Word: ambedkar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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During India's struggle to break free of British colonial rule, Mohandas Gandhi dominated the political stage. But there were two other important leaders who challenged Gandhi's hegemony over the independence movement. One, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, became the founder of Pakistan. The other, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, won crucial victories in the emancipation of India's oppressed untouchables, making them beneficiaries of what is today the world's largest program of affirmative action for education, jobs and political office...
...achievement was stunning. Born in 1891, Ambedkar was himself an untouchable, the 14th child of a poor school teacher. He faced extreme prejudice growing up in western India: in school, he had to sit separately from high-born students. During his college education in Bombay, a Sanskrit professor refused to teach an outcaste the language of Hindu scriptures. Ambedkar compensated by becoming one of the most highly educated Indians of his time. After the British left in 1947, Ambedkar helped draft the newly independent nation's constitution and piloted legislation banning untouchability. He grew disillusioned with the slow pace...
...This dramatic life, marked by audacious leaps and deep disappointments, great statesmanship and eventual political marginalization, is natural material for a bio-pic. Though there have been major international movies about Gandhi and Jinnah, Ambedkar has been ignored. Indian filmmaker Jabbar Patel has redressed that neglect with Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (that's what his followers call him), an exhaustive three-hour-long English-language docu-drama, with a moving and memorable lead performance by south Indian actor Mammootty...
...tussle between Ambedkar and Gandhi for the leadership of the untouchables takes up a good part of the film. The problem was more than just a clash of personal ambitions. Gandhi was a conservative reformer against untouchability, but he valued the Hindu caste system and opposed inter-caste marriages until two years before his 1948 assassination. Ambedkar, by contrast, wanted radical change. He believed that untouchables could not be emancipated until the caste system was altogether destroyed. "There will be outcastes as long as there are castes," he declared...