B. R. Ambedkar

Biography

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born in 1891 in the cantonment town of Mhow, the fourteenth child of an army subedar, into the Mahar caste, then treated as untouchable; as a schoolboy he was made to sit apart from his classmates. He graduated from Elphinstone College in Bombay in 1912 and, with a scholarship from the Gaekwad of Baroda, studied economics at Columbia University, which later awarded him a doctorate, and at the London School of Economics, which granted him a DSc in 1923. He also trained as a barrister at Gray's Inn.

Back in India he taught political economy at Sydenham College, practised law at the Bombay High Court and launched periodicals and associations to advance the depressed classes. In 1927 he led the Mahad Satyagraha for the right to draw water from a public tank and publicly burned the Manusmriti. His campaign for separate electorates for untouchables brought him into conflict with Gandhi and ended in the 1932 Poona Pact, which reserved seats for them within the general electorate. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1936, later reorganised as the Scheduled Castes Federation, and from 1942 to 1946 was Labour Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council.

At independence in 1947 he became India's first Law Minister and chairman of the committee that drafted the Constitution, adopted in November 1949. He left the cabinet in 1951 after the Hindu Code Bill was defeated, and later sat in the Rajya Sabha. Having long rejected Hinduism, he converted to Buddhism at a public ceremony in Nagpur in October 1956 together with hundreds of thousands of followers, and died in Delhi that December. He was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1990.