The Essential Writings of B R Ambedkar

"Ambedkar was born at a time when even getting an education for somebody from an ‘Untouchable’ background was almost impossible. When he went to school, he had to sit on a piece of sacking, separate from the other children. When he wanted to get water between classes, he would have to wait for somebody to open the tap for him, since he wasn’t allowed to touch the tap himself. He managed to go from this very inauspicious background to being a legislator, a politician, an activist, a lawyer, an academic, and one of the great political figures of India in the mid-20th century. He was the person responsible for overseeing the drafting of the Indian constitution, which is the longest constitution in the world. It’s beautifully put together; it’s a great creative work, balancing the different demands of the federal system and the state with the demands of India’s diverse people, and the need to keep the country together. The constitution also brought in democracy. At that time, no large country with a large number of illiterate people had ever tried democracy. It was a huge experiment and he was at the centre of that. But the reason I recommend his book is that he was such a good prose writer. It does! If you read the stuff he wrote against Mahatma Gandhi – they had a long-running dispute, which Gandhi won to a large extent – the way in which he writes is forensic and passionate in the way that Orwell’s writing was. Essentially the Dalit community – at that time called the ‘Untouchable’ community – felt that they needed their own historically disadvantaged position to be recognised and taken seriously. For example, they wanted seats in elected bodies reserved for them and certain legal protections. Gandhi wouldn’t accept that. What he wanted was to speak personally on behalf of all the people of India. Ambedkar saw that as an upper-caste attempt to disenfranchise his people. And because Gandhi is the figure that everybody remembers, Ambedkar’s arguments were largely forgotten for a long time. What’s interesting now is that, as people from the Dalit community gain more political and economic power in India, his importance as a historical figure, the importance of the arguments he was putting forward, is beginning to be recognised, some 60-odd years after independence. But that’s really only been in the last ten to 15 years. It’s come out of democracy. It comes from the fact that those disadvantaged groups have been able to band together, slowly at first, and elect politicians from their own communities who can represent them. He was extraordinary. Gandhi formed an organisation for the Untouchables or Harijans, as he called them – which means ‘children of God’, though Ambedkar saw it as a patronising term. Harijans themselves were not allowed to join the organisation, the Harijan Sevak Sangh; it was simply for upper-caste people to decide what was best for them. Gandhi said that everybody should engage in sweeping and scavenging [jobs traditionally carried out by Untouchables], as a way of cleansing Hindu society. Ambedkar writes: ‘Can there be a worse example of false propaganda than this attempt of Gandhism to perpetuate evils which have been deliberately imposed by one class over another?’"