Politics
1891 to 1956, Mhow and Delhi, India
The economist who measured a currency, the sociologist who cracked open caste, and the constitution-maker who bound justice to the rights of the most despised.
Start learning B. →Before he was a constitution-maker, Ambedkar was one of the world’s sharpest monetary economists. In The Problem of the Rupee (1923) he argued that the true test of a currency is not its exchange rate but its purchasing…
In a 1916 paper written as a graduate student at Columbia, the young Ambedkar cracked open the machinery of caste. Its essence, he argued, is not occupation or race but endogamy - a class that has closed itself by forbi…
In 1932 Ambedkar won separate electorates for the Depressed Classes - the right to elect their own representatives - only to see Gandhi threaten to fast to death against it. Their clash was a profound argument about wha…
As independent India’s first Law Minister, Ambedkar staked his office on rewriting Hindu personal law to give women rights to property, inheritance, and divorce. When the bill was blocked, he resigned - convinced that a…
In one of his last essays, Ambedkar staged a confrontation between the Buddha and Karl Marx. They shared, he argued, almost the same diagnosis of human suffering and the same goal of ending it - but differed decisively…
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