Reading Ambedkar as a Philologist: Language, Time, and Caste in BAWS (Volumes 3, 11, and 16)

The paper reads B.R. Ambedkar as a philologist through his engagement with Pali and Sanskrit towards the making of Buddhist texts. By tracing a genealogy of key sacred texts, the essay specifically focuses on how liturgical languages engage with caste hierarchy. The object of analysis in the paper is the category of caste and how it continues to function from antiquity to the mid-twentieth century. I historicize Ambedkar’s engagement with language (Choudhury, 2018; Bronkhorst, 2019) and read it with other philological interpretations of early Buddhism (Norman, 2006), alongside recent scholarship on Ambedkar (eds. Jondhale and Beltz, 2004; eds. Rathore and Verma, 2011). This long historical thread culminates in a (casteless?) The Buddha and His Dhamma (Ambedkar, 1957) based on which I argue that Ambedkar reformulates the idea of what it means to be sacred through his decades-long engagement with Buddhism.