In January 1919 he gave evidence to the Southborough Committee, which had been sent out to decide who in India should get the vote under the coming reforms. He was twenty-seven. He asked for separate electorates for the Depressed Classes — the official term of the period for the Untouchable communities. It was the first time the demand had been put in that form to a British constitutional body, and the argument behind it did not change for the next thirty years.

He put a second point to the Committee that is less quoted and harder to answer. The Depressed Classes, he said, could not be represented by the men who were then presenting themselves as their spokesmen, because those men had been chosen by caste Hindus and were acceptable precisely for that reason. The question of who is entitled to speak for a group runs under everything he did afterwards, and it is the question the next thirty years kept returning to.

On 31 January 1920 he began a fortnightly newspaper, Mooknayak — Leader of the Voiceless. It was funded by Shahu Maharaj, the ruler of Kolhapur, another reforming prince, and it existed because no established newspaper in Bombay would print the material. When he tried to buy advertising for it in the Marathi press, one of the largest papers in the province declined to carry even a paid announcement of its existence.

Mooknayak is the first of five papers he founded, and the pattern held for all of them: each ran while he could pay for it and stopped when he could not, and each existed because the press that already existed would not print what he wanted printed. Bahishkrit Bharat followed in 1927, Samata in 1928, Janata in 1930, and Prabuddha Bharat in 1956, the last of them renamed in the year he became a Buddhist. Forty years of his life have a masthead attached to them somewhere.

He returned to London in 1920 to finish the work Baroda had interrupted, paying for it partly out of Kolhapur's help and partly out of savings from Sydenham. He came back in 1923 a barrister of Gray's Inn, with a master's degree and a doctorate of science from the University of London. The doctoral thesis, The Problem of the Rupee — Its Origin and Its Solution, argued against the exchange-rate policy the Government of India was then running, and against the gold-exchange standard that policy rested on.

That book is the part of him left out of almost every summary, including the admiring ones. He gave evidence to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance in 1925 as a monetary economist, on a subject with no relation to caste whatever, and the argument he made there — that a managed currency invites the government managing it to inflate, and that ordinary people pay for that in prices — is a technical argument about institutions and incentives. It is worth knowing about because it is the same shape of argument he made about everything else: rights are worth what the mechanism enforcing them is worth, and good intentions are not a mechanism.

In July 1924 he founded the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha — the association for the welfare of the excluded — in Bombay. It was not a protest organisation. It ran hostels so that students had somewhere to live, libraries and reading rooms, free schools, and an employment bureau, on the theory that a community cannot argue its case until it has people equipped to argue it. Its motto was three words he used for the rest of his life.

The order of the three is deliberate and is usually reversed by people quoting it. Education comes first because agitation without it has nothing to say; organisation comes last because it is the only one of the three that outlives the person who starts it.

In 1926 the Governor nominated him to the Bombay Legislative Council. He now had a newspaper, an organisation, a legal practice, a professional reputation in a field unrelated to his community, and a seat in a legislature. He had spent seven years building a platform because Baroda had taught him that standing on merit alone put him on nothing. The following spring he used it.