Why Read Babasaheb Ambedkar
Patrick French, the author of India: a portrait, is fascinated by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. He even counts Essential Writings of Babasaheb Ambedkar as a must-read to know India. He also describes the writings of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar as comparable with the writings of George Orwell.
Orwell has been lauded for his immense contribution in understanding authoritarianism in the forms of dominant ideologies through writing popular books conveying deeper structures such as 1984 and Animal Farm. His novel Burmese Days is important as well. His take on how language and politics are intertwined and create power is very well documented and useful to understand the use of language in misleading people.
The thread is running through Thomas Jefferson, whose biography John Dewey wrote, of whose Babasaheb Ambedkar was a student in Columbia University and owed his intellectual life to Dewey, all the way up to Christopher Hitchens who lauded Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and wrote a readable account of Orwell’s life and thoughts. Patrick French no doubt is influenced by Orwell and impressed with Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar.
Slowly, but surely, Babasaheb Ambedkar will appeal to intellectuals, civil rights leaders, Buddhists, and lovers of democracy from all over the world. This is happening and it will speed up.
However, this comparison deserves some comments. Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar never used the literary genre of novels or novellas to further his emancipatory project. He recommended a few novels and read them thoroughly, references that are scattered. He wanted to write a novel, but could not due to his busy life.
Where do we situate the vast body of writings of Babasaheb Ambedkar in the literary genres? His books are scholarly and written with purpose. Sometimes, his methods are devised de novo to study particular subjects not studied earlier. Sometimes, he writes in different literary forms in a single book. And if one is equipped with a vast body of understanding and use of different literary forms and tools, one can take immerse delight in reading his books and teasing out knowledge and wisdom.
The way he constructs the theory of the origin of Shudras and untouchables is a great art of knowledge production based on vast and deep reading, but also imaginative and reasoned way of thinking and arriving at the conclusions.
What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables is a work of very high calibre. And his Thoughts on Pakistan is a masterpiece.
He delights, provokes, urges, and leaves you free to decide for yourself instead of bringing his personality between him and the truths that he expounds.
That’s why reading Babasaheb Ambedkar is a total experience if we can immerse into it from whatever background we engage with him. Reading Babasaheb Ambedkar is entering into entirely a different world, as Perry Anderson remarked.
Author – Mangesh Dahiwale, Human Rights Activist
Best