Babasaheb — The Liberator Who Chose the Dhamma
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Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) was born at Mhow in the Central Provinces on 14 April 1891 into a Mahar family, was schooled in Bombay, took his degrees at Elphinstone College, and in 1913–1915 went to Columbia University, where he wrote on provincial finance under the supervision of John Dewey. He returned to India, and the central work of his life was a sequence of campaigns against caste inequality: the movement for temple entry in the 1920s and early 1930s, his 1936 essay The Annihilation of Caste, and the Mahad Satyagraha campaigns in the Deccan in 1935. He was also the chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution of India.
On 14 November 1935 he declared that he would not teach a religion he did not hold, and on 14 October 1956, at the Nagpur ground, he and a great many people took the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts and entered what he called Navayāna — the "new vehicle" — later described by his community as the Navayana or Ambedkarite Buddhist tradition. He died in Delhi on 6 December 1956. His memorial shrines are at Chaityabhumi in Mumbai and at Dikshabhoomi in Nagpur, where a stupa in the śūlāvdāna form — not the chaitya prākāra form, in which Ambedkar was deliberately particular — holds his ashes. He had earlier organised the mass conversion of his caste into the Bahujan, a caste-reforming step, and the two identities (Bahujan and Buddhist) are both his.
Two things about this entry are contested and should not be flattened. The first is the relation of Navayāna to the Theravāda traditions that have an unbroken institutional history in South Asia — Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand and the Sinhala monasteries — and to the modern revival of Ambedkarite practice: scholars including Bhikkhu Bodhi have criticised what they see as a Kantian or neo-Vedāntine re-reading of the canon, a debate that continues inside the Sangha. The second is the well-known "temple entry then conversion" reading, in which the 1935–36 events are presented as a single intention, and which Ambedkar's own written statements qualify in places. Both positions are recorded here; the entry does not arbitrate. The person, the constitutional record and the documented conversion are not in dispute; the theology is.
