Nikhil Bagade
Jai Bhim! Namo Buddhay!
Couple of years ago, when I came across the work of Syamsundar Vunnamati, I was quite inspired by his work of digging up cartoons and news articles about Dr. Ambedkar to present us the context of his struggle amidst the Brahminical media. It got me thinking how foreign news media covered Dr. Ambedkar’s life and work, and just how different it was from the domestic media which was dominated by Brahminical forces.
I would like to present my findings of all the articles that I could find over The New York Times and The Times of London which were two of the very popular newspapers back then. Also, a few other things from different archives across the world. I’m hoping this can be very insightful for some of us who are engaged in doing historiography of Dr. Ambedkar’s life and work or are interested in some facets of his life. I’m no expert (far from it) on the events that were circling around the dates. I hope more capable, knowledgeable, and wiser people can comment and interpret these events and findings. I believe my job right now is to simply put the material out there, and highlight a few of them to you, to get you interested in exploring the vast archives.
The first article (article in NYT Archives numbered “101. June 3, 1915 COLUMBIA ’15 CLASS..”) that ever mentions his name (twice) is the 3rd June 1915’s announcement of Columbia University about setting a record of awarding the most degrees in a year in its history. In that old-style announcement, you can find Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s name in the 3rd paragraph from top after the “Young Women Win Honors” (third column) with a one-liner description of his background, and the fact that he was only one of the three people from foreign descent to have been conferred that degree that year. One of those three being the Chinese philosopher and polymath Peng Chun Chang, who was part of the committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Dr. Ambedkar’s name is misspelt by the newspaper in that specific location, while spelt correctly in a different location (under the “MASTER OF ARTS” list which is at the bottom of the 5th column). There is a long list of over 2000 graduates from different fields. An interesting trajectory for some of you might be the list of Dr. Ambedkar’s classmates or batch passouts and where they went after. It may take months to comb through that list, and I hope we can find more clues to that puzzle.
The second interesting article (article in NYT Archives numbered “91. June 6, 1952 DR. KIRK SEES…” and numbered “90. June 5, 1952 COLUMBIA TO GIVE DEGREES…”) for me was about Columbia University conferring the degree of Doctor of Laws, on a fairly pleasant afternoon (25 deg C) of June 5, 1952 on Dr. Ambedkar. He was one of the only six people selected for the degree on that day. Eighteen thousand people attended the ceremony at South Field (probably called “South Lawn” today). The said lawn looks amazingly beautiful if one were to go on Google Maps to view it. The dean of the University, Dr. Lawrence Chamberlain urged that “…the graduates must remember that their education had been made possible by the free expression of ideas and that it was their responsibility as educated men, to protect their freedom..they would encounter a great deal of opposition in the spirit of free enquiry…you have been exposed to all points of view…controversy has been part of your life since the day you entered“. The full speech of the dean is worth reading. It was like a General addressing his army about a battle of ideas, tactics and actions. It’s a misfortune that the-then President of the University, General D. Eisenhower, who won the Allied Powers the great victory at World War II against Axis Powers (led by Hitler), was absent that day. I can only imagine how Dr. Ambedkar must have felt being there with his life’s moments flashing in front of him. Take a moment to imagine that. That’s who we are proud of and will always be.
What was the most interesting thing about this event was the presence of some of the most influential people in the world in that little space of Low Memorial Garden at Morningside Heights, Columbia. I will list and shortly describe some of them below:
- Banker Allan Sproul who was the NY head of the Federal Reserve banks (one of the 12 Fed Reserve Banks of US) was among the select six people who were awarded that degree
- Career diplomat Lester Pearson, then Canadian Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, later a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (for resolving the Suez Canal Crisis), and later being elected as the 14th Prime Minister of Canada
- Joseph Pulitzer Jr., son of the popular editor Joseph Pulitzer who launched the prestigious Pulitzer prizes through his will, was next in line for his work with St. Louis-Dispatch
- Anna Rosenberg (Assistant Secretary of Defense, adviser to four US Presidents, then-highest ranking woman in the history of the Department of Defense who got the racially-divided US military desegregated among other milestones in her career).
I wonder what conversations they might have had with Dr. Ambedkar, especially given that he was the only one from an emerging country like India. One must also read the beautiful citation for Dr. B. R. Ambedkar that accompanied the honorary degrees that the NYT published, to get a picture of all the aspects that were taken into consideration for conferring this degree.
The third interesting article (Article 7 in the NYT Archives titled “7. Ambedkar, Leader of the ‘Untouchables,’…”) is about the time that Scott Stroud (https://www.saada.org/tides/article/ambedkar-jane-addams) said he was unclear about: Dr. Ambedkar’s short visit to America, soon after the Round Table Conferences in London during the late 1931. I managed to find the sailing record of Dr B. R. Ambedkar in a passenger manifest of a Europa ship that sailed from Bremen (Port of Bremerhaven, Germany) to New York specifying the proper date of departure and arrival which matches with the NYT article (https://catalog.archives.gov/id/157810109?objectPage=706). I’m not sure if this was already put out in the public domain, but I hope it fills a gap. He travelled with 4 other passengers in a tourist cabin, of which I could only find vintage food menu cards and sailing fare cards being sold on eBay (I know the menu is from 1929, but I doubt the menu card changed https://www.ebay.com/itm/225785684201, https://shorturl.at/V4l5T). Far more importantly, the article fills the gap about his purpose of visit to the America: “..visit Washington, Philadelphia and Chicago…accomplish the first of his missions by personal conversation with leading Americans interested in Indian thought…hopes to visit President Hoover at the White House and to present to various philanthropists the social and financial plight of the untouchables, which has been depicted, [he said], by Miss Katherine Mayor in in her book ‘Mother India’.” The article confirms that Dr. Ambedkar was staying at the International House, which was confirmed by the letterhead of the letter he wrote to Jane Addams – who I believe might have been on his list of the leading Americans to meet, but unfortunately was found to be in sickness.
Other honorable mentions from the NYT Archives of such interesting articles are
- Article numbered 29 which shows the anxiousness of the Baptist Church members in New York about Dr. Ambedkar’s decision to leave Hinduism, keeping Christianity as an option
- Article 76 about Dr. Ambedkar adopting Buddhism in a privately-held event in Delhi 1950, seems to be a misreporting by NYT and LA Times (https://shorturl.at/qz3ZY), because according to Indian Express (https://shorturl.at/sncsw), Dr. Ambedkar refused to comment on the reports of him deciding to convert to Buddhism. The question was still about the decision – and not about the conversion happening itself. I do not see any undisputed evidence about the conversion happening. The closest challenge would then be the interview with Mulk Raj Anand dated in May 1950, if verified to be true, which might suggest this to be a true incident. But so far, this news from NYT is not corroborated by any contemporary sources in totality.
- Article 79 refers to the fact that Dr. Ambedkar was among the hundreds of intellectuals around the world, who had been signatory (https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.53686/2015.53686.Indian-Congress-For-Cultural-Freedom-1951_djvu.txt) to the CCM (Congress for Cultural Freedom) unbeknownst to them who was funding it. Decade and a half later CCM was shut down after it was revealed that it was one of the largest and longest running covert operations of CIA (https://shorturl.at/mUvnF). My personal opinion is that I wouldn’t mind running an intellectual op against the Communist Russia given the crimes and excesses of Stalin during his final years.
The archive from the Times of London, while it mainly covers the period from the 1930s and 1940s, has quite a lot of material and is a little inconvenient to zoom-in and sift through. I would implore the readers to find more of such archives across different forms of media and collate them by dates to get the context of the struggle and how it was reported (sometimes, misreported) in the print media. We must keep improving our knowledge of the chronology of Dr. Ambedkar’s life and work to get the full picture and to find more things to be proud of.
Link to the NYT Archives: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1axqOFdzfP6auCaFiAaWLhmiq4YxZin5G/view?usp=drive_link
Link to the Times of London Archives:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iniKYofcBjCmp5X7KHIZx6CJscPF8wW_/view?usp=drive_link
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- S. If you have troubles with downloading or accessing the files, please feel free to reach out to me at: nikastroisbac@gmail.com
I would recommend you to download the files and keep multiple copies of such important collections.
Jai Bhim!
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Nikhil Bagade holds a Bachelor’s degree in IT from Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Technological University, Lonere (2012) and has previously worked for IT cos in India (Cognizant), Belgium (Telenet), and is currently working in Munich (Germany) for CHECK24 as a Lead DevOps Engineer.
