In Dalit-Bahujan folklore, poetry, songs, novels and biographies, B R Ambedkar appears almost like a deity or messiah, equivalent to the Buddha, Jesus or Nanak. Ambedkar is often mythicised and raised up as an iconic superhero, who challenged the mighty Brahmanical realm and liberated the depressed masses from the dark of servitude, illiteracy and powerlessness.
Ambedkar is also shown as a brilliant academic, journalist, jurist and economist, as the architect of the Constitution of India, and, finally, as a religious revolutionary who reintroduced Buddhism to modern India. On occasions like his birth anniversary, large public gatherings are witnessed in major cities across India. For his followers, such passionate devotion has made Ambedkar a charismatic hero, above criticism and challenges.
The standard telling of his life is as follows: Born into the Mahar caste on 14 April 1891, it was "ordained" that he had to suffer humiliation and harassment from the social elites, most of them of the dominant castes. He educated himself against such odds and earned prestigious degrees from some of the finest universities in the world. Then, he applied his intellectual and academic training to initiate a heroic battle against caste inequalities and to provide a dignified location to the "untouchable" castes in the social and political spheres. By the time India got its freedom from British imperialism, Ambedkar was one of the tallest national leaders. As the architect of India's new constitution, he contributed immensely to the foundational ideas of the modern republic. On 14 October 1956, just two months before his death, he shunned Hinduism and embraced Buddhism alongside thousands of his followers, and started a new era of socio-religious revolution in India.
But, with the rise of the rightwing political forces in India today – with the Hindutva duo of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh at the forefront – attempts are being made to appropriate Ambedkar as a Hindu social reformist and popular nationalist leader, detaching him from his radical anti-Brahmanical thought. In this contest, though hagiographic representations offer Ambedkar an extraordinary pedestal and portray him as a radical, messianic leader of the oppressed, they also limit serious deliberation on his intellectual contributions and philosophical oeuvre. The populist literature on him is marked by emotional, un-intellectual acts that sometimes resist the scientific, secular and rational objectivity through which Ambedkar's life and ideas can truly be discovered. Yet this latter vein of understanding is an essential tool in resisting the rightwing distortions of who Ambedkar really was.