There may only be a few people outside the subcontinent who have heard of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. But as one of the founders of modern India, he was a revered scholar who championed the rights of Dalits, while his work as a civil rights leader has been likened to that of Martin Luther King Jr in the US.
A new film aims to revive the memory and the message of Ambedkar, affectionately known as “Babasaheb”, who was born a Dalit – the lowest rank of India’s caste system – but became an activist who helped draft the post-independence constitution, worked as an economist and a politician, and is now revered as a Buddhist saint.
His 1927 protest led thousands of fellow Dalits, known then as the “untouchables”, to drink from a public water tank – something forbidden at the time. It was a landmark moment and the date, 20 March, is still marked as Social Empowerment Day in India.
“Ambedkar is our hero, because of him we’ve got human rights,” says Somnath Waghmare, the film-maker behind Chaityabhumi, a documentary he hopes will resonate in today’s India, which is again being pulled apart by religious and social divisions.
Waghmare was born into a rural Dalit-Buddhist family in the western state of Maharashtra, where Ambedkar’s march took place. “Ambedkar is our Martin Luther King, yet our issues are still present,” he says.
“I think caste is the biggest social problem in India,” he said. “It is a similar social issue to racism.
“But because of our constitution, which Ambedkar drafted, there are rights to protect Dalit people. Discrimination became illegal even though it is rife in today’s India.”
Chaityabhumi, which premiered on 24 October at the London School of Economics, where Ambedkar worked on his doctoral thesis in 1916, is a reference to the campaigner’s shrine in Mumbai. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Dalits, flock to Chaityabhumi on 6 December to commemorate Ambedkar’s death.
Born in 1891, Amebedkar escaped poverty and discrimination through scholarships, studying economics at Columbia University in New York and the LSE, but spent most of his life in Mumbai, becoming a key figure in the Dalit movement.
Around the time of his civil disobedience march, he was active in campaigning and he dedicated much of his later life to empowering Dalit rights. His biggest contribution came in 1947, in his role as the chief architect of India’s constitution after independence.
Jawaharlal Nehru, the new prime minister, invited him to take charge of the committee tasked with drafting it. It stipulated the abolition of “untouchability” and allowed Dalit people and other minorities fair access to education.
In the final months of his life in 1956, Ambedkar converted to Buddhism, renouncing Hinduism for its perpetuation of the caste system. Many Dalits followed suit.
Waghmare’s documentary features interviews with scholars, including with Rahul Sonpimple, who grew up in a slum in Nagpuur in Maharashtra state. “The Ambedkarite movement is there in everyday life,” he says.
“Ambedkar was a part of all the conversations, so if you don’t have good shoes, your mother would say, ‘Ambedkar also went to school without shoes’, even if he didn’t! He was the perfect example for us.”
Shakuntala Banaji, a professor of social change at LSE, said she was “deeply moved” watching the new documentary. “After generations of misrepresentation in, or exclusion from, mainstream Indian cinemas and media, Dalit-Bahujan directors and producers have started to tell the stories of their communities in original and exciting ways,” she says.
Bahujan – “the majority” – is a term used in Buddhist texts and chosen by the anti-caste social movement to refer to scheduled castes and other minorities.
“Both [Mahatma] Gandhi and Babasaheb Ambedkar would be horrified and ashamed at the levels of discrimination happening in contemporary India and had they been alive today, both would have recognised these ordinary people [seen in Waghmare’s film] as the true heirs of the anti-colonial freedom struggle,” Banaji says.
Prachi Patankar, a US-based activist and the daughter of Gail Omvedt, a leading anti-caste campaigner, said Ambedkar’s commitment was to achieve independence for Indian people, not only from the shackles of colonialism but from the dominance of the Brahmins, the highest caste of Hindu society.
“Ambedkar was waging a struggle to fight the colonial powers along with the internal Brahmanical dominance that systematically kept the Dalit-Bahujan and Adivasi masses in oppressive and exploitative conditions,” she says. Adivasis are Indigenous ethnic minorities across the Indian subcontinent.
“His opposition to British imperialism included a strong indictment of their approach of collaborating with the dominant-caste Hindus to maintain their colonial power by reinforcing existing Brahmanical Hindu dominance, caste supremacy and the exploitation of peasants and workers.”
Even though he was a revered leader, Gandhi’s vision for post-independence India did not include ending the oppressive caste system.
As the Hindu nationalist regime in India attempts to reshape the nation as a Hindu rashtra [nation], Patankar says Ambedkar’s vision of caste annihilation, economic equality, gender justice and religious pluralism is more important than ever.
Martin Luther King visited India in 1959, three years after Ambedkar’s death, and was initially put out when a school headteacher called him “a fellow ‘untouchable’ from the United States of America”. It took him a while to consider it but later he acknowledged there was a connection and said: “Yes, I am an ‘untouchable’, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.”
