Beginning with his submission to the 1919 Southborough Committee, B.R. Ambedkar’s career as the first pan-Indian Dalit leader was in many respects defined by a program of legal and constitutional reform. Frequently depicted in Mahar artwork holding the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar qualified at Grays Inn in 1919, practised and taught law in Bombay, and eventually served as the chair of India’s constitutional drafting committee and the independent country’s first Law Minister. Over the course of nearly four decades, he produced a substantial body of writing on the nature of constitutional structure, affirmative action, and the social preconditions for substantive and participatory – versus merely formal – democracy. Newer scholarship has shed considerable light on the intellectual foundations of Ambedkar’s juridical worldview (Rao 1993), his policy vision of political inclusion (Thorat and Kumar 2008), and the central role of subjectivity, violence, and redress in his understanding of caste and law (Rao 2009). Yet the image that emerges through these and other accounts is largely synchronic and holistic. The name ‘Ambedkar’ has come to stand for a determinate set of positions, or even a particular mode of theoretical analysis. Not only does this process minimize the significant discontinuities in Ambedkar’s intellectual biography, it also tends to divorce his political thinking from practical and contingent questions of strategy. To a certain degree, Ambedkar himself encouraged this type of reading by redeploying his earlier ideas and rhetoric in new configurations, thus masking shifts in his constitutional philosophy. In his writings on the law, Ambedkar’s overriding concern was the relationship between constitutional form and social structure: how can representative democracy function in a society characterized by the degradation – the systematic marginalization and oppression – of minority groups by a communal majority? The fundamental difficulty of this problem lies in the fact that if ‘popular rule’ simply entails ‘majority rule’ through individual suffrage, the dispossession of minorities will become permanent. Ambedkar believed that a solution to this dilemma must accomplish three aims: the democratic self-governance of the country as a whole; the protection of minority communities through ensuring the capacity to exercise individual citizenship rights; and collective empowerment of minorities within the state apparatus in order to secure the equitable administration of the law. Two major strands of thinking interwove within this overall

argument. First, Ambedkar confronted the problem of how political institutions could work democratically within a society defined by social, economic, and educational inequality. As a result, he designed a series of mechanisms – including reservations within the civil service, separate electorates for Dalits, and nonterritorial electorates – that were meant to neutralize the influence of caste within the government and state. Second, Ambedkar recognized that the actual functioning of the law was profoundly conditioned by social life. Increasingly, he stressed concepts like socio-economic equality, constitutional morality, and civic religion as preconditions for democratic governance. While these lines of reasoning embodied different approaches to the same dilemma, their relationship was uneasy, and their implications contradictory. A latent impasse existed between supporting a state-driven process of democratic transformation and recognizing the socially determined character of the law’s functioning in practice. In this essay, I argue that Ambedkar’s thinking about the question of the law divides into three main periods, separated by two moments of significant reorientation. Of course, these breaks were not absolute: he remained driven by the overriding question of untouchability’s eradication and he often returned to the same fundamental principles. During the first period (from 1919 to the early 1940s), Ambedkar concentrated on advocating particular constitutional mechanisms designed to ensure the independent power of minorities in the state. This programme of ‘shared sovereignty’ corresponded with his efforts to triangulate between the Indian National Congress and the British colonial power in order to ensure the recognition of Dalits as a minority in any constitutional settlement. Although he continued to pursue this strategy until the British Cabinet Mission’s 1946 rejection of separate electorates for Untouchables, the focus of his legal writings began to shift in the early 1940s following his experience leading the Independent Labour Party and the triumphs of European fascism. At this point, Ambedkar began to stress social consciousness and the egalitarian foundations of democracy over and against constitutional structure. This position – which drew on a Romantic tradition dating back to Coleridge – guided Ambedkar’s intervention into the Constituent Assembly. Yet, despite his historic role in drafting the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar lacked the political support necessary to incorporate his characteristic legal ideas into the final document. At the end of his life, Ambedkar advocated mass conversion to Buddhism not only to remove the stigma of untouchability, but also as a solution to the crisis of political agency created by the law’s grounding in the social.