Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Context of Religious Conversion

Abstract

It is evidently seen that the history of religion has gone through various historical trajectories, such as conflicts and appropriation, spread and conversion, individual change and social transformation. In the recent history of conversion, Dr Ambedkar’s mass conversion to Buddhism is one of the important cultural phenomena in India. In this article, I intend to discuss the social–cultural context of Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s historical public conversion from Hinduism to Buddhism in 1956 at Nagpur, Maharashtra. Further, I argue that Dr Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism was an attempt of replacement of the ‘common sense’ of historically humiliated and stigmatized ‘untouchable’ castes. It was an attempt of the restructuring and culturalization of the untouchable castes through rejecting the ‘coercion’ and ‘consent’ of the hegemonic structure of caste Hindu cultural authority, which was functional as a culture authority and social power. I argue that Dr Ambedkar’s religious conversion was an attempt to establish the epistemological separation and formulation of social ontology through the cultural imagination of ‘ex-communicated’ castes with the refusal of the ideology of ‘pure and impure’.