A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B. R. Ambedkar

"Yes. This is the only biography in my list of five books. There are a number of really excellent biographies that have come out, so if you had asked me to choose six or seven books, I would have suggested a few others. Ramachandra Guha’s book on Verrier Elwin, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India , is one of my favourites. Elwin was a British man who stayed on in India after independence. His work was with Adivasi people who have historically been some of the most marginalised people in India. Ambedkar is someone who’s dealing with another group of people who have been extraordinarily marginalised: the Dalits, formerly called ‘untouchables’. The reason I’ve included this book is twofold. Firstly, I think more people outside India need to know about Ambedkar. He is not just a person who is essential to understand modern Indian history, but he’s someone who’s important to know, just in the general theme of social justice anywhere in the world. His ideas can be applicable in so many different contexts. During the Black Lives Matter movement, you had some general transmission of some of Ambedkar’s ideas into American public discussion. In the past few decades, if you were in a place like South Africa or Ghana, you’ve increasingly seen a lot of intellectuals talk about the importance of Ambedkar. He’s someone who I think is increasingly globally important, and most people outside of India don’t know much about him. Secondly, this is the best book in the English language to give an objective, comprehensive history of the man and his ideas. It is a remarkable work of scholarship, building on Gopal’s ten years of close study and research. There have been many biographies of Ambedkar beforehand (some are in English, many are in Marathi, which is the language that Ambedkar spoke), but this is the first book that deals with his entire corpus of writings in English and Marathi and understands him not just as a person who was historically important for uplifting Dalits or writing the Indian Constitution, but also someone who thought very deeply about democracy in general and how democracy could be applied in the Indian context. He was someone who issued many worrying pronouncements about how democracy could fare in India after independence: some of which have not come true; many of which have. One particular idea that he talked about a lot was in a democracy you need liberty, equality, and fraternity to coexist. He took many of the ideas of people like John Dewey and applied them to the Indian context. He asked, ‘In an Indian context, where you have caste (where still today, if you are a member of a certain religious group or you’re a member of a certain caste, you cannot get a house in a particular area) what does that do to the quality of democracy?’ He was someone who, no matter how high he rose, kept on having these humiliating experiences that reminded him of who he was. There’s a wonderful series of essays that I give my students called “Waiting for a Visa,” which Ambedkar wrote in the 1930s, where he summarises about five or six accounts from his life and one or two from the lives of other Dalits. He talks about one particular instance. He had studied in the United States, he had studied in Great Britain, he went on to earn two PhDs and one law degree, and yet, when he came back to India to work in the princely state of Baroda as an official, it was impossible for him to find a house. He found a living quarter where he had to disguise himself as a Parsi (a member of my community). After a while, he was found out, and he was violently kicked out of that particular accommodation, and the only place he could really go was a bench in a park. “A lot of intellectuals talk about the importance of Ambedkar. He’s someone who I think is increasingly globally important” Here was someone who had studied at Columbia and LSE, knew some of the brightest minds around the world, was working for the government of the Maharaja of Baroda (a very progressive and important leader), but he couldn’t get a house. Those humiliations stalked him throughout his life. Ambedkar talked about how his politics were informed with a great degree of anger. He said that was necessarily a good thing because there was a reason for where that anger came from. That anger needed to be used in positive ways to make sure that the humiliations of the past were not repeated."