B.R.Ambedkar (contd-2)

In 1935, Ambedkar was a Government Law College, Mumbai, a position he held for two years. Settling in Mumbai, Ambedkar oversaw the construction of a house, and stocked his personal library with more than 50,000 books. His wife Ramabai died after a long illness in the same year. It had been her long-standing wish to go on a pilgrimage to Pandharpur, but Ambedkar had refused to let her go, telling her that he would create a new Pandharpur for her instead of Hinduism's Pandharpur which treated them as untouchables. Speaking at the Yeola Conversion Conference on 13 October in Nasik, Ambedkar announced his intention to convert to a different religion and exhorted his followers to leave Hinduism. He would repeat his message at numerous public meetings across India.

In 1936, Ambedkar founded the Independent Labour Party, which contested in the 1937 Bombay election to the Central Legislative Assembly for the 13 reserved and 4 general seats and securing 11 and 3 seats respectively.

On his report to the Viceroy about Bombay Presidency election, the Governor of Bombay, Lord Brabourne said that:

Dr. Ambedkar's boast of winning, not only the 15 seats which are reserved for the Harijans, but also a good many more looks like completely falsified, as I feared it would be.

Ambedkar published his book The Annihilation of Caste in the same year. This strongly criticised Hindu orthodox religious leaders and the caste system in general. Ambedkar served on the Defence Advisory Committee and the Viceroy's Executive Council as minister for labour.

In his work Who Were the Shudras?, Ambedkar attempted to explain the formation of Untouchables. He saw the Shudras, who form the lowest caste in the ritual hierarchy of the Hindu caste system, as being separate from Untouchables. Ambedkar oversaw the transformation of his political party into the Scheduled Castes Federation, although it performed poorly in the elections held in 1946 for the Constituent Assembly of India. In his 1948 sequel to Who Were the Shudras?, which he titled The Untouchables: A Thesis on the Origins of Untouchability, Ambedkar said that:

The Hindu Civilisation ... is a diabolical contrivance to suppress and enslave humanity. Its proper name would be infamy. What else can be said of a civilisation which has produced a mass of people ... who are treated as an entity beyond human intercourse and whose mere touch is enough to cause pollution?

Ambedkar was also critical of Islam and its practices in South Asia. While justifying the Partition of India, he condemned the practice of child marriage, as well as the mistreatment of women, in Muslim society.

No words can adequately express the great and many evils of polygamy and concubinage, and especially as a source of misery to a Muslim woman. Take the caste system. Everybody infers that Islam must be free from slavery and caste. [...] [While slavery existed], much of its support was derived from Islam and Islamic countries. While the prescriptions by the Prophet regarding the just and humane treatment of slaves contained in the Koran are praiseworthy, there is nothing whatever in Islam that lends support to the abolition of this curse. But if slavery has gone, caste among Musalmans [Muslims] has remained.