B.R. Ambedkar

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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 his last completed essay, placed in comparison with Marxism as a rival path to human liberation. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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 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.

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. In his final completed essay, "Buddha or Karl Marx," composed in the last years of his life, 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.

Recent scholarship has debated how far Ambedkar's Buddhism should be read as a form of socialism proper: while 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. 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.

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.

• 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. (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. (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.]
• Ambedkar, B.R. (1956). "Buddha or Karl Marx". In Writings and Speeches, Vol. 3. [Ambedkar's final completed essay, 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.]

Secondary Literature in English

• Rodrigues, Valerian (2024). Ambedkar's Political Philosophy: A Grammar of Public Life from the Social Margins. Cham: 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.]
• Geetha, V. (2021). Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India. Cham: 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, 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.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos 2026). "B.R. Ambedkar". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 15 August 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/BR_Ambedkar.