Ambedkar: A Life by Shashi Tharoor

The story of the rise of a man of ideas, unmatched intellectual worth, and extraordinary scholarship

“To be born an untouchable in nineteenth-century India was to be consigned to the depths of human degradation.”

The latest book of Shashi Tharoor is a small, concise and accessible biography of Dr B R Ambedkar. Tharoor wrote this biography in order to make Ambedkar and his ideas accessible to the young Indians who would now find it impossible to dive into the long-running biographies of the Constitutionalist or read Dr Ambedkar in his own words – the total volume of his writings runs into an approximate length of 17,500 pages, an impossible number of pages to read and fully appreciate for anyone other than a devoted scholar of Dr Ambedkar. I think part of the reason behind penning down this book was also to make the younger generations of urban Indians sensitive about what is popularly known as the “Caste Issue” – many youngsters still do not fully appreciate or understand the extent of discrimination and humiliations the Dalit and other downtrodden groups have faced and continue to face. 

Cover of the Book

First, a comment on the writer

Tharoor is someone who has grown from being what can be called a “caste-denialist” to a sensitive, informed and outspoken ally of the Dalits and backward castes. In the past, Tharoor has repeatedly highlighted in his interviews, columns and books how he grew up largely blind to the reality of caste in India since his urban, educated parents did not introduce him to such things – he only found out what his own caste was when a classmate, son of a bollywood star, asked him about it and he in turn came back home and asked his own parents. Therefore, Tharoor, who grew up in an urban, middle-class home with educated, anglophone parents, and moved to the US to study and later work as an international civil servant was completely oblivious to caste. He did not pay enough attention to it, disregarding it as unimportant and irrelevant, until recently when an 18 year old Dalit blogger gave him a schooling on the issue: the very fact that he could leave his caste behind, be oblivious to what his caste identity, was itself a privilege of belonging to an upper-caste. In his own words, “I have… been schooled to accept that even caste-blindness is a reflection of privilege, and that no Dalit can ever escape being conscious of her caste, as I was brought up to be unaware initially of my own.” Thus, that is a remarkable shift in the writer’s own approach and understanding. 

The Story of an Infant Scrambling in the Dust of the Town of Mhow 

Dr B R Ambedkar, the chief architect of Indian Constitution, was born as Bhimrao Sakpal, the 14th child of Ramji Sakpal, an army Subedar, and Bhimabai Sakpal. His family hailed from the Marathi town of Ambadawe (which is where the name Ambedkar comes from). The family belonged to the Mahar caste – needless to say, an untouchable caste. His ancestors had served in the army and his father too continued to serve in the British army, which had a separate Mahar regiment, stories of whose valour and bravery would require a separate essay. As a matter of policy, all children of British army officers had to attend school, the medium of whose education was English: this is how young Bhimrao came to attend primary school. Owing to his caste-identity, however, he had to face discrimination in school: he was not allowed to sit with his upper caste classmates; he was required to carry a gunny sack of his own to sit on in a corner of the classroom; he was not allowed to drink water from the school’s pot, and a separate pot was kept for him and his brother, but they couldn’t take water themselves from this separate pot either, they had to ask the peon to turn on the tap for them and only then would they be allowed to drink. In case the peon was on leave or out for some work, they had to tolerate their thirst and go about their lives. He later recounted the experience in bitter words: “No peon, no water.” In addition, no washerman would wash their clothes and no barber would cut their hair. The degradation, discrimination and humiliations faced by the man are revolting – what’s even more revolting is that these things continue even today in some corners of the country. Of course there was occasional kindness from  some Brahmin teachers at school – which Tharoor does not fail to highlight – most importantly of Krishna Keshav Ambedkar, who shared his meal with Bhimrao everyday, and changed Bhimrao’s name from Sakpal to Ambedkar in the school register, which led him to be known by the name that he is known by today. 

Due to financial constraints, which were to be a constant in Ambedkar’s life, his brothers could not finish their education. Ambedkar, brightest of all the children of the Sakpals, was the only one allowed to continue his studies. “Ramji’s meagre pension could only support the education of one son, so the brightest, Bhim, was enrolled in the prestigious Elphinstone College’s High School, the only member of his community at that institution, his father borrowing money to pay for his school books. Even there he could not escape reminders of his untouchability.” Ambedkar wanted to study Sanskrit but was denied the permission to do so since he was an Untouchable, and according to the scriptures, Sanskrit was a language only for the upper castes (or varnas, if you like), and Ambedkar had to finally settle for studying Persian instead. It is pertinent to mention that when he matriculated in 1907, he had scored the highest marks in the school in Persian; had he been allowed to pursue Sanskrit instead, I have no doubts he would have scored the highest there too, and the sight would have been one worth watching. Matriculation, by the way, was by no means a small feat: Bhimrao Ambedkar was the only person from his community to achieve this distinction. But there was more to come. Meanwhile, before matriculation in 1907, his marriage was customarily arranged with a nine-year-old Mahar girl: this was Ramabai, who was to be his constant support through the majority of his life.  

However, by this point it was clear that his family could no longer bear the expenses of his education, and it was then that a well-wisher named K A Keluskar, a social reformer and scholar, intervened and helped Bhimrao secure the scholarship offered by the Maharaja of Vadodara that allowed him to continue his college studies. In 1912, he graduated with a degree in BA – at a time when many of his upper caste colleagues used to wear “BA (Failed” as a badge of distinction, Dr Ambedkar had finished the degree successfully. 

Education in USA and elsewhere 

In 1913, he won another scholarship from the Maharaja to pursue an MA from Columbia University in the United States. There he is said to have devoted himself to the studies eighteen hours a day, surviving on only one meal a day. At the same time, he found a life-long friend and benefactor in a young Parsee boy from Bombay named Naval Bhathena, who would financially help Bhim multiple times. Dr Ambedkar was a brilliant economist and authored a paper on “Commerce in Ancient India”, winning an MA in 1915. He later authored a thesis on “National Dividend of India”. In May 1916, he presented a paper called “Castes in India, their Genesis, Mechanisms and Development” in an anthropological conference, which remains to this day a groundbreaking work on Caste in India from an anthropological and sociological perspective, and the work that opened the eyes of the Western scholars to the issue of Untouchability and Casteism in India, substantially similar to the issue of Racism in their own homelands. This is where Dr Ambedkar described Hinduism metaphorically as a “multi-storied building in which each floor is occupied by a caste, but there is no staircase which links the different floors. One lives and dies on the floor on which one is born.” 

Later, he moved to London on another scholarship from the Maharaja and enrolled himself at the London School of Economics for postdoctoral studies and enrolled himself also at Gray’s Inn to qualify for the bar. Next year he had to return to India since the scholarship ended, and, according to the Bond he had signed, he had to serve the kingdom of Baroda for 10 years. He obtained permission from the University to retain his admission on a deferred basis and to be allowed to resume his studies later; such a permission was rarely granted, and to Ambedkar also it was granted for a period of 4 years and not 10. On his way back home, World War I was raging, and the ship carrying his collection of books was drowned by a German torpedo – the loss of these books, he would mourn for a long time. Tharoor puts it better: “Ambedkar, who always found in books the enveloping acceptance and the sense of equality of access that had been denied to him in his own life, mourned their loss bitterly.” He would later finish his master’s degree in 1921 by submitting a Thesis on “The Problem of Rupee: Its origin and its solution”, another groundbreaking work, this time in the field of economics. He would obtain his D.Sc. from LSE in 1923 and would be called to Bar in England in the same year – the width and breadth of the man’s knowledge and qualifications was unmatched. 

Time in Baroda: Confronting Reality and Discrimination

Back in Baroda to serve the State of Baroda according to his bond, Ambedkar found himself shattered by his confrontation with the reality of his caste once again and the resultant discrimination and humiliation. “My five years of staying in Europe and America had completely wiped out of my mind any consciousness that I was an untouchable, and that an untouchable wherever he went in India was a problem to himself and to others,” he wrote later. Military Secretary to Gaikwad, the ruler of Baroda, Ambedkar continued to face discrimination from his juniors and colleagues – he could not find a home to stay in; when he applied for a government bungalow, no clerk would touch his file, lest they may be rendered ‘impure’. Finally, he lied about his identity and found lodging in a Parsi inn, but when his true caste-identity was disclosed, a bunch of Parsis descended upon him, ousted him from the inn, and he had to spend the night under a tree, where he reportedly wept with all his high degrees and certificates scrambled around him – all of it rendered essentially meaningless solely due to his caste identity. Ambedkar then left the service of the state, arguing that such conditions of living made it impossible for him to fulfil his obligations; the generous and empathetic Maharaja let him go. 

Lawyer, social worker, scholar, revolutionary

Ambedkar took up different jobs to feed his family after resigning from the service of Baroda State. Finally, he enrolled in the Bombay Bar as a lawyer, but could not make a very good living due to the reality of his caste. While practising law, he began his efforts at educating his people and raising awareness about the issue of caste and untouchability – essentially his crusade against the social structure that made it impossible for his people to climb the socioeconomic ladder. He started a weekly called Mooknayak with the help of Maharaja Shahu of Kolhapur, an outstanding social reformer himself. It was with the help of Maharaja Shahu this time that he was able to return to London to finish his studies. 

When he was back in India, he pushed for the rights of his people. He was an outspoken and informed critic of the varnasystem – the Hindu system of social organisation – and the Hindu society in general. In 1924, Ambedkar established his first organisation in the form of Bahishkrit Hitkarini Sabha (Assembly on the Rights of the Excluded) to fight for the rights of the depressed classes and to speak on their behalf. The founding motto of the Sabha was: “Educate, Organise, Agitate.” He held many conferences and assemblies in an effort to educate his people and ignite a fire among them that would lead to their emancipation: Ambedkar believed wholeheartedly that Dalit emancipation was possible only by Dalits themselves and by nobody else, one of the grounds of his disagreements with Gandhi, who believed otherwise. 

The most extraordinary act of Ambedkar was the Mahad Satyagraha in 1927 where he led a group of Dalits to a water tank – which was open to all, on paper, but in reality closed to Dalits – and all of them collectively drank water from it, to the obvious chagrin of the upper caste villagers who thought Dr Ambedkar and his followers had polluted the water tank. They later undertook some sort of purifying ritual to rid the water of the impurity instilled by Dr Ambedkar and his followers by pouring milk, ghee, and even cow urine in the water tank in an effort to purify it (it is laughable, to say the least, and pitifully stupid, at most). Notably, many upper caste leaders had supported this Satyagraha undertaken by Ambedkar. Later, Ambedkar and his followers undertook another radical act – the Burning of Manusmriti, an ancient Code of Law that legitimised the caste system.  In the words of Yashica Dutt: “The act of Dalits drinking water from the same source as upper castes was neither simple nor ordinary. It was downright revolutionary since it directly attacked notions of purity and pollution, one of the most fundamental ideas of the caste system. Certain upper-caste Hindus at the time didn’t even tolerate a Dalit’s shadow on their person, much less make physical contact with them… With this seemingly small gesture, Ambedkar defied a sacredly held caste belief and asserted the absolute equality of Dalits.” 

He continued to argue for the equal rights for his people and serve in different capacities, once as a Member of Legislature, at other time as Member of the Viceroy’s Council, or representing Dalit interests before the British in the Round Table Conferences, etc. It is beyond the scope of this essay to cover all those instances where he argued – largely successfully – for his people. He spoke and lived by the dictats invoked first in the French Revolution: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. 

Ambedkar and Gandhi: the Doctor and the Saint

Ambedkar’s disagreements with Gandhi are well known and well-documented – the Doctor and the Saint were mutually irreconcilable. The most extraordinary piece of work on their rivalry and disagreements is Arundhati Roy’s essay “The Doctor and the Saint” from which I borrowed this subtitle. That essay captures the subtleties and intricacies of the debates and disagreements between the two men in an unprecedented manner. My analysis is simpler: they disagreed on mainly three grounds. 

First, whether Gandhi could claim to be a legitimate representative of the Dalits (whom he called Harijans, by the way)? Ambedkar said, no, because Gandhi had not lived as a Dalit and he could not understand the pains and humiliations experienced by a Dalit – therefore, no caste Hindu could claim to represent or emancipate Dalits, they had to represent and emancipate themselves. Therefore, Ambedkar was a much more legitimate representative of Dalit interests. This debate has settled in favour of the Doctor rather than the Saint, for obvious reasons. To let Gandhi represent Dalit interests would be equivalent to let a White Man represent the Blacks – no matter how much sympathetic he may be (in Gandhi’s case how sympathetic he really was is also a question), a White Man cannot fully understand and appreciate the problems of the Blacks. 

Secondly, the debate about Separate Electorates for Dalits, which settled in favour of Gandhi after the two leaders signed the Poona Pact, which is still lamented by many even today as an emotional blackmail by Gandhi to Ambedkar. After Ambedkar secured Separate Electorates for his people, Gandhi undertook a fast unto death to force Ambedkar to give up the Separate Electorates. Ambedkar cared little if Gandhi lived or died, but he knew that if something were to happen to Gandhi, Dalits across India would be put in an unprecedented jeopardy and the crisis that would erupt would be uncontrollable: thus Ambedkar reluctantly agreed to the demands of the Mahatma – whose technique of non-violence, at least this time, relied upon a possibility and threat of dangerous and unprecedented violence. This act is one of the reasons why this writer is particularly wary of Gandhi and his ways and despite admiring him for his political acumen, refuses to grant him the same treatment of worship that many in the country still do. 

The third issue of debate was economic. Gandhi promoted a simple lifestyle called ‘Village Life’ or ‘Village Living’. Ambedkar, as an economist, was against this and promoted economic growth and development. He was also afraid that Gandhi’s idea of village life would not do well to promote the interests of his community – villages were after all cesspools of casteism and discrimination, in his worldview, and it’s not entirely untrue. This debate too has settled in favour of the Doctor, as India has moved towards urban development and economic growth rather than Village Life and Simple Living. 

Ambedkar: a Feminist

Ambedkar was a feminist long before it was fashionable for men to be feminist, at least in India. He talked about equal rights for women and called for their emancipation. He was a champion of gender equality and equal treatment of men and women. His speeches are a testimony that he was a feminist unlike any other at the time in India. His feminism too would require a separate essay entirely and is beyond the scope and space of this rather general view of his life and ideas. 

Father of the Constitution

After India achieved independence, Dr Ambedkar was indispensable in the Indian Constituent Assembly. He was made the Chair of the Drafting Committee, the most important committee of all, and was wholly responsible for spearheading the drafting process of the Constitution of India – the most important document of the country. That an infant, the fourteenth child of a Subedar, scrambling in the dust of the military cantonment of Mhow, belonging to an untouchable community, came to achieve such a feat is marvellous. The story of the man is awe-inspiring. As a politician in post-independence India he was not very successful: his parties did not do well in the election, always overshadowed by the Indian National Congress. Although Nehru invited him to join the cabinet as Law Minister, he later resigned over his differences with his own party and prime minister Nehru about the Hindu Code Bill. 

Buddhism and Death 

In 1956, he converted to Buddhism along with his followers; this did not come as a surprise to anyone since Ambedkar had openly talked about his will to leave Hinduism. After studying different religions, Ambedkar settled on Buddhism since this is the religion he found most suitable for his people. Why he chose Buddhism is a big discussion in itself. 

Two months after his conversion to Buddhism, Dr B R Ambedkar passed away in his sleep at his home in Delhi. The way of his death is befitting a man of his intellectual stature and a scholar unlike any other the world has ever seen: he was found dead slumped on his desk, where he had dozed off writing something. He was only 65 when he died, a rather short life. The reason for his death was his ill-health – he had been a diabetic since 1948.

Some final thoughts 

This post is just an attempt to capture, as briefly as possible, the life of Dr Ambedkar. In an attempt to keep it as brief as possible, there are many things that I have not touched upon – his feminist ideas, his bitter words directed at Gandhi, his personal life and his relationship with his wife and children, the circumstances of his second marriage, his love for books and his famous library of 50,000 books, etc. All these and many other aspects of his life are talked about in Tharoor’s book and for anyone interested, I would recommend that they read the book. However, the book too is rather short and does not capture all of Ambedkar and his ideas – for anyone even more interested, I would recommend you read him in his own words, starting with his most famous work The Annihilation of Caste.. This is where I was first introduced to Ambedkar and his writings. Arundhati Roy’s essay, The Doctor and the Saint, is also an extraordinary piece of work that was among my introductory texts about Dr Ambedkar. Finally, there are many quotes I have omitted mentioning, which is very unlikely for me to do, but it was done to avoid capturing in more words what could have been captured in fewer words.