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

There are few public personalities as multifaceted, deeply engaged with the community, and persistent in the people’s movement along with that of his nation’s, as Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, affectionately referred to as Babasaheb Ambedkar. Out of the many interesting aspects of his life, the first part of this paper traces one of the scholarly trajectories of Ambedkar through the Pali language and its connection with the Buddhist tradition. The attention Ambedkar invests on Pali is read critically alongside his engagement with Sanskrit where my specific focus is on how the two liturgical languages engage with caste hierarchy. A philological study of Ambedkar’s work across languages with a focus on sacred texts reveals a remarkable conflict between Buddhism and Brahmanism in ancient Indian history since around 600 BC. Ambedkar’s archival preference of the ancient Pali-Buddhist texts in opposition to Sanskritic-Brahmanism point towards a perspective and history of the marginalized people of South Asia in direct confrontation with Vedic Brahmanism. This reading gives a caste conscious vantage to view South Asian studies through the intersection of Buddhist studies and critical caste studies. 

Among the seventeen volumes of Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, volume 16 titled Grammar and Dictionary of the Pali Language stands apart from the rest of the writings. It is almost missable as part of the collection of Ambedkar’s writings. This volume sheds light on another aspect of Ambedkar’s scholarship, that of a lexicographer. While there are recent works on Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism and the Navayāna movement, the effort put in by Ambedkar to lay a linguistic foundation for the new Buddhist converts have not been paid enough attention. Vasant Moon in the editorial section of volume 16 (BAWS) points out that Ambedkar was past fifty years old when he began his work on Pali, and compares the task undertaken by Ambedkar with that of Samuel Johnson who attempted his dictionary of the English language in 1755. Moon explains the magnitude of the task Ambedkar had undertaken–a compilation of a dictionary of words and phrases of a language no longer spoken–as fraught with difficulties. The volume includes, in addition to the Pali - English dictionary as Book I, another dictionary where words in Pali are translated into English, Ambedkar’s native Marathi, neighbouring Gujarati and Hindi as one of the big lingua francas of the newly formed nation. The third book or section titled “Pali Grammar” further classified into orthography, rules of change, etymology, syntax, general conversation etc. is modelled on introductory grammar texts by colonial grammarians. The go-to theme is Buddhism and monasteries which lead to the final book in the volume, a twelve-page article published in Marathi in 1956. It is titled “Bouddha Pooja Pāth” meaning “Lessons to Worship Buddha”. Ambedkar explains and translates Buddhist rituals and prayers in Marathi and then presents the original Pali prayer alongside it. The gradual movement from a dictionary and grammar to religious education must be noted as early indication of the long term vision of Ambedkar.  

Ambedkar’s turn to Pali is well documented in some of the early biographies and writings on Ambedkar. Moon’s biography titled Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar mentions the “World Fellowship of Buddhists” conference held in Rangoon (or Yangon, in modern day Myanmar) in December 1954 where Ambedkar had remarked, “it is pathetic that the country where Lord Buddha was born had also witnessed the eradication of his religion.” Ambedkar in his speech informs the audience, “I introduced the study of Pali, the lion-seal of Ashoka in front of the Rajbhavan and the Ashok wheel on the flag without any opposition. In two colleges in Mumbai and Aurangabad, there are faculties for the study and research of Buddhist religion” (2002:206). Moon adds that it is around this period Ambedkar started to edit the multilingual Pali dictionary. Ambedkar’s work on Pali, his impending conversion to Buddhism and the ongoing work on The Buddha and His Dhamma is all happening around the mid-1950s. It emphasizes the interrelation between Ambedkar’s work on language and Ambedkar’s work on religion. There is a developing sense of Ambedkar and his propagation of Pali studies and Buddhism at this point. Eleanor Zelliot, one of the foremost scholars of the Ambedkar movement, however, makes a distinction between Pali and Sanskrit.   

"The Pali scriptures, rather than the Sanskrit scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism, are used in the current movement. Dr. Ambedkar felt that the Pali tradition was purer and more rational; it is also more logical that rebels against Brahmanism would want Pali rather than Sanskrit as their religious language, and so in the Bible of the movement, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar' s The Buddha and His Dhamma (Bombay: Siddharth Publications, 1957), stories from the Pali scriptures as well as interpretations of Buddhism from a rational, humanistic viewpoint dominate" (1992:250).  

This distinction connects Ambedkar’s stake in the ancient historical understanding of caste with language. It also makes a binary between Pali as the sacred language of the Buddhist scriptures and Sanskrit as the language of Brahmanism and its sacred texts. Ambedkar’s placing of ancient Indian history gains prominence here—” The history of India is nothing but a history of a mortal conflict between Buddhism and Brahmanism” (1979:267). Ambedkar engages at length on early India especially in part III of Volume 3 “revolution and counter-revolution in Ancient India” where the Buddhist tradition at its peak is referred to as the “revolution” whereas the return of Brahmanism is referred to as the counter-revolution. Overall, there is now a bridge between Ambedkar’s later work on the Pali grammar, language, and the conversion to Buddhism, and Ambedkar’s early work on ancient history and philosophy.