Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, born on 14 April 1891, in Mhow, India, was a leader of the Dalits (Scheduled
Castes; formerly called untouchables) and law minister of the government of India (1947–51).
Born of a Dalit Mahar family of western India,
he was as a boy humiliated by his high-caste schoolfellows. His father was
an officer in the Indian army. Awarded a scholarship by the Gaekwar (ruler)
of Baroda (now Vadodara), he studied at universities in the United States,
Britain, and Germany. He entered the Baroda Public Service at the Gaekwar’s
request, but again ill-treated by his high-caste colleagues, he turned to legal
practice and to teaching. He soon established his leadership among Dalits,
founded several journals on their behalf, and succeeded in obtaining special
representation for them in the legislative councils of the government.
Contesting Mahatma Gandhi’s claim to speak for Dalits (or Harijans, as
Gandhi called them), he wrote What Congress
and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945).
In 1947 Ambedkar became the law minister of the government of
India. He took a leading part in the framing of the Indian constitution,
outlawing discrimination against untouchables, and skilfully helped to
steer it through the assembly; the adoption of
the constitution on January 26, 1950, is today celebrated as Republic
Day, a national holiday. He resigned in 1951, disappointed at his lack of
influence in the government. In October 1956, in despair because of the
perpetuation of untouchability in Hindu doctrine, he renounced Hinduism
and became a Buddhist, together with about 200,000 fellow Dalits, at a ceremony
in Nagpur. Ambedkar’s book The
Buddha and His Dhamma appeared posthumously in 1957, and it was
republished as The
Buddha and His Dhamma: A Critical Edition in 2011, edited, introduced, and annotated by
Aakash Singh Rathore and Ajay Verma.
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