Works in Progress
COVER STORY / HISTORY
AATHIRA KONIKKARA
IN A RARE MOMENT OF LEISURE, on the night of 5 December 1956, at his rented bungalow on Delhi’s Alipur Road, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar chanted the Buddhist liturgy as it played on the radiogram: “Buddham Sharanam Gachchhami, Dhamman Sharanam Gachchhami, Sangham Sharanam Gachchhami”—I take refuge in Buddha, in his Dhamma and in the Sangha. His cook broke his reverie by asking him to come have dinner. He had to be coaxed several times before he agreed to eat a little rice.
On his way to the dining table, Ambedkar stopped at his library to pick out a few books to keep him company at night. Nanak Chand Rattu—a central-government employee who had been helping him with secretarial work since Ambedkar lost his official staff when he resigned as law minister, in 1951—took his leave around midnight. Ambedkar instructed Rattu that, the following morning, he should dispatch for publication a set of freshly typed drafts, including the preface and introduction to his book The Buddha and His Dhamma.
Ambedkar’s second wife, Savita, recalls in her autobiography that he was engrossed with his writing “till the last moment of his life.” Since technology such as photocopying was not yet available, she adds, he had to rely on handwritten or typed copies of rare books for his research. “He got typed copies of some books from the British Library in London,” Savita Ambedkar writes. “His thirst for knowledge was passionate and unmatched.”
In his final years, despite his deteriorating health and numerous political commitments, Ambedkar carved out time to write and revise the drafts of four ambitious books, eventually published as The Buddha and His Dhamma, Buddha and Karl Marx, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India and Riddles in Hinduism. Savita Ambedkar lists 18 titles that were in various stages of progress—“Some are chapters of untitled books, while some are essays created from a chain of thought.” He had written about eighty pages of an autobiography, titled Waiting for a Visa, which would be published on the eve of his birth centenary, in 1990. Ambedkar was also planning to write books about Jotirao Phule, Sayajirao Gaekwad and Mohandas Gandhi.
He often worked late into the night. Rattu wrote a memoir about this period, Last Few Years of Dr Ambedkar, in which he recounts Ambedkar’s distress as he spent hours poring over the manuscripts and approaching potential publishers. According to Rattu, The Buddha and His Dhamma—originally titled “Buddha and His Gospel”—was Ambedkar’s priority, a book he wanted to publish in his lifetime. Preparing it “was a tremendous and a very tedious job which I had to perform single-handed, always reaching home past midnight,” he writes. “The type-script of the book was corrected, recorrected, paged, repaged, paragraphs numbered and renumbered. At times few lines or a para were cut away with the scissor and pasted at its proper places.”
Rattu recalls cycling about twenty-five kilometres every day between his home, his office and Alipur Road. “Be it winter, summer, rain, storm, tempest, lightning or thunder, I had to reach there after office hours, early morning on Sundays and holidays, type out heaps and heaps of material for his books, replies to communications, office routine, in addition to looking after him.” On the night of 5 December, he went home for the first time in five days.
The Buddha and His Dhamma was completed in March 1956, after five years of laborious effort. But Ambedkar could not secure the twenty thousand rupees required to print it. He repeatedly wrote to the Mumbai-based Dorabji Tata Trust as a potential publisher. “Mr Tata must have returned by now and so there could be no difficulty in your communicating his mind,” Ambedkar wrote in a letter to MR Masani, the chairman of Tata Industries at the time, on 17 March. “I am dreadfully in a hurry,” he added, so, if Tata had refused his request, he would “like to go with my bowl to another door.” Masani wrote back that the trust could not publish the book but would provide monetary assistance. Two months later, Ambedkar received a cheque for ₹ 3,000.
The union government, under Jawaharlal Nehru, had set up a committee to organise programmes in commemoration of Buddha’s twenty-five-hundredth birth anniversary that year. Ambedkar wrote to Nehru, asking the government to purchase 500 copies of The Buddha and His Dhamma and distribute them among state libraries and visiting dignitaries. Nehru refused. “We had set aside a certain sum for publication on the occasion of the Buddha Jayanti,” he wrote back. “That sum has been exhausted and in fact, exceeded.” The book was eventually published a year after his death by the People’s Education Society—founded by Ambedkar in 1945—under the supervision of SS Rege, the librarian at the PES-run Siddharth College.
Ambedkar died in his sleep on 6 December. His vast corpus of unpublished writings led a tortured afterlife. The manuscripts languished in the Alipur Road bungalow for years, until Savita Ambedkar was forced out along with the papers. They then passed into the apathetic care of the government, and Ambedkar’s relatives and followers, such as JB Bansod and JV Pawar, had to petition the government and judiciary for years before they were brought into public light. It was only as a result of this pressure that the Maharashtra government began releasing the Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches series in 1982—a quarter century after his death. The series is meant to publish the titles Ambedkar was unable to release during his lifetime, as well as to republish his many books and essays that were already in the public domain but risk going out of circulation. This exercise remains incomplete.
The central government published the first volume of Gandhi’s collected works in 1958, a decade after his assassination, and the hundredth volume in 1994. After Nehru’s death, in 1964, it swiftly established the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library to house his papers. The NMML also became custodian to much of Gandhi’s work, and the papers of numerous others considered founding fathers of the republic. The surviving papers of Ambedkar—the chief architect of the Indian Constitution, and an icon of emancipation for millions fighting to annihilate caste and patriarchy, as well as to safeguard labour rights—presently lie in an office of the Maharashtra education department, under the care of a committee appointed by the state government. The committee has brought out 22 volumes of Ambedkar’s work to date, the last of them over a decade ago. There is no clarity on how many remain to be published.
Even though Ambedkar’s ideas have inspired generations of people around the world, their spread has often been in spite of, rather than due to, the government’s efforts. There are many reasons for the official neglect of his writings—not least Ambedkar’s unabashed critique of Hinduism. The appearance of the BAWS volumes has gradually deepened Ambedkar’s stamp on Indian thought, yet uncertainty still hangs over the manuscripts and their publication. In the face of bureaucratic apathy and disputes over intellectual property, it has often been the toil of individual Ambedkarites, both inside and outside the committee, that has ensured these works have remained in print and been digitised in perpetuity.
Various iterations of the committee, appointed by changing state governments, have left their own marks on the publications. Vasant Moon, a bureaucrat and Ambedkarite who led the committee for the first two decades of its Hinduism—dissolved the committee appointed by the government that preceded it, which was led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, and neglected to appoint a new one for over a year.
