DR. AMBEDKAR has a living legacy in India today, unlike any other historical leader. His name is chanted in Jayanti rallies on April 14 where Dalits gather to sing, dance and celebrate. Across India, emancipatory politics and legal struggles claim inspiration from him. His legal reforms brought rights of inheritance, divorce and choice of a marriage partner to women, and his economic analysis propelled the birth of the Reserve Bank of India.
Ambedkar studied an extraordinary range of subjects and left original, rigorous scholarship in each of them. His writings on economics, history, law, religion, and morality provide frameworks on which we continue to build today. For instance, he wrote from the perspective of a colonized nation, before ‘Third World Approaches to International Law’ were developed. His insight that women are a gateway to caste is a foundation to the intersectional theories of caste and gender.
In times of incessant quote consumption on social media, most people circulate what is already in circulation. Students and readers too tend to rely on secondary material – other people’s views on what Ambedkar said or wrote – rather than the original texts. This project reintroduces several of Ambedkar’s writings, inviting readers to engage with his original work rather than with its reputation. The contributors are all PhD candidates studying theory within the course ‘Law and Society’. Each writer has studied one book/essay/ speech by Ambedkar and offered notes on how to understand and contextualise it, why it matters, and, mainly, what it says.
The writings selected for this series span caste, philosophy, religion, and economy. What is striking is not only the range of subjects he took on but the seriousness with which he took each one. When writing about the origins of caste, he worked as a social historian; when writing about monetary policy, as an economist; when writing about religion, as a philosopher. He did not write about everything at once. He went deep into one subject at a time, and he brought the full weight of his training to each.
This special series features five articles:
Abhijeet Gaurav Jha reads Ambedkar’s 1916 Columbia lecture, Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development, and shows that caste is neither divine nor mysterious, but a social institution built on the practice of endogamy -= marriage within the group. It needs specific mechanisms to sustain itself. Durgesh Kumar Dubey turns to the Untouchables (1948) to trace the historical roots of untouchability.
Arshia Sana introduces Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah (1943), the address Ambedkar delivered on the 101st birth anniversary of Justice Ranade, that argues that political freedom is hollow without social reform, that a democratic constitution built on a caste-stratified society will reproduce domination rather than dissolve it. Vishishth Malhotra reads Ambedkar's final lecture, Buddha or Karl Marx, delivered fifteen days before his death in December 1956. Mohd Imran reads The Problem of the Rupee (1923), Ambedkar's doctoral thesis at the London School of Economics, through the lens of Third World Approaches to International Law..