ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a commentary on Ambedkar’s historical method. It is based on the presumption that as a legacy of his prodigious intellect his historical approach to politics has, so far, not been acknowledged as it should be by the establishment of Indian historians. The attempted political misappropriations of Ambedkar necessitate periodic visits to his multifarious and prodigious intellect. So far he has been examined and accepted as an expert on the Indian caste system, the politics of constitutionalism and an organic intellectual of the Indian untouchable and lower castes. Since Ambedkar’s becoming a historian of Indian society was intimately connected with his negation of caste and thereby the Hindu religion he began the Preface by coming to the point straightaway by raising the political question which inspired his historical research. As a modernist he desired rational knowledge and a new egalitarian society, and not another myth, to replace the sophistry of the establishment.