B. R. Ambedkar

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  B. R. Ambedkar was born on the 14th of April 1891 in the town and military cantonment of Mhow, as the 14th and last child of an army officer. He was born into the Mahar caste, classified as untouchable, and as a child he was forbidden from sitting inside the classroom. When he needed water, someone from a higher caste had to pour it from a height, because he was not allowed to touch the vessel. He later described those school years in four stark words: "No peon, No Water." From that beginning, he went on to earn doctorates from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, chair the committee that drafted India's Constitution, and lead half a million people in a single day's conversion to Buddhism. How a boy barred from touching a water pot became the principal architect of a nation's founding document is the story this documentary tells.

• 2. Schoolrooms and Scholarships

  ›

  At Elphinstone High School in Mumbai, Ambedkar became the only untouchable enrolled there in 1897. When he passed his English fourth standard examinations, his community held a public ceremony to celebrate, calling it a great achievement. Ambedkar himself noted, with some irony, that this was "hardly an occasion compared to the state of education in other communities." At that ceremony, a family friend and author named Dada Keluskar presented him with a biography of the Buddha, a gift that would shape the final chapter of his life decades later.

  In 1913, at the age of 22, he was awarded a Baroda State Scholarship of 11 pounds and 50 shillings per month for three years, under a scheme established by Sayajirao Gaekwad III to fund postgraduate education at Columbia University in New York City. At Columbia, he came under the influence of the philosopher John Dewey and his philosophy of pragmatism. He passed his M.A. exam in June 1915, majoring in economics alongside sociology, history, philosophy, and anthropology. He also presented a paper titled Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development before a seminar led by anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser in May 1916.

  His path back to London was interrupted when his book collection, dispatched on a separate ship, was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. He eventually returned, completed a master's degree in 1921, and in 1923 received a D.Sc. in Economics from the University of London. That same year, Gray's Inn called him to the Bar. He was among a handful of Indian students to earn doctorates at either Columbia or the London School of Economics in the 1920s.

• 3. Fighting Untouchability

  ›

  In 1918, Ambedkar became professor of political economy at the Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai. His students responded well, but other professors objected to his sharing a drinking-water jug with them, an echo of the indignities he had faced as a child.

  He used every legal and political channel available. In 1920, with support from Shahu IV of Kolhapur, he began publishing the weekly Mooknayak, meaning Leader of the Silent. In 1926 he successfully defended three non-Brahmin leaders who had accused the Brahmin community of ruining India and been sued for libel. Biographer Dhananjay Keer described the outcome as a victory that was "resounding, both socially and individually." He established the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha to promote education and socio-economic improvement for depressed classes, and started several periodicals including Mook Nayak, Bahishkrit Bharat, and Equality Janta.

  By 1927 he had decided direct action was necessary. He led satyagraha marches to open public drinking water to untouchables and launched a struggle for the right to enter Hindu temples. He led thousands to the main water tank in Mahad. In a conference that same year, he publicly condemned the Manusmriti for ideologically justifying caste discrimination. On the 25th of December 1927, he led thousands of followers to burn copies of the ancient text. That date is now observed annually as Manusmriti Dahan Din by Ambedkarites and Dalits.

  In 1930, after three months of preparation, he launched the Kalaram Temple movement in Nashik. Around 15,000 volunteers assembled, marching in disciplined columns headed by a military band and a batch of scouts. When the procession reached the temple gates, the Brahmin authorities closed them.

• 4. The Poona Pact

  ›

  In 1932, the British colonial government announced a Communal Award that would create a separate electorate for depressed classes. Mahatma Gandhi fiercely opposed the measure, arguing it would divide the Hindu community. He began a fast while imprisoned at Yerwada Central Jail in Poona. Politicians including Madan Mohan Malaviya and Palwankar Baloo organized joint meetings at the prison to bring Ambedkar and Gandhi's supporters together.

  On the 25th of September 1932, Ambedkar and Malaviya signed the agreement that became known as the Poona Pact. It gave the depressed classes reserved seats within a unified general electorate. Under the Communal Award, those classes had been allocated 71 seats in provincial legislatures; the Poona Pact replaced that figure with 148 seats. The text used the term "Depressed Classes" to refer to untouchables among Hindus, a group later designated as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes under the India Act 1935 and the Constitution of 1950.

  The compromise gave more seats in total, but surrendered the principle of a separate electorate that Ambedkar had argued for before the Southborough Committee in 1919. Primary and secondary elections were structured so that untouchables could in practice choose their own candidates, even within the unified system.

• 5. Drafting India's Constitution

  ›

  Upon India's independence on the 15th of August 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited Ambedkar to serve as Law Minister. Two weeks later, he was appointed Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution for the future Republic of India. In his concluding speech to the Constituent Assembly on the 25th of November 1949, Ambedkar was careful to share credit: "The credit that is given to me does not really belong to me. It belongs partly to Sir B. N. Rau the Constitutional Advisor to the Constituent Assembly who prepared a rough draft of the Constitution for the consideration of the Drafting Committee."

  The Constitution that was adopted on the 26th of November 1949 abolished untouchability, guaranteed freedom of religion, outlawed all forms of discrimination, and introduced a system of reservations in civil services, schools, and colleges for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, and other backward classes. Ambedkar had argued for extensive economic and social rights for women and won the Assembly's support on that point.

  Yet Ambedkar's own feelings about the document were complicated. In 1953, during a parliament session, he said: "People always keep on saying to me, 'Oh you are the maker of the constitution'. My answer is I was a hack. What I was asked to do, I did much against my will." He added that he would be the first person to burn it if given the chance. He had also warned the Constituent Assembly that the country might lose both its Constitution and its democratic freedoms, pointing to widespread "bhakti" or hero worship, a weak democratic tradition, and the gap between the Constitution's republican promises and persistent socio-economic inequality.

  Scholars Steven Calabresi and Martha C. Nussbaum have called it "Ambedkar's constitution," partly because the Supreme Court of India evolved away from the legal positivism Nehru favored toward the purposive interpretive approach Ambedkar had supported during the drafting process.

• 6. Economic Thought

  ›

  Ambedkar was the first Indian to pursue a doctorate in economics abroad. His 1923 D.Sc. thesis, The Problem of the Rupee: Its Origin and Solution, examined the causes of the rupee's fall in value. He argued for a gold standard in modified form and opposed the gold-exchange standard favored by Keynes in his treatise Indian Currency and Finance, published in 1909, which Ambedkar judged less stable. He favored stopping the coinage of the rupee and minting a gold coin to fix currency rates.

  His thinking on agriculture was that too much land sat idle or underused. He believed a large share of the population tied to agriculture was a structural problem, and he advocated industrialization to shift surplus labor into non-agricultural sectors. He also argued that the caste system, through its division of laborers and hierarchical nature, blocked movement of both labor and capital, because workers from higher castes would not perform lower-caste occupations, and investors tended to funnel capital into their own caste's trades.

  A number of his ideas reflected engagement with the Austrian school of economics. His theory of free banking drew on the work of Carl Menger, alongside Gopal Krishna Gokhale's treatise on finance and money. His view on the quality of money was influenced by Menger's concept of the saleability of money, set out in Menger's article "On the Origin of Money." Those recommendations for free banking were ignored by both the Royal Commission and the Indian government.

  He was a professional economist until 1921, when political leadership consumed him. He wrote three books on economics: Administration and Finance of the East India Company, The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India, and The Problem of the Rupee: Its Origin and Its Solution. He did not return to academic economics, but his views on birth control, women's equal rights, and investment in public hygiene and community health as foundations of development were adopted as national policy by the Indian government.

• 7. Conversion to Buddhism

  ›

  Around 1950, Ambedkar began attending meetings of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, traveling to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. He twice visited Burma in 1954; the second time to attend the third conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Rangoon. He had earlier considered Sikhism, which appealed to him because of its opposition to oppression, but after meeting with Sikh leaders he concluded he might receive only "second-rate" Sikh status.

  In 1955, he founded the Bharatiya Bauddha Mahasabha, or Buddhist Society of India. In 1956, he completed what would be his final work, The Buddha and His Dhamma, and asked Nehru to support its publication through government funding. Nehru refused. The book was published posthumously.

  After meetings with the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Hammalawa Saddhatissa, Ambedkar organized a formal public conversion ceremony in Nagpur on the 14th of October 1956. He accepted the Three Refuges and Five Precepts in the traditional manner, converting alongside his wife. He then converted approximately 500,000 supporters gathered around him, prescribing 22 Vows for these converts, following the Three Jewels and Five Precepts. He then traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal to attend the Fourth World Buddhist Conference.

  Three days after completing the manuscript of The Buddha and His Dhamma, Ambedkar died in his sleep on the 6th of December 1956 at his home in Delhi. A Buddhist cremation at Dadar Chowpatty beach on the 7th of December drew half a million people. No government ministers attended. A conversion program held on the 16th of December 1956 brought many cremation attendees into Buddhism at the same location. His son Yashwant later served as the second President of the Buddhist Society of India from 1957 to 1977.

• 8. A Legacy Debated

  ›

  Ambedkar was voted "the Greatest Indian" since independence in a poll organized by History TV18 and CNN IBN in 2012, with nearly 20 million votes cast. Economist Amartya Sen called him "father of my economics." Narendra Jadhav described him as "the highest educated Indian economist of all times."

  Scholar Anand Teltumbde observed that Ambedkar's relevance only grew as Indian politics became more competitive and divisive, noting that even 10 years after his death in 1956, there was not a single road or monument named after him. The Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award, was conferred on him posthumously in 1990, more than three decades after his death.

  Criticism followed him into posterity as well. Some biographers faulted him for concentrating on caste at the expense of cooperation with the broader nationalist movement, and for neglecting organization-building. Marxist theoretician Abhinav Sinha charged that Ambedkar had not read a single work by Marx, Engels, or Lenin, making his critiques of communism questionable on their own terms.

  His conversion to Buddhism set off a revival of Buddhist philosophy in India and abroad. Mass conversion ceremonies have since been organized by human rights activists emulating his Nagpur ceremony. During the late 1990s, some Hungarian Romani people drew parallels between their own situation and that of Dalits in India, and inspired by Ambedkar, began converting to Buddhism. A 125-foot-tall statue of Ambedkar, called the Statue of Social Justice, was installed in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, on the 19th of January 2024, standing on an 81-foot-high platform. A 450-foot-tall Statue of Equality at Indu Mill in Mumbai is planned for completion in May 2026, which would make it the second tallest statue in India and the third tallest in the world.