Ambedkar in America

On April 14, 1881, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh India as the sixteenth child of his family, who were Dalits. Ambedkar’s father was an officer in the British Army and leveraged his rank to ensure his children received a proper education.^¹ Ambedkar was one of five other Dalit students to attend a government school. During his schooling, he experienced severe caste oppression. His education was one of neglect, where the few Dalit students were cordoned off to a separate room.^¹ They had very limited interactions with their teacher and were restricted from being directly in his presence. As a result, they would place answer sheets in sight of the teacher through the door and then “retreat to a far corner” as the teacher provided minimal feedback. If any confusion or misunderstanding arose, they were helpless and unable to ask any follow-up questions.

Of the group of students, Ambedkar was the only one who progressed to the next level of education. At his new school, he was permitted to sit in the same classroom as his peers, but only as long as he sat on the floor in a distant corner. He was also forbidden from interacting with his peers or drinking from the school's tap-water system due to fear he would contaminate it. The notion that caste is something that is dirty and taints upper caste people is called “caste pollution,” and it is a discriminatory philosophy that continues in India and within the Indian diaspora today.^¹

Even with these frequent, negative experiences in academia, Ambedkar was determined to further his education and obtained a scholarship to attend Elphinstone College at Bombay University. He was again ostracized by and isolated from many of his classmates, but successfully graduated in 1912 with a degree in Political Science and Economics.^¹

While Ambedkar was studying at Elphinstone College, his brilliance and success in the classroom garnered the attention of the Maharaja of Baroda. It is unclear how the Maharaja had learned of Ambedkar, but by the time he graduated, the Maharaja had committed to fund his continued education at a program abroad.^¹ Due to caste norms at the time, Ambedkar learned of this news through an intermediary, not the Maharaja himself. He subsequently chose to study at Columbia University and began pursuing a masters in economics in 1913. He chose a specialization in economics to better understand the social issues preventing growth in India.^¹ Had he been granted this opportunity four years later, he would have been barred entry under the exclusionary Asiatic Barred Zone Act, which prevented the immigration of Asians to the United States.

Upon arrival in New York City, Ambedkar first stayed in Wallach Hall, before moving to the more internationally oriented Cosmopolitan Club.^¹ As a graduate student, he was highly involved in topics beyond his focus of economics, engaging in intellectual discourse surrounding politics, philosophy, history, and sociology. Through these conversations, he learned of the parallels between Indian caste discrimination and the Black experience in America. Ambedkar spoke very highly of his time at Columbia and appreciated the influence it had on his later work. 

“The best friends I have had in my life were some of my classmates at Columbia and my great professors, John Dewey, James Shotwell, Edwin Seligman, and James Harvey Robinson.” 

Perhaps there was no one who had more of an effect on Ambedkar than John Dewey, one of his professors at Columbia.^¹ Dewey was a leading American thinker, pragmatist, and philosopher who had a profound impact on the nation’s educational systems. In later years, Ambedkar wrote to his wife, “I owe all my intellectual life to him,” telling her how “wonderful” of a man Dewey was.^¹ Ambedkar seemed most captivated by Dewey’s Democracy and Education, as it is frequently referenced in his own works, and his former copy is filled with a myriad of annotations.^¹ Scott Stroud, a scholar of Ambedkar and Dewey, noted that in Amebdkar’s personal library “no text was more engaged [with]” than Dewey’s. Stroud specifically focused on Ambedkar’s notion of pragmatism in the annotations, listing three aspects:

“(1) an acknowledgement of the importance of tradition and education in producing a continuous society; (2) the mediating role reconstruction plays in meliorating harmful aspects of past traditions; and (3) the dialectic between individual dispositions and the democratic ideal of a community animated by shared interests and free communication.” 

The preamble of the Indian Constitution references four key values: justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity.^¹ It is no coincidence that Ambedkar wrote in his famous book The Annihilation of Caste, “If you ask me, my ideal would be a society based on Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. And why not?”^¹ These three values were key to Dewey’s pragmatist worldview and evident in his many classes at Columbia.

Edwin Seligman, another professor mentioned by Ambedkar, introduced the young Ambedkar to Lala Rajpat Rai, an Indian activist spearheading the Home-Rule Movement for independence from British colonialism. Rai attempted to recruit Ambedkar to the movement; however, he rejected these efforts, noting that caste discrimination continued to be neglected.^¹ When Rai organized a Council of Indian Students in America in September of 1916, Ambedkar was not present. Read more about Lala Rajpat Rai and his NYC movement in my prior exhibit, found here.

“My five years of staying in Europe and America had completely wiped out of my mind any consciousness that I was an untouchable, and that an untouchable wherever he went in India was a problem to himself and to others.”

During Ambedkar’s transformative experience at Columbia, he was introduced to a variety of individuals that would inform much of his future work. Even under the racial conditions of America, he was surprised by the positive treatment he endured as a brown, Dalit man. However, this complicates his solidarity with black Americans who had been subjected to centuries of discrimination within US society. If anything, this demonstrates the concept of racial triangulation, as Asians occupy an ambiguous, intermediary place in the hierarchical division between Black and white Americans.^¹ By 1916, Ambedkar completed his degree and returned to India. Over the next decades, he would maintain correspondence with many of his Columbia acquaintances, occasionally sharing various manuscripts or updating them on his advocacy work.

In practice, Gandhi and Ambedkar worked towards the same goal of emancipating India and uplifting the downtrodden, but their approaches and ideologies greatly differed. In fact, during their lifetimes they were considered political rivals with strong, independent followings. Gandhi’s worldview was rooted in Hindu spirituality, drawing on scriptures that highlighted ahimsa, or non-violence, to dictate his actions. Contrarily, Ambedkar valued rationalism and practical interventions prioritizing legal reform, educational equity, and the complete destruction of caste. If religion did not serve the public good, then Ambedkar believed it must be reassessed.^¹ 

Ambedkar, having experienced a lifetime of caste discrimination, despised Gandhi’s claims that caste was not inherently evil in its purest form. Gandhi did not necessarily believe caste was a means to create a hierarchy in South Asian society, and instead posited that it existed as a division of labor. As he did not want to destroy Hinduism, Gandhi sought to purify the religion, promoting inter-caste marriage and dining. Ambedkar took issue with this softer view, seeing caste as facilitated by Hinduism, and instead advocated for total reform or rejection of the religion. 

Their disagreements carried into broader social reforms as Gandhi began campaigns to uplift Dalits, or as he referred to them, Harijans. This included opening schools, wells, and temples for their communities while simultaneously attempting to change the hearts and minds of broader Indian society. Ambedkar saw some superficiality in this indirect approach and urged for Dalit liberation. He wanted direct government interventions, such as the promotion of political representation and passage of legal safeguards, to ensure that structural inequities are thoroughly remedied.

Ambedkar defined his relationship with Gandhi in a 1955 interview with the BBC, detailing his grievances across many issues. They can be categorized into the following:^¹

1. Gandhi’s character
   • “I have a feeling that I know him better than most other people because he had opened his real fangs to me and I could see the inside of the man, while others who generally went there as devotees saw nothing of him except the external appearance which he had put up as a Mahatma. But I saw him in his human capacity, the bare man in him.”
   • “In fact, he was all the time double-dealing. He conducted two papers, one in English, the Hari Jan, you see, and before that, Young India,”
   • “So far as India is concerned, he was, in my judgment an episode in the history of India never an epoch maker.”
   • “He was never a Mahatma and I refused to call him Mahatma. I've never in my life called him Mahatma. He doesn't deserve that title, not even from the point of view of his morality.”
      
2. Hinduism
   • “In the English paper, he posed himself as an opponent of the caste system and of untouchability, and that he was a democrat. But if you read Gujarati magazine you will see him worse Orthodox man. He had been supporting the caste system the varna dharma and all the Orthodox dogma which has kept India down you see all through ages”
   • “All the biographies that have been written of him, you see, are based upon his Harijan and the young India, but not upon the Gujarati writings of Mr. Gandhi.”
   • “He was absolutely an orthodox Hindu. He was never a reformer, you see. He had no dynamics in him.”
   • “Somebody ought to write Mr. Gandhi’s biography, by making a comparative study of the statements made by Mr. Gandhi in his Harijan and the statements made by Mr. Gandhi in his Gujarati paper…the Western world only reads the English paper where Mr. Gandhi in order to keep himself in the steam of Western people who believe in democracy or the advocating democratic ideals. But you ought to see what he actually talk to the people in his vernacular paper.”
      
3. Caste and treatment of untouchables
   • “We want untouchability to be abolished. But we also want that we must be given equal opportunities so that we may rise to the level of the other classes. Mere washing off of untouchability is of no consequence. We have been carrying on with untouchability for the last 2,000 years. Nobody has bothered about it. Nobody has bothered about it.”
   • “…that [untouchables] should have the same status in the country and that they should have the opportunity to hold high offices so that not only their dignity will rise, but also they will get what I call strategic positions from which they could protect their own people, Mr. Gandhi was totally opposed. Totally opposed. He was content with things like temple entry. Temple entry. That was all the thing that he wanted to do. Which is a very, nobody cares for Hindu temples now. The untouchables have become so conscious of the fact that temple going is of no consequence at all.”
   • “All this talk about untouchability was just for the purpose of making the untouchables drawn into the Congress. That was one thing. And secondly, he wanted that the untouchables should not oppose his movement of Swaraj [self-rule/independence]. I don't think beyond that he had any real motive of uplift.”
   • “I am not going to save your life at the cost of the life of my people. This is too much. How much I have labored in all this, I know very well. And I'm not going to sacrifice your whim. Sacrifice our people's interest just for the sake of satisfaction.”
      
4. Indian political structure and independence
   • “For five years, we live separately from the Hindus with no kind of intercourse or intercommunication, you see, of a social or a spiritual sort. What can one day's cycle of participation in a common electorate do to remove this hardened crust of separatism, which has grown for centuries?”
   • “Gandhi's object was that we [untouchables] should not get free, independent representatives. Therefore, in the first place, he said, no representation ought to be given to us. That's how he stands in the roundtable conference. He said, I recognize only three communities, namely Hindus,  Muslims and Sikhs. These are the only three communities that will have a political recognition, you see, in the constitution, you see. But the Christians or the Anglo-Indians or the Sri Lankans will have no place in the constitution. They must merge themselves in the general community. That was the stand that he had taken.”
   • “If you are prepared to give special representation to the Sikhs and special representation to the Muslims, who are thousand times superior in strength, and political and economic stamina, how can you deny it, to the [unintelligible] or to the Christians. [Gandhi] always used to say, oh, you don't understand our problem.”
   • “He was very much afraid, you see, that the [unintelligible] would be sort of as independent a body as the Sikhs and the Muslims were. And that the Hindus would be left alone to fight a battle against the combination of these three sections. That was what was at the back of his mind. And he didn't want the Hindus to be left without any allies.”
   • “I personally myself think that if Swaraj had come in slow degrees in India, it would have profited the people better for each community or each group, you see, which is suffering from many of these disabilities would have been able to consolidate itself at each stage of the transfer of power from the British. Today the whole thing came as a flood. People were unprepared.”

While Gandhi was a revered figure in Indian society, particularly for his very public advocacy for Indian decolonization, Ambedkar recognized him as an ordinary individual with human flaws that the general public often ignored. Ambedkar was critical of the fact that Gandhi’s beliefs tended to differ depending on his audience. His writings reference times that Gandhi tried to soften his messaging to be more appealing to Western powers, diagnosing this as a lack of moral consistency. While Ambedkar also wanted liberation from British rule, he criticized Gandhi’s political ideology for failing to progress beyond decolonization. Ambedkar recognized Gandhi's embrace of values consistent with Orthodox Hinduism as being a key part of the system preventing progress in India and fostering the current culture of oppression.

In 1956, six weeks before his death, Ambedkar finally rejected Hinduism, converting to Buddhism alongside over 500,000 of his followers.^¹ This act honored the statement he made years earlier in 1935 when he said, “I was born a Hindu, but I’m determined not to die a Hindu. I’m going to figure out which of the religions offers me and my community the most dignity and hu­manity.” It is speculated that he waited to convert to Hinduism until after he retired in order to preserve his power as a key political figure in India. This single move served as a thorough rejection of Gandhi and all that his movement stood for, renouncing any possibility of reform within Hinduism.

Ambedkar was likely first introduced to the work of Jane Addams through John Dewey’s “Moral and Political Philosophy” course at Columbia University.^¹ Dewey and Addams had known each other from their time in Chicago and were both highly involved in similar pragmatist, democratic movements. In particular, Addams gained notoriety for founding Hull House, one of the first settlement houses, which provided aid and housing for local, impoverished populations.^¹ Even as Dewey moved to New York City for his new professorship at Columbia University, the two of them maintained contact, continuing to influence each other’s ideology. As Addams grew older, much of her advocacy shifted internationally. She was a friend of Mahatma Gandhi and visited India in 1923, but focused on the Home-Rule Movement, rather than the plight of Dalits.^¹

In late 1931, Ambedkar made his first visit back to the United States since leaving almost 15 years earlier and stayed at the International House, a diverse hub near campus for foreign, multidisciplinary scholars. At this same time, he felt compelled to send Addams a letter, even though the pair had never met, nor corresponded before. Earlier that month, Addams had just received a Nobel Peace Prize for her peace and anti-WWI advocacy and shortly after fell very ill. For Ambedkar, this letter served as a form of introduction to Addams, both for himself and the plight of the untouchables in India. Hence, he acknowledges her service to the “submerged” within the United States and connects them to the “downtrodden” of India.^¹ Unfortunately, Ambedkar’s efforts to educate Addams and establish a link between their two movements failed. After sending the letter, there is no evidence the two of them met or Addams ever responded.

Transcript:

My dear Miss [Addams],

Allow me as a representative of sixty millions of downtrodden untouchables of India as well as for myself to express my most earnest hope that you will have a full and speedy recovery from your distressful illness. Your life of devotion to the submerged of the world has been the inspiration and encouragement to us all even in darkest India. I devotedly hope that your recovery will come within the limits of my short stay in America to permit me to present my humble respects to you in person.

Sincerely yours,

B. R. Ambedkar

As a young man studying at Columbia University during the early twentieth century, Ambedkar was well aware of the hostile racial climate in America. At the forefront of the resistance to inequality endured by Black Americans was prominent civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Beyond being a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Du Bois was a prolific writer, highlighting the systematic struggles of Black Americans.^¹ His perspective on embracing heritage often clashed with the approaches of other intellectuals, including Booker T. Washington and Fredrick Douglass. 

During the 1940s, while Ambedkar was back in Mumbai, he sent a letter to Du Bois requesting assistance. Du Bois had recently filed a petition to the United Nations on behalf of the “Negroes of America,” elevating the Black struggle to the global stage.^¹ Ambedkar understood the intersectionality between Blacks and Dalits, having been exposed to the mutual discrimination both groups endured during his time at Columbia.^¹ Therefore, he requested copies of Du Bois’ petition and wanted to follow a similar course on behalf of his people.

Transcript:

Although I have not met you personally, I know you by name as every one does who is working in the cause of securing liberty to the oppressed people. I belong to the Untouchables of India and perhaps you might have heard my name. I have been a student of the Negro problem and have read your writings throughout. There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary.

I was very much interested to read that the Negroes of America have filed a petition to the U.N.O. The Untouchables of India are also thinking of following suit. Will you be so good as to secure for me two or three copies of this representation by the Negroes and send them to my address. I need hardly say how very grateful I shall be for your troubles in this behalf.

Unlike James Addams, Du Bois responded. In fact, he even knew of Ambedkar’s work and the struggle of “untouchables” in India. Du Bois had always taken an interest in India, frequently publishing pieces about the subcontinent in The Crisis, the official journal of the NAACP.^¹ He also was a close friend of Lala Rajpat Rai, mentioned earlier for his work in the Indian Home-Rule Movement.

Transcript:

I have your letter concerning the case of the Negroes of America and the Untouchables in India before. the United Nations. As you say a small organization of American Negroes, The National Negro Congress has already made a statement which I am enclosing. I think, however, that a much more comprehensive statement well documented will eventually be laid before the United Nations by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. If this is done I shall be glad to send you a copy.

I have often heard of your name and work and of course have every sympathy with the Untouchables of India. I shall be glad to be of any service I can render if possible in the future.

Du Bois’ response was short but concise. He offered resources and acknowledged the important work Ambedkar had done in the name of caste liberation. The interaction is an early but prominent example of solidarity between Black and Indian activists. Despite occupying lands thousands of miles apart, their struggles were deeply intertwined and necessary to elevate to the United Nations.

Ambedkar’s global anti-caste activism and widespread connections created a legacy for future generations to draw inspiration from. In his own home nation, the Dalit Panthers emerged during the early 1970s, promoting Dalit liberation with a Black Panther-esque approach.^¹ They understood caste violence would not be answered with patience and adopted the notion of self-defense to resist the brutal discrimination Dalits continued to endure in India. Like Ambedkar, they rejected the softer approach of Gandhi and directly confronted the systems of oppression.

The founders of the Dalit Panthers published their work in the Vidroh, meaning revolt, and challenged Indian society for neglecting the struggles of Dalits. Similar to the Black Panthers, the Dalit Panthers endured many issues with the police and local militias. They would often be arrested, assaulted, and prevented from protesting or spreading their message. Many members also followed Ambedkar’s example and converted to Buddhism, rejecting the oppressive nature of Hinduism so prevalent in their everyday lives. Their manifesto reflected a combination of their newfound religion and their Marxist philosophies. 

Across Mumbai, there were over thirty Dalit Panther affiliated groups. They expanded beyond their initial objective, eventually advocating for the rights of all downtrodden communities including women, the poor, political dissidents, and religious minorities. By 1977, the movement disbanded due to ideological disagreements amongst its founders and brutal violence that members continued to experience. Though short-lived, their mere existence was a manifestation of the Black-Dalit solidarity that Ambedkar had imagined years earlier in his correspondence with Du Bois.

In more recent times, caste has emerged as an issue in the US, particularly amongst newly immigrated Indian workers and students.^¹ Recent lawsuits and claims of workplace discrimination rooted in caste during the early 2020s prompted a push for legislation to add caste as a protected class. Specific instances involving workers in the tech space led thirty Dalit women in the industry to release a letter detailing their experiences with casteism despite the risk of “losing [their] jobs” or “immigration status.”^¹ Research by Equality Labs has corroborated their claims, finding that one in four Dalit Americans have been subjected to verbal or physical assault due to their caste, with around two-thirds reporting experiences of caste-based discrimination.^¹

Even with an abundance of evidence for reform, the legislative response has been slow. Seattle is the only city to have any specific anti-caste discrimination law in place, passing CB 120511 in 2023.^¹ The law provides protections against caste discrimination in housing, employment, and public spaces, and also extends beyond the South Asian community to include Japanese and Somalian individuals oppressed by lesser acknowledged caste systems. A handful of prominent universities, including California, Columbia, Brown, Harvard, and Brandeis, have also taken action, all implementing anti-caste discrimination policies, but national progress has stalled.

In New York, during the 2025-26 legislative session, a bill was introduced providing caste protections and outlawing caste discrimination statewide.^¹ Shekar Krishnan, a New York City Council Member, emphasized the need for this legislation, saying “Caste discrimination is happening every single day, not just in India and broader South Asia, but here in America, from the East Coast to the West Coast. We have to be very honest about this issue in our communities.”^¹ However, in June 2026, the bill failed to advance, after much resistance from right-wing Hindu organizations that claimed anti-caste laws would be anti-Indian and akin to Hinduphobia.^¹ 

Over sixty years later, Ambedkar’s legacy lives on and subsequent generations have continued his fight against casteism. Globally, activists have drawn on his strong belief that caste discrimination must be resisted collectively and via pragmatic means across all lines of division. By corresponding with Du Bois and Addams, reaching beyond racial and gendered barriers, Ambedkar provided a blueprint for transnational solidarity that remains effective to this day. 

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