The struggle to publish BR Ambedkar's writing

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• Even though Ambedkar’s ideas have inspired generations of people around the world, their spread has often been in spite of, rather than due to, the government’s efforts.

• The Buddha and His Dhamma was completed in March 1956, after five years of laborious effort. But Ambedkar could not secure the twenty thousand rupees required to print it.

• “I am dreadfully in a hurry,” he added, so, if Tata had refused his request, he would “like to go with my bowl to another door.”

• Masani wrote back that the trust could not publish the book but would provide monetary assistance.

• Ambedkar wrote to Nehru, asking the government to purchase 500 copies of The Buddha and His Dhamma and distribute them among state libraries and visiting dignitaries. Nehru refused.

• Ambedkar died in his sleep on 6 December. His vast corpus of unpublished writings led a tortured afterlife. The manuscripts languished in the Alipur Road bungalow for years, until Savita Ambedkar was forced out along with the papers.

• Ambedkar’s relatives and followers, such as JB Bansod and JV Pawar, had to petition the government and judiciary for years before they were brought into public light. It was only as a result of this pressure that the Maharashtra government began releasing the Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches series in 1982—a quarter century after his death.

• The committee has brought out 22 volumes of Ambedkar’s work to date, the last of them over a decade ago. There is no clarity on how many remain to be published.

• There are many reasons for the official neglect of his writings—not least Ambedkar’s unabashed critique of Hinduism.

• Some have alleged that the committee has excluded numerous prominent Ambedkarite intellectuals, and others that it has more recently included figures with ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

• ON THE MORNING that he died, Ambedkar was supposed to go over the final proofs of his preface and introduction to The Buddha and His Dhamma with Rattu, before sending them off for publication. The preface was neither included in the PES edition, nor in the 1979 reprint of the book by the Maharashtra government.

• Ambedkar added that The Buddha and His Dhamma “is one of the three books which will form a set for the proper understanding of Buddhism.” It was meant to be read in conjunction with two of his other works in progress at the time, Buddha and Karl Marx and Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India, in order to place Buddha’s theology in the context of the social revolution against the caste order that Buddhism represented.

• Ambedkar’s first wife, Ramabai, had died in 1935. He had resolved to not remarry, he wrote, even though the decision had not pleased his friends. “Notwithstanding this, I have been beginning to feel that in the interest of health I may have to revise my resolution and that my own people will not forgive me if I refused the aid of a woman assuming such aid is absolutely essential for the restoration of my health,” Ambedkar wrote. “If at all it comes to this,” he added, “such a woman can only be my lawfully wedded wife and not a nurse or a companion.”

• In January 1948, Ambedkar had consulted Malvankar about severe leg pain caused by diabetes. Dr Sharda Kabir, who practised at the same clinic as Malvankar in Bombay, was put in charge of his treatment.

• In a letter dated 12 February, Ambedkar turned to a crucial issue regarding their marriage. Kabir was a Saraswat Brahmin and had asked him not to inform her relatives of their engagement until after the wedding. “The reason I believe is that your relations would object to your marrying me on account of my low origin,” Ambedkar wrote. “My origin will remain what it is. I can not change it nor any body else can.”

• Kabir did not change her mind, and the two were married on 15 April 1948 at Ambedkar’s house in Delhi. She changed her name to Savita Ambedkar.

• Ambedkar was worried about a colleague sowing trouble between Kabir and Yeshwant, his son from his first marriage.

• In 1952, after Ambedkar failed to win a Lok Sabha seat in the country’s first general election, she asked Chitre to have him elected to the Rajya Sabha since “politics was Doctor’s very existence, the best tonic for his mental and physical health,” Keer paraphrases.

• Keer also notes that nobody “was allowed to touch any book in Ambedkar’s library. He once said that if ever owing to any misfortune, a bailiff came to take possession of his library, he would kill him on the spot before he touched the first book. Books were the breath of his life.”

• Savita’s Brahmin habitus and privilege created hurdles to her assimilation among a section of Ambedkar’s close aides, who felt alienated due to her proximity to Ambedkar.

• The mistrust of her grew and, in the aftermath of Ambedkar’s death, a conspiracy theory that held her responsible for the loss was widely circulated and believed.

• He mentions several reasons why Ambedkarites blamed her for her husband’s death, including her failure to inform leaders of the movement of his death on the morning of 6 December, her alleged reluctance to allow the domestic help to enter Ambedkar’s room that day and her insistence on having the body cremated in Sarnath as soon as possible instead of waiting for the elaborate funeral in Bombay that the movement felt was more appropriate. She eventually agreed to a Bombay funeral, and Ambedkar was cremated at Chaitya Bhoomi in Dadar.

• Rattu himself makes much of her refusal to have other doctors examine her husband, even though she and Malvankar had little success with his ailments. Her intransigence, he writes, was the cause of many tumultuous arguments, often ending with Ambedkar refusing to eat.

• Nehru did eventually order a probe, which concluded that Ambedkar had died of natural causes, but the government’s refusal to release the full inquiry report kept the issue alive.

• AMBEDKAR DID NOT leave behind a will. After the funeral, Yeshwant Ambedkar returned to Delhi and petitioned a sessions court to be named his father’s sole heir. The court ordered that Ambedkar’s possessions at the Alipur Road bungalow, including his papers, be sealed until the property dispute was settled.

• The bungalow belonged to the maharaja of Sirohi. In 1966, a decade after Ambedkar’s death, the property was purchased by one Madan Lal Jain, who reassured Savita Ambedkar that she could continue living there for as long as she wished.

• In her absence, men acting on Jain’s orders took possession of the house and emptied out Ambedkar’s belongings. When she returned that evening, she was refused entry.

• Moreover, Rattu writes, “they removed countless precious documents and important papers, nicely kept in the several racks of a big store room and recklessly dumped in an open yard opposite the shed in a most shameful manner, not realizing the importance of these.”

• “Since this bungalow was sanctified by Saheb, I strongly wished that it should not be sold or demolished, and that it should be a national memorial,” Savita Ambedkar recalls in her autobiography. “I approached almost every member of parliament and leaders who called themselves the political heirs of Ambedkar. But no one showed any interest, or even any attention, towards this.”

• The Narendra Modi government eventually built a memorial to Ambedkar at the site, which Modi himself inaugurated in 2018. Spread over two acres, the memorial cost Rs 100 crore and depicts Ambedkar only as a nationalist icon. There is little mention of his anti-caste struggles, and nothing that serves as a reminder of the bungalow that once stood there.

• With a nonchalance aided by his youth, he asked her, “Maisaheb, there is a perception in our community that you poisoned Babasaheb Ambedkar to death. What do you have to say?” There was a brief silence, after which Savita laughed. “Arre, what you’re asking is nothing new,” she said. “I have been hearing this all these years.”

• Having maintained a close acquaintance with Savita Ambedkar until her death, in 2003, Surwade disputed accusations that she took no initiative in publishing her husband’s manuscripts.

• Besides his writing in English, Ambedkar edited three Marathi newspapers, Janata, Mooknayak and Bahishkrit Bharat.

• Pawar said that Raja Dhale, another co-founder of the Dalit Panthers, asked the chief minister, Vasantrao Naik, “You are publishing Gandhi’s literature, but why are you not publishing Babasaheb’s literature?”

• Pawar agreed with Surwade that Rattu had exaggerated Savita’s indifference towards publishing the papers. He also disputed Rattu’s characterisation of the scale of the damage to the papers as a result of Savita’s 1967 eviction.

• “Membership to the committee was limited to Maharashtra’s politicians and intellectuals,” Bhagwan Das, a member of the Scheduled Castes Federation who worked with Ambedkar as a research assistant, writes in his book In Pursuit of Ambedkar.

• The economist and Ambedkarite scholar Sukhadeo Thorat writes that Moon was part of a generation of Dalit government employees and social workers who produced most of the Ambedkarite scholarship in India during the first two decades after Ambedkar’s death.

• Teltumbde writes that Moon’s deputation to the committee “was an official assignment,” but “a staunch Ambedkarite in him transformed this job into a mission. It will not be exaggeration to say that he was possessed by this work until his death. He spent almost all his waking life on it.”

• Savita Ambedkar wrote a letter to a Bombay-based solicitor shortly before the committee took custody of the papers. She instructed him to ask the administrator general that he ensure adequate security of the manuscripts. She was concerned about papers being misplaced

• The government had wanted to publish The Buddha and His Dhamma first, but Moon had insisted that the first BAWS volume be about caste.

• Soon after the first volume was published, Moon was temporarily removed from the committee, as the government felt he was approaching the task of publication as an Ambedkarite rather than as a bureaucrat. Moon enlisted the support of Ambedkarite activists such as Bhagwan Das and Jotiba Godbole, who successfully lobbied the government to have him reinstated. Later, the government tried to make it untenable for him to remain in the post, at one point even denying him official transportation.

• Savita Ambedkar, however, was not pleased with Moon’s performance. In 1994, she wrote to Sharad Pawar, the chief minister of Maharashtra at the time, asking for Moon’s removal. “I observe that Mr Vasant Moon is prolonging the work without much interest except his extension of tenure on deputation,” she wrote. “I, therefore, sincerely feel that his extension may not be considered further, as no fruitful purpose of the government is achieved, for which, he had been deputed, even after his retirement.”

• “The government always works like this,” Raosaheb Kasbe said about the delays in the BAWS process. “There are many pressure groups surrounding it. Each pressure group has its own role. Even then, the work done by Vasant Moon was excellent.”

• “The manuscripts of ‘Riddles of Hinduism’ have been found in separate chapters bundled together in one file,” the editors write in the volume’s introduction. “These chapters contain corrections, erasures, alterations, etc. by the hands of Dr. Ambedkar himself. Fortunately, the introduction by Dr. Ambedkar is also available for this book. We, however, regret that the final manuscript of this volume has not been found.”

• The publication of Riddles had been held up, Rattu writes, because Ambedkar wanted to include two photographs. The first was of Rajendra Prasad, the first president of India, who, “when he went to Benares, worshipped the Brahmins, washed their toes and drank the water.” The second was of Nehru on 15 August 1947, when he “sat at the yajna performed by the Brahmins of Benares to celebrate the event of a Brahmin becoming the first prime minister of free and independent India, wore the Raja Danda given to him by the Brahmins and drank the water of the Ganges brought by them.”

• According to Rattu, Prasad’s photo was sourced but the one featuring Nehru was never found. The Maharashtra government’s edition of the book did not carry either image or mention either event.

• In 1987, Maharashtra was gripped by an agitation to rename Aurangabad’s Marathwada University after Ambedkar. The Maratha community responded with violence against Dalits, and Bal Thackeray, the founder of the Shiv Sena, issued the slogan “Gharaat Naahi Peeth, Kashala Havey Vidyapeeth?”—They don’t have food in their homes, why do they want a university?

• Soon after the fourth volume was released, the Marathi newspaper Loksatta carried a column by its editor, Madhav Gadkari, criticising an appendix to Riddles for maligning the Hindu deities Ram and Krishna.

• The Maratha Mahasangh and the Shiv Sena took to the streets, demanding the appendix’s removal. Thackeray issued a call for the consolidation of those with “pure Hindu blood” against Riddles. “This appeal left an impact among common Hindus and the movement grew bigger,” Pawar writes. “It presented a challenge before [the] Ambedkarite community.”

• After a delegation met Chavan, the state education minister, Ram Meghe, announced that the appendix would be withdrawn.

• Ambedkarite organisations held another mass protest, and called for Chavan and Meghe to resign. “As per the agreement that we, the heirs, have signed with the Maharashtra government, they have only been given the right to publish,” Prakash Ambedkar said at the protest

• In future editions, “The Riddle of Rama and Krishna” would come with a footnote: “Government does not concur with the views expressed in the chapter.”

• Riddles in Hinduism is one of four BAWS volumes now out of print, according to the committee’s response to a right-to-information request I filed. It is not available among the piles of complimentary copies for visitors at the committee’s present office, in Mumbai’s Ballard Estate. At the government-run press in nearby Charni Road, where BAWS volumes are printed, a staff member said, in June 2019, that the book had been out of print for “at least one-and-a-half to two years.”

• Ever since Modi was elected prime minister, in 2014, the party has made various symbolic gestures to claim Ambedkar’s legacy. Before the 2017 assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Modi launched the Bharat Interface for Money, an online-payment application whose acronym, BHIM, was billed as a tribute to Ambedkar as a scholar of economics.

• In 2018, the new BJP government in Uttar Pradesh announced its decision to refer to Ambedkar in all official documents as “Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.”

• Dalit intellectuals saw the unusual insistence on using Ambedkar’s middle name as an attempt to ascribe a Hindu identity to a man who rejected the religion outright.

• A corpus of Rs 3 crore was allocated to the committee every year, Kamble added, but lapsed without being utilised. Prakash Bansod, who has been monitoring the committee’s progress for years through right-to-information applications, confirmed this.

• NG Kamble, who served on the committee under both Moon and Narke, said that vested interests and political considerations severely affected its functioning.

• Bansod added that, for the financial year 2019–20, “the BJP government allotted a budget of Rs 4.8 lakh”—amounting to a 98.4-percent cut—“to the committees for Ambedkar, Phule and Shahu put together.”

• “JV Pawar, Namdeo Dhasal put a lot of pressure on the then government to publish them,” Jogdand said. “This is how 22 volumes are out now.”

• As an example of the kinds of documents that could be published in future BAWS volumes, Shinde retrieved a printout of an article published by the magazine Time in March 1936. It describes Ambedkar as “probably the only man alive who ever walked out in a huff from a private audience with the Pope.” Ambedkar had taken offence at Pius XI’s assertion that it might take “three or four centuries” to resolve the discrimination faced by India’s Dalits.

• The article reported that Ambedkar was considering converting to Christianity after he denounced Hinduism at the Depressed Classes Conference in 1935. It quotes him telling a reporter from Zion’s Herald, “Hinduism is not a religion. It is a disease.”

• The photobiography has been a cause for disappointment among Ambedkarites. It contained several factual errors, and Shinde counted 703 misspellings. He wrote a detailed article in the Marathi daily Maharashtra Times listing out mistakes—for instance, the assertion that the Burmese monk Mahasthavir Chandramani had ordained the six hundred thousand followers who converted to Buddhism with Ambedkar in Nagpur on 14 October 1956. In fact, Ambedkar had ordained his followers himself. Widespread criticism forced Dolas to reissue the volume during his tenure.

• For example, Ambedkar’s wedding with Savita is described in a caption as a grand function attended by Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, the country’s first home minister. On the contrary, Surwade said, “hardly twelve people were present.” He called the caption a “historical mistake.”

• The letter asked him to turn his entire collection over to the committee so that the photographs could be scanned and sent back. “Who will give, tell me?” Surwade said. “We have collected so laboriously. I have spent maximum money, maximum labour, maximum time to collect all this. How will I give everything to you?”

• Shinde shared a copy of Publication of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings-Speeches: Problems & Solutions, a collection of English and Marathi essays edited and compiled by Prakash Bansod. The book is a scathing criticism of Narke’s editorial leadership.

• The photobiography also contains a message for readers, cautioning them against reproducing or transmitting the material in any form “without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.” Busi sees this as a strange directive. “Any material that is published by the government on Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar shall be encouraged to be republished or extensively quoted by others without any permission of the government in Maharashtra so that there is extensive dissemination of Dr Ambedkar’s philosophy,” he writes.

• The mistreatment of Ambedkarite literature by consecutive governments has provoked demands for an autonomous foundation to publish his works without the lapses and delays associated with the BAWS effort.

• At Dadar’s Chaitya Bhoomi, where Ambedkar was cremated, stalls sell his books all year round. Sales peak on important anniversaries, when thousands visit to pay their respects. The booksellers travel to Nagpur and Aurangabad to source most of their wares, primarily from small private publishers