B. R. Ambedkar 1891 – 1956

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer, and the principal architect of the Indian Constitution. Born into the Mahar caste, he was the first Dalit to earn doctorates from Columbia and the London School of Economics, and devoted his life to the abolition of caste and the political and economic emancipation of the Dalits. His Annihilation of Caste remains one of the most powerful indictments of the Indian social order. Late in life he led half a million of his followers in conversion to Buddhism, founding a neo-Buddhist movement that has continued to grow.

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born in 1891 at Mhow in central India to a family of the Mahar caste, then classed as untouchable. Despite the discriminations of his early education he took degrees at Bombay, at Columbia in New York (MA 1915, PhD 1927), and at the London School of Economics (DSc 1923), and was called to the bar at Gray's Inn — an unprecedented academic career for an Indian Dalit of his generation.

From the 1920s he led the political and intellectual movement for Dalit emancipation, founding journals, organizations, and the Mahad satyagraha for water rights, and clashing with Mahatma Gandhi over separate electorates in the Poona Pact of 1932. After independence he served as the first Law Minister of India and as chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution adopted in 1949. His books include Annihilation of Caste (1936), Who Were the Shudras?, The Untouchables, States and Minorities, The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957), and Thoughts on Pakistan.

Ambedkar made the abolition of caste and the constitutional guarantee of equal citizenship the central political problems of modern India, and in 1956, shortly before his death, publicly converted to Buddhism with hundreds of thousands of followers, founding the contemporary Navayana Buddhist movement. He died at Delhi in December 1956 and is honored in India as a Bharat Ratna and as a principal architect of the Indian Republic.