītā critically, as a “counter-revolution” text — a Brahminical defence of the caste duties (svadharma) and of violence against the egalitarian revolution of Buddhism: “The Bhagavad Gita is neither a book of religion nor a treatise on philosophy. What it does is to defend certain dogmas of religion on philosophical grounds.” His unfinished Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India develops this thesis.

Legacy

For decades after his death, Ambedkar was honoured mainly by Dalits; from the 1990s he became a figure revered across Indian politics, his statue — in a blue suit, holding the Constitution — standing in countless towns and villages. He was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna (1990). The Dalit movement, Dalit literature (Namdeo Dhasal, Om Prakash Valmiki, Baby Kamble), political parties like the Bahujan Samaj Party, and the Ambedkarite Buddhist community of some seven to eight million all claim his legacy. His slogan “Educate, agitate, organise” and his question — can political democracy survive without social democracy? — remain the sharpest challenges to Indian society.

Ambedkar in conversation

His deepest diagnosis is “graded inequality”: a ladder in which everyone has someone beneath them, so the oppressed never unite. And his warning on the eve of the Republic — political equality alongside social inequality is a contradiction that cannot last — is still the question of Indian democracy.