Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (born April 14, 1891, Mhow, India—died December 6, 1956, New Delhi) was a leader of the Dalits (Scheduled Castes; formerly called untouchables) and law minister of the government of India (1947–51).

Born of a Dalit Mahar family of western India, he was as a boy humiliated by his high-caste schoolfellows. His father was an officer in the Indian army. Awarded a scholarship by the Gaekwar (ruler) of Baroda (now Vadodara), he studied at universities in the United States, Britain, and Germany. He entered the Baroda Public Service at the Gaekwar’s request, but, again ill-treated by his high-caste colleagues, he turned to legal practice and to teaching. He soon established his leadership among Dalits, founded several journals on their behalf, and succeeded in obtaining special representation for them in the legislative councils of the government. Contesting Mahatma Gandhi’s claim to speak for Dalits (or Harijans, as Gandhi called them), he wrote What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (1945).

In 1947 Ambedkar became the law minister of the government of India. He took a leading part in the framing of the Indian constitution, outlawing discrimination against untouchables, and skillfully helped to steer it through the assembly; the adoption of the constitution on January 26, 1950, is today celebrated as Republic Day, a national holiday. He resigned in 1951, disappointed at his lack of influence in the government. In October 1956, in despair because of the perpetuation of untouchability in Hindu doctrine, he renounced Hinduism and became a Buddhist, together with about 200,000 fellow Dalits, at a ceremony in Nagpur. Ambedkar’s book The Buddha and His Dhamma appeared posthumously in 1957, and it was republished as The Buddha and His Dhamma: A Critical Edition in 2011, edited, introduced, and annotated by Aakash Singh Rathore and Ajay Verma.