Maadhuri Hireker: Education, Emancipation, and an Ambedkarite-Buddhist Woman’s Journey from India to the UK

This article presents a transnational oral history of Maadhuri Hireker (b. 1940), a first-generation educated Ambedkarite woman whose life traverses rural Maharashtra, the historic moment of Buddhist conversion in 1956, and the institutionalization of Ambedkarism in postwar Britain. Grounded in extended first-person narrative, it advances an Ambedkarite feminist methodology that treats lived experience as a site of theory production rather than illustrative data. It argues that Ambedkarism circulates not as abstract ideology but as an ethical and socio-political practice, enacted through education, refusal of humiliation, gendered agency, and institution-building across borders. Situating Maadhuri’s life within Ambedkar’s core commitments—the annihilation of caste, education as emancipation, ethical self-respect, and resistance to graded inequality—the article foregrounds the gendered labour through which Ambedkarite ethics are sustained and transmitted in the diaspora. Placing her experiences alongside Ambedkar’s writings and subsequent scholarship, it shows how her life challenges patriarchy, caste, and untouchability while extending Ambedkarite thought in practice. Rooted in rural Maharashtra, Maadhuri drew on a distinct cultural and political inheritance, including witnessing Dr. Ambedkar firsthand, which shaped her trajectory toward emancipation. By centering her voice, the article addresses a significant gap in scholarship on Dalit women’s leadership within the global Ambedkarite movement while also contributing to broader discussions on caste, feminism, oral history, and migration. The article is embedded in a longitudinal project documenting the oral histories of first-generation Ambedkarites who migrated to the UK between the 1950s and 1970s and laid the foundations of contemporary Ambedkarism.