“Revolutions can and often have begun with reading.”~Arundhati Roy To begin with reading is to begin with refusal. It is to turn a page and find, not comfort, but a quiet insurrection unfolding within the self. This is where Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar still lives most urgently, not only in statues or anniversaries, but in the act of reading that unsettles inheritance and demands a reckoning with what we have been taught to accept. Ambedkar read against the grain of a civilisation that had normalised graded inequality as sacred order.
His rebellion was not merely political, it was epistemic. He asked not only who rules, but who writes the rules, who sanctifies them, and who is denied the right to question them. In this sense, reading becomes an act of defiance, a way of dismantling the authority of texts that have long governed bodies and destinies without consent. In one of his letters, he writes with a clarity that feels almost elemental in its force. Only darkness is there. There is a sea of sorrow. “We will have to bring sunrise ourselves, Rama. We have to make our path. We have to become a garland of lamps on that path as well.
We also have to travel the path to victory on that road. We do not have any world. We have to make our world.” Here, education is not ornamentation. It is illumination. It is the labour of becoming both the path and the light upon it. Ambedkar’s insistence on education was never about mere access to literacy. It was about the creation of modern citizens who could interrogate tradition, who could refuse the comfort of inherited hierarchies, and who could imagine justice not as an abstraction but as a lived, material condition. To read, for Ambedkar, was to unlearn obedience. It was to acquire the courage to stand outside the sanctioned truths of one’s time.
This is why his critique of caste was so unsettling. It did not negotiate with the idea of sacredness. It questioned the very foundations upon which such sacredness was constructed. If the shastras have been understood in ways that perpetuate humiliation and exclusion, then their authority must be challenged, not reinterpreted into harmlessness. Reading, then, becomes an act of ethical clarity. It forces us to confront not what texts claim to say, but what they have done to people. Even today, Ambedkar is often described as utopian, as someone who imagined a society too distant from the realities of faith and tradition. But perhaps what is truly impoverished is not his vision, but our willingness to inhabit it. His so called utopia is, at its core, a demand for dignity.
It is a refusal to accept that injustice, even when divinely sanctioned, must be endured. To read Ambedkar today is to feel that demand pressing upon us still. It is to recognise that the sunrise he spoke of is not an event that arrives on its own. It is something we must continue to bring into being, through thought, through dissent, through the quiet and radical act of reading that refuses to leave the world as it is. If revolutions begin with reading, then Ambedkar teaches us that they must also continue with it. Each page turned is a small act of courage, a flicker of light in the long night of inherited inequality. And perhaps that is where his enduring power lies, in reminding us that before we can change the world, we must first learn to read it differently, and in doing so, begin to write it anew.