ON JANUARY 18, 1940, B.R. Ambedkar stood before a Poona audience gathered to celebrate the 101st birth-anniversary of jurist, economist and the foremost social reformer of nineteenth-century Maharashtra, Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade. . He accepted the invitation reluctantly. He knew, as he later wrote in the preface, that his views on social and political problems "would not be very pleasing to the audience." He delivered the address anyway which ran for an hour and a half.
What emerged from that evening was one of the most conceptually rich texts in Ambedkar's body of work. Published in 1943, after reviews had already condemned it,Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah is a dissection of his two famous contemporaries– a tribute to Ranade, and a sustained argument for why social reform is not merely prior to political freedom but constitutive of it.
This article introduces you to the text. The argument is Ambedkar's. The words, where it matters most, are his own.
Who makes a great man?
Ambedkar opens with a theoretical question that may seem academic but is, in fact, the engine of everything that followed: what makes a man great? He moved through Carlyle's test of sincerity, Rosebery's criterion of ‘natural power’ and genius, and a philosopher's notion of the great man as a "scourge and scavenger" born to cleanse society and lead it on to the right path to conclude that sincerity and intellect, while necessary, are not sufficient. A great man, according to him, must be "motivated by the dynamics of a social purpose."
By this measure, Ranade qualifies. A historian, economist, educationist, jurist; yet his title to greatness rested on a single overriding commitment– social reform. Ranade understood, in a way his opponents refused to, that Hindu society's political weakness was inseparable from its social deformation. His response to the fall of the Maratha Empire was not resignation. Ranade articulated a new faith, quoted Ambedkar:
"I profess implicit faith in two articles of my creed. This country of ours is the true land of promise. This race of ours is the chosen race."
