Ambedkar

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 at Mhow, a British army cantonment in the Central Provinces of India — today the town of Dr. Ambedkar Nagar in the state of Madhya Pradesh. He was the fourteenth and last child of Ramji Maloji Sakpal and Bhimabai. Most of the fourteen did not reach adulthood. His mother died when he was five.

If you have never encountered caste, the single fact that matters at the start is this. Hindu society was ordered into hereditary groups, fixed at birth, that a person could not leave, marry outside, or rise above. Below all of them sat communities held to be so polluting that their touch, their shadow, and in some places the sound of their voice, were treated as contaminating. They were called Untouchables. The word describes a legal and ritual position, not a level of poverty: a prosperous Untouchable was still untouchable, which is the whole point of the thing and the reason his own career later proved what it proved.

Ambedkar's family were Mahars, from the village of Ambadawe in the Ratnagiri district of the Konkan coast. The Mahars were the largest of the Untouchable communities of the Marathi country, and they were not landless by accident. In the traditional village order a Mahar household held a hereditary office and a hereditary set of duties in exchange for a fixed share of the harvest: village watchman, messenger between villages, tracker of stolen cattle, mender of the village wall, and remover of dead animals. The last of those duties is the one that carried the pollution. The others made the community indispensable to the running of every village it was excluded from.

What untouchability meant in daily practice was not an attitude but a set of rules. Where a Mahar could walk, which well he could draw from, what he could wear, what he could be called, whether his children could sit inside a schoolroom, what work he was permitted and what work he could not refuse — all of it was already decided, and enforced by the village itself rather than by any court. There was no appeal, because there was nothing to appeal to.

The cantonment was the exception. His father was a subedar, a senior Indian rank, and had served as a headmaster in an army school. The British Indian Army recruited Mahars, paid them, promoted them, and required the education of soldiers' children, and it did all three without consulting the village on whether it approved. Ambedkar was born literate two generations into a family the army had made literate.

That opening was already closing. After the revolt of 1857 the army reorganised itself around the doctrine of the martial races — the belief that some Indian communities were natural soldiers and the rest were not. In 1892, the year after Ambedkar was born, the Bombay Army stopped recruiting Mahars, who were reclassified as non-martial and left out of the new class regiments. Serving soldiers were demobilised. The single ladder his family had climbed was pulled up behind them within his lifetime, and he grew up hearing about it.

Petitions followed for twenty years and are worth naming, because they establish that he did not begin the movement he is remembered for. Gopal Baba Walangkar, himself a retired soldier, petitioned in 1894. Shivram Janba Kamble petitioned in 1904. Recruitment of Mahars resumed in 1914 only because the First World War made manpower matter more than the doctrine did.

There is one more inheritance. The family were followers of the Kabir Panth, the devotional tradition of the fifteenth-century weaver-poet Kabir, which rejected caste distinction, priesthood and ritual outright. He grew up inside a religious tradition that already held the caste order to be false, several centuries before he made the argument in constitutional terms.

Thirty-six years later, on 1 January 1927, he went to the obelisk at Koregaon Bhima outside Poona, raised by the East India Company after a battle fought there on 1 January 1818 by a Company force that included Mahar soldiers. The speech he gave was not a victory speech. It was an indictment of the government that had taken those soldiers' descendants off the recruitment rolls. Every New Year's Day since, people have gone to the pillar because he went to it.

The surname was not his either. The family name was Sakpal, and by the custom of the region they were also known by their village, as Ambavadekar. In the school register it became Ambedkar, after a Brahmin teacher who had grown fond of the boy and gave him his own name.

His father left the army and the family moved to Satara, in the western Deccan, where Ambedkar was admitted to the government high school in November 1900. Admission was the whole of the concession, and it is worth being precise about what it did and did not include.

He sat apart from the other boys, on a piece of sacking he brought from home and took home again. The sacking was not squeamishness on his part. The floor an Untouchable child sat on could not afterwards be swept by the school's own sweeper without the sweeper being polluted in turn, and the sweeper's caste was below the Mahars. Untouchability was not a line with the respectable on one side of it. It was a gradient, and every step of the gradient had someone standing on it who had something to lose.

He could not touch the water tap. A peon turned it on and poured, from a height, into cupped hands.

He was not taught Sanskrit. The language of the scriptures was closed to the castes the scriptures placed at the bottom, and the teacher would not take him, so he took Persian instead and satisfied the language requirement with it. He learned Sanskrit later, in adulthood, on his own. Forty years afterwards he would write at length about what those scriptures say and how they say it, and the fact that he had to acquire the language by himself in order to do it is part of why he wrote about them the way he did.

No barber in Satara would cut his hair, because cutting it would have polluted the razor and the hand holding it. His elder sister cut it for him. He noted, without further comment, that the same barbers shaved buffaloes.

The clearest account of what all this felt like is his own. In a set of autobiographical notes written in the mid-1930s and later published as Waiting for a Visa, he set down a handful of incidents and offered almost no commentary on any of them. In one, he and his brother and two nephews travelled to a town in Satara district where their father was working. The letter announcing them never arrived, nobody met the train, and the stationmaster, having asked the routine question of who they were, stepped back from them. The station cartman who eventually agreed to take them refused to drive. He would let the children drive the cart themselves, for double the fare, if he could walk beside it. They travelled that way into the night. At a village on the road they were refused water, and the boys went without it.

Around 1904 the family moved to Bombay, to a single room in a tenement, and he entered Elphinstone High School. The room housed the family and the studying, and he did the studying at night because there was no other time when the room was quiet. His father woke him for it.

In 1906 he was married to Ramabai, who was about nine years old; he was about fifteen. Child marriage was ordinary in every caste at the time and was not remarked on by anyone. She kept a household on almost nothing through the twenty-odd years of study, foreign travel and unpaid political work that followed, and she buried four of their five children. She is absent from most accounts of his life for the same reason most wives of that generation are absent from most accounts, which is that nobody wrote her down.

He matriculated in 1907. It was rare enough for a Mahar boy to pass the examination that his community held a public meeting to mark it, and the meeting is the part that matters: a matriculation certificate was an event for a whole community because so few had ever got one. At that meeting the writer Krishnaji Arjun Keluskar, a caste Hindu who had taken an interest in him, gave him a book he had written on the life of the Buddha. Nothing came of it for forty-nine years.

He took his BA from Elphinstone College in Bombay in 1912, in economics and political science. The following year Sayajirao Gaekwad III, the ruler of the princely state of Baroda, awarded him a scholarship to study abroad on the condition that he return and serve the state for ten years. In July 1913 he sailed for New York and enrolled at Columbia University.

It is worth pausing on how narrow that door was. The scholarship was a personal decision by one reforming prince, taken for a handful of students, and it carried an obligation rather than a gift. There was no scheme behind it, no quota, no second award, and no second chance if it went badly. The whole of his access to the education that made the rest of his life possible rested on the continuing goodwill of one man, and he knew it.

He read economics, sociology, history, anthropology and philosophy, and took his MA in June 1915 with a thesis on ancient Indian commerce. He worked under Edwin Seligman, the public finance economist, who supervised his doctoral work; and he sat under John Dewey, whose argument that democracy is not a form of government but a way of living alongside other people — a mode of associated living, in Dewey's phrase — stayed with him for the rest of his life. He was still making that argument, in almost those words, in the Constituent Assembly thirty-four years later.

New York did something else that no reading list accounts for. For three years the first thing known about him in a room was not his caste. He said afterwards that his classmates and professors at Columbia were the best friends he had ever had, and the remark is usually quoted as warmth. It is also data: it tells you what the absence of the thing felt like to someone who had never been without it.

On 9 May 1916, in an anthropology seminar run by Alexander Goldenweiser, he read a paper called Castes in India — Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development. He was twenty-five. It was published in the journal Indian Antiquary in May 1917. The paper does what almost nothing written on caste before it had done: it treats caste as a mechanism with working parts that can be taken apart and named, rather than as an ancient mystery of the East to be described and marvelled at.

The third point is the one that has aged least and is quoted least. He was arguing, in 1916, that the position of women in a caste society is not a separate grievance running alongside caste but the mechanism by which caste reproduces itself. Thirty-five years later that argument is what he resigned from the Cabinet over.

His doctoral thesis was on the evolution of provincial finance in British India — a study of how the imperial government devolved revenue and spending onto the provinces, and what that did to both. Columbia required a doctoral thesis to be published before the degree was conferred, and publication took years, so the doctorate itself was awarded in 1927, eleven years after the work was finished. He left New York in 1916 for London, still under the Baroda obligation, with the clock running.

From New York he had gone to London, enrolled at the London School of Economics for a further degree in economics and at Gray's Inn to read for the bar. He had been there less than a year when the Baroda scholarship expired and the state called in the obligation. He was given leave to return and finish the London work within four years, and he sailed for India in 1917, in the middle of a war. The books he had bought over four years were shipped separately. The ship carrying them was sunk.

Baroda appointed him military secretary to the Gaekwad. He arrived with a Columbia master's degree, a completed doctoral thesis, part of a London degree and a senior appointment in his pocket, and could not find anywhere to sleep. No Hindu household would rent a room to a Mahar. He tried Christians and he tried Muslims, and was refused by both. In the end he took a room at a Parsi inn under a Parsi name.

He was found out on the eleventh day. A crowd came up the stairs with sticks and gave him until evening to be gone. He had nowhere else in the city to go: the friends he approached would not have him, for reasons they were candid about. He spent the afternoon sitting in a public garden, and took the night train back to Bombay.

The office had been no better than the lodging. Peons who would not risk contact tossed files onto his desk from a distance, and the carpet was rolled back before he walked on it so that it would not need to be washed afterwards. There was no drinking water he was permitted to reach. He was the second most senior officer in the department, and the department's clerks had decided the question of his standing among themselves before he arrived.

This is the turning point of the life, and it is easy to sentimentalise into a story about humiliation. The useful reading is the one he drew himself, and it is analytical rather than wounded. He had assumed, as the reformers around him assumed, that education and demonstrated merit would in time dissolve untouchability from the inside — that the objection was ignorance and the answer was proof. Baroda was the disproof, delivered inside a fortnight and at the top of the scale rather than the bottom. What the caste order responded to was not the qualifications of an individual. It was power held by a group.

Everything he did afterwards follows from that correction, and it is why the sequence of the next thirty years looks the way it does: newspapers, conferences, a union, a party, separate electorates, a constitution, a conversion. Not one of them is an appeal to be recognised as an exception. All of them are attempts to assemble a bloc that does not need to be recognised.

He went back to Bombay and took what work he could get: private tuition, advice on investments, and a short-lived consultancy that closed when the clients discovered whose advice they had been taking. From November 1918 he taught political economy at Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Bombay, where the students petitioned about sharing the water jug in the staff common room with him. He stayed two years, saved what he could, and went back to London to finish what Baroda had interrupted.

In January 1919 he gave evidence to the Southborough Committee, which had been sent out to decide who in India should get the vote under the coming reforms. He was twenty-seven. He asked for separate electorates for the Depressed Classes — the official term of the period for the Untouchable communities. It was the first time the demand had been put in that form to a British constitutional body, and the argument behind it did not change for the next thirty years.

He put a second point to the Committee that is less quoted and harder to answer. The Depressed Classes, he said, could not be represented by the men who were then presenting themselves as their spokesmen, because those men had been chosen by caste Hindus and were acceptable precisely for that reason. The question of who is entitled to speak for a group runs under everything he did afterwards, and it is the question the next thirty years kept returning to.

On 31 January 1920 he began a fortnightly newspaper, Mooknayak — Leader of the Voiceless. It was funded by Shahu Maharaj, the ruler of Kolhapur, another reforming prince, and it existed because no established newspaper in Bombay would print the material. When he tried to buy advertising for it in the Marathi press, one of the largest papers in the province declined to carry even a paid announcement of its existence.

Mooknayak is the first of five papers he founded, and the pattern held for all of them: each ran while he could pay for it and stopped when he could not, and each existed because the press that already existed would not print what he wanted printed. Bahishkrit Bharat followed in 1927, Samata in 1928, Janata in 1930, and Prabuddha Bharat in 1956, the last of them renamed in the year he became a Buddhist. Forty years of his life have a masthead attached to them somewhere.

He returned to London in 1920 to finish the work Baroda had interrupted, paying for it partly out of Kolhapur's help and partly out of savings from Sydenham. He came back in 1923 a barrister of Gray's Inn, with a master's degree and a doctorate of science from the University of London. The doctoral thesis, The Problem of the Rupee — Its Origin and Its Solution, argued against the exchange-rate policy the Government of India was then running, and against the gold-exchange standard that policy rested on.

That book is the part of him left out of almost every summary, including the admiring ones. He gave evidence to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance in 1925 as a monetary economist, on a subject with no relation to caste whatever, and the argument he made there — that a managed currency invites the government managing it to inflate, and that ordinary people pay for that in prices — is a technical argument about institutions and incentives. It is worth knowing about because it is the same shape of argument he made about everything else: rights are worth what the mechanism enforcing them is worth, and good intentions are not a mechanism.

In July 1924 he founded the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha — the association for the welfare of the excluded — in Bombay. It was not a protest organisation. It ran hostels so that students had somewhere to live, libraries and reading rooms, free schools, and an employment bureau, on the theory that a community cannot argue its case until it has people equipped to argue it. Its motto was three words he used for the rest of his life.

The order of the three is deliberate and is usually reversed by people quoting it. Education comes first because agitation without it has nothing to say; organisation comes last because it is the only one of the three that outlives the person who starts it.

In 1926 the Governor nominated him to the Bombay Legislative Council. He now had a newspaper, an organisation, a legal practice, a professional reputation in a field unrelated to his community, and a seat in a legislature. He had spent seven years building a platform because Baroda had taught him that standing on merit alone put him on nothing. The following spring he used it.

In August 1923 the Bombay Legislative Council passed a resolution, moved by S.K. Bole, declaring that public places maintained out of public funds — water sources, wells, dharma shalas, schools, courts — were open to the Depressed Classes. In January 1924 the municipality of Mahad passed its own resolution giving effect to it. The Chavdar Tank in Mahad was public, it was maintained out of public money, and by two separate resolutions anyone could drink from it. In practice no Untouchable did, because the law said one thing and the town said another, and only one of them was enforced.

That gap is the subject of this chapter and it is the subject of most of his life. A right that nobody will enforce is not a weaker right. It is a different kind of object altogether: a statement about what a government would like to be true.

On 19 and 20 March 1927 a conference of the Depressed Classes met at Mahad, called to press for the Bole resolution to be honoured. Reported attendance runs from about two and a half to ten thousand. On the second day, after the speeches, the delegates walked down to the tank with Ambedkar at the head of them, and he drank from it, and they drank from it. The act took a few minutes and was entirely orderly.

What followed took ten years. A rumour spread through the town that the crowd intended to enter the Vireshwar temple next. Caste Hindus attacked the delegates with sticks, and went on to the sheds where they were lodged. Ambedkar restrained his people from retaliating, on the ground that a riot would end the argument on the attackers' terms; the injured were treated and the conference dispersed. The tank was then ritually purified with the five products of the cow. The municipality repealed its resolution. The dispute went into the courts as a claim that the tank was private property, and the courts did not settle it until 1937.

Something else happened at Mahad that is left out of most accounts. Several hundred women attended, and he addressed them separately. What he told them was not about water. It was that they should stop wearing the marks by which an Untouchable woman could be identified at a distance and made to stand aside, should wear the sari as caste Hindu women wore it, should give up the customs that the caste order had assigned to them, and should educate their daughters. He returned to the position of women in every decade of his life afterwards, and it ended his career in government.

A second conference was called for 25 and 26 December 1927. The plan was another march to the tank. A court injunction stopped it, and Ambedkar obeyed the injunction — the man who had just been beaten off a public tank submitted to a court order restraining him from returning to it, and said so publicly. Instead, on the evening of 25 December, in front of the pandal, a copy of the Manusmriti was placed on a pyre built for the purpose and burned. The resolution to burn it was moved by a Brahmin follower of his, and Brahmins carried it out.

The Manusmriti is an ancient Sanskrit text of law and social ordering, and it is the text most often produced when someone wants scriptural authority for the caste order. It sets out the duties, the entitlements and the punishments of each caste, and it does so unequally by design: the same offence carries a different penalty according to who commits it and against whom, and the penalties prescribed for a Shudra who hears the Vedas recited are of a kind that does not admit of a benign reading. Ambedkar's case was that untouchability was not a village prejudice that scripture had failed to correct, but an order that scripture had established, and that a movement attacking the practice while leaving the text sacred was attacking a symptom.

The burning was condemned widely, including by reformers who had supported the march, and it cost him allies who never came back. It also did something no march had done: it moved the argument from what Untouchables were permitted to do to what Hinduism itself was, and it made that a question anyone could see being asked.

The litigation ran for a decade. On 17 March 1937 the Bombay High Court dismissed the appeal of the men claiming the Chavdar Tank as private property, and the right to drink from it was finally established in law. Ten years, for a tank in a small town that two resolutions had already declared open. He was by then a member of the province's legislature and had spent the intervening decade concluding that this was not an efficient way to obtain anything.

The road to Poona begins with a boycott. In 1928 the British sent out the Simon Commission to report on India's constitutional future; it contained no Indian member, and Congress boycotted it on that ground, meeting it at every station with black flags. Ambedkar did not boycott it. He gave evidence to it, on the reasoning that a body which was going to write the rules would write them whether or not he was in the room, and that the Depressed Classes could not afford a gesture. That decision made him, in the eyes of a great many nationalists, a man who worked with the British. It is the first appearance of a charge that followed him for the rest of his life, and the reasoning behind his choice never varied.

Between 1930 and 1932 the British government held three Round Table Conferences in London to settle what a self-governing India would look like. Ambedkar attended all three as a representative of the Depressed Classes. At the first, from November 1930, Congress boycotted the proceedings entirely and its leaders were in jail. At the second, in the autumn of 1931, Gandhi attended as its sole representative.

The two men met for the first time in Bombay on 14 August 1931, shortly before sailing. The meeting went badly and the conference went worse. Gandhi's position was that the Untouchables were Hindus, that Congress spoke for all Hindus, and that he himself spoke for the Untouchables. Ambedkar's position was that a body led by caste Hindus could not represent the people it excluded, and that he was in London precisely because it did not. Neither man was being disingenuous, and the disagreement was not about facts. It was about who is entitled to speak for a group, and there is no evidence available to either side that settles it.

On 16 August 1932 the British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, announced the Communal Award. It gave the Depressed Classes separate electorates for a period of twenty years, in which only Depressed Class voters could vote for Depressed Class candidates, together with a vote in the general constituencies as well — a double vote. On paper it was everything Ambedkar had argued for since he sat in front of the Southborough Committee in 1919.

Gandhi, imprisoned at Yerwada Jail in Poona, announced that he would fast to the death against it. He did not object to reserved seats, and he had said repeatedly that untouchability was a sin that had to end. He objected to the separate electorate, on the ground that it would sever the Untouchables from Hindu society permanently, convert a social wrong into a constitutional category, and make the division something no future reform could undo. The fast began on 20 September 1932.

What followed is not well described as a negotiation. For five days Ambedkar bargained in a country in which he was being held publicly responsible for the life of the most revered man in it, with crowds outside, with mediators arriving hourly, and with the explicit warning that if Gandhi died his community would answer for it. On 24 September 1932, in Yerwada Jail, he signed what became known as the Poona Pact. Gandhi ended the fast two days later.

The panel provision is the part that is almost always dropped from summaries, and it is the part that shows what he thought he had salvaged. Its whole purpose was to answer the objection to reserved seats — that a seat won inside a joint electorate goes to whichever candidate the majority finds least troubling — by making the community's own voters the gatekeepers of who could stand at all. Whether that would have worked is not knowable. It was a temporary provision, and it did not become a permanent feature of Indian elections.

Two things are not in dispute. He signed, and he never once described it as a victory. And within three years he had concluded that no arrangement of seats inside Hindu society was going to be enough, and said so at Yeola.

In March 1930 a satyagraha — a campaign of disciplined non-violent pressure — began at the Kalaram temple in Nashik for the right of Untouchables to enter it. It was organised by his colleagues, it was conducted with exactly the restraint the method requires, and it ran, on and off, for five years. Volunteers were beaten. The doors did not open. Set beside the Mahad litigation, which took ten years to establish a right to drink water that two resolutions had already granted, it is the second of two long experiments with the same result.

Ramabai died in May 1935, after twenty-nine years of a marriage conducted almost entirely in poverty and mostly in his absence. She had buried four of their five children. He was forty-four, and by every account it broke something in him that did not mend.

On 13 October 1935, at a conference at Yeola in Nashik district, he told an audience of some ten thousand people that he had been born a Hindu because it had not been in his power to prevent it, but that dying one was.

Read carefully, that is not the announcement of a destination. It is the announcement of a departure, and twenty-one years passed before he named where he was going. The distinction matters for the last chapter of this account: at Yeola the decision to leave was taken and made public, and everything afterwards is the question of what to leave for. Representatives of several faiths approached him within weeks, and he let the question stand open for two decades while he studied it.

The next year the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal of Lahore — the Society for the Breaking of Caste, a reformist Hindu body whose entire stated purpose was the abolition of caste — invited him to preside over its annual conference. He wrote the address and sent the text ahead, as they had asked. The committee read it and wrote back asking for passages to be removed: the section arguing that caste rested on the authority of the Vedas and the shastras, and the closing declaration that he would not remain a Hindu. He replied that he would not change a comma. The conference was cancelled.

He printed the undelivered address himself, at his own expense, in May 1936, under the title Annihilation of Caste. The first printing sold out. It is the most widely read thing he wrote, and it is still in print in more languages than he could read.

The argument of the book is not that caste is unkind, and it is not an appeal for sympathy. It is that caste is a system of graded inequality, in which almost every group has some other group beneath it, so that the people injured by the system are also invested in it and will defend the step they stand on. From there it makes the claim that got the conference cancelled: that reformers who attack caste while treating as sacred the scriptures that sanction it are asking people to disobey what they believe to be divine command, and that this is not a strategy but a wish.

He also disposed of the defence most often offered then and now — that caste is simply a division of labour, an economic arrangement that acquired a religious coating. His answer is that a division of labour would let a man change his work when the work ran out, and caste does not; that it is not a division of labour but a division of labourers, ranked; and that no other system of work in the world assigns a man's occupation before he is born and forbids him to leave it when it is starving him.

The remedies he proposed in the book are the part almost nobody quotes, and they are startling. Intermarriage, on the ground that endogamy is the mechanism and everything else is enforcement. The abolition of the priesthood as a hereditary office, with priests instead qualified by state examination and licence, subject to the same law as any other citizen, and limited in number. One scripture in place of the many, so that there is a single text to argue with. He was proposing to reorganise a religion from the outside, and he said plainly that he did not expect to be thanked for it.

Gandhi replied in his journal Harijan in July 1936, in an article that took the address seriously as the challenge to Hinduism it was. He defended varna — the fourfold ideal order — as a thing distinct from caste as practised, argued that a religion must be judged by its best exponents rather than its worst, and said that Ambedkar's quarrel was with the failures of Hindus rather than with Hinduism. Ambedkar answered in turn, at length, and did not concede the distinction: an ideal that has never once been practised anywhere, he wrote, is not being judged unfairly by its results.

Both replies are printed at the back of later editions, which is the right way to read the book: as one half of an argument that was never resolved, between two men who each had a serious answer to the other and neither of whom moved.

In August 1936 he founded the Independent Labour Party. The name is exact and it is usually passed over. It was a labour party rather than a caste party; it contested on tenancy, industrial conditions and wages; it ran non-Untouchable candidates and asked for non-Untouchable votes; and its programme was written in the language of class.

It did well in the 1937 Bombay provincial elections — the first held under a substantially widened franchise — and became a real opposition force in the province. In September 1937 he introduced a bill to abolish the khoti system, the form of landlord tenure that governed much of the Konkan, under which tenants held at will and paid whatever the holder of the village demanded. The tenants in question were mostly not Untouchables.

In November 1938 he did something that fits no summary of him at all. The Bombay government, run by Congress, brought forward an Industrial Disputes Bill that made certain strikes a criminal offence. Ambedkar opposed it in the legislature as an attack on the only weapon workers had, and then joined the communist-led unions — whose leaders he disagreed with about nearly everything else, and who disagreed with him about caste — in a one-day general strike against it. Something like a hundred thousand workers stopped.

In December 1940 he published Thoughts on Pakistan, later expanded as Pakistan or the Partition of India. The Muslim League had adopted the demand for a separate state that March, and almost no serious Indian writer would examine it on its own terms rather than denouncing it. Ambedkar did. He set out the case for the demand and the case against it at length, each as its own advocate would put it; argued that a state whose two largest communities did not consider themselves one people would be permanently unstable and would spend its strength on the fact; and concluded that if partition did happen it would have to be accompanied by a deliberate, organised, compensated exchange of populations, on the ground that the alternative was for it to happen anyway, in panic, with people walking.

In July 1942, at a conference in Nagpur, he wound up the Independent Labour Party and founded the Scheduled Castes Federation. Scheduled Castes was the new official term, introduced under the Government of India Act of 1935 for the communities listed in a schedule for the purposes of reservation; it is the term still used in Indian law today, and the schedule is still a schedule. The change of party was a change of strategy: the labour appeal had not produced a bloc large enough to bargain with, and he went back to organising the constituency that was unambiguously his.

That same month, by a warrant dated 20 July 1942, he was appointed Labour Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council, and he held the portfolio until the Council was reconstituted in 1946. It was the first executive office he had ever held. He was in it during a war, with the Quit India movement breaking out three weeks after he took office and most of the Congress leadership in jail for the duration — a fact that is held against him and that he never apologised for, on the grounds that he had a department to run and the war was going to be fought whatever he did.

What he did with the department has almost nothing to do with the story usually told about him, and it is the most durable administrative work of his life.

The bill was his own — the Viceroy reported to the Secretary of State in December 1945 that Ambedkar had submitted his labour proposals for the coming budget session and that the first of them was a bill to cut factory hours — and the cotton textile industry fought it. India was short of cloth, the mills argued, and what the moment called for was longer hours, not shorter ones. He answered with the record of the previous cut. When the week had come down from sixty hours to fifty-four in 1934, the number of mills, of looms, of hands employed and of bales of cotton consumed had all risen in the years immediately after, and he read the figures out. Then he did something a minister carrying a reform does not usually do: he made it smaller. Rather more than a quarter of perennial factories, he told the House, were already working a forty-eight-hour week, and something over a third of India's two and a half million factory hands were already in factories working between forty-eight and fifty-four — so the bill could not fairly be called the radical measure its critics were calling it. He spent part of his own speech shrinking his own achievement.

Alongside the department he kept writing. In 1945 he published What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, a book-length indictment written thirteen years after Poona, and in 1946 Who Were the Shudras?, an argument about the origins of the fourth varna that set out to show the caste order had a history and therefore a beginning, and therefore was not eternal. In July 1945 he founded the People's Education Society, which opened Siddharth College in Bombay the following year. He was building the first of the three words while writing the second.

He very nearly was not there at all. The Scheduled Castes Federation had done badly in the 1946 provincial elections and could not deliver him a seat in Bombay. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly in July 1946 from Bengal instead, from a Khulna seat, after Jogendra Nath Mandal of the Federation made way for him; the votes that carried him came from the Muslim League. When Bengal was partitioned the following year his constituency fell inside East Pakistan and the seat vanished under him. Congress then arranged his return from Bombay, M.R. Jayakar resigning to make room, and he was re-elected in July 1947.

Both halves of that belong in the account and they are usually told one at a time, by people making opposite points. He entered the Assembly without Congress and against its preference. He could not have stayed in it without Congress. Neither fact cancels the other, and a version that carries only one of them is being used for something.

In August 1947 he became independent India's first Law Minister — Nehru offered him the portfolio, which is itself worth noticing, given what he had published about Congress two years earlier. On 29 August 1947 the Assembly appointed him chairman of the Drafting Committee, a body of seven.

It is worth being concrete about the scale of the thing. The Assembly sat for two years, eleven months and eighteen days. The document that came out of it is one of the longest national constitutions in the world, and it had to do several jobs that no single document had been asked to do before: hold together a federation of provinces and several hundred princely states, define citizenship in a country that had just been partitioned along religious lines, and give enforceable rights to people whose disabilities were social rather than statutory.

He did not get what he had asked for. In 1947 he had put a memorandum to the Assembly, later published as States and Minorities, proposing that key industries and insurance be state-owned and that agriculture be organised into collective farms with the state as landlord — economic rights entrenched in the constitution itself, on the argument that a political democracy resting on a landless and dependent population is a formality. Almost none of it survived into the text. Much of what did survive went into the Directive Principles, which by their own terms are not enforceable in any court. He accepted the outcome and defended the document that emerged, and it is not the document he would have written alone.

On 25 November 1949, the day before the Constitution was adopted, he made his closing speech to the Assembly. It is not a speech of celebration. Almost all of it is a list of the ways the thing they had just built could fail.

He went on to say that if the contradiction were not removed, those denied equality would blow up the structure of political democracy the Assembly had so laboriously built. Then he made the point that undercuts the entire idea of a document as a guarantee — and it is the same point he had been making since Mahad, when a tank that two resolutions had opened stayed shut for ten years.

The Constitution was adopted on 26 November 1949 and came into force on 26 January 1950. In April 1948 he had married Dr. Sharada Kabir, a physician who had been treating him, and who took the name Savita; he was in poor health throughout the drafting, with diabetes and failing eyesight and neuropathy in his legs, and much of the work was done from a sickbed. His health did not improve afterwards.

Personal law in India — marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption, guardianship, maintenance — was, and in large part still is, administered separately for each religious community. For Hindus it was uncodified: drawn from scripture and local custom, differing between regions and schools, and interpreted by judges working from translations of texts. Under it a woman had no right to divorce, a wife had no share in her husband's property, a daughter had no share in her father's, a widow's interest in what she held was limited and reverted on her death, and a man could take more than one wife.

The work of codifying it had begun before him. A committee under B.N. Rau was appointed in 1941 and produced a draft code by 1944. What Ambedkar did, as Law Minister from 1947, was take charge of the bill that came out of it and carry it. It would have codified the whole of Hindu personal law in one statute: monogamy, a right of divorce available to both parties on the same grounds, a daughter's share in her father's property, an absolute rather than limited estate for widows, and rights of adoption and maintenance. It was the largest single social reform proposed in independent India, and it was aimed squarely at the majority community rather than at a minority one.

The opposition was ferocious, sustained for four years, and much of it came from inside Congress. The objections were not all of one kind, and it is worth separating them. That the state had no business legislating on religion. That codifying Hindu law alone, leaving other communities' personal law untouched, was itself discrimination against Hindus — an argument still made about the same subject today. That an unelected provisional parliament had no mandate for a change of this size and should leave it to the first elected one. And, said quietly and often, that the reform was being drafted by a man who had publicly announced he would not die a Hindu.

Rajendra Prasad, the President of India, raised his own constitutional objections and let it be understood that he might decline assent — a position that would have set the head of state against the cabinet in the republic's second year. Orthodox organisations demonstrated outside Parliament. Nehru supported the bill and did not spend his authority on it at the moment it needed spending, which is the judgement Ambedkar made and which historians have argued about since.

In September 1951 the Bill was talked out. After a truncated debate, four clauses were passed and the rest was abandoned. Ambedkar resigned from the Cabinet on 27 September 1951.

When he came to explain himself in the House on 10 October, the Chair ruled that he could not make the statement at the point he had risen to make it, since a copy had not been furnished in advance; he was told he might read it later the same evening. He walked out instead, and released the text to the press. It is the only resignation statement of an Indian cabinet minister that was never delivered in the chamber it was written for.

The statement went well beyond the Bill. He set out that he had been given no portfolio of substance beyond Law, having asked for Planning and been refused; that he had been left off the Planning Commission; that the condition of the Scheduled Castes was no better than it had been under the British and that the machinery meant to improve it was not working; and that he disagreed with the government's foreign policy, including on Kashmir. It reads as the account of a man who had concluded that his presence in the Cabinet was being displayed rather than used.

He stood in the first general election in 1952, in Bombay North Central, and lost — to Narayan Sadoba Kajrolkar, a Congress candidate from his own community who had worked as his own assistant. The margin was about fourteen thousand votes in a poll of more than a quarter of a million. He had spent twenty years warning that a reserved seat inside a joint electorate returns the candidate the majority finds acceptable, and the first general election of the republic he had drafted the constitution for demonstrated it on him personally. He stood again at a by-election at Bhandara in 1954 and lost again.

He entered Parliament through the Rajya Sabha, the indirectly elected upper house, in March 1952, and stayed there for the rest of his life. The last years of his political career were spent out of office and out of favour, in poor health, and writing: on the case for reorganising India's states along linguistic lines, on the republic's unfinished business, and on the book about the Buddha he did not live to see published.

The twenty-one years between Yeola and Nagpur were not hesitation. They were an examination, conducted in public and at length, and he wrote about it as he went. Representatives of several faiths approached him after 1935 — the offers were substantial, because the number of people who might follow him was substantial — and one of them, Sikhism, he considered seriously enough that a delegation was sent to Amritsar and terms were discussed. It did not happen. Islam and Christianity he ruled out on the same ground, and he was explicit about it: both would have moved his people out of the civilisation they belonged to, and he was not willing to buy equality at the price of nationality.

Buddhism met all four, and it had one further quality he valued: it had begun in India, and had been argued into and then out of existence there. Choosing it was not an exit from Indian history but a claim on a part of it — and, he argued, a return rather than a departure, since he held the Untouchable communities to be descendants of Buddhists who had refused to conform. That last argument, which he made at length in The Untouchables in 1948, is his own and is not accepted by most historians.

In 1955 he founded the Bharatiya Bauddha Mahasabha, the Buddhist Society of India, and set a date. On 14 October 1956, at Nagpur, in front of a crowd whose size no one has ever settled, he took the three refuges and the five precepts from Bhadant U Chandramani, the senior-most Buddhist monk in India. He then turned round and administered them to the crowd, together with twenty-two vows of his own composition. The ceremony was repeated the following day for those who had not been able to reach the ground. Reported attendance runs from about three hundred thousand to half a million. The ground is now called Deekshabhoomi.

He told the crowd he had chosen Nagpur because of the Nagas, the people he held to have been the original carriers of Buddhism in India. He also told them, in the same speech, that this was not a matter of taking a new name but of accepting an obligation, and that anyone who converted and then went on living as before had done nothing at all.

The scale of what followed is visible in the census and is easy to miss. India recorded a few hundred thousand Buddhists in 1951. Ten years later it recorded several million, the great majority of them in Maharashtra, the great majority of them former Mahars. It is one of the largest religious conversions in recorded history to have happened without violence, inducement or an army, and it happened in the seven weeks either side of his death.

He had been writing The Buddha and His Dhamma for years and finished it shortly before the conversion. It is his own arrangement of the Buddha's life and teaching, and it is deliberately unorthodox: it argues that suffering is social and economic before it is metaphysical, treats the four noble truths and rebirth in ways many Buddhist scholars dispute, and is unsentimental about the parts of the tradition it does not accept. He wrote in the preface that he expected to be criticised for it. He was, and is. It was published in 1957, after his death, because he could not find a publisher for it while he was alive.

In November 1956 he travelled to Kathmandu for the conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, where he spoke on the Buddha and Karl Marx — arguing that they had asked the same question about human suffering, that the Buddha's answer did not require the killing that the other answer had come to require, and that a society could not be made just by force and kept just afterwards. It was his last journey.

He died in his sleep at his house in Delhi on 6 December 1956, seven weeks after Nagpur. He had been diabetic and in poor health for years and had been working through most of it. He was cremated at Dadar in Bombay the following day, on the shore, in front of a crowd that no one has ever counted accurately. The place is now called Chaitya Bhoomi.

He was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour, in 1990 — thirty-four years after his death, by a government that needed the votes of people who had been asking why it had taken so long. His portrait hangs in the Central Hall of the Parliament whose founding document he took through clause by clause. The Constitution he defended in 1949, and warned against relying on, has outlasted every government that has worked it.