A deep interest in food is not something one would immediately associate with B.R. Ambedkar, but from accounts of people who were close to him, we know that he liked to eat well.
From his Marathi biographer, C.B. Khairmode, we know that he loved bombil chutney—dried Bombay Duck, roasted, ground, and cooked with chopped onions, tomatoes, and spices—made by his first wife, Ramabai. From the published reminiscences of his second wife, Savita, we know that from his student days abroad, he developed a lifelong liking for Western cuisine.
Artwork – Vikrant Bhise, 2024
The interest in food varieties was limited; Ambedkar was not one of those who go out of the way to try out different kinds of foods.
That is not surprising considering his priorities and circumstances. Fighting several battles at the same time, often single-handedly, against formidable opposition as well as the pressures of earning a livelihood and increasing ill-health, Ambedkar simply did not get much time to pursue matters of personal interest.
A well-known exception was his passion for reading. But even this pursuit was not truly a personal one; his library was a zealously guarded private space, but the reading he did there was invariably related to arguments he wanted to make or ideas he wanted to promote in public.
Artwork – Vikrant Bhise, 2024
In the last two decades of his life, Ambedkar found the time to do some gardening, learn the violin, and try his hand at sculpture and painting.
From reminiscences of some people who knew him, we also learn that he occasionally did some cooking. But he did not write or speak about this at length.
However, food, or rather its absence, figured in Ambedkar’s thought prominently.
He had personal experience of hunger; as a student in New York and London on a scholarship, he could afford only meagre meals, and the family he had left in Bombay struggled to feed themselves.
Ambedkar often spoke about those experiences, but his thought went beyond personal experience. He explained how the systemic oppression and indignity suffered by the Untouchables was centred around socially enforced hunger.
In “The Indian Ghetto—The Centre of Untouchability—Outside the Fold,” a chapter of an unfinished book, Untouchables, or the Children of India’s Ghetto, he presented the analysis as follows:
India was primarily an ‘agricultural country,’ where agriculture was the main source of living. (This was certainly true when Ambedkar wrote the piece.) But this source was generally beyond the reach of the Untouchables mainly due to two reasons. First, they did not have the capital to purchase land. Second, if they tried to purchase land, they often faced violent opposition from ‘Touchable’ Hindus, as the former’s ‘act of daring’ threatened to put them on par with the latter. In some places, such as Punjab, the Untouchables were not even legally eligible to purchase agricultural land.
The Untouchables could earn a living only by working as labourers. In their position, they had no bargaining power. The Touchable Hindus ‘combined’ to give them ‘the lowest possible wages.’ The wages were paid in the form of cash or grains. In parts of Uttar Pradesh, the wages were ‘privy corn or corn contained in the dung of animals,’ which was known as gobaraha.
In the month of March or April when the crop is fully grown, reaped and dried, it is spread on the threshing floor. Bullocks are made to tread over the corn in order to take the corn out of husk by the pressure of their hooves. While treading over the corn, the bullocks swallow up the corn as well as the straw. As their intake is excessive, they find it difficult to digest the corn. Next day, the same corn comes out of their stomach along with their dung. The dung is strained and the corn is separated and given to the Untouchable workmen as their wages, which they convert into flour and make into bread. (BAWS 5: 23-24)
Artwork – Vikrant Bhise, 2024
After the agricultural season, the Untouchables did not get work from farmers. They turned to ‘precarious and fleeting’ sources of income such as cutting grass and firewood in jungles and selling it in nearby markets.
The Untouchables had only one ‘secure’ source of livelihood in many parts of the country known to Ambedkar: They had the ‘right to beg’ for food from Hindu families in their villages. This ‘customary right’ was taken into account by the government when it fixed the remuneration for Untouchables, for menial government jobs they were asked to do in villages. Customary beggary was turned into ‘statutory beggary.’
In a sense, breaking the system of begging for food was a major plank of Ambedkar’s political thought and action. In his first major address, at the first of two historic events held in Mahad, Maharashtra, in 1927, he told the audience to take up farming, get into business, get educated and secure white-collar jobs, or earn a livelihood in any other way but stop begging for food.
Artwork – Vikrant Bhise, 2024
In the years that followed, Ambedkar advocated several policy measures to help the Untouchables secure freedom from caste oppression and attendant hunger: grant of wastelands to enable them to become farmers; introduction of contractual, cash-based arrangements for the services they provided in villages; reservation in public services; statutory minimum wages in all sectors of the economy; universal insurance; and expansion of educational facilities.
On the last point, he himself took action, setting up colleges in Bombay and Aurangabad.
More broadly, he reposed faith in the liberatory force of modern industry. Attacking ‘Gandhism’ in What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables? he wrote (BAWS 9: 283-84): ‘Machinery and modern civilization are … indispensable for emancipating man from leading the life of a brute, and for providing him with leisure and making a life of culture possible’ (with the caveat that the organisation of society had to be altered so that that the ‘benefits will not be usurped by the few but will accrue to all’).
Good food, thoughtfully made and presented, was a part of the ‘life of culture’ that Ambedkar lived after his early years of hunger and struggle. His well-appointed official residence in New Delhi (as the nation’s first union law minister) had a large dining table, different sets of fine crockery and cutlery for different kinds of meals, as well as an electric hot plate placed close to the dining table, as he liked his food hot.
Recalling these details, Savita Ambedkar told the Ambedkar archivist Vijay Surwade that her husband’s standard breakfast was a three-course affair: oats porridge or cornflakes; followed by eggs, boiled, scrambled, half-fried or as omelette, eaten with toast, butter and different kinds of jam; followed by a cup of coffee. Coffee was Ambedkar’s favourite beverage; if tea was served, brewed tea and hot milk had to be in separate pitchers (S. Ambedkar: 147-50).
Artwork – Vikrant Bhise, 2024
Lunch would be light: usually soup, two small phulkas and a small amount of rice, eaten with a small helping of meat: either roasted or cold mutton; or fish, preferably hilsa, fried pomfret or fried prawns; or chicken—fry, curry, or tandoori. The meal would end with a pudding.
At night, Ambedkar preferred to skip dinner and head straight to his room to write or read. His wife had to coax him into eating by preparing some dish he particularly liked.
Like some film stars of his time who had biryani flown in from Hyderabad, Ambedkar would ask D.G. Jadhav, an associate holding a government job in Calcutta, to send him hilsa packed in ice by plane.
The interest in good food—complemented by a taste for fine clothes, fine pens, fine furniture and fine art and architecture—was related to a philosophy of life, for which Ambedkar found support in the teaching of the Buddha. In his last book, The Buddha and his Dhamma, he wrote (BAWS 11: 368, 459):
[The Buddha said] Hunger is the worst of diseases. Health is the greatest of gifts, contentedness the best riches …We must learn to live happily indeed…
The Blessed Lord did not elevate poverty by calling it a blessed state of life. Nor did he tell the poor that they may remain content for they will inherit the earth. On the contrary, he said riches are welcome. What he insisted upon is that the acquisition of riches must be subject to vinaya (discipline).
This philosophical stand, which was part of the universal ethics advocated by Ambedkar, stood starkly in opposition to the enforced hunger of caste and the voluntary hunger of Gandhism.
References:
- Ambedkar, Savita. Dr Ambedkaranchya Sahavasat (In Dr Ambedkar’s Company). Tataghat Prakashan: Kalyan, 2013
- BAWS: Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches (multiple volumes). Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Source Material Publication Committee, Government of Maharashtra: Mumbai, 1979-
