Was Ambedkar a practising lawyer and a teacher?
He was both, and earned a living at both before public office ever paid him. Called to the bar in London, he practised as a barrister in Bombay, taking cases that included the defence of social reformers and members of his own community against the weight of orthodoxy. The courtroom was not a sideline; it was where a man barred from the village well argued the law in front of the people who barred him.
He taught as well. He held a professorship in economics at a Bombay commerce college and later served as principal of a government law college in the city — an Untouchable heading an institution that trained the region's lawyers, at a time when his presence at a shared table was still contested. Teaching and pleading were of a piece with the rest of his method: wherever there was a platform from which knowledge could be dispensed or a right defended, he took it.
Anyone who pictures him only as a national figure of the 1940s misses how much of his life went into ordinary professional work — briefs, lectures, students, fees. The Constitution came at the end of a long career in law and learning, not out of nowhere.