Reading Ambedkar
Jadumani Mahanand
THE EVOLUTION OF PRAGMATISM IN INDIA: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY OF B.R. AMBEDKAR by Scott R. Stroud HarperCollins, 2023, 302 pp., INR 599
August 2023, volume 47, No 8

The scholarship on Dr BR Ambedkar is increasingly acquiring considerable relevance across the world. One of the distinct ways to study Ambedkar that fascinates scholars is a comparative hermeneutic method that helps them situate his intellectual positionality: for example, Ambedkar and Gandhi debates, Ambedkar and the Marxist question and Dewey’s influence on Ambedkar. A new comparative approach has developed in recent times, where Ambedkar is comparatively studied with thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci and Axel Honneth, John Rawls and WEB Du Bois to cite a few. The later approach is a transatlantic one. All these comparative studies provide a framework to situate Ambedkar globally.

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