NEW AMBEDKAR BIOGRAPHY
Anand Teltumbde, Iconoclast: A Reflective Biography of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. Published in New Delhi in 2024 by Penguin/Viking.
This remarkable book will, I predict, be read, discussed, and cited for a long time, for it provides as complete a story as seems available of the man who has been replicated in India in more statues than any other human (or even divine) being, and whose name has been joined to more roads, towns, districts, universities, study circles, and other institutions than is the case with any other individual: Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956), lovingly and reverentially called “Babasaheb” by millions.
Anand Teltumbde, Iconoclast’s 73-year-old author, born in eastern Maharashtra, is among other things a prisoner of conscience currently on bail as also a Big Data Analyst. In addition, he is a professor of management, a corporate professional, an engineer, a political commentator – and a lover and scholar of Ambedkar. And the husband of Ambedkar’s only granddaughter, Ramatai, the daughter of Babasaheb’s son Yashwant (1912-77).
HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHS
An immense collection of photographs from every phase of Babasaheb’s life, and pictures also of his family, relatives, co-workers, and followers, forms part of this book of close to 700 pages. Teltumbde had first assembled the photographs in 1998 and published them on a CD-ROM. Iconoclast is worth studying for these historic photos alone.
The author tells the reader that he is not offering fresh information on Ambedkar. According to him, old and new Ambedkar biographies have, between them, told the whole story. Teltumbde wholeheartedly acknowledges their authors. Iconoclast’s special merit lies in Teltumbde’s wish to tell “the life story dispassionately”, and in his “supplementing” the story with his own frank “reflections”.
The frankness is real, and the reflections are frequently critical. Teltumbde swings his iconoclastic sword with the freedom that Ambedkar exercised when he took on critics or rivals, or when he commented on his older contemporary, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), of whom Ambedkar was by turns admirer, resolute-and-blunt foe, and, in 1947-48, partner in supplying newly freed India with a foundation of democracy.
NOTES TO A GREAT STORY
Informed by its author’s wide reading in a variety of disciplines – including history, political philosophy and sociology – Iconoclast divides the Ambedkar story into eight chronological phases. Significant events in his life, and significant moves by Ambedkar in India’s life, are concisely recounted and clearly sourced by Teltumbde. The reader of Iconoclastthus confronts a scholar who is both brilliant and careful. Teltumbde’s candid criticisms of Ambedkar are brief notes to the great story he is telling; they’re not the burden of the book.
The reader learns that Ambedkar’s father, Subedar Major Ramji Sakpal, who served the British Empire’s Indian Army in a variety of places, spoke English well (which, at the end of the 19th century, was rare for most Indians) and earned a salary that wasn’t too low for the time. And that most members of the extended family, including Bhiva, as the child Ambedkar was called before he became “Bhimrao”, devoutly sang or recited verses in Marathi by poets like Dnyaneshwar and Tukaram.
The horrific insults and cruelties that Bhimrao and his relatives faced as Dalits are recorded, as also the encouragement and help he received, including from a few Brahmins and from the Kolhapur raja. The book provides glimpses of a vast array of events and episodes: Ambedkar’s higher education at New York’s Columbia University and then in London and in Bonn in Germany; the journals and organizations he would found; the books he would write about India’s past and about Hindu society (which Ambedkar famously likened to a tall building with many floors but no means of moving between floors); Ambedkar’s Mahad satyagraha of 1927; his historic and controversial Poona Pact of 1932 with Gandhi; his 1941 book on Pakistan, which was first demanded in 1940; his role as a Member of the Viceroy’s executive council from 1942 to 1945; his post-independence role in 1947-1949 in architecting India’s constitution; his conversion to Buddhism in 1956; his passing shortly thereafter; and much more.
The seventh phase presented by Teltumbde, titled “Refuge in Buddha”, is about Babasaheb’s last days. The final phase examined by the book, an ongoing one, is about the posthumous Ambedkar. Surveying post-Ambedkar India, Teltumbde notes with admiration that the Punjab-born Dalit leader, Kanshiram (1934-2006), once a research assistant in a Government of India defence department, created a successful alliance of Dalits, Other Backward Castes and Muslims which captured power in India’s largest state, UP, first in the 1990s for a couple of years and then again from 2007 to 2012, with Kanshiram’s protégé, Mayawati, serving as chief minister.
To this eighth and final chapter, Teltumbde gives the title “Iconization of the Iconoclast”. Happily defying the instructions of Ambedkar, who was a staunch rationalist, countless followers have deified the hero. Teltumbde refuses to join their queue. He yields to no one in honoring Ambedkar’s tireless passion against the heartlessness that for centuries marked India’s treatment of the Untouchables. Or in praising the sharp pen and withering logic with which Ambedkar demolished the arguments of defenders of the caste system. But Teltumbde exercises the thinker’s right to question and criticize, and a biographer’s right to note his subject’s weaknesses.
SIKHISM OR BUDDHISM
For instance, Teltumbde points out that while studying in New York Ambedkar seemed to take no interest in the African Americans living very close to his Columbia University campus. Later in life, says Teltumbde, Ambedkar didn’t always bother to return the books he was borrowing from libraries. After announcing, in 1935, that he would change his religion because, in his view, Hinduism could not and would not do away with caste, Ambedkar at times gave Sikhs the impression, suggests Teltumbde, that he would become a Sikh, when in fact he was more serious about Buddhism.
Iconoclast also criticizes Babasaheb for his inconsistencies over the Poona Pact, which Ambedkar signed in 1932 and later hailed and denounced at different times.
Teltumbde blames Ambedkar for not pressing for proportional representation in India’s elections when the Constitution was being drafted. In Teltumbde’s view, PR would have given Dalits and other minorities greater representation and protection than what they receive under India’s first-past-the-post system. Moreover, argues Teltumbde, since PR makes parties more important than individuals, it would have curbed the personality cult in India’s politics.
LAW TO ABOLISH CASTE?
Ambedkar is also questioned by Teltumbde for not striving, when the Constitution was being written, to “abolish caste,” even though two or three Dalit members of the Constituent Assembly had demanded “the abolition” of caste, which had been Ambedkar’s call in his 1936 classic, Annihilation of Caste. One may, however, ask whether it is possible to “abolish caste” through an article in the Constitution. The practice of untouchability in a public well or school can be made punishable, as it has been, but can you require a citizen, through a law or a constitutional provision, to socialize or marry only outside her or his caste or tribe?
Possibly the most important criticism made by Teltumbde relates to Ambedkar’s refusal to make class struggle a central or consistent theme of his agenda. Ambedkar’s final recipe to his people of Buddhism, which was a religious rather than a social or economic solution, is amply acknowledged by Teltumbde, who however points out that Asia’s Buddhist lands have witnessed continuing injustices. But isn’t that equally true for lands that have privileged class struggle?
There was worldwide interest in Anand Teltumbde when in 2018 and again in 2019 he and some others were arrested on allegations of a conspiracy against the Indian state. Between 2020 and November 2022, when his release on bail was ordered, Teltumbde was kept behind bars without trial. That in such circumstances he managed to write Iconoclast is a wonder. The book establishes Teltumbde as a masterly scholar of the astonishing Babasaheb and one of India’s most courageous and gifted intellectuals.
