There are reasons why everyone in India needs to know and read more about Babasaheb Ambedkar. For the young though, this is especially important, in an age where role models in India, outside the world of cinema and sports, are often difficult to find. What distinguishes Ambedkar’s life from that of other great national leaders is that unlike leaders such as Gandhi, Nehru and Bose, he faced immense obstacles and discrimination even as a child, and succeeded against all odds. This makes his life’s journey especially relatable for children and young adults.
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. Ambedkar and his siblings could not drink water at Masur Railway Station, and no bullock cart driver was willing to take them to their father’s house at Koregaon because they were Dalits.
If Gandhi’s famed train episode in South Africa exposed the racial bias of the colonisers, Babasaheb’s childhood journey exposed the terrible evil of caste that has afflicted India for centuries. The colonisers have long since left but caste and caste discrimination continue to afflict the Indian nation like an incurable virus. We have made progress but not sufficiently so.
The parallels with Gandhi’s life 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.
Young Indians will easily relate to Ambedkar’s struggles and be inspired. As a child, young Bhim couldn’t even drink water from the tap at the school unless there was a peon there to open the tap for him. He sat on a gunny bag at the end of the class. As a young adult, he couldn’t even access the basic human right of housing. It is a matter of historical record that when Ambedkar returned to India after having finished his higher studies overseas, despite his qualifications and brilliance, he could not find a place to stay in Baroda! He then sought accommodation first at a Hindu friend’s home and then at a Christian friend’s home, but there too he was unsuccessful. All these disturbing events are recorded in his autobiography.
In recent years an increasing number of writings and even books have drawn comparisons between two of India’s greatest sons, which have sometimes created a fair amount of controversy and public debate. There are parallels between the two lives but also great differences. Gandhi did not experience unequal treatment in his own country. It was in a foreign land that he first encountered major discrimination with that life-changing moment captured in Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning film. Ambedkar on the other hand grew up facing discrimination in his own country ever since his childhood. Gandhi’s writings have been widely available even before Indian independence, but Ambedkar’s essays and books have only recently become widely available despite their evident merit and intelligence. The birth of the internet has also contributed in this respect. A few years ago, in 2016, for the first time, the United Nations also commemorated Babasaheb Ambedkar’s birth.
I believe that from Ambedkar’s life and struggles, children will learn not only to face up to challenges but also to not allow others to put them down. Children will learn to stand up to bullies in a determined but non-violent manner. A children’s play on Ambedkar’s life and struggles was long overdue.
My play The Boy Who Wrote a Constitution, being launched on Babasaheb’s birthday, is intended to promote national integration in a gentle, unobtrusive fashion. In his own life experience, Ambedkar discovered the painful truth that in India everyone who is not Dalit himself discriminates against the Dalit be the person Hindu, Christian, Muslim or Parsi!
Plays have been staged on Ambedkar’s life among the Dalit community, and even outside, but they have not been written out and published in a formal, methodical manner keeping children in mind. My play is written out in a simple, easily relatable fashion and can be read with interest by children, their parents and teachers, as also the general reader.
In India, it is high time we get rid of the hypocrisy that often exists in the moralizing done by elders in the family, be it parents or grandparents. The new generation is far too intelligent to be taken in by homilies and platitudes anymore. It should be beyond any debate that discrimination based on caste is an evil, a great evil at that, and we should all collectively accept this important truth.
When you stop to think of it, there exists a great deal of literature including plays on the civil rights movement in the US. Children’s plays were staged and even children’s marches took place addressing the issue of discrimination against African-Americans. In India, on the other hand, there is a dearth of plays addressing the issue of caste discrimination, and practically no play has been written keeping children in mind. While being educative, the play is not divisive in any way for it shows how those who belonged to non-Dalit communities have also supported the movement against discrimination.
Moral science lessons can often be boring, but in contrast the enactment of a play can be a rewarding and exciting endeavor. The play offers great scope for positively impacting the minds of children in a way that will ultimately prove beneficial to them as well as society.
Any young person reading about Ambedkar will also start to develop some familiarity with the Indian Constitution, and this too is important, for children too have rights, and it can be an empowering experience for them to be made aware of their rights.
Rajesh Talwar has authored 34 books including The Boy Who Wrote a Constitution, a play for children published by Ponytale Books. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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