This was an unusual book launch in Mumbai on October 30 where the author , a prominent human rights activist, management professor, faces restrictions on his movements because of a court order. And the audience included some of the best minds including well known poet Vara Vara Rao, who are either on bail in the Bhima Koregaon case or their movements are restricted too. The author is Anand Teltumbde and the book is “Iconoclast – a reflective biography of Babasaheb Ambedkar”. Teltumbde is married to Dr Ambedkar’s grand daughter, lives in Rajgruha, the house in Dadar built by the Constitution maker and in a way he is an iconoclast because he is very critical of Dr Ambedkar even while emphasizing his greatness.
Said Teltumbde, this book was written during the peak of the crisis in my life. I wasn’t even sure whether I would complete it. If I had been arrested on 28 August 2018 when the police raided my house on the campus of the Goa institute of management, there was no question of completing it. Even if I had completed it, it would have been taken away by the police. It was a fortunate stroke of serendipity that my arrest was thwarted by a whisker as I had left Goa for Mumbai just a few hours before the police raid, in connection with my institutional work. For reasons known to them, they did not arrest me in Mumbai though my whereabouts were quite well-known. However, I got entangled in the legal process that gave me some twenty months of freedom save for a brief brush with police custody of thirteen hours in February 2019. It is this period, fraught with anxieties, that I used for writing this book along with securing the future of my students. Subsequently, Anand Teltumbde spent 31 months in jail before being released on bail in November 2022.
The book was praised at the function by Vibhuti Patel, former professor of political science at TISS and SNDT university, Ramu Ramanathan, playwright, director, and Keshav Waghmare, dalit writer.
Like all major personalities, Dr Ambedkar had his shortcomings, Vibhuti said he showed little understanding of the problems of adivasis , questioned the role of women members of Parliament, who he said, should be doing work at home. She recalled that her grandfather was one of the supporters of Dr Ambedkar in his early days in Baroda state and seen the discrimination he was subjected by some people.
Teltumbde was right when he said for several years after his death Dr Ambedkar was not in the popular imagination such a revered figure as now. Chaitya Bhoomi, where millions now gather every year in Dadar, was built years after his death by son Bhaiyyasaheb. There is now a surge in books and scholarship on Dr Ambedkar but for many years not much was being written. I remember clearly because I wrote an article in the Times of India in 1981 on 25 years of the conversion of Dalits to Buddhism after a visit to the census office and going through other documents which were not easily accessible. That was an unusual piece, not much was being written on Dr Ambedkar then.
Now there is blind worship of Dr Ambedkar so the followers do not tolerate any dissent, Teltumbde encountered opposition from such people even in a reputed institution, recalled, Sanober Keshavar, a law professor, while talking with me later. corrupt leaders have imprisoned Dr Ambedkar by building statues all over, said Waghmare.
Dr Ambedkar himself wrongly believed that only Dalits can lead their struggles and told this to social reformer Vithal Ramji Shinde who belonged to the Bahujan samaj, said Teltumbde. Dr Ambedkar should have built an alliance with Shinde.
Teltumbde also said Dr Ambedkar could not be called the sole architect of the Constitution, many others contributed. However, Shekhar Hattangadi, a lawyer, journalist who has studied Constitution law, said Dr Ambedkar’s role was predominant. He also raised the issue of Constitutional morality. He said his problem lay with the content of the evening’s discussion, and more particularly with at least one quite dubious statement — about DrBRA calling himself a “hack” . Now this puts me in mind of M.K.Gandhi’s reported statement that “India is a land of nonsense.” V.S.Naipaul flaunted this quote (not surprisingly, without context) to justify his book-long vituperative tirade against Indian society in An Area of Darkness.
Not denying the veracity of both those statements, but I feel, in all fairness, that we need to examine their subtext in light of the reference to context in which they were made.
However, as a lifelong student (and a part-time prof) of Constitutional Law, Hattangadi said, I am thoroughly convinced that Dr BR Amebedkar’s description of himself as a “hack” is most unfair — given his tireless efforts to become a “bridge” of sorts between the words of the Drafting Committee and the ideas of the rest of the Constituent Assembly members. Even a cursory reading of the CA Debates will make that clear. Although the phrase “architect of the Indian Constitution” has been used rather loosely and ignorantly by many who might not have read a single page of the CA proceedings (they’re available online), it is interesting that it most accurately describes DrBRA’s role in making the Constitution. An architect is never a bricklayer (so the actual words in the Constitution may not be his), but an architect’s role is to conceptualize a building’s look and structure with the objective of rendering it functional and comprehensive, and getting his blueprint approved by the representatives of the people at large, the constituent assembly members. This, I believe, is what he amply succeeded in doing, Hattangadi said.
Gautam Navlakha, Vernon Gonsalves, activists in democratic rights who are on bail in the Bhima Koregaon case, were present along with Bernard Dmello, former senior editor, EPW, Sudharak Olwe, photographer, who provided rare photographs for the book and J.V. Pawar, a founder of dalit panther, a reference guide to Teltumbde on certain issues.
Vidyadhar Date is a senior journalist, culture critic, and author of a book on the importance of public transport
