Indian jurist, economist, and Dalit emancipator; principal architect of the Constitution of India (adopted 1950), independent India's first law minister, and — by a reckoning only recently acknowledged in the Indian mainstream — the most consequential 20th-century theorist of caste and its abolition. Born into a Mahar (Dalit, formerly "untouchable") family in western India at a time when caste still denied his community access to drinking water from public wells, Ambedkar was sent to school and then, through the patronage of a reformist princely state, to Columbia (where he studied under Dewey) and the London School of Economics, returning with doctorates in economics and law and a settled intellectual program: the dismantling of caste was the precondition for any genuine Indian democracy.
His quarrel with Gandhi — the central intellectual disagreement of late-colonial Indian politics — centered on whether caste could be reformed from within a Hindu framework (Gandhi's position) or whether it was structurally inseparable from Hinduism and could only be defeated by Dalit political organization, separate electorates, and eventually mass conversion out of Hinduism (Ambedkar's). Annihilation of Caste (1936), the undelivered address that became his most famous text, is the sharpest statement: caste, he argued, is not an incidental social wrong that a purified Hinduism could transcend but the organizing principle of Hindu religion and society, and its abolition therefore requires the repudiation of the scriptures that underwrite it. Gandhi wrote a pained critical response; Ambedkar republished Annihilation with Gandhi's reply and his own counter-reply appended, refusing either to soften the argument or to drop it.
As chairman of the Constituent Assembly's drafting committee (1947–49) Ambedkar wrote into the Indian Constitution the legal abolition of untouchability (Article 17), a regime of affirmative action (reservations) for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and the fundamental-rights framework on which Indian constitutional law has run ever since. In October 1956, months before his death, Ambedkar led roughly half a million followers in mass conversion to Buddhism at Nagpur — the culmination of his twenty-year search for a religious home for Dalits that rejected caste at its foundations, and the beginning of the still-growing neo-Buddhist Dalit movement. His collected Writings and Speeches, published by the Government of Maharashtra from the 1970s, run to seventeen volumes.