Savita Ambedkar: The other Dr Ambedkar who lived in the shadow of a giant

Dr Savita Ambedkar with her husband Dr BR Ambedkar. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

"How did such a personal account of this giant of a man never get translated?" was the question Nadeem Khan asked Vijay Surwade when he travelled all the way from Amravati to Thane. Vijay Surwade was the name on the copyright page of the Marathi book Dr Ambedkaranchya Sahavasat, an autobiography of a wife, a doctor herself.

Nadeem Khan was no ordinary enquirer. His credentials are impeccable. An English teacher who has taught at the Indian Institute of Mass Communications, among his many books (and poetry), this award-winning translator has given us Vishwas Patil’s celebrated Marathi novel Panipat (1988) and Avadhoot Dongare’s Yuva Sahitya Akademi winning novel Swatahala Faltu Samajanyachi Goshta.

And now here we are, reading a brilliant translation, Babasaheb: My life with Dr Ambedkar (Penguin India, 368 pages, Rs 599), which shares a very personal account of a woman married to a man who drafted India’s most important document, the Constitution. The man who was responsible for fighting for the downtrodden Dalits all his life, an educator, a scholar, a lawyer: Babasaheb Ambedkar or Dr BR Ambedkar. Her name was Savita Ambedkar.

Reading the book was an eye-opener for me in many ways. Wives of great men are wont to write domestic details that, many a time, turn out to be tiresome for the readers. How wrong I was in that assumption! If you have heard his impassioned speeches and strong reasoning why Mahatma Gandhi’s belief that the "hard crust of separatism formed over centuries cannot suddenly be broken because the Hindus and the Scheduled Castes were voting in the same booth" was incorrect, you would think that the man was in the pink of health.

The man was suffering from diabetes, neuritis, and his constitution was delicate, and, yet, after working for 18 hours in the day he would find time to write love letters that were 25 pages long, could cook, loved eating hot food cooked at the dining table, liked to sing, was interested in playing the tabla and the violin, could sculpt too! I grinned as I discovered that his wife and driver attempted to teach him how to drive and failed! The book offers rare insights on his faith in Buddhism and so much more.

In a freewheeling interview, Nadeem Khan shared a translator’s insights: "This book sounds like a transcribed interview. Savita Ambedkar spoke and Surwade took it all down. This is not meant to have anything like literary nuance, you won’t find metaphors in this narration of her life’s story. So, my job as a translator here was to retain the conversational, almost confessional tone. That was easy. It’s the citations, the validations of claims that took a fair bit of research. You see, the book has references to people and speeches and events that need corroboration. Thankfully, there are scholars and Ambedkarites who have saved photographs and original letters. Surwade himself has a treasure trove of documents which he can access within minutes of asking. That is phenomenal. In the book, Savita Ambedkar comes across as fearless, naming names, and she defends her position, sometimes too strongly. The editors/publishers have ensured that such parts, too, are carefully annotated."

The book tells you how it was rare in those days for women to join medical college and then get into practice. Dr Sharada Kabir studied hard to fulfil her father’s wishes and she did nothing else but study ("I got the first rank," she says in the book, and I’m like everyone needs to hide this book from dads who expect nothing less!). So, when she describes her first meeting with Dr Ambedkar, she is naturally thunderstruck by the intelligence of the man. And when she meets him as a patient we realise that the giant of a man we think we know is "hollowed out by many diseases". We see how her admiration turns into compassion and, yes, love.

I was a little irritated about something I read in the book and asked Khan about it. His explanation was wisdom: It’s a thing between a husband and a wife. If he asked her to wear a particular kind of sari (ones with a small border, not large), it was not because he was being a chauvinist, but simply telling her that she looked nicer, and this she mentions was when she was at the Parliament. Imagine the love between them, he looks up to see if she’s there. Also the way he was at home, letting her bathe him, dress him, fold that handkerchief just right in his suit pocket. Who knows, maybe she chose what he wore!

Khan says, "look at the poignancy of the moment when the woman he diligently wrote long love letters to turns into a mother when she bathes him, and a doctor when he is very unwell…."

When Savita tells us that he would look back to see her wave until the car was out of sight, personal details like these make you feel for the boy who grew up without a mother’s love and suffered most of his life for belonging to a low caste.

Khan says, "I was utterly astounded by the aspects of the man revealed by his wife. How could any biographer know these facets? Perhaps, Dr Ambedkar’s one and only friend Naval Bhathena could have written an account from his perspective and it would be a great biography, but only a wife could understand how to fill that hole of loneliness of his childhood, always an outcast."

I was thrilled to discover that Dr Ambedkar studied with John Dewey! We teach Dewey versus Fiske today, and I was happy to read about Dr Ambedkar’s consistent learning and reading from the book. For a man to quote a Dhammapada (like a shloka or a psalm) in a love letter is mind-blowing. His words have stuck on my mind since I read the book: Atta hi attano natho. It means "One is indeed one’s own refuge".

I ask Khan, "What’s next, and will that be a book you are writing?" And the answer was just as he, perhaps, is: irreverent and unapologetic.

Khan says, "If I wrote a book, I would be one of those also-rans. But I enjoy translating. This book by Dr Savita Ambedkar will be soon published in many Indian languages, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and even Bengali. And yes, my translation of Avadhoot Dongare’s Pan, Pani and Pravah will be out soon."

He read a little from that translation, explaining the challenge for a translator: "How do you tell Latakka’s account in Gond to a Marathi author and retain the flavour of having their conversation in ‘broken’ Hindi and yet retain the flavour in English?’ He further shared a couple of stanzas of the Hindi version of a childhood favourite, Lewis Caroll's poem The Walrus and the Carpenter (1871).

Babasaheb: My life with Dr Ambedkar by Savita Ambedkar will hopefully help ease the pain of a wife who was vilified and practically erased by many. This book helps us understand the woman who lived in the shadow of a giant and yet managed to be her own person. No wonder Dr Ambedkar credits her for extending his life by being a doctor as well as a soulmate.