Ambedkar on Religion, Buddhism and Marxism

August 2, 2007 on 12:49 am | In Your Blog | No Comments

Website Editor’s Note : The following article was written by our member Tanvi Patel, last year, as part of her project work at the JNU, where she was doing her post graduate course. We are reproducing it without any changes, and would welcome comments and posts from readers. In particular we would like to get the reactions from our friends in the Buddhist community of the followers of Dr. Ambedkar.

Ambedkar on Religion, Buddhism and Marxism

By Tanvi Patel, November 2006

• Why Convert?

In 1935 Ambedkar announced, ‘Although I have been born a Hindu, I will not die a Hindu.’ And it culminated in October 1956 in the city of Nagpur where he and 400,000 followers took the ‘three refuges’ of traditional Buddhism and an additional 22 vows.

Conversion to Buddhism became one of the aspects of dalit negation of the appropriation by the hegemonic forces of Brahmanism. Through conversion dalits sought to counteract the imposed external definitions and have strived to assert their humanity as both the autonomous makers of their identity and contributors to the making of Indian society. Conversion has been a kind of social rebirth.

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