Fieldnotes on Ambedkar and the Constitution

14 Apr, 2025

In the Margins, the Mandate

This essay takes the form of fieldnotes not out of literary indulgence, but to echo the mode of Ambedkar’s own life: not linear, but layered; not academic alone, but lived. To write about Ambedkar is to write with one foot in the archive, and the other in the street.

It is April 14th. Amongst many holidays (Odia New Year, Bengali New Year in Bangladesh, Tamil New Year, beginning of the Assamese New Year, Malayali New Year), it is Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Jayanti. The day Indians celebrate the birth of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the principal architect of the Indian Constitution, a visionary social reformer, jurist, economist, and champion of equality.

The coincidence of so many New Years on April 14 isn't merely a calendrical accident. For Ambedkarites, it signals the birth of a new moral calendar. It reframes time itself: not as cyclical tradition, but as rupture. A call to begin again, more justly.

— Calendar —

Born in 1891, Dr. Ambedkar dedicated his life to fighting caste discrimination and uplifting the marginalized. He became the voice of the oppressed and the driving force behind a Constitution that enshrines justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity for all Indian citizens. His ideas continue to ignite social justice movements, not only in India, but in every place where dignity is denied and silence is weaponized.

In the final chapters of his life, Ambedkar found liberation in Navayana Buddhism—a radical act of reclamation that extended his lifelong struggle into spiritual terrain. It was not renunciation, but revolution. Navayana was a second birth, not into silence, but into speech.

A few powerful touchpoints:

“Annihilation of Caste” which is the foundational critique of caste as a system, and also where Ambedkar most sharply articulates the moral necessity of dissent.

“The real remedy is to destroy the belief in the sanctity of the Shastras.” In doing so, Ambedkar wasn’t just critiquing tradition, but he was crafting an epistemology of resistance. His rationalism was not Enlightenment mimicry; it was the rationalism of the wounded. ¹

Ambedkar once declared, “The assertion by the Untouchables that they are as good as the Touchables is a challenge to the supremacy of the Touchables.”

It wasn’t just rhetoric. It was revolution at the level of ontology. In asserting their full humanity, the oppressed were not merely seeking inclusion, they were demanding a redefinition of the social. For Ambedkar, dignity was not to be granted, but recognized. Not given from above, but wrested from below. Recognition, not permission. His fieldnotes might not have been filled with strategies for upward mobility, but with plans for structural undoing.

For Ambedkar, education was not a ladder. It was a chisel to chip away at the pillars of caste that had been mistaken for heritage. He didn’t seek access to Brahminical knowledge. He sought to dissolve its monopoly, wanted the gates torn down. ²

— Constitution —

“States and Minorities” where he proposes a constitutional vision that is not just legal, but deeply moral.

He read John Dewey, but surpassed liberal individualism by rooting justice in social and structural transformation, not just rights.

Nancy Fraser’s distinction between "affirmative" and "transformative" remedies helps us read Ambedkar as a thinker not of piecemeal reform, but of structural repair. His Constitution was not a bandage. It was a re-architecture. ³

Where most constitutions celebrate founding fathers, Ambedkar’s Constitution is a founding fracture. It does not glorify the past. It calls it to account. In doing so, he turned the Constitution into what Sharmila Rege might call a “counter-archive”; a site where subaltern pain enters legal memory. ⁴

The metaphor of a palimpsest may serve us here—the Constitution as layered script: overwritten, contested, reclaimed. The margins bleed into the text. The Constitution as a breathing wound — not healed, but cauterized in struggle.

Upendra Baxi extends this thinking through the idea of constitutional morality and transformative constitutionalism—echoing Ambedkar’s mandate that law must not merely codify justice but confront caste where it lives. ⁵

Aishwary Kumar describes Ambedkar as a thinker of radical equality, one who writes from the space of impossibility, in conditions where justice must be invented, not merely implemented. ⁶

Ambedkar as an architect not of buildings, but of breathing rooms.

The “living constitution” vs. “originalism” is how Ambedkar anticipated the former through his emphasis on social dynamism, not static texts.

Substantive equality: not just formal equality under the law, but equity as an interpretative principle as we peek into Ambedkar’s drafting philosophy.

Charles Mills described liberalism as a “racial contract.” Ambedkar sought a break from its caste-based cousin. His was not a borrowed liberalism, but a rewritten one, from the margins, for the majority. ⁷

Cedric Robinson’s “Black Radical Tradition” helps us place Ambedkar among global traditions of resistance, where the subjugated do not wait to be saved—they redefine what it means to be human. ⁸

— Caste —

What good is a Constitution if its interpreters cannot see caste? Ambedkar warned: “Caste is not just in society. It’s in the courtroom. It’s in the syllabus. It’s in the silence.” ⁹

Ambedkar vs. Gandhi:

“Where Gandhi sought reform within the varna system, Ambedkar demanded annihilation, because reform was not enough where dehumanization was built into the foundation.”

Caste as a script written in invisible ink — legible only to those made illegible.

Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics—the power to determine who may live and who must die—resonates eerily with how caste renders certain lives socially dead, long before biological death arrives. ¹⁰

Ambedkar’s critique wasn’t reserved for conservatives. He confronted the Indian Left’s blind spots too—its fixation on class to the exclusion of caste. Justice, for him, required binocular vision. ¹¹

— Critique —

Dr. Ambedkar’s life reads like a blueprint for ethical leadership: born into oppression, he turned every personal barrier into a collective breakthrough. From Columbia University to the drafting of the Indian Constitution, he carved out space where there was none. Education wasn't just his tool, it was his rebellion.

His fieldnotes, if one imagines them, might be filled with:

• Margins scribbled with the names of the nameless. [Perhaps he wrote them the way others write equations or prayers. Not to forget, but to insist.]
• Speeches turned into weapons against systemic cruelty. [His voice: less oratory, more seismic tremor.]
• Laws annotated with compassion. [Justice, for Ambedkar, wasn’t the state’s revenge, not as retribution. It was society’s repair.]
• Silent moments burdened by the weight of revolution. [The man who gave others words often walked alone with his own silences.]

Ambedkar as a cartographer of moral geographies—always mapping routes out of oppression.

Fieldnotes as not just documentation but orientation—where the margin becomes the map.

If fieldnotes are for remembering, curricula are often for forgetting. Ask any schoolchild to name Constitution-makers, and you’ll hear Nehru, Gandhi, maybe Patel. Ambedkar enters late, or never. That too is design.

— Continuities —

And Ambedkar Jayanti isn’t just a celebration. It’s an annual invitation to check:

• Are we living the Constitution he envisioned?
• Are we still building that house of justice, brick by brick?

Fieldnotes require proximity. Yet his work demands distance from apathy.
To observe Ambedkar is to observe absence of dignity, of justice, still unfulfilled. We are not studying Ambedkar. We are studying ourselves, through the questions he left us. Ambedkar didn’t just draft a constitution.
He drafted an ethic.

One in which dignity is not transactional. One in which fraternity is not optional. They were conditions for democracy to breathe. One in which silence; especially caste silence; is violence. The Constitution as a living document. Not ink on parchment, but breath in the body politic. His Constitution is not a relic. It is a mirror. And on days like today, it asks us not for reverence, but for reflection.

Think of fraternity as the scaffolding without which the rest of the building collapses. Ambedkar knew: you can legislate equality, but you cannot legislate feeling. That’s the work of pedagogy, of politics, of protest. ¹²

• What if justice was not a destination, but a direction?
• What if fraternity wasn’t the final page, but the preface?
• What does it mean to be equal in a world built on hierarchy?
• Who decides what counts as knowledge?
• Why do some lives need to scream just to be heard?
• Who gets the mic, and who gets muted?

Ambedkar didn’t fight for access alone; he fought for structural undoing. When the state offers Economic Weaker Section (EWS) quotas to upper-caste poor while ignoring the historical axis of caste oppression, it stages inclusion without excavation. This is what Ambedkar might’ve called legal formalism without social substance. Not every redistribution is reparation.

OBC reservations, born of the Mandal moment, were closer to Ambedkar’s ethos—acknowledging historical exclusion, not just present poverty. But even they remain trapped in the logic of numerical justice, without touching symbolic or cultural capital. Ambedkar's vision was not quota-based parity, but dignity-based transformation.

What good is a new category if the old hierarchies remain unshaken? What Ambedkar offered was not a policy template, but a diagnostic tool. Caste was not just a wound; it was a design. And policy without caste literacy is architecture without earthquake resistance.

His fieldnotes didn’t end in 1956. To invoke Ambedkar is to invoke unfinished work. They live in Rohith Vemula’s final letter—less suicide note, more indictment. Who reminded us that merit is caste-marked and silence is political. They pulse in Bama’s fiction, where Dalit girlhood refuses erasure, who turned testimony into literature. They march with Bezwada Wilson, organizing sanitation workers against the structural stench of caste, who calls not for rehabilitation, but abolition. They organize in Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan blueprint, recalibrating political power from below, who reimagined democracy as demographic assertion.. They rage in Meena Kandasamy’s verses—equal parts lyric and legal brief, who makes poetry do the work of protest. These are not echoes. They are evolutions. Ambedkar gave us the grammar. They’re writing the next chapters.

April 14 is a day of lamps. Lamps for gods, for ancestors, for fresh starts. But today, some lamps are torches. Some lamps flicker in reverence. Lighting paths, not altars. Lit not for memory, but for movement. Not for mourning, but for marching forward. In this convergence of calendars and convictions, we remember not just that Ambedkar lived—but how he lived, and for whom. And so the fieldnotes continue. Unfinished, as they must be. Not just as a hero, but as a thinker whose work reshapes the very grammar of justice.

These aren’t fieldnotes from a distance. They are instructions scrawled in the margins of our present: Do not forget. Do not normalize. Do not look away. April 14 is not just a memory. It is a mandate.

April 14 is not just the day Ambedkar was born.
It is the day India must ask: have we?

Footnotes: