From inclination to immersion: reconstructing B.R. Ambedkar’s Long Road to Buddhism

This article argues that B.R. Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism was not a sudden rupture at Nagpur in 1956 but the culmination of a five-decade process shaped by intellectual inquiry, social crisis, and political responsibility. Drawing on Ambedkar’s writings, speeches, and recollections and existing scholarship on his religious conversion, the article reconstructs a chronological arc beginning with his first encounter with the Guatama Buddha Caritra in 1907 and extending through his scholarly engagements with Buddhist economic history, his public renunciation of Hindu identity in the 1930 s, his institutional commitments, such as the 1945 People’s Education Society, and his private adoption of Buddhism by 1950. These developments reveal a sustained effort to locate a religious framework capable of grounding Dalit dignity, rational ethics, and social equality. Ambedkar’s 1956 initiation thus emerges not as an isolated event but as the public affirmation of convictions formed over decades, inaugurating the transformative tradition of Navayāna Buddhism.