The Tap He Could Not Touch

The day was hot, and the boy was thirsty.

The other children in his school in Satara, in western India, could simply walk to the water tap, turn it on and drink. He could not. He was not allowed to touch the tap. If he wanted water, he had to wait for the school peon, the attendant, to come and open it for him and pour the water into his cupped hands.

If the peon was busy, or away, the boy went without. Years later, he summed it up in four plain words: "No peon, no water."

Born an "untouchable"

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born on 14 April 1891 in Mhow, in what is now Madhya Pradesh. He was the fourteenth child of Ramji Sakpal, who served in the British Indian Army, and his wife Bhimabai.

The family belonged to the Mahar community. Under the caste system of the time, Mahars were treated as "untouchable". People of so-called higher castes believed that even their touch, or their shadow, could make them impure.

At school, Bhimrao had to sit apart from the other children, on a piece of sacking he carried from home. Some teachers would not touch his notebooks. He could not drink from the common water. His mother died when he was a small boy, and his father brought up the children with the help of an aunt.

His father believed fiercely in education, and Bhimrao read everything he could find.

Books, and a long journey

The family moved to Bombay, now Mumbai, where Bhimrao went to the Elphinstone High School. Few boys from his community had ever finished school. When he passed his matriculation examination in 1907, his community held a celebration, and a teacher gave him a biography of the Buddha as a gift.

He earned a degree from Elphinstone College in 1912. Then the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad, gave him a scholarship to study abroad.

In 1913 he sailed to New York, to Columbia University. For the first time in his life, he could sit where he liked, eat with others and drink from any tap. He studied economics, history, politics and philosophy, sometimes for eighteen hours a day. Later he studied at the London School of Economics and trained as a barrister in London. He became one of the most highly educated Indians of his time, with doctorates from both Columbia and London.

Coming home

When he returned to India, all his degrees did not protect him. In Baroda, where he went to work for the state, no landlord would rent a room to a man of his caste. He stayed at an inn under a false name, until he was found out and thrown out. He later wrote that he sat under a tree that day and wept.

He decided to spend his life fighting the injustice he had known since childhood.

He became a lawyer, a teacher and a writer. He started newspapers and organisations for the rights of the people he called the "depressed classes". In 1927, at Mahad, in Maharashtra, he led thousands of people to the Chavdar Tank, a public water tank that they had been forbidden to use, and they drank from it together.

The boy who could not touch the tap had led a whole community to the water.

Writing the Constitution

When India won its independence in 1947, Ambedkar was invited to become the country's first Law Minister. He was also chosen as chairman of the committee that would draft India's Constitution, the highest law of the land.

For more than two years, he and his colleagues worked through every article and answered every question in the Constituent Assembly. The Constitution was adopted on 26 November 1949 and came into force on 26 January 1950, the day India celebrates as Republic Day.

It promised every citizen equality before the law. It abolished untouchability and made its practice an offence. It gave every adult, rich or poor, man or woman, of any caste or religion, an equal vote.

The last years

Ambedkar knew that a law on paper was only a beginning. He warned that political equality would mean little without equality in social and economic life.

In 1956, at Nagpur, he embraced Buddhism, together with a very large gathering of his followers, choosing a faith that, for him, stood for equality and compassion. He died a few weeks later, on 6 December 1956, in Delhi.

In 1990 he was awarded the Bharat Ratna. Today his statue stands in towns and villages all over India, often holding a book: the Constitution.

Want to read more?

Dr Ambedkar's short autobiographical notes, Waiting for a Visa, describe the tap, the inn at Baroda and other experiences in his own words. Dhananjay Keer's Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission is the classic biography, and Shashi Tharoor's Ambedkar: A Life is a short modern one.