• Vikas Kumar

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born into an untouchable ‘Mahar’ family at Mhow, in present Madhya Pradesh, on 14 April 1891. His paternal grandfather Maloji Sakpal came from a good family and his father Ramji Sakpal was a head master in the Military School in the rank of subedar-major in the 2nd Grenadiers. His mother Bhimabai belonged to a rich family of Murbadkars from Murbad Village in Thana District of Bombay, whose father and six uncles were all Subhedar Majors in the Army. By normal standards Ambedkar would have had a regular life, however, the reality of him being born into an untouchable family changed this whole course of a possible normal and comfortable life. Ambedkar did his primary school at Dapoli but at the age of five the family moved to Satara and hence his brother and he attended high school at Satara. It was during his high school days he tasted the painful stigma of untouchability. It so happened that one day in summer, Ambedkar, his elder brother and their nephew set out to meet their father at Goregoan where he now worked as a cashier after his retirement as Headmaster. They got the train from Padali and travelled till Masur expecting their father to be waiting for them at the station. Theletter did not reach their father on time and after waiting for hours in vain, they somehow persuaded the station master, a caste Hindu, to arrange a bullock cart to take them to Goregoan. Hardly a yard had the cart pulled, and the ‘god-fearing caste Hindu cartman’ came to learn that these welldressed boys in his cart were the ‘accursed Untouchables’ and his fury knew no bounds. In a fit of rage, the cartman threw them out on the road like waste because ‘he felt that they had polluted his wooden cart and destroyed the purity of his domestic animals’. More dramas followed; the boys pacified the cartman’s rage by paying double the fare, Ambedkar’s brother drove the cart, and the cartman followed the cart on foot. The journey turned out to be more than what the boys were prepared for, from evening till midnight, they travelled parched with thirst as no one was willing to give them water to drink – people shooed them away or pointed them to filthy waters. This was the day, Ambedkar was introduced to a rude awakening that ‘he belonged to a family that was untouchable, degraded to drink and eat filthy things’ only to confirm it a few days later when out of thirst he drank water stealthily at a public water tap and when it was found out, he was beaten mercilessly.

MAHAD SATYAGRAHA: THE DECLARATION OF EQUALITY

"MAHAD SATYAGRAHA: THE DECLARATION OF EQUALITY ", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.6, Issue 1, page no.1034-1042, January-2019, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1901F40.pdf

"MAHAD SATYAGRAHA: THE DECLARATION OF EQUALITY ", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.6, Issue 1, page no. pp1034-1042, January-2019, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1901F40.pdf