Ambedkar’s Journey of Conversion to Buddhism

Abstract

The history of religious conversions has highlighted two aspects. One is the transformation in one’s spiritual and transcendental realm and the other is the social and the political domain that encompasses a sense of rejection of existing religious and philosophical world views as well as assertion of one’s political outlook. In this context, this article explores the contours of one of the most important political thinkers of modern India, that is, B. R. Ambedkar who embraced Buddhism after 40 years of his experiment with the Hindu religion. This article is divided into two parts; the first deals with Ambedkar’s engagement with Hinduism with a hope of reforming the same but having failed in his attempt for 20 years, he declared to leave the religion in 1936. The second part deals with Ambedkar’s both explicit and implicit deliberations for selecting the right noble faith, that is, Buddhism whose foundation was egalitarianism, based on equality and compassion. He used Deweyian experimentalism and Buddhist rationalism, to reject Hinduism and seek refuge in the reformed Buddhism, that is, Navayana Buddhism.