Editing BR Ambedkar (section)

== Biography ==
Ambedkar was born on April 14, 1891, in the military cantonment town of Mhow (present-day Madhya Pradesh), one of the youngest children of Ramji Sakpal, a Subedar in the British Indian Army, and Bhimabai Sakpal.<ref>Geetha, V. (2021). ''Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India''. Palgrave Macmillan, ch. 2.</ref> The family belonged to the Mahar caste, classified as "untouchable" under the prevailing Hindu social order; despite the relative social mobility that army service offered Mahar families, Ambedkar experienced segregation and humiliation from childhood, including exclusion from classroom seating and public water sources. His family's devotional (bhakti) affiliation with the Kabir Panth, a tradition critical of caste and Brahminical ritual, has been identified as an early influence on his religious sensibility.<ref>Gokhale, Balkrishna Govind (1999). "Theravada Buddhism and Modernization: Anagarika Dhammapala and B.R. Ambedkar". ''Journal of Asian and African Studies'' 34.1: 33–46, p. 41.</ref> According to Ober, he first learned of the Buddha from a Marathi biography presented to him on his high-school graduation.<ref name="Ober2023">Ober, Douglas (2023). ''Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India''. Stanford University Press, ch. 5, citing Keer (2009), pp. 19–21.</ref>

Ambedkar matriculated from Elphinstone High School in Bombay in 1907 and, with the patronage of the progressive ruler of Baroda State, Sayajirao Gaekwad III, completed a B.A. at Elphinstone College in 1912. A Baroda scholarship then took him to Columbia University in New York (1913–1916), where he studied economics and earned a doctorate. He continued his education in London (1916–1917 and again 1920–1923), qualifying as a barrister and earning a doctorate in economics from the London School of Economics; his years abroad, particularly the relative absence of caste discrimination he experienced in the United States and Britain, sharpened his sense of the specificity of Indian untouchability as a distinct and severe form of social exclusion.<ref>Gokhale (1999), "Theravada Buddhism and Modernization", pp. 40–41.</ref><ref>Accounts of the degrees and their dates differ. The earlier version of this page placed a Columbia M.A. and "shortly after" a Ph.D. in 1913–1916 and a London D.Sc.; Ober (2023), ch. 5, lists a London School of Economics doctorate (1923), a Columbia doctorate (1926), and a Gray's Inn law degree (1923); Geary and Mukherjee, "Buddhism in Contemporary India", in: Jerryson, Michael (Ed.) (2017), ''The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism'': 36–57, Oxford University Press, p. 48, gives an M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia and an M.Sc. and D.Sc. "in constitutional law" in London. The dates and degree names are recorded here as the sources give them and are not reconciled.</ref>

Returning to India, Ambedkar combined a legal and academic career with an increasingly public role as leader of the Depressed Classes. He founded the journal ''Mooknayak'' ("Leader of the Voiceless") in 1920 and, over the following decade, organized landmark public actions against untouchability, including the 1927 Mahad Satyagraha to assert Dalits' right to draw water from a public tank and the 1930 Kalaram Temple entry movement at Nashik. In December 1927 he presided over the ceremonial burning of a copy of the ''Manu Smriti'', the ancient law code he held most responsible for sanctifying caste hierarchy.<ref>Geetha (2021), ''Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar'', ch. 5.</ref> Ambedkar represented the Depressed Classes at the Round Table Conferences in London (1930–1932), where his demand for separate electorates for untouchables was resisted by Mohandas Gandhi; Gandhi's fast unto death against separate electorates forced Ambedkar to accept the compromise Poona Pact of September 1932, which secured reserved seats within the general Hindu electorate rather than a separate electorate. The episode confirmed Ambedkar's view, developed across his career, that Gandhi's paternalistic reformism and the term "Harijan" ("children of God") that he popularized for untouchables addressed the symptoms of untouchability while leaving the underlying caste order intact.<ref>Gokhale (1999), "Theravada Buddhism and Modernization", p. 41.</ref>

At the Yeola Conference in October 1935, Ambedkar publicly announced that although he had been born a Hindu, he would not die a Hindu, inaugurating nearly two decades of comparative study of alternative religious traditions.<ref>Gokhale (1999), "Theravada Buddhism and Modernization", p. 42.</ref> During this period he served as Labour Member on the Governor-General's Executive Council (1942–1946), founded the Independent Labour Party (1936) and later the Scheduled Castes Federation, and after Indian independence became India's first Law Minister and chairman of the Constitution's Drafting Committee, in which capacity he was principally responsible for the Constitution's abolition of untouchability (Article 17) and its provisions for reservation and social justice. His frustration with the limits of constitutional remedy, together with his defeat in the general elections of 1952 and 1954 and his resignation from the cabinet in 1951 over the stalling of the Hindu Code Bill, deepened his conviction that legal equality was insufficient without a parallel transformation of the religious and social order.<ref>Geetha (2021), ''Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar'', ch. 3.</ref>

Ambedkar's turn specifically to Buddhism, rather than to Islam, Christianity, or Sikhism, all of which actively sought his followers' allegiance after 1935, drew on the historical memory of Buddhism as an indigenous Indian tradition that had once directly challenged Brahminical ritualism and caste, and on his reading of the Buddha's teaching as a rational, ethical, and this-worldly doctrine compatible with democracy and social equality.<ref>Gokhale (1999), "Theravada Buddhism and Modernization", pp. 42–44.</ref> That turn was not made in isolation. Ober argues, against the common view that Ambedkar constructed a new Buddhism from scratch, that he had been in contact with existing Buddhist networks for decades: he met the monk Bodhananda at the Kolhapur Non-Brahmin Conference in 1920; in 1936 he approached the Bombay Buddha Society and [[Dharmanand Kosambi]] with a request for a vihara in Bombay, which led to the Bahujan Vihara in Parel, though Ambedkar himself apparently never attended its events, probably because of its Birla financing and Kosambi's Brahmin and Gandhian affiliations; he studied Pali privately with Ishwardatt Medharthi of Kanpur into the mid-1940s; and he met the monk U Chandramani and his pupil Dharmarakshita, who edited the Hindi Buddhist journal ''Dharmadoot'', at Kushinagar. Dharmarakshita arranged his 1954 journey to the World Fellowship of Buddhists meeting in Burma, and Ambedkar had attended its first meeting in Ceylon in 1950. Two colleges, Siddharth College in Bombay (1946) and Milind College in Aurangabad (1950), named for Buddhist figures, were established years before the public conversion.<ref name="Ober2023b">Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 5, pp. 217, 219 and n. 53 (p. 328), citing Vajpeyi (2012), p. 231, for the common view. The Bahujan Vihara is dated 1937 by Ober and as completed in 1936 by Meera Kosambi's edition of Dharmanand Kosambi's writings. Ober's phrase for Ambedkar's absence from the vihara ("apparently") marks an inference.</ref> The widely repeated claim that Ambedkar had hoped Bodhanand, who died in 1952, would officiate at his conversion rests on one second-hand report by Shanti Swarup Bauddh (via Ober, p. 214); it should be read with the caveat that the Bodhanand of Ober's account, Bhadant Bodhanand Mahastavir (1874–1952), may not be the "Swami Bodhanand" of other sources.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', p. 214; Geetha (2021), p. 269, whose account of Bodhanand is drawn from Ober's 2016 dissertation, adds that Ambedkar remained in touch
 with him and discussed his decision to convert with him.</ref>

Ambedkar's relations with other Buddhist thinkers also shaped his later writing. He took from Dharmanand Kosambi's Marathi ''Bhagwan Buddha'' and his play ''Bodhisattva'' the account, adopted in ''The Buddha and His Dhamma'', of why Siddhartha left home: not a shock at mortality but a voluntary exile after his dissent in a Sakya–Koliya council dispute over the waters of the river Rohini was voted down.<ref>Geetha (2021), ''Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar'', pp. 290–291 n. 46; Rodrigues, Valerian (2024). ''Ambedkar's Political Philosophy: A Grammar of Public Life from the Social Margins''. Palgrave Macmillan, ch. 5; Ambedkar (1957), ''The Buddha and His Dhamma'', in BAWS 11: 24–32. Kosambi's play is printed in Kosambi, Meera (Ed.) (2010), ''Dharmanand Kosambi: The Essential Writings'', pp. 348–402.</ref> Whether and how far Ambedkar owed this to Kosambi is contested: Meera Kosambi, the editor of Kosambi's writings, holds that the book silently adopts Kosambi's ''Bhagwan Buddha''; Vasant Moon's source list cites Kosambi's ''Bodhisattva'' for the life but not for doctrine; Anand Kausalyayan says the two men covered different ground; and Kasbe suggests that credit was omitted from Ambedkar's lost introduction.<ref>Meera Kosambi's introduction and endnotes 70–72; Anand Kausalyayan (1992), ''An Intelligent Man's Guide to Buddhism'', pp. 23, 110–111; Gokhale (Ed.) (2021), p. 268, which accepts that Ambedkar took Kosambi's account.</ref> [[P Lakshmi Narasu|P. Lakshmi Narasu]], with Dharmanand Kosambi and Haraprasad Shastri, is named by Geetha as one of the writers who appealed most to Ambedkar for treating the Buddha's presence in Indian history as consequential and his teaching as radical.<ref>Geetha (2021), ''Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar'', pp. 273, 284. Ambedkar's reading also included T. W. and Caroline Rhys Davids, Oldenberg, Edward Thomas, Spence Hardy, Burnouf, and the popular writers James Pratt, Henry Olcott, Paul Carus, and Kenneth Saunders (pp. 281–285).</ref> In a preface dated 10 March 1948 to the third edition of Narasu's ''The Essence of Buddhism'' (Thacker, Bombay), which Ambedkar had reprinted, he called it the best book on Buddhism that had appeared so far, and he said that he had never met Narasu.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', p. 141; Aloysius, G. (1998). ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils under Colonialism''. New Age International, App. 10, pp. 230–232, which reproduces the preface. Ayyathurai's "1943" for the preface is an outlier. Ambedkar's field for Narasu there is physics; other sources say chemistry.</ref> Aloysius goes further and argues that Ambedkar knew of, had links with, and was influenced by the Tamil Buddhist movement, naming R. Srinivasan, N. Sivaraj, and G. Appaduraiyar as associates; this is Aloysius's own argument, resting largely on inference and oral testimony, and Ayyathurai finds no direct archival evidence of an influence of Iyothee Thass on Ambedkar.<ref>Aloysius (1998), ''Religion as Emancipatory Identity'', pp. 187–189; Ayyathurai, Gajendran (2011). ''Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness: Pandit Iyothee Thass, Tamil Buddhism, and the Marginalized in South India''. PhD dissertation, Columbia University, p. 136 n. 211.</ref>

On October 14, 1956, at Nagpur, Ambedkar and his wife Savita Ambedkar took the Three Refuges and Five Precepts from the Arakanese-Burmese monk U Chandramani of Kushinagar, a disciple of the monk Mahavir and the senior monk at the ceremony, and Ambedkar then administered a set of twenty-two vows of his own composition, renouncing Hindu deities and ritual practice, to hundreds of thousands of his followers, in what remains among the largest single conversion events in modern religious history.<ref>Rodrigues, Valerian (2024). ''Ambedkar's Political Philosophy''. Palgrave Macmillan, ch. 1; for Chandramani: Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', pp. 185–186 (photograph caption) and p. 219; LeVine, Sarah, & David N. Gellner (2005). ''Rebuilding Buddhism: The Theravada Movement in Twentieth-Century Nepal''. Harvard University Press, pp. 44, 60. Estimates of the number converted range from 200,000 to 600,000 in different sources (Geary and Mukherjee in the ''Oxford Handbook'', p. 47: 400,000 "additional"; p. 388: 600,000; LeVine and Gellner p. 9: "half a million"; Meera Kosambi, via Sukhathankar: "two lakh"; Aloysius: "more than 300,000").</ref> Himself a lay follower (upasaka), Ambedkar administered the refuges and precepts to thousands, a departure from the practice that only monks do so.<ref>Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.) (2021). ''Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste''. Routledge, p. 265 and pp. 270–271 (ch. 13, by Gokhale).</ref> Institutional Buddhist responses were not uniformly hostile: [[Rahul Sankrityayan]] wrote an approving pamphlet in 1957, Anand Kausalyayan translated ''The Buddha and His Dhamma'' into Hindi and called it a new orientation but not a distortion, and the [[Maha Bodhi Society]] petitioned Nehru over the loss of reservation benefits for converts and distributed 50,000 copies of Bodhananda's ritual manual to new converts, while the Birla-funded donor network effectively stopped funding the Ambedkarite movement.<ref>Ober (2023), ''Dust on the Throne'', ch. 7, citing Queen (1996), p. 57, for Kausalyayan's phrase.</ref> He completed the manuscript of ''The Buddha and His Dhamma'', his systematic reconstruction of Buddhist doctrine, in the weeks before his death; it was published posthumously in 1957 as the first volume of the Siddharth College Publication series.<ref>Ambedkar, B.R. (1957). ''The Buddha and His Dhamma''. Siddharth College Publication.</ref> A few weeks after Nagpur, on November 20, 1956, he spoke at the Fourth General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Kathmandu (see the [[#Writings|Writings]] section below). Ambedkar died on December 6, 1956, in Delhi, about seven weeks after the Nagpur conversion. The Republican Party of India, formed from his Scheduled Castes Federation, and the broader Dalit Buddhist movement (sometimes termed ''Navayana'' or Ambedkarite Buddhism) that his conversion inaugurated, continue to organize millions of Buddhists, overwhelmingly of formerly untouchable background, principally in the state of Maharashtra.