Review: Becoming Baba Saheb by Aakash Singh Rathore

Ambedkar’s birth anniversary this year saw the launch of two biographies of the social reformer, scholar, and political leader: Becoming Baba Saheb: The Life and Times of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar by Aakash Singh Rathore and A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of BR Ambedkar by Ashok Gopal. Just a month later, a “Savarkar Ambedkar Study Circle” was founded at a university in Delhi to “create bold new visions for Indian society”. Savarkar was a proponent of Hindu nationalism, while Ambedkar railed against Hindu strictures and scriptures and forsook the religion for Buddhism. The latter also criticised Savarkar on several occasions, both in speeches and writings.

Bizarre as associating them might seem, it has been an enduring preoccupation, including for a 1954 Ambedkar biography by Dhananjay Keer. In the preface to his book, Rathore writes, “Not only is Savarkar’s name superfluously brought up throughout the biography, but Keer also seems to have inserted fictitious meetings and conversations between Savarkar and Ambedkar that cannot be corroborated through any other source — Keer was intent on uniting his two heroes, seemingly filling in with fantasy what failed to realise in historical fact.”

In Becoming Baba Saheb, Rathore sets out to rectify the errors not only in Keer’s and other biographies of Ambedkar, but also the ones in Ambedkar’s autobiographical fragments, Waiting for a Visa. He explains how the inaccuracies arose in the “hugely influential, classic, standard and even ‘authoritative’ biographies of Ambedkar” and how subsequent authors relying on these have uncritically reproduced them.

Some of the corrections, such as dates or sequences of events, seem minor and do not significantly alter our understanding of Ambedkar’s life and work. However, others have more profound implications. Rathore dwells on the perceived misreadings in Christophe Jaffrelot’s biography of Ambedkar, published in 2005. Citing the latter’s comments about Ambedkar initially being “Sanskritised” and eventually “Westernised”, he talks about Jaffrelot’s “seeming inability in his biography to really understand who Ambedkar was” and ascribes it to his “Eurocentric worldview”.

However, Rathore also seems to have succumbed to inaccuracies even as he sought to correct them. Many writers point out that he has relied on sketchy evidence and consequently mischaracterised Ambedkar’s relationship with a widowed woman in London in whose house he was a lodger. However, his assessment is not definitive because he ends the brief section with a note that he will “delve more deeply into the long-lasting relationship between Frances and Ambedkar” in the yet-to-be-published second volume of his two-part biography. The first volume traces developments until the Mahad Satyagraha of 1927 — the first 38 years of Ambedkar’s life.

As a lay reader, it is interesting to see how Rathore parses through primary sources to rectify errors that he claims have endured for decades. As insightful is his focus on chronicling Ambedkar as a person and not just his achievements as a celebrated revolutionary figure. He writes, “Because he meant so many different things to so many different people, it is genuinely difficult to make objective sense of what he was really like. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that Ambedkar was actually a complex, multidimensional person.”

By highlighting seemingly minor details — the books Ambedkar purchased during his stay in New York, a jovial photograph of him with his acolyte sitting on his lap, or his adherents wondering which incarnation of god he was and Ambedkar’s response to that — he builds a holistic portrait of the man. I found the photo especially delightful. Most of his representations in the public domain are forbiddingly stern, but the author notes that in candid photos, he was often smiling or laughing.

Many of the details Rathore mentions are not necessarily a result of original scholarship, but the way he weaves together facts, observations, and inferences makes for a riveting read. That is why the narrative might be engaging even for those familiar with the key events in Ambedkar’s life, such as the Mahad satyagraha, his education in New York and London, or the incidents of discrimination he faced.

In both his earlier work, Ambedkar’s Preamble: A Secret History of the Constitution of India, and Becoming Baba Saheb, Rathore talks about the “reverential, if not hagiographic approach” of Ambedkar biographies. In the latter, he cites an excerpt from Khairmoday, who published a 12-volume biography in Marathi: “Ambedkar’s fingers were just like a baby’s — beautiful and endearing. But when he overworked, they became like wilted flowers…” While this is an extreme example, it is illustrative of the lens many biographies of Indian political luminaries adopt. In a few instances, Rathore’s surfeit of adjectives teeters on the edge of adulation, but on the whole, he conveys Ambedkar’s achievements dispassionately yet engrossingly.

Rathore has described the recent spurt of writing on Ambedkar as appropriation (he includes himself in this list) by “Jai-Bhim-come-latelys”. While the criticism of the social location of the authors writing on Ambedkar might be justified, especially since many Dalit scholars often do not have the same kind of access, these works nevertheless are important as the ideals Ambedkar promulgated are increasingly in peril. At a time when elected representatives who have taken an oath of allegiance to the Constitution of India publicly declare that they will change it and others cherry-pick his writings to justify Islamophobia, the Uniform Civil Code, or an affinity to Savarkar, we need more such scholarship.

Syed Saad Ahmed is a writer and communications professional.