What did Ambedkar actually study, and where?
He was one of the most formally educated Indians of his generation, and the fact matters because of where he started: a boy of an Untouchable caste made to sit apart in school was not supposed to be able to acquire any of it. He crossed two oceans to do so, on scholarships and on his own resolve.
The qualifications
- Columbia University, New York — a doctorate in economics, for work on the finances of British India.
- The London School of Economics — further degrees in economics, culminating in a Doctor of Science for his study of the rupee.
- Gray's Inn, London — called to the bar as a barrister, so that he was a practising lawyer as well as a scholar.
The combination is unusual: an economist's training and a lawyer's, held by the same person, each at the highest level his era offered. It explains the shape of his later career, in which he moved between arguing currency policy, drafting law and pleading cases as though they were one continuous kind of work. The degrees were not ornaments; they were the tools he used to take apart the arrangement that had tried to keep him from ever holding them.