We think of Dr. B R Ambedkar as someone who overcame extreme adversity to become one of India’s most revolutionary thinkers and thought leaders. We think of him as a champion of the marginalised and downtrodden Dalit communities; and a writer who penned treatises such as Annihilation of Caste. We also remember him as the chief architect of our constitution but we need to remember him as a feminist. Dr. Ambedkar was a feminist as well – someone who thought about women's equality, education and emancipation much before most others.
Ambedkar saw how a society cannot be said to progress if it disenfranchises significant numbers of its population and keeps them out of the economy and decision-making processes. He saw similarities in the way that certain castes were kept landless and economically disempowered and in the way that women were not allowed to own land or enjoy economic autonomy. If half of the population – women – do not have the same rights, freedoms and choices that the other half has, how can that society progress? His thoughts and ideas were futuristic for the time that he lived in.
He had himself seen how education could be transformative even though he suffered untold humiliation in school. He speaks about being made to sit separately on gunny bags no one would touch, being thrashed for drinking from the school tap and other horrifying experiences in the essay No Peon, no water. During his school years, he read books other than school curriculum books and later he was able to continue his education because of a kind benefactor. He saw how only education and learning could help create the kind of social mobility that could help overcome the structural hierarchies of society. And since he saw education as a key to emancipation, he advocated this for the oppressed sections of society as well as for all women.
It was a revolutionary idea for a country as unequal as India that each citizen, including oppressed communities and women, would have the right to vote. The aim of ensuring that no citizen remained disenfranchised was to see that discrimination and structural inequity would slowly be removed from society.
At the time, it was a widely held belief that women were unable to grasp complex concepts and as such were intellectually inferior; hence best kept out of the professional sphere. Dr. Ambedkar's push for women's education was based on his conviction that women were in no way intellectually inferior to men. His experience of women supported his convictions.
As a group that is undermined and discriminated against, women have the ability and the insight needed to bring about positive change he believed. He saw how women in leadership roles would bring empathy and creative solutions to long-entrenched social problems.
At a time when women were still fighting for the vote in other parts of the world, the Indian constitution embraced universal adult franchise, which was a revolutionary idea. Not only that, but Dr. Ambedkar also saw the importance of making laws that protected women's rights. As the country’s first law minister, he was instrumental in bringing the maternity bill and equal pay laws. He continued to strive to create social and legal structures that would offer rights and the kind of protection to women that would help bring them on par with men – in the eyes of the law at least if not in practical social reality. On Ambedkar Jayanti, the women of India would do well to remember a great social reformer not just of Dalits, but a true feminist in the modern sense of the word.
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