Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar

Early life and education

Ambedkar was born in Mhow into a Mahar family, a community classified as untouchable under the caste system, and experienced discrimination throughout his schooling in western India despite his father's position in the British Indian Army, which afforded the family some access to education. With the support of the Maharaja of Baroda and later a scholarship, he studied economics in the United States at Columbia University, earning a doctorate, and subsequently studied at the London School of Economics and trained as a barrister in London. He was among the most highly educated Indians of his generation, credentials he used throughout his career to press the case that caste discrimination was a structural, legally addressable problem rather than a matter of custom to be gradually reformed away.

Activism against untouchability

On returning to India, Ambedkar took up legal practice and public activism on behalf of Dalit communities, whom he increasingly referred to using the term Depressed Classes in the political vocabulary of the period. He founded the fortnightly newspaper Mooknayak (Leader of the Voiceless) in 1920 to give the movement a public voice, and in 1924 organized the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha to promote education and social welfare among excluded communities. He led the Mahad Satyagraha in 1927, a campaign asserting the right of untouchables to draw water from a public tank in Mahad, Maharashtra, and, at the conclusion of a second phase of that campaign in December 1927, he and his supporters publicly burned a copy of the Manusmriti, the ancient legal text codifying caste hierarchy, as a symbolic repudiation of its authority. He later led campaigns for temple entry, notably at Kalaram Temple in Nashik. He argued that caste was fundamentally a religious and social structure that required political representation and legal safeguards to dismantle, a position that put him increasingly at odds with Gandhi, who favoured reform within Hinduism and campaigns against untouchability that did not depend on separate political status for Dalits.

The Poona Pact and constitutional work

The disagreement came to a head over the question of separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, which the British government's 1932 Communal Award had granted, similar to existing separate electorates for Muslims and Sikhs. Gandhi opposed separate electorates for Dalits as a measure that would permanently divide Hindu society, and undertook a fast in protest. The resulting Poona Pact of 1932, negotiated between Ambedkar and Gandhi, replaced separate electorates with a system of reserved seats for the Depressed Classes within the general electorate, a compromise Ambedkar accepted under pressure but which he and later critics viewed as a curtailment of the political leverage separate electorates would have given the community; the episode remains a point of historiographical contention, with assessments ranging from a necessary unifying compromise to a setback imposed on Ambedkar by Gandhi's fast. During the Second World War, Ambedkar served as Labour Member on the Viceroy's Executive Council (1942-46), a position in which he was involved in early labour-welfare and social-security legislation. After independence, he was appointed chairman of the committee that drafted the Constitution of India, in which capacity he is credited with shaping provisions on fundamental rights, the abolition of untouchability, and affirmative action reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. He served as India's first Law Minister in Jawaharlal Nehru's cabinet but resigned in 1951 over disagreements including the stalling of the Hindu Code Bill, which he had championed to reform Hindu personal law on issues such as inheritance and marriage.

Political organizing and writings

Ambedkar founded the Independent Labour Party in 1936, which won a number of seats in the Bombay Legislative Assembly in the 1937 provincial elections, and later reorganized his political base as the All India Scheduled Castes Federation in 1942; the Federation performed poorly against Congress-backed candidates in the 1946 provincial elections, a result that constrained Ambedkar's independent political leverage even as his stature as a constitutional authority continued to grow. He was also a prolific writer on caste and constitutional questions; his best-known works include Annihilation of Caste (1936), an undelivered address rejecting the possibility of reforming caste from within Hindu religious tradition, and Pakistan or the Partition of India (1940), an analytical study of the Muslim League's demand for a separate state.

Later life and conversion to Buddhism

In his later years Ambedkar concluded that Dalits could not achieve full dignity within Hinduism and turned to Buddhism as an alternative. In October 1956, shortly before his death, he and a large number of followers formally converted to Buddhism in a mass ceremony at Nagpur, an event that launched a continuing Dalit Buddhist movement in India. He died weeks later, in December 1956, and was posthumously awarded India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1990. He is commemorated across the political spectrum in India, though his legacy is invoked in markedly different ways by different constituencies, from his constitutional and legal work to his social and religious critique of caste Hindu society.