Discovering Babasaheb

He towers above us, forever frozen in stone, a bespectacled man in a suit, the index finger of his right-hand pointing forward, his left arm holding a book close to his heart. Statues similar to this one are dotted all across India. Indeed, there are almost certainly more of them than that of any other figure, not excepting even Gandhiji.

Yet, if Dr B. R. Ambedkar has passed into legend for the Dalits among us, he remains, for too many others, a shadowy or much misunderstood figure. But the amazing life and trenchant teachings of this great Indian still hold valuable lessons for everyone.

Turning Point

The tall, stout young man with a receding hairline and scholarly mien, stood in Baroda railway station wondering what to do. He had just been appointed military secretary to the Maharaja of Baroda, and although orders had been issued for him to be met at the station, nobody had shown up.

The reason was obvious. During the four years, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar had studied in New York in London, on a Baroda government scholarship, it hadn’t mattered at all who he was. But now he had returned home, and in the India of 1917, it mattered a great deal. His academic accomplishments couldn’t undo the incontrovertible fact that he was an Untouchable.

Given his appearance, it wouldn’t have been difficult for the 26-year-old Ambedkar to pretend to be a Brahmin and check into a Hindu hotel. But his identity was bound to be discovered before too long, and the consequences could be dire.

Dr Ambedkar, chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, pictured here with the members of the Committee. Photo: Alamy

Could he stay with one of the Indian students from Baroda he’d known in New York? Ambedkar wondered. But how could he be sure that they wouldn’t be embarrassed at an Untouchable entering their home?

Learning from one of the station’s tongawalas that there was a Parsi inn in Baroda cantonment, Ambedkar decided to seek shelter there. After all, Zoroastrians didn’t have a caste system.

At the inn, an elderly Parsi caretaker took him to an upstairs room. But on learning shortly afterwards that Ambedkar was a Hindu, he asked him to leave since the inn was for Parsis only. Desperate, Ambedkar offered to register under a Parsi name. Fortunately, the caretaker, who hadn’t had any guests for a while, agreed and set the charge room and board at a rupee and a half a day.

Once he started going to the office, though, Ambedkar was granted no reprieves. He was never told what exactly he was supposed to do. Moreover, his subordinates were insolent. They ran him down openly and flung files on his table so that they wouldn’t have to come too near him. He was given no drinking water, and at the officer’s club, he had to sit in a corner and keep his distance from the other members.

Not a man to take things lying down, Ambedkar often gave back as good as he got. But whenever possible, he went to Baroda’s public library to read books on political and economic subjects. He also applied for a government bungalow. Then one morning, as he was getting ready to go to work, a dozen Parsis, all wielding sticks, rushed upto his room, screaming that he’d polluted the inn and insisting he leave immediately.

Ambedkar begged them to let him stay for a week longer since he had hoped to get his government bungalow by then, but they were obdurate. If they found him at the inn that evening, they said, God help him. So after spending much of the day in a public garden, Ambedkar left Bombay by the 9:00 p.m. train.

Author’s Note: Writing about the incident 18 years later, Ambedkar confessed that he could never recall it “without tears in my eyes”. And one scholar contends that it was a turning point in Ambedkar’s life, setting him on the path to fight casteism and injustice. At any rate, it is reminiscent of what had happened to another Indian rebel 24 years earlier, when Ghandhi was ejected from his first-class train compartment in Maritzburg, South Africa.

The Right to Water

As Brahman priests chanted mantras, 108 earthen pots were dipped into the tank and pulled out. Then the water in each pot was mixed with cow dung, curds, milk and cow’s urine, and the pots lowered into the tank again. Now, declared the priests, the water in Chowdar tank in the Maharashtrian town of Mahad was again fit to be drunk by caste Hindus.

That ceremony on 21 March 1927, was performed to purify water supposedly polluted by Ambedkar and more than a thousand other Untouchables when they’d drunk from the tank the previous day. Although the Mahad municipality had—in line with the government directive—passed a resolution three years earlier, allowing Untouchables access to the tank, no Untouchable had dared to go near it until Ambedkar and his followers tested the waters. And that had led to a riot in which caste Hindus had attacked Untouchables.

About 100 Untouchables, mostly men who had served in the army, had been eager to retaliate. One word from their leader would have been enough to send them on a rampage, but Ambedkar calmed them down.

However, after the Mahad municipality revoked its earlier resolution, Ambedkar announced that a satyagraha would be held in Mahad that December to reassert the right of untouchables to the Chowdar tank’s water. But before it could take place, Orthodox Mahad Hindus got a court injunction, restraining Ambedkar and other untouchables from going to the tank. Once again, showing his preference for not settling matters in the streets, Ambedkar persuaded the 3,000 enthusiastic Dalit satyagrahis not to break the law. They’d already made their views clear the day before when the Manusmriti—the law book of Brahmanic Hinduism—was placed on a pyre and burnt.

Author’s Note: The Mahad satyagraha was seen by many Dalits as the beginning of their political awakening. Of course, nobody then could possibly have dreamt that 20 years later, Ambedkar would oversee the writing of the Constitution of a free India and be hailed as the modern Manu. Ambedkar’s rise to the leadership of the Untouchable community, (then officially called Depressed Classes) was rapid. He was the only Dalit post-graduate at the Bombay presidency, and within a few years of the Baroda humiliation, he started newspapers, established the Dalit self-help and self-respect organizations, and began lobbying the British government to improve the lot of his community. But amidst his trials, there was heartbreak, too. In July 1926, his favourite son, Rajaratna died—the fourth of Ambedkar’s five children to die in infancy. The distraught father wrote to a friend, ‘Life to me is a garden full of weeds.”

Ambedkar with his second wife, Dr Savita Ambedkar. Photo:Alamy

Clash of Titans

Gandhiji got up at 2:30 a.m. on 20 September 1932, and wrote a few letters, including one to Rabindranath Tagore. After breakfasting on milk and fruit, he listened to a recital of the Gita. At 11:30, he drank lemon juice and honey with hot water. Then, as the Yerwada prison bell struck noon, the Mahatma, just a couple of weeks shy of 63, began the only fast he had ever directed at an Indian politician. His target was Ambedkar, and the fast was, in the Mahatma’s words, unto death. 

At stake was the issue of separate electorates a matter that had been bedevilled Indian politics ever since the British began allowing Indians to choose their representatives and government councils. Under a separate electorate system, each of India’s various communities—such as Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Anglo-Indians, Untouchables—would vote independently of each other. To Gandhiji, separate electorates were anathema because they promoted communalism and division. He’d accepted separate electorates for Muslims and Sikhs with reluctance, but to him, untouchables were not a separate community—they were Hindus.

Ambedkar, on the other hand, reasoned that Untouchables had little in common with caste Hindus—as he once memorably put it, “I am not a part of the whole, I am a part apart.” Given this, separate electorates were the best way for the Depressed Classes to get real political power: in joint electorates, they’d always be outvoted by caste Hindus.

The difference in perspective stemmed from each man’s assessment of the nature of Untouchability. Gandhiji felt it was a corruption of Hinduism and that it could be removed by appealing to the conscience of caste Hindus; Ambedkar was convinced that Untouchability was an integral part of the Hindu caste system and would persist unless the caste system itself was destroyed.

The two men had not hit it off from the time they first met in August 1931. Ambedkar felt that the Mahatma had been rude and condescending, and Gandhiji—incredibly—had then assumed Ambedkar was an intemperate Brahmin!The two men clashed again that December at a British-sponsored conference in London to discuss the political future of India, claiming that he—not Ambedkar—represented the Untouchables, Gandhiji criticized the demand for separate electorates. “I cannot tolerate,” he said, “what is in store for Hinduism if there are these two divisions ... I will resist it with my life.”

The clash with Gandhiji earned Ambedkar, the ire of Congressmen and much of the Indian press. He was called an enemy of Hindus, a traitor, a stooge of the British. Such vilification did not faze Ambedkar; his priorities were clear. He once described his position thus: “As between the country and myself, the country will have precedence, as between the country and the Depressed Classes, the Depressed Classes will have precedence ...”

The British who had arrested Gandhiji soon after he returned from London, granted the Depressed Classes a separate electorate in August 1932. Soon after, the Mahatma announced his fast, and Ambedkar became the most hated man in India. 

The possibility that Gandhiji might starve himself to death horrified not just Indians, but people around the world. Millions prayed for his safety and fasted in sympathy. And in a show of Hindu solidarity, temples, wells, and public areas hitherto closed to the Depressed Classes were thrown open to them.

This commemorative Ambedkar stamp issued in 1991, had a print run of 1,00,000. Photo: Wikimedia/india post

Initially, Ambedkar described the fast as a political stunt. “I trust the Mahatma will not drive me to the necessity of making a choice between his life and the rights of my people,” he said. “For I can never consent to deliver my people bound hand and foot to the caste of Hindus for generations to come.” But he negotiated with other Hindu leaders for a compromise and also met Gandhiji on a couple of occasions as he lay on his iron cot under a mango tree in the prison yard. 

Once, Ambedkar began by saying, “Mahatmaji, you have been very unfair to us.” Gandhiji replied that it was always his lot to appear unfair, and reiterated his opposition to separate electorates. “You are an Untouchable by birth,” he told Ambedkar. “I am an Untouchable by adoption. We must be one and indivisible.”

As the negotiations dragged on, Gandhiji began to sink and Ambedkar came under tremendous pressure to give in. Then on the fifth day of the fast with Ghandiji near death, M. C. Raja, an Untouchable leader from Madras, told Ambedkar: “For thousands of years, we have been downtrodden, insulted and despised. The Mahatma is taking his life for our sake, and if he dies, there will be such a strong feeling against us that the … Hindu community … will kick us downstairs further still.”

Soon after, Ambedkar agreed to a settlement, and Gandhiji broke his fast by accepting a glass of orange juice from his wife, Kasturba. 

Author’s Note: Actually, the complicated settlement, known as the Poona Pact, did little more than confirm Ambedkar’s leadership of the Depressed Classes, and highlight Gandhiji’s commitment to combat Untouchability. Both, caste Hindus and the Untouchables felt too many concessions had been made, and Ambedkar, who later described the pact as “a mean deal”, reverted to his demand for separate electorates. In November 1933, Gandhiji started a nine-month, 20,000-km tour of the country to combat Untouchability. It was not a great success. One 1939 survey revealed that out of 15,751 temples in the Bombay presidency, which received government grants, only 501 had been open to Untouchables.

Born Again

14 October 1956 was Dussehra, but thoughts of the festival were not uppermost in the minds of the three to five lakh people, most of them dressed in white, who filled the 5.6 hectare maidan on the outskirts of Nagpur that morning. They broke into cheers as, shortly after nine, Ambedkar appeared, wearing a white silk dhoti and a white coat, his wife, Savita, and his secretary on either side of him.

The Ambedkars were escorted to a dais on which sat five saffron-robed Buddhist monks, one of them, the 83-year-old Mahasthaveer Chandramani, the oldest Bhikku in India. After the vast gathering observed a minute’s silence in the memory of Ambedkar’s father, whose death anniversary fell on that day, the five monks chanted the oaths of conversion in Pali. Ambedkar and his wife repeated the mantras in Marathi, then bowed thrice before a statute of the Buddha and offered white lotus flowers.

Thus, Ambedkar fulfilled a pledge he’d made 21 years earlier when he’d said: “Unfortunately for me, I was born a Hindu Untouchable ... I solemnly assure you, I will not die as a Hindu.”

Now that he was a Buddhist, Ambedkar addressed the throng, asking all those who also wanted to convert to stand up. Everyone did, and he administered the oaths to the entire gathering. Never before had so many people changed their religion simultaneously.

Author’s Note: Ambedkar was very ill and politically very isolated at the time of his conversion. Not only were his great days as chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution and law minister of India long past, he was not even a member of Parliament: two years earlier, he had been defeated in a bye-election to the Lok Sabha. But his hold on the Dalit imagination remained as secure as ever. And when he died less than two months later, Bombay witnessed an unprecedented outpouring of grief. And by the time of the 1961 census, more than 3.25 million Indians were Buddhist, an 18-fold increase over the 1951 figure.