My complicated relationship with B.R. Ambedkar

Dr. Ambedkar, the 20th-century leader of the lowest (“Dalit”, formerly “untouchable”) Indian caste groups, might be having a moment. In my Indian philosophy class in 2019, I wanted to have a segment on modern Indian philosophy, so I introduced the students to Gandhi and to Ambedkar as a critic of Gandhi – and was interested to see how the students absolutely loved Ambedkar. This year, I attended a fascinating workshop at Princeton on black Buddhist perspectives, where Ambedkar probably played a larger role than any other figure, even the Buddha himself. I’m glad to see black Americans discovering Ambedkar, since there are such close analogies between American race and Indian caste – already observed by Martin Luther King. A recent Economist article now mentions that even Narendra Modi is trying to proclaim Ambedkar as an ally for his militant Hindu agenda – a claim that should be laughable, given Ambedkar’s clearly expressed hostility to Hinduism, but an understandable attempt given Ambedkar’s huge popularity in India: there are now more statues of Ambedkar than any other Indian political figure, including Nehru, Gandhi and Aśoka.

I find Ambedkar overall a very admirable figure – both his personal story of rising through the ranks intellectually and becoming a leader, and his accomplishments. I also find his approach to caste more sensible than the American approach to race, one that Americans could learn a lot from. My late father admired him greatly. He is also a figure who makes me personally uncomfortable – perhaps in a good way.

I’ve generally been left cold by the Social Justice movement‘s feelings of North American ancestral guilt: my white ancestors got to Canada long after native people had been displaced from the lands they arrived in, and none of them owned slaves or even lived in places where slavery was prominent. My Indian ancestors, on the other hand, are not just brahmins, they are Marathi brahmins – from Maharashtra, the same state and language as Ambedkar. I come from the people who kept Ambedkar’s people down. My Indian ancestors actually oppressed his, in a way that my white ancestors didn’t really oppress native people and definitely didn’t oppress black people. So insofar as I do feel ancestral guilt, I feel it much more strongly toward people like him.

All of which makes me nervous about having criticisms of Ambedkar. But, I see the awful consequences that have ensued from white Americans’ ancestral guilt: so eager to atone for their ancestors’ sins against black people, they could not bear to criticize black leaders, leading them to elevate a hapless midwit like Ibram X. Kendi to a position entirely unmerited by his views. I do not want to repeat their mistakes: I do not want to use patronizing kid gloves in discussing the descendants of people my ancestors mistreated. And so I feel the need to speak up on the place where I think Ambedkar’s views really are misguided and misleading: namely, on Buddhism.

Ambedkar’s decision to convert to Buddhism was pure cultural appropriation, in any meaningful sense of that term that doesn’t just use it to enforce racial boundaries. That is, while Ambedkar’s Marathi Mahar culture might perhaps have been influenced by Buddhism thousands of years in the past, they had no connection to it at all in recent centuries, unlike the millions of contemporaries who were living parts of the tradition. Ambedkar’s ancestral lineage gave him no more connection to Buddhism than a contemporary Protestant’s does to Judaism.

I say the above point as clarification and not as criticism. After all, I’m for cultural appropriation. I call myself a Buddhist, and I don’t have any more ancestral connection to Buddhism than Ambedkar did. I’m all for people discovering a tradition without being raised in it.

What I am concerned about is when people pick up the tradition for an agenda that has nothing to do with the tradition’s content, and start throwing out some of the most important aspects of that content. That, as far as I can tell, is what Ambedkar did, and I do find that problematic.

As far as I can tell, Ambedkar’s reasons for becoming a Buddhist were pure process of elimination. Understandably, he wanted to reject everything about the caste-divided and caste-centric tradition in which he was raised, which by that point had come to be known as Hinduism. But he also was a proud Indian nationalist, and he was concerned that “conversion to Islam or Christianity will denationalize the Depressed Classes.” (quoted in Queen 52) It seems to me that the tradition that would have best fit Ambedkar’s criteria – an Indian activist egalitarian program – would have been Sikhism, with its own egalitarian tradition. I’ve never gotten a definitive answer on why Ambedkar didn’t pick Sikhism in the end – he did consider it seriously as an option – but it seems to have to do with the fact that Sikhism was harder to culturally appropriate: there were living Sikhs around doing things that Ambedkar didn’t like, and he didn’t want to be associated with them. By contrast, since there basically weren’t any Buddhists left in India, he was free to treat Buddhism as a blank slate on which he could write whatever he felt like.

And that’s basically what he did. Above all, Ambedkar rejected an idea that, from my first encounters with Buddhism, I have always taken to be at the very heart and soul of Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths (ārya satyas), and perhaps above all the Second Noble Truth, that suffering comes from craving. Without the Second Noble Truth it’s not just that I wouldn’t have become a Buddhist, but that I would have had no reason to become a Buddhist. In my view, a “Buddhist” who rejects the Four Noble Truths is like a “Christian” who thinks there was nothing special about Jesus. But that’s just what Ambedkar did: just like his colonial rulers, he proclaimed that “The four Aryan Truths make the gospel of the Buddha a gospel of pessimism.” (The Buddha and his Dhamma, xxix)

I have never accepted the idea that self-identification as a Buddhist is sufficient to make one a Buddhist, any more than self-identification as a peanut butter sandwich is sufficient to make one a peanut butter sandwich. For sociologists, self-identification is by far the most convenient way to define who’s in which tradition, and it’s very convenient. But for people who take the tradition’s ideals seriously, those ideals have a content, and that content matters. When Buddhist scholars advocate self-ID, I’ll often ask: “If Donald Trump calls himself a Buddhist, is he therefore a Buddhist?” (Perhaps the better example nowadays would be Elon Musk, since with his countercultural tastes that seems like something he might actually do.) That nearly always gives them pause, and rightly so.

And the Four Noble Truths, and related ideas about the mental causes of suffering, are so central to what I take Buddhism to be that I regard a self-identified Buddhist who rejects them with suspicion. It sure doesn’t help that what drew Ambedkar to Buddhism had nothing to do with any ideas or practices the Buddha actually taught, but just a convenient process of elimination. The ideas and practices of Sikhism would have been a closer fit to what he wanted to do; he picked Buddhism because it was a blank slate he could write on to without the inconvenience of existing Buddhists around to do things differently. It would be a really big stretch for me to consider Ambedkar a real Buddhist.

Yet having said all that, I still have some reason to view Ambedkar positively from a Buddhist perspective. More on that next time.