Person · jurist & social reformer

B. R. Ambedkar

Also known as Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ambedkar, Babasaheb, B R Ambedkar

Date

1891 – 1956

Function

Social reform & movement

Tradition

Annihilation of Caste; The Buddha and His Dhamma

Confidence

Established / referenced

Worth knowing

His Buddhism is deliberately a reconstruction: The Buddha and His Dhamma sets aside rebirth and karma as later accretions and reads the teaching as a social ethic. The twenty-two vows he administered at Deekshābhūmi are explicit renunciations of Hindu deities and of caste.

Connections (9)

• Monastic foundationDeekshābhūmi, Nagpur

  Ambedkar converted at Nagpur on 14 October 1956 with several hundred thousand Mahārs, having announced twenty years earlier that he would not die a Hindu. The twenty-two vows he administered are the sharpest public renunciation of caste ever made, and he died seven weeks afterwards. The stupa built on the site is among the largest in Asia, and the conversion is re-enacted there every year on the anniversary by tens of thousands of people.

• Teaching lineageThe Buddha

  Ambedkar's The Buddha and His Dhamma sets aside rebirth, karma and the four noble truths as later monkish additions and reads the teaching as a social ethic against inequality. It is a deliberate reconstruction, rejected by many traditional Buddhists, and it is what several million Indians practise. He had announced in 1935 that he would not die a Hindu and spent twenty-one years choosing which religion to take instead, examining Islam, Christianity and Sikhism before settling on Buddhism.

• Court associationMohandās Karamchand Gandhi

  Ambedkar and Gandhi's central quarrel was the Poona Pact of 1932: Ambedkar had won separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, Gandhi fasted against them from Yerwada jail, and Ambedkar gave way and took reserved seats instead. He wrote afterwards that he had been made to choose between a man's life and his people's political independence.

• CampaignPune/ Poona

  The Poona Pact was signed at Yerwada jail in September 1932, after Gandhi began a fast unto death against separate electorates for untouchables. Reserved seats in joint electorates is the arrangement Indian legislatures still use, and it is the outcome of that week in Poona. Ambedkar wrote afterwards that he had been made to choose between a man's life and his people's political independence, and that he never forgave the way the choice was put.

• Succession in timeJallianwala Bagh

  The massacre and the martial law that followed in Punjab — public floggings, the crawling order, aircraft firing on crowds at Gujranwala — did more than any other single episode to end Indian confidence in British justice, and it is where Gandhi's non-cooperation and the whole mass phase of the movement begin. Ambedkar drew a different conclusion from the same decade: that a national movement which did not first address caste would simply transfer power within it.

• Alternative toVaikom

  Vaikom in 1924 and Mahad in 1927 attacked the same exclusion from opposite directions. At Vaikom the demand was the right to use the roads around a temple, run within a broadly Gandhian frame with Periyar, Narayana Guru and eventually Gandhi himself involved and disagreeing. At Mahad, Ambedkar had Dalits drink from a public tank and then burned the Manusmriti in public — a rejection of the frame rather than a request within it.

• Education modernity debateSevagram / Wardha

  Gandhi's Nai Talim, worked out at Sevagram from 1937, proposed education through a productive craft in the mother tongue, self-financing and rooted in the village. Ambedkar rejected the whole premise: the village, he said, was a den of localism and the sink of communalism, and the only route out for an untouchable was English, the city, and the law. The two positions are the founding argument of Indian education policy and it was never resolved.

• Imperial administration ofConstitution Hall (Parliament House)

  Ambedkar chaired the drafting committee of a constitution that abolished untouchability in its seventeenth article, guaranteed universal adult franchise from the first election to a population around eighteen per cent literate, and gave the state the power to make special provision for backward classes. He had spent his career arguing the Congress could not be trusted with any of it, and he resigned from Nehru's cabinet in 1951 over the Hindu Code Bill.

• Peer movementRāmnāmī Samāj

  The Rāmnāmī Samāj's 1890s rejection of Brāhmin-mediated Rām-worship and its programme of unmediated Dalit devotional access — tattoo the name, wear it on the shawl, meet in the melā, not the temple — ran parallel to B. R. Ambedkar's later programme of Dalit self-emancipation. The two movements chose different exits from caste subordination (devotional for the Rāmnāmīs, political and finally Buddhist for Ambedkar), but shared the premise that the orthodox framework could not be reformed from within.

Sources

Wikipedia, “B. R. Ambedkar”. Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches (Government of Maharashtra, 17 vols); Annihilation of Caste (1936).

• Wikipedia — B. R. Ambedkar