Decoding Ambedkar

Revealing Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's enduring impact on sociology, social justice, and political thought.


The book sets out a discourse on Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's vast horizon of knowledge production. Through the essays in the book, the author has tried to deconstruct the reductionist approach adopted by mainstream academia, intelligentsia, and the Indian media to understand Ambedkar. It has recorded his erasures from various academic texts on sociology, history, literature, and creative fields like feature films. Juxtaposing this process of reductionism and erasure of Ambedkar, the book probes how he has been received and appreciated by international institutions and academicians; how, on the one hand, they have engaged with his writings on various aspects of society, polity, democracy, and social justice, and on the other, how they have hailed his academics in their writings. Further, the book maps the original and unique theoretical and philosophical insights provided by Babasaheb on Hindu social order with the place of an individual, varna, the genesis of caste, graded inequality, and the annihilation of caste, etc.
Additionally, taking clues from the essential elements of social justice delineated by Plato and Rawls, this book has tried to search for the aspects of social justice in Ambedkar's thoughts. His refutations of thoughts of social scientists, such as Senart, Nesfield, and Risley, and recognition of thoughts of Ketkar, Jefferson, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Tarde, Renan, and Acton, to name just a few, prove the point that Ambedkar should be regarded as one of the pioneers of Indian Sociology and treated at par with any national and international academics. In this sense, the book has underlined that Dalits are not engaged only in producing and analysing empirical data. Instead, they can evolve theoretical and conceptual propositions to deconstruct and reconstruct various social realities.

VIVEK KUMAR is a Professor of Sociology and a former Chairperson of the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (2018-2023), School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he earned his doctorate. He is also the Ambedkar Chair Professor in Sociology (I/C), instituted by the Ministry of Empowerment and Social Justice, Government of India.
Prof. Kumar has also been the Convener of the Global Studies Program in collaboration with four international institutions. As a Fulbright Teacher's Fellowship recipient, he has been a visiting Associate Professor at Columbia University, New York. As a DAAD-UGC Fellow, he has also been a visiting faculty at Humboldt University, Berlin. His publications include Caste and Democracy in India, India's Roaring Revolution, and Dalit Leadership in India. His seminal articles include 'How Egalitarian is Indian Sociology?', and 'Indispensability of Interdisciplinarity in Studying Society: On Philosophy, Science in Sociology'.