A play about Ambedkar

What a wonderful book to introduce Ambedkar to children!

Having learnt about Gandhi till October 2nd, we wished to start learning about Dr. Ambedkar. This is among the books we will be using. Absolutely thrilled!

Here is a quote from the postface, which is the more serious portion of the book.

"The world is aware of Mahatma Gandhi's train journey in South Africa where he was thrown out of a compartment despite possessing a first-class ticket. In comparison, even in India, far fewer people are aware of a similar, hugely significant train journey that Ambedkar undertook with his siblings while he was yet a child. If Gandhi's famed train episode in South Africa exposed the racial bias of the colonisers, Babasaheb's journey exposed the terrible evil of caste that has afflicted India for centuries. The colonisers have left but caste continues to afflict us like an incurable virus.

The parallels do not end there. Everyone knows of the Mahatma's famed Dandi March undertaken in 1930 to protest the salt tax imposed by the British, but far fewer know of the peaceful march undertaken by Ambedkar three years prior to Gandhi's march, in 1927. The long, non-violent march undertaken by thousands of Dalits, now known as the Mahad Satyagraha, was to the Chowdar Lake at Mahad, to protest against the 'custom' whereby Dalits were not permitted to use the waters of the lake! The salt tax was unfair and the world came to know about it, but if you stop to think about it, it was immeasurably worse to disallow Dalits from consuming water from a water source available to everyone else. As Dr Ambedkar himself famously said: 'Political tyranny is nothing compared to social tyranny, and a reformer who defies society is a more courageous man that a politician who defies government."

RAJESH TALWAR

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