B.R. Ambedkar

⚠  Awaiting Peer Review  ⚠ This encyclopedia entry is complete but has not yet undergone review by an area specialist.

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), popularly honored as Babasaheb, was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer, and the principal architect of the Constitution of India who, in October 1956, led a mass conversion of several hundred thousand of his followers, most of them from his own Mahar caste, from Hinduism to a reinterpreted, rationalist form of Buddhism. Trained at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, Ambedkar built his political career on the emancipation of India's "untouchable" (Dalit) communities, arguing that caste was a structural device for the division of laborers rather than merely a division of labor, and that political independence from Britain would be meaningless without the annihilation of caste. His turn to Buddhism, culminating in the mass conversion at Nagpur and the posthumous publication of The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957), reframed Buddhism as a this-worldly, rationalist, and egalitarian social ethic explicitly opposed to caste hierarchy and, in a late essay on Buddhism and Marxism, placed in comparison with Marxism as a rival path to human liberation. That turn drew on existing Buddhist networks in India more than the common picture of a Buddhism built from scratch allows. Though he rejected the label of socialist and was a sharp critic of the Communist Party of India, Ambedkar's demand for the constitutional and economic transformation of a graded, caste-based social order, combined with his conviction that religious reform was a precondition of that transformation, situates him as a central, if idiosyncratic, figure in the history of radical, socially engaged Buddhism in twentieth-century South Asia.

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. 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. According to Ober, he first learned of the Buddha from a Marathi biography presented to him on his high-school graduation.

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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Himself a lay follower (upasaka), Ambedkar administered the refuges and precepts to thousands, a departure from the practice that only monks do so. 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. 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. 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 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.

Ideas

Ambedkar's engagement with Buddhism cannot be separated from his lifelong analysis of caste as a structural, graded system of inequality rather than a simple division of labor; he held that Hindu society lacked the associated, fraternal life that alone could ground genuine democracy, and that annihilating caste required destroying the religious sanction, rooted in the authority of the Vedas and codified in texts such as the Manu Smriti, that Brahminical Hinduism gave to hierarchy. Where Gandhi sought to reform Hinduism from within and treat untouchability as a removable excrescence on an otherwise sound social order, Ambedkar argued that caste was constitutive of Hindu religion itself, so that reform without a change of religious foundation could never suffice; this conviction, developed at length in Annihilation of Caste (1936), supplies the logical basis for his eventual conversion. In The Untouchables (1948) he argued that untouchables were "broken men", remnants of an indigenous Buddhist population conquered by Aryan Brahmin invaders and punished for their Buddhist identity and their continued beef-eating, a claim very similar to that asserted by Iyothee Thass before. In an article of 1941 he had already cast the Buddha as the doctor of India's Brahminical disease.

In choosing Buddhism specifically, Ambedkar drew a sharp distinction between what he called canonical accretion and the Buddha's original teaching. In The Buddha and His Dhamma he set aside doctrines he regarded as later monkish or metaphysical additions, including rebirth understood as the transmigration of a soul and the Four Noble Truths read as a doctrine of universal, inescapable suffering, and instead presented the Dhamma as a rational, ethical, and fundamentally social teaching centered on the elimination of suffering caused by social and economic injustice. His Buddha is a rationalist and empiricist who rejected the authority of the Vedas, denied the existence of a creator god and an eternal soul, and offered a "middle path" grounded in reason, morality (sila), and compassion (karuna) rather than ritual or metaphysical speculation. Scholars have described this reconstruction as a distinctively modernist and "Protestant" Buddhism, in the sense of stressing lay ethical practice, scriptural rationalism, and this-worldly social reform over monastic withdrawal and ritual, a reading Ambedkar shared in emphasis, though not in political direction, with the Sri Lankan reformer Anagarika Dharmapala. Geetha adds that he substituted an "acquisitive instinct" for, or alongside, craving (tanha), drawing on Tawney, and that he took the conflict between classes to be the root of the Buddha's sorrow, without identifying this with a Marxist theory of history.

Central to Ambedkar's social interpretation of Buddhism are the twin values of liberty and fraternity, which he understood as inseparable from equality; he held that a caste society could never achieve genuine fraternity because its very structure required the systematic degradation of some groups by others, whereas the Buddhist sangha, in his reading, offered a historical model of a voluntary, non-hereditary community bound by ethical discipline rather than birth. He also defined four tests that a religion must meet: that society needs a sanction of law or morality to hold together; that religion must accord with reason, which he called another name for science; that its moral code must recognize liberty, equality, and fraternity; and that religion must not sanctify or ennoble poverty.

Buddhism and Marx

In a late essay, "Buddha or Karl Marx," Ambedkar directly compared Buddhism with Marxism as rival diagnoses of, and remedies for, social suffering. He credited Marxism with correctly identifying exploitation and the necessity of eliminating private property in the means of production as a route to human welfare, but rejected the Marxist means of violent revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and a purely materialist account of history and morality; he argued that Buddhism achieved a comparable commitment to economic justice and the abolition of exploitation while grounding it in individual moral transformation, non-violence, and democratic, gradualist means. The essay's fuller structure is an introduction and eight sub-topics, running from the creed of the Buddha and the original creed of Marx to a comparison of means and the withering away of the state. Ambedkar accepts as surviving from Marx only a "residue of fire" (p. 444) and rejects the "inevitability" of class struggle and the progressive impoverishment of the working class; he allows that a proletarian dictatorship might be a necessity for backward countries but argues that it must give way to a democratic phase. In the last section he says that the Russians pay no attention to Buddhism as an aid in sustaining Communism once force is withdrawn, and that "the wonder of all wonders" is that the Buddha established communism within the Sangha without dictatorship.

The same arguments appear in speeches of 1956. At the Nagpur conversion he contrasted "the school of Karl Marx", which holds that economic change comes first and everything else follows, with his own view that people also need to feel enthusiastic and creative and be gripped by energy to change things, which only religion could supply; and he asked what Marx taught that differed from the Buddha's saying on sorrow. At Kathmandu on November 20, 1956, delegates insisted on the subject of "Buddha or Karl Marx"; Ambedkar himself called it "Buddhism and Communism". He argued that the Buddha used dukkha in the sense of poverty, that the rules of the Sangha were stricter than any Communist rule in Russia, that Buddhism would not stand in the way of abolishing private property because the Sangha had already conceded it, and that a Marxist must say how long a dictatorship lasts and what replaces it; he ended with the injunction not to be allured by Communist successes. The speech and the essay overlap on dukkha and poverty, property in the Sangha, and dictatorship.

How far Ambedkar's Buddhism should be read as a form of socialism has been much debated. He explicitly refused the label and criticized the Communist Party of India's disregard for caste as a category of oppression distinct from class; his insistence that the state must play an active role in economic life, expressed programmatically in his 1947 memorandum States and Minorities, which proposed state ownership of key industries and agriculture, and his description of Buddhism's economic content as aiming at the abolition of poverty and exploitation, place him in close, if unresolved, tension with socialist thought. Geetha judges that the essay takes an ethical lens to Marxism and a socialist lens to Buddhism, pressing Buddhism into the service of distributive justice more emphatically than The Buddha and His Dhamma, without ever quoting Marx or citing specific Marxist texts. Skaria offers a different, avowedly interpretive reading that claims no textual influence: Ambedkar's most sustained engagement with Marx lies on the shared terrain of the "minor", in the way a "religion of the principle" sits between civil religion and Marx's critique of religion and secularism in "On the Jewish Question", and Ambedkar is, for Skaria, more faithful than Marx to the spectrality of that essay's argument. Skaria himself says he has not ascertained that Ambedkar read "On the Jewish Question", and Ambedkar says only that he studied Marx at length and taught economics. The secondary debate in a recent anthology gives several positions: Guru holds that Ambedkar's Buddhism can be neither reduced to Marxism nor opposed to it, credits the Dalit Panthers' manifesto as the first to bring Ambedkar and Marx together, and argues that the annihilation of caste is a precondition for the annihilation of class (and reports, on an inference from the editors' note, that the original title was "Buddha and Karl Marx"); Bagade stresses Ambedkar's rejection of "rigid Marxist economism" and his treatment of a socio-religious revolution as the prerequisite of a socialist one; and Gokhale notes that the essay reduces what survives of Marx's creed to four points all found already in Buddhism, differing on means.

Ambedkar's practical relations with the organized Indian left were uneasy. Ober, citing Anupama Rao, notes his personal distrust, the dominance of Brahmins in the Communist Party, and direct competition over shared Dalit constituencies in Maharashtra, so that his comparison of Buddhism and Marxism as "two universalisms" in his last months does not imply warmth toward the Left in practice. Nehru's government did not invite him to the 1952 Sanchi relic ceremony and refused his 1956 request for funds to distribute The Buddha and His Dhamma. Ambedkar also insisted that his conversion, and the Dhamma he articulated, remained continuous with an "Indic" civilizational identity, distinguishing his choice of Buddhism from Islam or Christianity on the grounds that it did not require his followers to abandon their attachment to the subcontinent's own religious and cultural inheritance, even as it constituted a definitive and public rejection of Hinduism. Ambedkar's comparison of Buddhism and Marxism is thus his own interpretation of Buddhist doctrine and history, joined to active religious leadership and a personal conversion; it is not an adoption of Marxism.

Writings

Ambedkar's writings are collected in:
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar : Writings and Speeches
First Edition: Education Department, Govt. of Maharashtra, 1979. Reprinted by the Dr. Ambedkar Foundation in 2014 and 2019. Freely available online.

The following is a very selective list of some of Ambedkar's key writings. Page references to the Writings and Speeches follow the 2019 Foundation reprint.

• Ambedkar, B.R. (1936). Annihilation of Caste. In Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1. [Originally an undelivered address prepared for the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal in Lahore, this is Ambedkar's most influential political tract, arguing that caste is sanctioned by Hindu scripture itself and cannot be reformed away without rejecting the religious authority of the Vedas and Shastras.]
• Ambedkar, B.R. (1947). States and Minorities: What Are Their Rights and How to Secure Them in the Constitution of Free India. In Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1. [A constitutional memorandum proposing state ownership of key industries and collectivized agriculture alongside political safeguards for minorities, reflecting Ambedkar's statist economic programme.]
• Ambedkar, B.R. (1948). The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables. In Writings and Speeches, Vol. 7. [A historical argument that the untouchables were "broken men", the Buddhist remnant of a conquered indigenous population, which sets out the historical premise of his later turn to Buddhism.]
• Ambedkar, B.R. (1948, March 10). Preface to Narasu, P. Lakshmi, The Essence of Buddhism (3rd ed.). Thacker. [Ambedkar's endorsement of Narasu's book as the best on Buddhism then available; reproduced in Aloysius (1998), Appendix 10.]
• Ambedkar, B.R. (1950). "The Buddha and the Future of His Religion". In Writings and Speeches, Vol. 17, part II: 97–108. [An article of 1950 on the future of Buddhism in the modern world, listed by Geetha among his key Buddhist texts.]
• Ambedkar, B.R. (composed 1950s, unfinished; published 1987). "Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India". In Writings and Speeches, Vol. 3. [An unfinished manuscript arguing that the historical decline of Buddhism in India resulted from a Brahminical "counter-revolution" that reimposed caste hierarchy; includes the chapter "The Decline and Fall of Buddhism."]
• Ambedkar, B.R. (1956). "Buddha or Karl Marx". In Writings and Speeches, Vol. 3: 441–462. [A posthumously published essay, compiled by the editors from typed copies, comparing Buddhism and Marxism as rival routes to the elimination of exploitation and arguing for the superiority of Buddhist ethical and democratic means over Marxist revolutionary violence.]
• Ambedkar, B.R. (1956, October 14–15). "The Twenty-Two Vows". Delivered at the mass conversion ceremony, Nagpur. In Writings and Speeches, Vol. 17, part III, pp. 530–2. [The vows Ambedkar administered to his followers at the Nagpur conversion, renouncing Hindu deities, ritual, and caste practice and affirming Buddhist ethical principles; foundational to the self-understanding of the Ambedkarite Buddhist movement. The Nagpur speech of 15 October 1956 follows at pp. 537–543.]
• Ambedkar, B.R. (1956, November 20). Speech at the Fourth General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, Kathmandu. In Writings and Speeches, Vol. 17, part III: 549–558. [Printed under the title "Buddha or Karl Marx" but described by Ambedkar as "Buddhism and Communism"; his last extended statement on the comparison, delivered in the palace of the King of Nepal.]
• Ambedkar, B.R. (composed 1956; published 1957). The Buddha and His Dhamma. In Writings and Speeches, Vol. 11. [Ambedkar's systematic reconstruction of Buddhist doctrine as a rational, ethical, and socially engaged teaching purged of what he considered later monastic and metaphysical accretions; the foundational scriptural text of the Ambedkarite Buddhist movement.]

Secondary Literature in English

• Rodrigues, Valerian (2024). Ambedkar's Political Philosophy: A Grammar of Public Life from the Social Margins. Palgrave Macmillan. [Argues that Ambedkar developed a distinct and internally consistent conceptual vocabulary for public life, reworking concepts inherited from liberalism, Marxism, and Gandhian thought from the standpoint of the socially marginalized rather than simply borrowing from any one tradition.]
• Ober, Douglas (2023). Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India. Stanford University Press. [Chapter 5 documents the Buddhist networks, teachers, and institutions that Ambedkar drew on before 1956 and argues against the notion that he built Buddhism from scratch; chapter 7 treats his relations with Nehru's government and the Left.]
• Geetha, V. (2021). Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India. Palgrave Macmillan (Marx, Engels, and Marxisms series). [A monograph-length study of Ambedkar's ambivalent relationship to socialism, culminating in a close reading of "Buddha or Karl Marx" as an argument for fraternal ethics and economic justice achieved through Buddhist rather than Marxist means; situates his Buddhism within debates on revolution, historical time, and the annihilation of caste.]
• Gokhale, Pradeep P. (Ed.) (2021). Classical Buddhism, Neo-Buddhism and the Question of Caste. Routledge. [Proceedings of a seminar at Sarnath containing several chapters on Ambedkar and Marx, including Guru, Bagade, Gokhale, and Kumar, and a foreword by Gail Omvedt; useful for the range of scholarly positions on whether his Buddhism is compatible with Marxism.]
• Skaria, Ajay (2015). "Ambedkar, Marx and the Buddhist Question". South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38.3: 450–465. [An interpretive article asking why a militant secularist converts to Buddhism and reading "Buddha or Karl Marx" and The Buddha and His Dhamma alongside Marx's "On the Jewish Question"; it claims no textual influence and its thesis is one scholar's reading.]
• Gokhale, Balkrishna Govind (1999). "Theravada Buddhism and Modernization: Anagarika Dhammapala and B.R. Ambedkar". Journal of Asian and African Studies 34.1: 33–46. [A comparative study contrasting Dharmapala's reaffirmation of Theravada Buddhism as a basis for Sinhalese cultural nationalism with Ambedkar's much later turn to Buddhism as an instrument of social liberation and cultural transcendence for India's untouchables.]
• Aloysius, G. (1998). Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement among the Tamils under Colonialism. New Age International. [The standard monograph on the South Indian Buddhist movement, whose eighth chapter argues for Ambedkar's links with Tamil Buddhism and whose Appendix 10 reproduces his 1948 preface to Narasu; the Ambedkar thesis is the author's own and rests largely on inference and oral testimony.]

Secondary Literature in Other Languages

(none identified)

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "B.R. Ambedkar". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 27 October 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/BR_Ambedkar.