ASPECTS OF AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE
A new book presents everyday details about Dr BR Ambedkar’s personality including his passion for book collecting, his gruff humour, and his love of dogs and sherwanis! An excerpt from its preface
Dr BR Ambedkar invites and deflects biographical curiosity, both together. ‘You have not cared to inquire into my past,’ he wrote in February 1948 to his fiancée Dr Sharda Kabir. ‘But it will be available to you at any time in the pages of many Marathi magazines.’ Offering up his past as a matter of public record was a cheeky remark in the circumstances, but it did give precedence to the published report of his life over a more private sense of it. The popular account of his struggles and accomplishments is certainly momentous and varied enough to deliver a characterful portrait. Crowded with incident, it reflects his drive and intellect. We see the goals and adversities that shaped the scholar, teacher, lawyer, writer, politician, founder of colleges, newspapers and parties, flayer at large of Hinduism and the Congress, and prime mover in drafting India’s constitution. This is also a life that belongs no longer to itself but to the headlines, to masses of people and to history. Its dynamics infuse institutions and statuary, household shrines, personal and communal aspiration, music and campus politics with an urgency that has intensified over the decades since Ambedkar’s death...
This is entirely as it should be, for his personal and political lives did fuse together to a remarkable degree... The rebuffs and slights never did cease, even at the height of his public eminence. In 1945, visiting Puri as the Labour Member of the Viceroy’s Council, he was refused admittance to the Jagannath temple, and, in Calcutta the same year, was boycotted by servants at a home to which he had been invited...
Given this extraordinary level of coincidence, why seek another Ambedkar beyond the public account? When we look at a statue of him, say a plaster cast figure of cherubic aspect in an electric blue suit, it is both unmistakably him and recognizably not. The posture recalls the prophet Moses, clutching the law tablets of God’s command to his side, his free arm raised to wag a hectoring finger at his feckless charges, the Israelites. Does this allusion reinforce Ambedkar’s persona, or is something of him lost to a visual rhetoric that evokes Bronze Age Semitism? Would the 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.