Ambedkar: Awakening India’s Social Conscience

Author: Narendra Jadhav
Publisher: Konark Publishers, New Delhi
(Pp 642, ISBN 978-93-220-0836-9, Rs 595)

Anyone who tries to describe Bharat Ratna Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, affectionately known as Babasaheb Ambedkar must feel very much the way Nehru felt when he tried to describe Gandhi. He remarked, “ It is always difficult to describe a man, who is rather unusual and a tremendous personality, who gave an impression of enormous strength and inner reserves of power… and then his career was one of success… in molding the Indian people…in making them better than they were, stronger, braver, and more courageous.”

Ambedkar: Awakening India’s Social Conscience is the first ever intellectual biography written by Narendra Jadhav, a well-known economist, policy maker, educationist, social scientist and bestselling author. The book incorporates all of Dr Ambedkar’s writings and most important speeches. The book is written in an unconventional style focusing primarily on Dr Ambedkar’s intellectual making evolution of his thinking and thought processes and the strategic stance that he took from time to time, over his momentous public life.

The book is divided into eleven parts – starting with making of Dr Ambedkar – about his education and foray in public life, his initiation of mass movement, his scholarly prowess as politician. Section devoted to ‘On war with Mahatma Gandhi’ makes an interesting read.

This well written volume will help the present generation to understand Dr Ambedkar in his true spirit. The author hopes and rightly so that this intellectual biography will help people understand this colossal intellectual figure and will provide them an opportunity to correct their misguided impression confining Dr Ambedkar only as leader of untouchables.

In short, it is very scholarly, readable volume on the life and times of Dr B R Ambedkar.

–GS Jolly