B. R. Ambedkar

B. R. Ambedkar: The Untouchable Who Wrote India's Rules

In 1918 a young economist with a Columbia master's degree took up a post in the Accountant-General's office in Baroda. He lasted eleven days. No one would rent him lodgings, because he was born a Mahar and therefore untouchable. Thirty years later the same man chaired the committee that drafted the constitution of the Republic of India, and wrote into it the abolition of untouchability.

Mhow, and the Mahar Inheritance

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 in the army cantonment at Mhow, in what is now Madhya Pradesh, into a Dalit family. Caste followed him into every classroom he entered. He was permitted to attend school and forbidden to belong to it — a distinction he spent his life dismantling.

He got out through examinations and patronage. With financial support from the Maharaja Gaekwad of Baroda he passed through Elphinstone High School and took a bachelor's degree in economics and political science at Elphinstone College in Bombay. The Maharaja then funded the thing that changed everything: a three-year scholarship to study in the United States.

Columbia, Gray's Inn, and the LSE

He arrived at Columbia University in 1913 and took a master's degree in economics. In 1916 he crossed to London, registered for a master's at the London School of Economics — the fee was ten pounds ten shillings — and enrolled simultaneously for the bar at Gray's Inn. His teachers were the geographer Halford Mackinder, G. Lowes Dickinson on political ideas, and L. T. Hobhouse on social evolution and social theory.

Then the money and the leave ran out. Recalled to India in 1917 as Military Secretary in Baroda, he secured four years' leave of absence from the University of London, taught political economy at Sydenham College in Mumbai, and returned in 1920 to finish. His doctoral thesis, *The Problem of the Rupee*, supervised by the economist Edwin Cannan, was submitted in March 1923, rejected, resubmitted in August and accepted in November. Cannan wrote the foreword, disagreed with parts of it, and praised its "stimulating freshness"; Ambedkar thanked him for a "severe examination of my theoretical discussions" that had "saved me from many an error." Professor Herbert Foxwell had already written of him in November 1920 that "there are no more worlds here for him to conquer." He was called to the Bar and took his London doctorate in 1923, and a second doctorate from Columbia in 1927.

Educate, Agitate, Organise

He came home to a country that did not care what degrees he held, and built instruments to make it care. He gave evidence to the Southborough Committee ahead of the Government of India Act 1919. In 1924 he founded the Bahishkrit Hitakarani Sabha under a motto that became a movement's slogan: *Educate, Agitate, Organise*. He sat on the Bombay Legislative Council from 1926 to 1934, founded the Independent Labour Party of India in 1936 and the All-India Scheduled Castes Federation in 1942.

The decisive act was symbolic and physical. At Mahad in 1927 he led untouchables to drink from a public water tank they were forbidden to touch, and there he burned a copy of the *Manusmriti*, the Hindu law book that codified the hierarchy he was attacking. The gesture told his followers that the sacred texts themselves were the enemy — a position he made explicit in *Annihilation of Caste*.

Gandhi, and the Argument About Representation

At the Round Table Conferences in London in the early 1930s, Ambedkar argued hard for separate electorates for the backward classes: seats that only untouchables would vote for, on the reasoning that a minority embedded inside a hostile majority cannot be represented by that majority's goodwill. Gandhi refused. The 1932 negotiations between them produced the Poona Pact, which settled scheduled-caste electoral representation on terms other than the ones Ambedkar had demanded.

He never let the disagreement go, and he published it: *What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables* is not the work of a man interested in reconciliation. He also wrote *Pakistan or the Partition of India*.

The Drafting Committee

Independence made him indispensable. In the Constituent Assembly he chaired the Drafting Committee and sat on the Advisory Committee on Fundamental Rights, Minorities and Tribal and Excluded Areas and on its sub-committees. He intervened in very nearly every debate. His memorandum *States and Minorities*, described as a mini-constitution in itself, pressed for hard constitutional protection of the scheduled castes rather than assurances of goodwill.

Two of his speeches are still quoted in Indian courts and classrooms. On 4 November 1948 he defended the constitution's detailed administrative provisions by invoking "constitutional morality" — the argument that written rules only work where a public habit of respecting them exists, and that India could not assume it. On 25 November 1949, the eve of adoption, he warned that political democracy would collapse unless India also became a "social democracy" recognising liberty, equality and fraternity as a single indivisible commitment. He held that the Directive Principles bound governments in conscience even though no court would enforce them, described the Union and the States as co-equals in their own spheres, and defended the parliamentary system for prioritising responsibility and accountability over stability.

Law Minister, and the Turn to Buddhism

He became independent India's first Law Minister in 1947. His great legislative project was the Hindu Code Bill, which would have reformed marriage, divorce, succession and adoption. It was fought to a standstill, and in 1951 he resigned in frustration. He stood in the 1952 general election for the Scheduled Castes Federation in Bombay North Central and came fourth; he entered the Rajya Sabha instead.

In 1956, after years of study, he converted to Buddhism, taking roughly 365,000 followers with him in a single ceremony. His reinterpretation of the religion — known as Navayana, or neo-Buddhism, or simply the Dalit Buddhist movement — was a deliberate exit from a religion he had concluded could not be reformed from inside.

Why Bhimrao Is Called a Genius

The quality is not oratory or moral courage, though he had both. It is the capacity to work simultaneously at the level of theory and of machinery — to diagnose caste as a system rather than a set of prejudices, and then to build the legal and institutional apparatus to attack it. He wrote monetary economics good enough for Edwin Cannan to publish, and constitutional prose precise enough to survive seventy-five years of litigation, and he did both while running a mass movement.

His concept of constitutional morality is the sharpest single example: the recognition that a constitution is only ever as strong as the political habits surrounding it, formulated before India had tested the proposition. He is routinely called the father of the Indian Constitution, and Foxwell's line at the LSE — that there were no more worlds there for him to conquer — was written when he was twenty-nine.

The honest counter-case is that "architect of the Constitution" flattens a collective effort: the Assembly ran to hundreds of members, and the Drafting Committee was a committee. His electoral record was poor — he finished fourth in 1952. His Hindu Code Bill failed and cost him the Law Ministry. He never persuaded Congress of the separate-electorate case, and the Poona Pact was, on his own terms, a defeat. He was a better analyst and drafter than he was a politician.

Legacy

He died in Delhi on 6 December 1956, weeks after his conversion. The Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour, came posthumously in 1991. His birthday, 14 April, is a public holiday — Ambedkar Jayanti — and the Indian government has published his complete works in seventeen volumes. The clearest measure of him is that the document he chaired the drafting of outlawed the practice that once cost him eleven days' employment in Baroda, and that Indians still argue about caste in the vocabulary he supplied.

Achievements

• Notable work: Annihilation of Caste
• Notable work: Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development
• Notable work: Communal Deadlock and a way to Solve it
• Notable work: Federation Versus Freedom
• Educated at Columbia University, Elphinstone College and London School of Economics and Political Science
• Fields of research: anthropology, constitution, economics and human rights