He said in 1935 he would not die a Hindu. Why did it take twenty-one years, and why Buddhism?
What he said at Yeola on 13 October 1935 was not a destination but a departure: "I was born a Hindu, but I solemnly assure you that I will not die a Hindu." The twenty-one years that followed were not hesitation but an examination in public and in print. Several faiths approached him within weeks; Sikhism he considered seriously enough that a delegation went to Amritsar. Islam and Christianity he ruled out on a stated ground: both, he judged, would move his people out of the civilisation they belonged to, and he would not buy equality at the price of nationality.
The four tests he applied
- It must rest on reason and morality, open to revision in the light of both, rather than on unquestionable revelation.
- It must not contain, or sanctify, a hierarchy of birth.
- Morality must be at its centre rather than ritual, and owed to other people rather than a god.
- Converting to it must not remove a community from its own country's history and culture.
Buddhism met all four, and had one quality he valued: it began in India, so choosing it was a claim on part of Indian history rather than an exit. He argued further, in The Untouchables in 1948, that the Untouchable communities were descendants of Buddhists who had refused to conform, so that the conversion was a return — an argument that is his own and is not accepted by most historians.
On 14 October 1956 at Nagpur he took the three refuges and five precepts from Bhadant U Chandramani, the senior-most Buddhist monk in India, then administered them to the crowd with twenty-two vows of his own composition. Attendance is reported from three hundred thousand to half a million. He died seven weeks later, on 6 December 1956. The census shows the scale: a few hundred thousand Buddhists in 1951, several million in 1961, mostly former Mahars in Maharashtra — among the largest religious conversions in history to have happened without violence, inducement or an army.
Two things this answer does not claim. Not that the conversion was a tactic: he wrote and spoke about the choice for two decades, and treating it as instrumental means ignoring most of the record. Not that the twenty-two vows are ordinary Buddhist practice — several are explicit renunciations of Hindu deities and rites, some Buddhists regard them as polemical, and those who took them regard the break as the entire point. The disagreement is recorded, not adjudicated.