ASPECTS OF AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE

stiff and suited figure relent to admit the historical Ambedkar’s love of the sherwani, kurta, lungi, and dhoti? Or his sudden paean one morning to elasticated underpants? This book is an attempt at intimacy with Ambedkar in his hours away from history and headlines. It seeks intimacy through the admirers and companions who have shared their memories of him and his impact upon their lives. If history is what survives the death of the subject, this book aims to recover the ephemera that attended Ambedkar’s life and died with him; such as his pleasure in his library and passion for book-collecting, his vein of gruff humour, the sensation of seeing him in the flesh for the first time, or of stepping out of a summer storm into his house and hearing him at practice on his violin. Here, we get to meet Ambedkar the ambidextrous writer, dog lover, proponent of sex education and contraception, antiprohibitionist teetotaler, and occasional cook. We recognize the readerly solitude that made up the greatest part of his waking hours, and kept him awake till all hours. We also notice a strain of Maharashtrian pride, edging towards chauvinism, that surfaces in his pronouncements from time to time...

An extended reading of our principal sources will reveal a pronounced stylization of Ambedkar’s personality in keeping with the individual writer’s sympathies: Rattu and Shankranand Shastri, for instance, detail a frequently lachrymose man but recall little of the wit that we encounter elsewhere... In its shifting tones of respectful formality and candour, this collection shares the qualities of a photographic album...these verbal snapshots are the more necessary as Ambedkar was not photographed with the same zealous attention to minutiae paid to several of his prominent contemporaries... The object here is to foreground the readily visible and available that yet remains neglected.