B. R. Ambedkar

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar rose from a caste treated as untouchable to become one of the most highly educated Indians of his day, the leading champion of the Dalits and the chairman of the committee that drafted the Constitution of India. A lawyer and economist, he spent his life attacking the caste system, and shortly before his death he left Hinduism for Buddhism, leading hundreds of thousands of followers with him. Known to admirers as Babasaheb, he is today honoured across the political spectrum.

Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 at Mhow, a military cantonment in central India, the fourteenth child of an army subedar of the Mahar caste. As a schoolboy he had to sit apart on a sack he brought from home, and he could drink only when someone of higher caste poured water for him, so that on days without the school peon there was "no peon, no water". His family's surname was Sakpal; a Brahmin teacher entered him in the school records under his own name, Ambedkar.

He entered Elphinstone College in Bombay, by his own account the first Mahar to do so, and graduated in economics and political science in 1912. With a scholarship from the princely state of Baroda he studied at Columbia University in New York, where the philosopher John Dewey influenced him, and then at the London School of Economics and Gray's Inn. In 1923 the University of London awarded him a doctorate for a thesis on the Indian rupee, and he was called to the bar; Columbia granted him a PhD in 1927. Even as a Bombay professor he met discrimination: colleagues objected to his sharing their water jug.

From the 1920s Ambedkar practised law, founded newspapers for the "depressed classes" and led campaigns for their right to use public water and enter temples. In 1927 he led a protest at Mahad over access to the town's water tank, and on 25 December that year he and his followers publicly burned the Manusmriti, the ancient law code he blamed for justifying caste. When the British granted untouchables separate electorates in 1932, Mahatma Gandhi began a fast in prison against the plan. Under that pressure Ambedkar signed the Poona Pact of 24 September 1932, accepting a joint electorate with 148 reserved seats in place of the 71 originally allotted. In 1935 he declared that although born a Hindu he would not die one, and in 1936 he published Annihilation of Caste, a fierce attack on orthodox Hinduism that included a rebuke of Gandhi.

He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1936 and later the Scheduled Castes Federation, and served as labour member of the Viceroy's Executive Council in British India. In Pakistan or The Partition of India (1940) he argued that if the Muslim-majority regions insisted on separation, a single state would bring endless conflict, a view that shaped later debate over the partition of India.

At independence in August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru made Ambedkar law minister, and he was soon appointed chairman of the constitution's drafting committee. The Constituent Assembly adopted the constitution on 26 November 1949. It abolished untouchability, outlawed discrimination and allowed reserved places in government jobs and education for scheduled castes and tribes. Ambedkar resigned from the cabinet in 1951 after parliament defeated his Hindu Code Bill, and he lost his bid for a seat in the first general election in 1952.

After years of considering other faiths, Ambedkar turned to Buddhism. At Nagpur on 14 October 1956 he took the Buddhist refuges and precepts and then led some 500,000 supporters through the same conversion, founding the modern Dalit Buddhist movement. He died in his sleep in Delhi on 6 December 1956, days after finishing The Buddha and His Dhamma. India awarded him its highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1990. Many parties and movements across India claim his inheritance.

Our 1930 and 1938 maps show British India during his campaigns against untouchability, and the 1960 map shows the independent republic whose constitution he helped write.