The Quiz

It was a ritual position, not a level of income, and that is the whole point of the arrangement. What it decided was which well you drew water from, which streets you could walk and at what hours, whether your children sat inside the schoolroom or on the verandah, and — the half usually left out — which work you were not permitted to refuse. The clearest test of it is his own year in Baroda: in 1917 he arrived to take up the post of military secretary to the Gaekwad with a Columbia master's degree and a completed doctoral thesis, and could not find anywhere to sleep, because no Hindu household would rent a room to a Mahar and the Christian and Muslim households he tried refused him too. Nor was it a colour line. The two sides were often indistinguishable by sight, which is exactly why the marks, the names and the standing distances mattered.

In the Archive: What did untouchability actually mean, day to day?

The objection was never that the word was impolite. It was that a benediction handed down from above is still handed down from above. The word never entered the Constitution, which abolishes untouchability in Article 17 and speaks of Scheduled Castes; governments later instructed their departments to drop it. Gandhi did not intend condescension and said so — his position was that the Untouchables were Hindus and that the language should say they belonged — and that is a real argument, the same one that ran through the Poona Pact. In ordinary use today, Dalit is the respectful word and the one most of the people described would choose, Scheduled Caste is correct in any legal context, and Untouchable names the historical position itself.

In the Archive: Dalit, Harijan, Scheduled Caste, Untouchable — which word is right?

The tank was public, it was maintained out of public money, and two separate resolutions had already opened it. Nobody drank from it, because the law said one thing and the town said another and only one of them was enforced. That gap is the subject of most of his life: a right nobody will enforce is not a weaker right, it is a different kind of object altogether. What followed the march was a beating, the ritual purification of the tank with the five products of the cow, the repeal of the municipality's resolution, and ten years of litigation — the Bombay High Court did not settle it until 17 March 1937.

In the Journey: Mahad, and the right to drink water, 1927

It was never delivered. He wrote the address, sent the text ahead as he had been asked to, and the committee wrote back asking him to remove two things: the argument that caste rested on the authority of the Vedas and the shastras, and the closing declaration that he would not remain a Hindu. He replied that he would not change a comma, and the conference was cancelled. He printed it himself, at his own expense, in May 1936, and the first printing sold out. The fact the book is usually read without is that it was an argument made from inside, addressed to people who thought they agreed with him — and it was the reformers, not the orthodox, who withdrew the invitation.

In the Journey: The speech that was never delivered, 1935–1936

The distinction is the whole of the episode and it is the thing most summaries lose. Gandhi did not object to reserved seats; he objected to the separate electorate, which he said would freeze a social wrong into a permanent constitutional category. Four days later Ambedkar signed it away, taking in exchange 148 reserved seats in the provincial legislatures against the Award's 71, eighteen per cent of the Central Legislature, and a primary in which Depressed Class voters alone would first choose a panel of candidates. Whether that was a gain or a defeat is argued seriously in both directions, by historians working from the same documents, and this site sets out both cases and resolves neither.

In the Archive: Was the Poona Pact a defeat?

Gandhi said publicly and often that untouchability was a sin that had to end, and the disagreement was never about that. It was about three other things: who is entitled to speak for a group, since Gandhi held that the Untouchables were Hindus and that he spoke for them while Ambedkar held that a body led by caste Hindus could not represent the people it excluded; whether the disease was Hinduism itself or only its practitioners; and method, Gandhi's instrument being moral pressure including on his own body, Ambedkar's being legal machinery that would work whether or not anybody's conscience moved. Whether twenty-five years of that makes two men enemies depends on the use of the word, and both answers are argued seriously.

In the Archive: Were Gandhi and Ambedkar enemies?

The name is exact and it is usually passed over. It was a labour party rather than a caste party and its programme was written in the language of class. In September 1937 he introduced a bill to abolish the khoti landlord tenure of the Konkan, whose tenants were mostly not Untouchables. In November 1938 he opposed a Congress provincial government's Industrial Disputes Bill, which made certain strikes a criminal offence, and joined the communist-led unions — whose leaders disagreed with him about caste and he with them about nearly everything else — in a one-day general strike against it that stopped something like a hundred thousand workers. Any reading of him as a leader concerned only with his own community has to account for that decade, and it is a real problem for it.

In the Archive: Was Ambedkar a British collaborator?

The claim that he cut the working day from fourteen hours to eight is written almost everywhere, and neither half of it holds. The Factories Act of 1934, in force when he took office, already capped a perennial factory at ten hours a day and fifty-four a week, and the Act he carried took those to nine and forty-eight with effect from 1 August 1946. The statutory day never became eight at all — eight is forty-eight spread over a six-day week, which is a real thing to have won and a different claim. Fourteen hours is a real number too: it is roughly what an unregulated Bombay mill ran in summer in the eighteen-seventies. The cotton mills fought the Bill, arguing that a country short of cloth needed longer hours; he answered with the production figures from the previous cut, and then spent part of his own speech arguing that the Bill was not the radical measure its critics were calling it. Forty-eight is still the figure in Indian factory law.

In the Journey: A party, a war, and a labour portfolio, 1936–1946

Both of the simple versions circulate in India, usually for something other than accuracy: the inflated one makes him sole author and writes the Assembly out, and the deflating one points at Rau's draft and stops, which would equally prove that no minister ever carried any bill. The strongest contemporary witness is a fellow member of the Drafting Committee, on the floor of the House: T.T. Krishnamachari told the Assembly that the burden of drafting the constitution had fallen on Dr. Ambedkar. A further fact complicates the hero version — he did not get the constitution he wanted. His 1947 memorandum, later published as States and Minorities, proposed state ownership of key industries and collective farming, entrenched in the text; almost none of it survived, and what did went into the Directive Principles, which are not enforceable.

In the Archive: Did Ambedkar write the Constitution of India by himself?

He resigned over the rights of Hindu women. The Bill would have replaced uncodified Hindu personal law — under which a woman had no right to divorce, a wife no share in her husband's property, a daughter none in her father's, and a man could take more than one wife — with a single statute, and it was the largest social reform proposed in independent India, aimed squarely at the majority community. In September 1951 it was talked out: four clauses passed and the rest was abandoned. Rising to explain himself in the House on 10 October he was ruled out of order for want of an advance copy, and gave the text to the press instead. It ended: to leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, untouched, and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems, is to build a palace on a dung heap. The Code became law anyway, in four separate Acts passed between 1955 and 1956, after he had gone.

In the Archive: What was the Hindu Code Bill, and why did he resign over it?

Yeola was a departure, not a destination: what he said was that he had been born a Hindu because it had not been in his power to prevent it, but that dying one was. The twenty-one years that followed were an examination conducted in public and in print. Representatives of several faiths approached him within weeks, and Sikhism he considered seriously enough that a delegation went to Amritsar; Islam and Christianity he ruled out on a stated ground, that both would move his people out of the civilisation they belonged to. Buddhism met the four tests he applied 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 from it. The census shows the scale of what followed — a few hundred thousand Buddhists in India in 1951, several million in 1961.

In the Archive: He said in 1935 he would not die a Hindu. Why did it take twenty-one years, and why Buddhism?

That no primary record has been found is not the same as saying it did not happen, and the difference is the whole answer. What the record does contain is that the provision was moved in the Assembly by N. Gopalaswami Ayyangar, a former Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir and then a minister without portfolio, and defended by him in the House rather than by the Drafting Committee; and that Ambedkar was out of sympathy with the government's foreign policy including on Kashmir, and said so on resigning. The absence matters because the quoted refusal is used constantly in a live political dispute. Repeating it because it is everywhere would hand his authority over on no evidence; declaring it invented would do the same in reverse. If a primary source turns up — anything with a date and a provenance — the archive entry will be rewritten around it and will say so.

In the Archive: Did Ambedkar refuse to draft Article 370?