Abstract
Anand Teltumbde, Iconoclast: A Reflective Biography of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, 2024, 732 pp., ₹1,499, Penguin. ISBN: 978-93-5708-671-4.
Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar wrote Waiting for a Visa sometime in the 1930s as a private document, not intended for publication. Reading it remains a jarring experience. Across its roughly 30 pages, he narrates six episodes from his own life, in which untouchability operated as a concrete, daily mechanism of exclusion: the mat he was forced to carry from home as a schoolboy, the bullock cart drivers who refused him transport throughout his adult years, the landlord who would not house him during a government posting in Baroda. What strikes the reader the hardest is not the violence of these encounters but their ordinariness. Untouchability, Ambedkar demonstrates, is not a matter of exceptional prejudice but of routine social organization, and it crosses every religious boundary, found among Hindus, Parsis, Muslims and Christians alike. It is, in his account, an Indian problem. Anand Teltumbde’s Iconoclast: A Reflective Biography of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar is the most comprehensive single-volume account of the man who turned that personal experience of humiliation into one of the most formidable intellectual and political projects in the history of the subcontinent. The book arrives at a moment when Ambedkar’s image has never been more visible, and his thought has rarely been more distorted.
The circumstances of the book’s composition are themselves part of its argument. Teltumbde wrote much of Iconoclast while living under the threat of arrest, and surrendered to authorities on 14 April 2020, Ambedkar’s birth anniversary, spending 31 months in prison. The preface is candid about this context and about Teltumbde’s governing ambition: to present Babasaheb Ambedkar ‘as a historical person in flesh and blood, to bring his greatness alive rather than make him an inert godhead and place him on a high pedestal for worship’ (p. xxxiv). This is not a hagiography. It is a reflective biography, a term Teltumbde uses deliberately to signal that his readings are interpretive and sometimes critical, that he is willing to take issue with Ambedkar when he judges his positions or actions untenable. The title comes from Ambedkar’s own self-description: he called himself an iconoclast, the breaker of icons. Teltumbde’s argument throughout is that ‘his iconization … is being competitively promoted by politicians of all hues to deradicalize Ambedkar and depoliticize Dalits’, making it the most effective betrayal of everything man stood for (p. xxxvii).
The book is structured across seven chronological phases and a posthumous chapter, each with a subtitle capturing both the biographical moment and its political significance. The First Phase (1891–1918), ‘A Legend Is Born: From Bhiva to Bhimrao’, traces Ambedkar’s origins in a Mahar military family in Mhow, his scholarships to Columbia University and the London School of Economics, and his first publications on the economics of caste. Teltumbde’s account of the Mahar military aristocracy that produced Ambedkar is among the book’s most original contributions. As Ambedkar described India’s caste society, it is ‘a gradation of castes forming an ascending scale of reverence and descending scale of contempt’, and Teltumbde shows that Ambedkar’s grandfather had already begun to break from that system before Bhimrao was born (p. 4). The Second Phase (1919–1927), ‘Making of the Legend: From Bhimrao to Babasaheb’, covers the founding of Mooknayak and the Mahad Satyagraha of 1927, in which Ambedkar led Dalits to drink from a public tank and was met with violence. Teltumbde reads Mahad not as a symbolic gesture but as a structural challenge to caste’s control of public space.
The Third Phase (1928–1934), ‘The Legend Grows over India: Dalits Get Their Leader’, and the Fourth Phase (1935–1940), ‘Tryst with Class Politics: Streaks of Caste’, are the most politically complex sections. They cover the Round Table Conferences; the Poona Pact of 1932, in which Gandhi’s fast unto death compelled Ambedkar to surrender the demand for separate electorates; and Ambedkar’s announcement in 1935 that he would not die a Hindu. Teltumbde’s reading of the Poona Pact is sharp and unsentimental: Ambedkar was coerced into a settlement that permanently damaged the political autonomy of Dalits by replacing separate electorates with reserved seats in a joint electorate dominated by caste Hindus. The Fourth Phase also addresses Ambedkar’s engagement with class politics through the Independent Labour Party, which Teltumbde reads as a genuine attempt to build a cross-caste movement of workers, and its failure as a product of both structural constraints and Ambedkar’s reluctance to fully subordinate caste to class.
The Fifth Phase (1941–1946), ‘Return to Caste: Rebel Becoming a Statesman’, and the Sixth Phase (1947–1951), ‘Glory and Disillusion: Taste of Swaraj’, track Ambedkar’s transformation from movement leader to government minister and his complex relationship with the constitutional process. Teltumbde is critical of the Indian Constitution’s failure to address land reform and notes that Ambedkar ‘never questioned the skewed land distribution in the country’ (p. 48). The Sixth Phase ends with Ambedkar’s resignation from the Cabinet in 1951 and his deepening disillusion with parliamentary democracy. The Seventh Phase (1952–1956), ‘The Last Days: Refuge in Buddha’, covers the conversion to Buddhism in October 1956 and the death in December of the same year. Teltumbde reads the conversion not as a spiritual retreat but as a political act, a final iconoclastic gesture against the Hindu social order. The post-Ambedkar Phase (1957–2023), ‘The Legend Lives On: Iconization of the Iconoclast’, traces the process by which the radical thinker who spoke of ‘“dynamiting” the Hindu Dharmashastras’ was converted into a constitutional symbol compatible with the political project he had spent his life opposing (p. xxxvii).
Iconoclast has two limitations worth naming. The first is length. At over 700 pages including apparatus, the book makes significant demands on the reader, and the density of archival detail in some sections can obscure the interpretive argument Teltumbde is making. A more assertive editorial process might have sharpened the book’s polemical force without diminishing its scholarly authority. The second concerns Ambedkar’s later philosophical and Buddhist writings. Teltumbde is the strongest on the political and economic dimensions of Ambedkar’s thought. The philosophical and theological dimensions of his late work, the writings that have shaped the contemporary Dalit Buddhist movement, receive less sustained attention than their importance for the movement would warrant.
These are reservations about a work of genuine intellectual courage. Iconoclast is the most ambitious attempt in English to reckon with Ambedkar whole, to refuse both the hagiography of his followers and the dismissals of his opponents, and to insist on his continuing relevance for anyone trying to understand caste, democracy and the Indian state. Teltumbde’s own incarceration during the book’s composition gives its arguments a moral urgency that no purely academic treatment could replicate. The book is an essential reading for scholars of South Asian history, Dalit studies, political philosophy and constitutional democracy. It is equally important for anyone who has read Waiting for a Visa and been left with the question that Ambedkar himself never stopped asking: how long, and what will it take?