Was Ambedkar just a caste leader, or something more?
The caste question was the cause of his life, but it was one room in a large building, and reducing him to it flattens almost everything he actually did. He came to public life already a trained economist and a barrister, and he left it having done substantial work in fields that have no obvious connection to caste at all.
The other rooms
- Economist — two doctoral theses on public finance and currency, and a lifetime's argument about how India should manage its money and its land.
- Jurist and law minister — chairman of the committee that drafted the Constitution and the first Law Minister of independent India.
- Labour reformer — the eight-hour day and the beginnings of worker welfare, from a government post in the 1940s.
- Educationist and editor — founder of colleges and of a string of newspapers, and the builder of a personal library of tens of thousands of books.
- Reformer of family law — author of the Hindu Code Bill, which rewrote women's rights in marriage and property.
Even the caste work is misremembered when it is treated as identity politics. His case was that a society sealed into a hierarchy of birth could not become a strong or a free nation, which is an argument about the whole country, not a plea for one group. The man who is remembered for a single thing spent his life on many, and connected them.