The man who chaired India's constitution drafting was once barred from sitting inside class
As a Mahar child, B. R. Ambedkar had to sit apart from classmates and wait for someone of higher caste to pour him water. He went on to earn doctorates from Columbia and the London School of Economics and to lead the committee that drafted the Constitution of India.
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 in Mhow, a military cantonment now officially named Dr Ambedkar Nagar in Madhya Pradesh. He was the fourteenth and final child of Ramji Maloji Sakpal, an army officer of Subedar rank. His family belonged to the Mahar caste, treated as untouchable. At school, he and other such children were segregated, ignored by teachers and kept from sitting inside the classroom.
His father retired in 1894, and the family later moved to Satara, where his mother soon died. In 1897 they settled in Mumbai, and he became the only untouchable pupil at Elphinstone High School. Following the custom of the day, he married nine-year-old Ramabai in 1906, when he was about fifteen. After matriculating in 1907, he entered Elphinstone College, by his own account the first Mahar to do so, and by 1912 held a degree in economics and political science. His father died in February 1913.
That year, aged 22, he won a Baroda State Scholarship worth £11.50 a month for three years, created by Sayajirao Gaekwad III to fund study at Columbia University in New York. There, in 1916, he presented a paper on the mechanism and origins of caste at a seminar led by the anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser. His doctorates came from the London School of Economics in 1923 and Columbia in 1927, a rare achievement for an Indian student then. Bound to serve Baroda, he briefly became military secretary to its ruler but had to leave, an episode he described in Waiting for a Visa.
Back in India he argued before the Southborough Committee in 1919 for separate electorates and reserved places for untouchables, and in 1920 launched the weekly Mooknayak, Leader of the Silent, in Mumbai. After independence he held the law and justice portfolio in the country's first cabinet. India awarded him the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1990; followers greet one another with Jai Bhim and call him Babasaheb.
Source: B. R. Ambedkar
