Abstract:

B.R. Ambedkar was many things--a statesman, labour economist, constitutional scholar and law minister, lawyer, activist and philosopher. While there have been various works published over the last ten years that seriously attempt to consider him as a rigorous philosopher, most of them try to annex his thinking to either pragmatist, deconstructionist or post-Marxist paradigms. In doing so, they provide new and constructive interpretations of his thought, but this comes at the neglect of his own philosophical method. In this talk, I will argue that we can best place Ambedkar in the tradition of Subcontinental philosophy. Ambedkar's later thought can be seen to be attempting to resolve two impasses simultaneously--that of nihilistic Buddhism and Marxist positivism, by bringing them into conjunction with each other. In the centrality of this use of the method of conjunction, we can find Ambedkar to belong to the hitherto unrecognized tradition of Subcontinental philosophy.