Is it true Ambedkar owned one of the largest private libraries in India?
He was, above almost everything else, a reader, and he built a private library on a scale few individuals of his time matched. His home in Bombay was arranged around the books, and accounts of the collection run into the tens of thousands of volumes — law, economics, history, religion, philosophy. Reading was not a pastime for him but the instrument of his whole method: he armed himself with knowledge because it was the one weapon the caste order could not deny a man once he had reached it.
The books were also the point of his politics. When he told his people to educate before they agitated or organised, he was describing how he had freed his own mind first, through study, and he wanted them to have the same. A library, on his view, was not a private luxury but a public argument — proof that the intellect the caste order said his people lacked was theirs for the taking.