His father left the army and the family moved to Satara, in the western Deccan, where Ambedkar was admitted to the government high school in November 1900. Admission was the whole of the concession, and it is worth being precise about what it did and did not include.

He sat apart from the other boys, on a piece of sacking he brought from home and took home again. The sacking was not squeamishness on his part. The floor an Untouchable child sat on could not afterwards be swept by the school's own sweeper without the sweeper being polluted in turn, and the sweeper's caste was below the Mahars. Untouchability was not a single line with the respectable safely on one side of it; it was a gradient, and every step of it had someone standing there who had something to lose.

He could not touch the water tap. A peon turned it on and poured, from a height, into cupped hands.

He was not taught Sanskrit. The language of the scriptures was closed to the castes the scriptures placed at the bottom, and the teacher would not take him, so he took Persian instead and satisfied the language requirement with it. He learned Sanskrit later, in adulthood, on his own. Forty years afterwards he would write at length about what those scriptures say and how they say it, and the fact that he had to acquire the language by himself in order to do it is part of why he wrote about them the way he did.

No barber in Satara would cut his hair, because cutting it would have polluted the razor and the hand holding it. His elder sister cut it for him. He noted, without further comment, that the same barbers shaved buffaloes.

The clearest account of what all this felt like is his own. In a set of autobiographical notes written in the mid-1930s and later published as Waiting for a Visa, he set down a handful of incidents and offered almost no commentary on any of them. In one, he and his brother and two nephews travelled to a town in Satara district where their father was working. The letter announcing them never arrived, nobody met the train, and the stationmaster, having asked the routine question of who they were, stepped back from them. The station cartman who eventually agreed to take them refused to drive. He would let the children drive the cart themselves, for double the fare, if he could walk beside it. They travelled that way into the night. At a village on the road they were refused water, and the boys went without it.

Around 1904 the family moved to Bombay, to a single room in a tenement, and he entered Elphinstone High School. The room housed the family and the studying, and he did the studying at night because there was no other time when the room was quiet. His father woke him for it.

In 1906 he was married to Ramabai, who was about nine years old; he was about fifteen. Child marriage was ordinary in every caste at the time and was not remarked on by anyone. She kept a household on almost nothing through the twenty-odd years of study, foreign travel and unpaid political work that followed, and she buried four of their five children. She is absent from most accounts of his life for the same reason most wives of that generation are absent from most accounts, which is that nobody wrote her down.

He matriculated in 1907. It was rare enough for a Mahar boy to pass the examination that his community held a public meeting to mark it, and the meeting is the part that matters: a matriculation certificate was an event for a whole community because so few had ever got one. At that meeting the writer Krishnaji Arjun Keluskar, a caste Hindu who had taken an interest in him, gave him a book he had written on the life of the Buddha. Nothing came of it for forty-nine years.