From the Pali Turn to The Buddha and His Dhamma: Reading Ambedkar as a Philologist

This article reconstructs B.R. Ambedkar as a philologist by engaging with three different strands of his scholarship. First, it traces his work on language in general and his construction of Pali as a language emblematic of Buddhism. By following cues in Ambedkar’s own writings and historicizing it, the article in its second section close reads the major historical stakes of his work. These two strands focus on how liturgical languages engage with caste hierarchy, and how ancient Indian history is perceived anew through Ambedkar’s critique of Brahmanism alongside contemporary scholarship on history. This long historical thread culminates in The Buddha and His Dhamma along with the focus on religion within his writings, which forms the third section of the article. I propose that the three strands together complete the trajectory of Ambedkar’s philological project for which he lays a critical foundation through an overarching history of India and its linguistic and religious past. In the article, the object of analysis is caste as a non-static category and how it functions from antiquity to the mid-twentieth century. Ultimately, I argue that Ambedkar reformulates the idea of what it means to be sacred from a Navayana Buddhist point of view, symbolized through a move away from Hinduism, which he announced at the Yeola conference in 1935, to the moment of his conversion to Buddhism in 1956.