Traveling with Babasaheb

Today we traveled from Nashik to Ahmednagar, where we are now relaxing in our hotel room. We were very intentional about today’s journey. Our aim was to get to Ahmednagar before dark, and we’ve arranged a tour driver to take us to the Ellora Caves on Sunday so we don’t have to drive the rickshaw for one glorious day.

More on the Ellora Caves later. The route today wasn’t necessarily special, but what we experienced on the way definitely was. On the way to pulling over for a morning chai, we happened upon two young guys riding a bicycle cart filled with ceramic statues. Hindu gods and goddesses, elephants, and, one glorious statue of some guy with glasses and a suit on, staring us out of the back of the cart as we drove along.

“I’ve got to buy that,” yelled Joe over the din of traffic and the Bollywood music we had playing on our rigged up stereo system. He flagged down the two guys, who were staring at us in disbelief (not an uncommon reaction from locals here when they see two white people driving a rickshaw along the highway), and asked them to stop.

“How much for this?”, asked Joe, pointing at the golden shiny head statue. “300 rupees” responded the kid. That’s about five bucks. “Okay okay” responded Joe gleefully, clutching his golden man head statue.

I sat in the back of the rickshaw while Joe grabbed some zip ties (the most useful thing we’ve packed, truly) and strapped the ceramic head thing to the front dashboard of the rickshaw. “Who is that,” I asked. “I have no idea, but it’s awesome,” responded Joe. A group of onlookers at the nearby chai stand looked on, and then ventured over for the inevitable selfie session. They didn’t seem to understand why we had pulled over the ceramics peddler, but were happy to get a group shot just the same.

A few times in the next hour we almost missed or completely missed turns because Joe was staring down at his beloved head statue. I started getting concerned. “At least we should find out who that is,” I suggested.

The opportunity to do so came at our lunch stop around 2 PM. We encountered a lovely family restaurant which also happened to be filled with mostly men drinking beer and doing their Saturday afternoon motorcycle tours. Our waiter spoke excellent English, and as it turns out was a cargo ship worker who has sailed all over the world working on cargo ships and sending money home to his family. He’s paid for both of his sisters’ weddings and is taking care of his parents that way. At the moment he’s working as a waiter because COVID slowed down the work opportunities in the shipping industry, apparently.

“Who is this a statue of?”, Joe asked him. “Why Sir and Mehmsab, that is Babasaheb”, he replied, like we should have absolutely known who that was. “He wrote the Indian Constitution,” he explained. But that’s not all Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the Father of the Indian Constitution, was famous for. Dr. Ambedkar was born in 1891 and was an Indian nationalist, jurist and political leader. He was also born into the Mahar Caste, who were considered to be the untouchables.

When he was a child, Ambedkar and other untouchable children were segregated and given little attention or help by teachers. Even though they had access to education, they were not allowed to sit inside the classroom. When they needed to drink water, someone from a higher caste had to pour the water on them from above as other Indians were not allowed to touch either the water or the vessel that contained it. Dr. Ambedkar experienced this and other significant impacts of discrimination throughout his childhood and into his early adulthood.

He eventually was awarded a scholarship to Columbia University in New York in 1913 and stayed there until he earned his Ph.D in Economics in 1927. He returned to India and spent many years leading the movement in India to abolish the caste system and tirelessly promoting human rights for untouchables. In 1947, Indian’s first Prime Minister Nehru appointed him to be Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution for the future Republic of India.

Under Babasaheb’s leadership, the resulting Indian constitution guaranteed protection for a wide range of civil liberties for individual citizens, including freedom of religion, the abolition of untouchability, and the outlawing of all forms of discrimination. Ambedkar argued for extensive economic and social rights for women, and won the Assembly's support for introducing a system of reservations of jobs in the civil services, schools and colleges for members of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes and Other Backward Class, a system akin to affirmative action. India's lawmakers hoped to eradicate the socio-economic inequalities and lack of opportunities for India's depressed classes through these measures.

Our waiter told us about all of this, in his own words, and the pride and love of his country shone through his eyes as he explained all of that to us. Then we took a selfie. And carried on our way, with Babasaheb watching over us.Read more