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''. Cham: 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>

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 completed an M.A. and, shortly after, a Ph.D. in economics. He continued his education in London (1916–1917 and again 1920–1923), qualifying as a barrister and earning a D.Sc. 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>

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> On October 14, 1956, at Nagpur, Ambedkar and his wife Savita Ambedkar took the Three Refuges and Five Precepts from the Burmese monk Chandramani, and Ambedkar then administered a set of twenty-two vows of his own composition, renouncing Hindu deities and ritual practice, to several hundred thousand of his followers, in what remains among the largest single conversion events in modern religious history.<ref>Rodrigues, Valerian (2024). ''Ambedkar's Political Philosophy: A Grammar of Public Life from the Social Margins''. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, ch. 1.</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''. Bombay: Siddharth College Publication.</ref> Ambedkar died on December 6, 1956, in Delhi, six 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.