Shashi Tharoor's Biography of Ambedkar Reveals Upper Caste Concerns & Anxieties

Thus, the task before Ambedkar’s biographer is not simply to sketch a personality from his writings, but to limn together the traces of his thinking by animating the psychic and social negotiations undertaken by him during his lifetime. Yet, Tharoor is captivated by Ambedkar as a politician, and sets out to explore this facet of his identity without espousing an anti-caste consciousness, which does not only leave this text bereft of an imaginative, progressive politics, but unfortunately recuperates the complexities of Ambedkar’s life within the narrow rubrics of a mainstream, dominant caste, liberal politics. Tharoor’s biography of Ambedkar comes four years after the publication of Why I Am a Hindu, a deliberate effort on his behalf to rescue Hindu mythology and culture from its vile assimilation into an explicitly militant Hindutva ideology. The title of the book directly responds to the political theorist’s Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s seminal book, Why I Am Not a Hindu, which insists on classifying “Dalitbahujan” cultures and religious practices as separate and oppositional to Hinduism. Tharoor’s penchant for the form of biography is a part of a longer preoccupation with illustrating the lives of Indian political leaders, as evidenced in Nehru: The Invention of India.