Ambedkar’s Religion

Anupama Rao (Barnard History).

This project has two interconnected aims. The first is to explore the considerable holdings of the American Marathi Mission located at Burke (UTS) and Andover-Harvard Theological Library. These records provide detailed accounts of the work of Nonconformist missionaries amongst lower-caste and Dalit communities in western India, and allow us to map underexplored links between Christian conceptions of egalitarianism and anticaste radicalism as these developed in tandem across the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The second aim of the project is to draw on ongoing primary research in these understudied archives as the spine around which to be able to better contextualize the 1956 Buddhist conversion of Dalit leader and Columbia’s native son, B. R. Ambedkar through inquiries into the longer-term trajectories of Dalit religiosity, debates about caste and Hinduism, and the disciplinary formation of comparative religion and cultural anthropology as these together enabled the rediscovery of Buddhism in India.

In brief, the project seeks to provide historical depth and conceptual clarity to answer the question “why Buddhism,” and to better understand the experimental nature of Ambedkar’s Navayana [new vehicle] Buddhism. It does so in two ways, by: a) addressing Ambedkar’s conversion as a critical event that requires a far deeper understanding of regional and historical debates about Hinduism and Buddhism in India, and b) thinking about Buddhist conversion through longer-term religious histories that can be fruitfully explored through our considerable holdings at Burke (UTS), in collaboration with records at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library.

This project also links with ongoing research at Butler’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library as a part of the recently launched Ambedkar Initiative.