Memoirs of a Dalit Communist by R.B. More

Next to him, in a finely tailored black suit and matching black trousers, is his stern, heavily built father wearing round spectacles. His shoulders slumped, his head tilted forward, he is peering at the photographer with something like suspicion. Against a background of potted plants, seated at the extreme left is an unsmiling, twenty-two-year-old man, Yeshwant Ambedkar, in a full-sleeve shirt and full-length trousers that don’t cover all of his slim frame. 1 The original glass negative of this photo was found, along with negatives of several photographs of Ambedkar and his associates, by Vijay Surwade and a fellow researcher, Naresh Shambarkar, in the tiny, dusty attic of Veer Photo Studio at Parel Naka, Mumbai, close to Ambedkar’s first office. Ambedkar published under the BAWS project, there are only three photographs of his first wife, Ramabai, and one of them, a formal family photo taken in 1934, is laden with meaning (BAWS 22: 96). In a lavishly produced 400-page photo-biography of B.R. The photos are from the archivist Vijay Surwade’s collection featured in the Navayana edition.)

All the footnotes in the book are included here in superscript with numbering. Gopal tracks original Marathi sources and documents to piece together this story. In this exclusive excerpt for The Satyashodak, we come to terms with the story of Ramabai, Ambedkar’s first wife whom he married in the year 1907 in Mumbai. Ambedkar, the comprehensive biography of Babasaheb Ambedkar published by Navayana on the eve of the 132nd birth anniversary, sheds new light on a range of issues.

( Ashok Gopal’s A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R.

Memoirs of a Dalit Communist by R.B. More