From New York he had gone to London, enrolled at the London School of Economics for a further degree in economics and at Gray's Inn to read for the bar. He had been there less than a year when the Baroda scholarship expired and the state called in the obligation. He was given leave to return and finish the London work within four years, and he sailed for India in 1917, in the middle of a war. The books he had bought over four years were shipped separately. The ship carrying them was sunk.

Baroda appointed him military secretary to the Gaekwad. He arrived with a Columbia master's degree, a completed doctoral thesis, part of a London degree and a senior appointment in his pocket, and could not find anywhere to sleep. No Hindu household would rent a room to a Mahar. He tried Christians and he tried Muslims, and was refused by both. In the end he took a room at a Parsi inn under a Parsi name.

He was found out on the eleventh day. A crowd came up the stairs with sticks and gave him until evening to be gone. He had nowhere else in the city to go: the friends he approached would not have him, for reasons they were candid about. He spent the afternoon sitting in a public garden, and took the night train back to Bombay.

The office had been no better than the lodging. Peons who would not risk contact tossed files onto his desk from a distance, and the carpet was rolled back before he walked on it so that it would not need to be washed afterwards. There was no drinking water he was permitted to reach. He was the second most senior officer in the department, and the department's clerks had decided the question of his standing among themselves before he arrived.

This is the turning point of the life, and it is easy to sentimentalise into a story about humiliation. The useful reading is the one he drew himself, and it is analytical rather than wounded. He had assumed, as the reformers around him assumed, that education and demonstrated merit would in time dissolve untouchability from the inside — that the objection was ignorance and the answer was proof. Baroda was the disproof, delivered inside a fortnight and at the top of the scale rather than the bottom. What the caste order responded to was not the qualifications of an individual but the power held by a group.

Everything he did afterwards follows from that correction, and it is why the sequence of the next thirty years looks the way it does: newspapers, conferences, a union, a party, separate electorates, a constitution, a conversion. Not one of them is an appeal to be recognised as an exception. All of them are attempts to assemble a bloc that does not need to be recognised.

He went back to Bombay and took what work he could get: private tuition, advice on investments, and a short-lived consultancy that closed when the clients discovered whose advice they had been taking. From November 1918 he taught political economy at Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Bombay, where the students petitioned about sharing the water jug in the staff common room with him. He stayed two years, saved what he could, and went back to London to finish what Baroda had interrupted.