Ambedkar’s hitherto unseen intercontinental-travel and census records, some of which expose baseless claims

“History is important. If you don’t know history, it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.” ― Howard Zinn

I am hugely indebted to Dr S.P.V.A. Sairam for pushing me to search through more archives and build on my previous work, published in Round Table India, which had navigational information about Dr Ambedkar’s journeys gathered from sources in the British Museum, and to provide better context to my findings with articles, addresses and anecdotes from ‘Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches’ (BAWS) and other scattered letters; and I would also like to thank Ms Pournima Gaikwad for guiding me on this article. Since I do not come from a Social Sciences or History background, it has always been a challenge for me to remember some of the events, and to piece them together into a narrative.

This small personal project has led to some exciting outcomes, uncovering and setting some of the records on Dr Ambedkar straight once and for all, based on hard evidence sourced from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) archives in the United States. For those of us from a Bahujan background, Dr Ambedkar’s accomplishments are a shared moment of glory that we yearn for to repeat amid all the negativity of a caste-ridden society. These records are a priceless treasure for us, especially because successive Indian governments have intentionally attached little to no importance to making them accessible. 

Before I undertook this project, Dr S.P.V.A. Sairam had drawn my attention to an article by A. R. Venkatachalapathy, which introduced me to the travel records of Dr Ambedkar available in the British Library. These records reveal the following:

• Dr Ambedkar had taken S.S. Sardinia on the Rubattino Line from Bombay on 15 June 1913

• In Naples he had boarded S.S. Ancona and arrived in New York on 22 July 1913

• Dr Ambedkar indicated that he intended to leave America on 3 June 1917 by S.S. St Paul

In searching through the records of these travels, I came across more travel and public records that were probably not known or documented before. This article is about these findings, their interpretation and some discussion on their context. I will leave it to the experts to build on these findings if they wish to. If you wish to make a correction in my assessments or assumptions, feel free to reach out to me on my email: nikastroisbac@gmail.com.

My research threw up the following records:

1. 1913: Travel from Bombay to the US via Italy (his first outside India)
2. 1915: Enumeration in the New York State Census
3. 1920: Travel from Bombay to Liverpool (UK)
4. 1923: Travel from London back to India (via present-day Sri Lanka)
5. 1931-32: Travel from London to New York and return after the Second Round Table Conference
6. 1952: Travel from Bombay to Columbia University and return

1) First Travel to the West: July 1913

As mentioned by Dr Ambedkar in his letter, which is preserved in the British Library, his first leg of travel, on his first foreign trip, was from Bombay on the ship that went by the name S.S. Sardegna. A The Times of India article dated 16 June 1913 provides information that corroborates Dr Ambedkar’s letter. I’m thankful to Vivek Kumar, a PhD scholar from JNU, for providing me with this record.

This travel record is about the first leg of the trip to America. SS Sardegna, also spelt SS Sardinia (built in 1902), was a passenger and cargo ship operated by the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company. This leg of the trip took Dr Ambedkar from Bombay to Naples in Italy – which was one of the many routes the ship regularly took in its life. After it was torpedoed in the First World War a few times, it was dismantled by a Japanese company, following an incident in which its cargo caught fire. Unfortunately, the newspaper article does not provide any more information, as the manifests did for the later travel records. 

First page:

Second page:

We all know that in the year 1912, by the age of 21, young Bhimrao Ambedkar had earned his degree in economics and political science from Bombay University, and then his postgraduate studies in Columbia University were made possible through a scholarship funded by the Maharaja of Baroda (their encounter has been covered quite well by Dr Sairam here, based on BAWS, Vol 17, Part I, Page 253), which was worth 11.50 British Pounds per month, for a period of three years (Keer, Dhananjay. Dr Ambedkar: Life and Mission). This was his first trip outside India. He would later describe his times at Columbia University as the very first time he experienced social equality, and speaking with the New York Times, he said, “The best friends I have had in my life were some of my classmates at Columbia and my great professors, John Dewey, James Shotwell, Edwin Seligman, and James Harvey Robinson.” The foreigners of different ethnicities whom he would have mingled with cared the least about his caste. For the first time in his life, he was tasting true freedom. You must remember the responsibility towards his people, and not merely obligation, that he carried on his shoulders, when he ventured on this journey. He was quite open about it at various points of time, including to Maharaja Sayajirao Gaikwad III during that encounter. 

I managed to find the details of the second leg of this trip with young Bhimrao’s name recorded at the bottom of the list. This, for me, is the most valuable of my findings for this article because it provides some very important clues about his circumstances that I will shortly point out below. Going through the records felt like interacting with him first-hand: 

• Young Bhimrao boarded SS Ancona, which had set sail from Genoa (Italy) on 7 July 1913, in Naples and arrived in New York (US) on 21 July 1913. The steamship was equipped with state-of-the-art wireless telegraphy (invented only a decade and a half earlier). After leaving Naples, the ship stopped in Palermo before crossing the Atlantic to serve New York and Philadelphia on the western coast of the United States. (The First World War started in 1914 and, in late 1915, the ship was torpedoed by the German submarine U-38 on the suspicion that it was carrying Allied/US military. Losing hundreds of lives on that ship had led to great anger among the American public. But that was not the incident in which Bhimrao lost the first thesis he had written for his PhD about which he mentioned in his letter to Prof Edwin Seligman. That incident took place on 20 July 1917 and the ship involved was SS Salsette.)

• His name was misspelt as “Ambedker, Bhimao” by the immigration officer of the port in New York. He is listed as a married student of age 22, travelling for the first time to America as a subject of British India. He is further recorded as a “Hindoo” under the race/people column while the others in the list (consisting of mostly people of Italian origin returning home to the US) are listed as either North or South – whose meaning I wasn’t able to decipher because even southern Italians were recorded as “North”.

• So far so good, but then I see him mentioning “father: Balaram Ambedkar” under the “Nearest Relative or Friend” column. Balaram was his elder brother who had probably become his father figure after the death of their father Subedar Ramji Maloji Sakpal only a few months earlier in February 1913. That must have been an emotional moment for a recently orphaned Bhimrao to put down his brother’s name as “his father” for the record. 

• On the second page of the immigration record, we find more interesting information. At the ports, the travellers had to produce the cash they possessed as proof of their ability to sustain themselves during their stay at the destination. He is initially recorded by the immigration officer as a student “going to study [at] Columbia University” having $50 cash, which is then struck out and $200 mentioned next to it, which must have been the money that the Maharaja provided; this might have been a bit of a shock, if not merely a surprise, to the immigration officer, having seen very few Indians, let alone a student, with such an amount of cash (most passengers had about $50)! Rigid caste laws back in India would not have allowed an “Untouchable” to keep that kind of money. It was as if Manusmriti’s laws had been struck out, with the officer totally unaware that an arduous struggle had led to it. According to BAWS, Vol 17, Part 1, Page 255, based on the agreement with Maharaja Sayajirao Gaikwad, young Bhimrao “will receive from the date of his starting from Bombay an allowance of £230 (two hundred and thirty pounds) per annum, and in addition the Government will pay all expenditure.” In 1913, a pound was equivalent to 4.87 dollars.

• He is recorded as having declared himself to be neither a polygamist nor an anarchist and his “Condition of Health, Mental and Physical” is marked as “good”. His height is recorded at 5’ 6”, which is corroborated independently by a picture of his passport that was circulated on social media a long time ago. This detail must have been recorded based on the passport itself.

• If one were to consider the dates of travel (15 June from Bombay and 7 July from Genoa) and speed of the steamship, an estimate of the layover in Naples between the first and second leg of his journey to the United States would be about seven days and in any case not less than five days. How you may ask? The average cruising speed of the SS Ancona ocean steamliner was about 17 knots and the route from Bombay to Naples (via Suez Canal) is about 4700 nautical miles, which would mean around (4700/17) hours or about 11-12 days of journey from Bombay to Naples. If Bhimrao left on 15 June from Bombay, he must have reached Naples by the end of June at the latest, considering the intermediate stops, while the next leg of travel from Naples to the US wouldn’t begin until a week later. Dr S.P.V.A. Sairam and I tried to imagine how young Ambedkar (with a degree in Economics and Political Science) would have spent that week in Naples. Dr Sairam writes: 

He [Ambedkar] definitely wouldn’t have stayed at his hotel. He would have explored the vicinity of Naples. By all accounts, the port of Naples is known for its scenic beauty. It’s of course one of the ancient sea ports through which trade has taken place between Asia and Europe. Babasaheb was cognizant of these facts. Interestingly, the legendary Pompeii and its ruins are located very close to Naples (around 22 km). Did Babasaheb visit Pompeii? We don’t have any direct evidence, but if we read his first paper on Anthropology that he presented before Prof A. A. Goldenweiser and his students of Ethnology, we will find that Babasaheb was referring to the ruins of Pompeii and how the local guides speak about the history of it “with a glib tongue”. This might suggest that Babasaheb had actually visited the ruins of Pompeii. If this is true, then a small conjecture can also be made, namely, that Babasaheb must also have visited the site of Mount Vesuvius – the great site of volcanic eruption that shook the foundations of the Roman Empire. There is a lot to discover and unearth!

2) New York State Census, 1915

As I was browsing through the publicly available census records, I came across young Bhimrao Ambedkar’s mention in the New York State Census that was conducted in 1915! This might be one of the oldest public records of him. I would be really glad if someone, who might be living close to the New York State Archives (222 Madison Av., Albany, NY), could visit it in person, and get a colour scan based on the information in the catalogue, now available online. It would be a treasure for me!

Below, I have reproduced a high-quality black and white scan of the page in the Census records that has been made available online by the Archives. Let me talk briefly about it.

Zoomed in:

• His first name has been scrawled, but the surname is perfectly legible. His address, given on the first column, is 124th St. House No. 505 (New York), which is today’s West 124th St. House No. 505, about a 10-minute walk from Columbia University. This was most likely not a University-provided accommodation because the building was home to a diverse bunch of people such as a housekeeper (row 47), a telephone operator (row 44), labourers (row 27, 29), a nurse (row 26), a movie actress (row 37) and others. Not all of the residents were working-class either (see column 11 under the head “Occupation”). 

• A noteworthy point was that he was recorded as a white person! The enumerator obviously got it wrong, not only in the case of young Bhimrao, but also a particular “Suchet Sing” (row 45) and another “Abdul Aziz” (row 46) both of whom hailed from India. On the next page (the right of the scanned double spread) has records of people from Turkey who have been given the same description. It is possible that perhaps the concept of “brown” hadn’t been there back then, that there might have been only White, Black, (American) Indian, Mixed, or Foreign as categorizations available (under the census policies, and not just general consciousness, but I have not been able to find the supplement to the 1915 Census, and had to settle with the one from 1910, that has some of these categories and “mulatto”, which meant having a mixed, black and white ancestry). Putting Ambedkar and others in the “white” category might have been a political/racist tactic from the prejudiced Census department. The only black people you see in the neighbourhood are listed (or segregated) on pages 12, 13 and 14, and there you can see that a “W” for “White” was scribbled initially, and then erased and overwritten with a “B” for “Black”. The high-definition scans give the truth away. In any case, neither I nor Dr Sairam are experts on racism and early 20th-century race politics in New York.

• Part of me initially thought that someone else must have shared Ambedkar’s details with the enumerator on his behalf. But then it’s quite unlikely that they would get both his age (listed correctly as “23”) and time spent in the US until then (listed correctly as “2” years) right. So, I’m ruling out that theory to a large extent. Rest of the details match up quite well, such as “Alien” under the head “Citizenship” and as a “Student (College)” (and therefore “Non Working Class”) under “Occupation”.

3) 1920s Travel from Bombay to Liverpool (UK)

This travel record pertains to the then six-year-old ship “SS City of Exeter” on which Dr Ambedkar sailed to the UK. You can find his name on the list on the fourth row. It was operated by the Ellerman Lines and was at times used as a troopship during World War I. It operated on the following route: Glasgow – Liverpool – Port Said – Suez – Bombay – Karachi – Kathiawar ports – East & South Africa – Continental UK ports – Glasgow. Given below is the record of the arrival of the ship in Liverpool (UK) on 31 July 1920. Dr Ambedkar was listed as a 28-year-old passenger on the ship embarking from Bombay and destined for Liverpool. What is interesting about this trip is that Ambedkar set sail after participating in an important event on 21 March 1920 in which Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj spoke, and correctly prophesied, to the “Untouchables” of Kolhapur that:

“You have found your saviour in Ambedkar. I am confident that he will break your shackles. Not only that, a time will come when, so whispers my conscience, Ambedkar will shine as a front-rank leader of all India fame and appeal.” (Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches (Vol 17, Part 1, page 19, “Editorial”)

4) Trip after Western Education: March 1923

This record belongs to the steam ocean liner SS Osterley, operated by Orient Line, which served the route between London and multiple ports in Australia via the Suez Canal (then controlled by the British and the French). This particular trip that began on 3 March 1923 must have been during the later part of Ambedkar’s studies abroad – but not at the end of his studies, as he had to “resubmit” his thesis in August 1923, which came months after this trip, before earning his doctorate from the University of London the same year. He had already completed his master’s at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1921. So this trip of 1923 took place during his last year of formal Western education. This was also the year when he was called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn (an association of lawyers and judges in London). 

A few more remarks on this trip record:

• Dr Ambedkar seems to have bought a third-class cabin ticket from London to Colombo (in Britain-controlled Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka) which was a port of call for SS Osterley on its way to Australia. I wonder if anyone has records of him spending any time in Colombo. The problem is that most of the material on him is still scattered in different places.

• This ticket also has a mention of him as a student of age 30, with the now-famous “Ambedkar House” in London as his “… last address in the United Kingdom …”. He has also been marked as a subject of British India.

• Dr S.P.V.A. Sairam has brought to my attention some claims about this voyage that appear to be unsubstantiated now. These claims have come from the likes of Changdev Bhavanrao Khairmode, who have provided no authentic references to back such claims. As I see it, they have simply made up some stories about Dr Ambedkar. Let me quote Ashok Gopal who refers to such claims in his recent book “A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar”, Navayana Publishing, 2023 on Page 210:

“Ambedkar did not have enough money for his return journey to India from England in March 1923. Once again, he appealed to the Kolhapur State for help. Rajaram, Shahu’s son, arranged to send some cash. Ambedkar left all the books he had bought in London with his friend “F”, and bought the cheapest ticket available for a passage to some place close to India. It was for room in a cargo ship going to Colombo. His travelling companions were pigs, ducks, and other animals, and Black, Chinese, Arab and Indian labourers hitting the bottle. From Colombo, he boarded a ship to Chennai, and then took a train going to Mumbai. He got down at Dadar station at the crack of dawn on 3rd April 1923.”

There are at least five claims from this story that are proven wrong by details emerging from this single travel record:

• SS Osterley was no cargo ship. The Museums Victoria Collections, among many others, that catalogues ships worldwide describes it thus: 

RMS Osterley was a quadruple-expansion steam engine passenger vessel built by the London & Glasgow Shipbuilding Co. in 1909. It was operated by the Orient Steam Navigation Co. Ltd on the United Kingdom to Australia service. This ship made 59 return voyages and was broken up in 1930. During the First World War, Osterley was used as a troopship by the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) as HMAT Osterley.

• A quick glance at the manifest will tell you that more than 85-90 per cent of the people, on this Australia-bound ship, were those whose “Country of Intended Future Permanent Residence” was Australia. This makes sense as it was an Australia-bound ship. Less than five passengers were Palestinians and about four were Egyptians, the rest were from England and New Zealand. Khairmode’s singular emphasis on Ambedkar travelling with “Black, Chinese, Arab and Indian labourers hitting the bottle” thus stands exposed as a figment of his patronizing, if not racist or classist, imagination.

• Third-class tickets would have been the cheapest, but this was not the first time Ambedkar booked third class as is clear from the records uncovered now. But could one say that he travelled with “pigs and ducks”? If one peruses the entire travel record, a whole range of people, including Constable (row 169), Police Officer (row 826), Clerks (row 839), Engineers (row 832), hotel manager (row AH7), were also travelling with him in third class, which strangely did not catch Khairmode’s eye. But how would such evidence catch his eye if he didn’t bother to look for it in the first place! There is even more diversity seen in other pages of the manifest. The total capacity of third-class cabins was about 700-900 and judging from the manifest now available, it was so far from being fully booked that it defies belief that the ship management simply stuffed people wherever possible! 

• It is hard to believe that the money Shahuji Maharaj’s Kolhapur State gave Dr Ambedkar was only enough to buy a seat next to ducks and pigs, given their generous help in the past. That he “left all the books he had bought in London with his friend ‘F’” also seems to be without any basis. 

• In light of the new evidence, I would have grave doubts about all the other vignettes Khairmode has included in his biography of Dr Ambedkar, such as Dr Ambedkar returning from a trip abroad, knocking on the door of his house and receiving no response, and then suddenly everyone showing up and springing a surprise on him. These vignettes may have been intended to give an air of authoritativeness to his biographies but they are totally unsubstantiated. 

• In the course of my discussions with Dr S.P.V.A. Sairam, I have also discovered another discrepancy, that may have gone unnoticed to date: a letter dated “15-5-24”, purportedly addressed by “F” to “darling Bhim” seems to have the following content: “..I thought of you on Monday and Tuesday the 10-11th…”. 

After reading it twice or thrice, I looked it up, and it turns out, that in the calendar of May 1924, or even April 1924 (if someone claims they were written a few days earlier), the 10-11th dates do not fall on Monday and Tuesday, and they fall on Saturday-Sunday and Thursday-Friday! I see this as an example of an utter lack of any peer-reviewing in reproducing these letters that are treated to be “authentic”.

The posh drawing room of the SS Osterley in which Ambedkar supposedly had “pigs and ducks” as fellow travellers:

5) US Tour after London Round Table Conferences 1931-32

These are records of Ambedkar’s three voyages to and from the United States barely a week after the conclusion of the Second Round Table Conference in London. The main purpose of this trip as discovered through the New York Times Archives was to “… visit Washington, Philadelphia and Chicago … accomplish the first of his missions by personal conversation with leading Americans interested in Indian thought … to visit President Hoover at the White House and to present to various philanthropists the social and financial plight of the untouchables, which has been depicted, [he said], by Miss Katherine Mayo in in her book ‘Mother India’.”

Ambedkar departed from the Southampton Port (120 kms southwest of London) on 5 December 1931, and arrived in New York a week later (11 December 1931), and was back in Southampton on 3 January 1932. 

A few details from the records of these travels are listed below:

• The first record is of Dr B. R. Ambedkar taking the legendary ship SS Europa operated by the Norddeutscher Lloyd Bremen Line on 5 December 1931. He had a tourist-class ticket. This sleek ship was one of the fastest at its time and was repaired and restored into service as “SS Liberte” after the Second World War. Several Hollywood movies were shot on it. The 1953 American musical “The French Line” was shot entirely on this ship. I haven’t seen this movie, but you know about it now. You will find videos on YouTube where experts explain why this ship was so resilient.

• Dr Ambedkar, listed as “Barrister-at [Law]” has provided an address that I couldn’t find in any of the archives or his writings and speeches before: 3 BERNARD ST WC 1. Since the date of departure from Southampton is only four days after the conclusion of the Second Round Table Conference (1 December 1931), I am assuming that this must have been his last place of stay in London before visiting America. Dr S.P.V.A. Sairam informs me of different addresses appearing in the letters he sent during that period. He may not have found a hotel that was vacant for the duration of the Round Table Conference, and may have had to hop from one place to another, which is not uncommon.

• The ship’s passenger manifest throws up interesting names. One name that stands out is the first-class cabin passenger, UK’s then Member of Parliament (Epping) and member of Privy Council (“PC” in the manifest) Mr Churchill, who became the Prime Minister of England during the Second World War, and his family (I have double-checked the titles, ages, and names of family members to be sure; they are listed below his name). Based on the information in the public domain, Mr Churchill, who would interact with Dr Ambedkar quite closely in the mid 1940s (Dr S.P.V.A. Sairam revealed to me a handwritten letter from Dr Ambedkar in which he thanked Churchill for letting him stay at his residence in Kent while discussing the plight of the Depressed Classes), seems to have been travelling to America at the time to give lectures at different Universities and was already aware of the troubles brewing with Mr Gandhi, whom he had called “... seditious … lawyer posing as a fakir …”. By then, Ukrainian artist Jakob Kramer’s sketches had probably been published. The 1930s were called “The Wilderness Years” of Churchill. He became politically isolated due to his controversial opinions on various subjects (including his opposition of Hitler). Dr Ambedkar and Churchill were on the same ship sailing for a week to America – their names only rows apart in the manifest. I wonder what discussions they might have had, given that there is nothing much for intellectuals to do on a ship except read books and talk to people. Two years after this trip, Ambedkar would interview Churchill on behalf of the Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, recorded in Dr Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches (Vol 2, Page 742). 

• The second name that stands out is yet another passenger of the first-class cabin, who is listed as a “MERCHANT”: then 37-year-old Ghanshyam Das Birla (popularly known as G. D. Birla). Belonging to the Baniya caste and a Gandhi admirer, Birla led Gandhi’s group called Harijan Sevak Sangh by 1932. He laid the foundation of the Birla Empire, beginning with trading in jute (and jute bags or gunny bags), profiting off of the uptick in jute’s demand during the World War II and his net worth increasing from Rs 20 Lakhs to Rs 80 Lakhs by some estimates (Herdeck & Piramal, “India’s Industrialists”, 1985). This funded his later ventures in media (Hindustan Times), automobile (Hindustan Motors), textiles (Grasim) and other sectors. Dr Ambedkar has written extensively on the bania politics in the Harijan Sevak Sangh in his book “Essays on Untouchables and Untouchability” under Chapter 6 titled “Gandhi and his Fast”. He writes that he was even invited to join the Sangh, but when he made certain proposals, they were completely ignored. Gandhi even thought it would be “unethical” to include Untouchables in this organization that was meant for upliftment of Untouchables.

• A person in the manifest whom I could not identify initially was Khaitan Tara Prasad. He is recorded as a “SECRETARY”, aged 23 years, travelling in the tourist-class cabin. It could not have been Debi Prasad Khaitan who was part of the Drafting Committee of India’s Constitution, and who died soon after. Pournima Gaikwad brought to my attention a piece from the Business Standard, which gives the background: Debi Prasad Khaitan was born in the year 1888, which means that in 1931, during this trip, he would be around 43 years old. Tara Prasad Khaitan, our mystery passenger, on the other hand is registered as being 23 years old. The second page of the manifest (shared below) reveals this passenger’s links (row 7) with G.D. Birla, because Birla paid for Khaitan’s ticket, and we have come to know that the Khaitans, having founded their law firm empire Khaitan & Co in 1911, under the leadership of Debi Prasad Khaitan, were initially lawyers for the Birla Group. Debi Prasad Khaitan had a brother by the name of Kali Prasad. Could K.P. Khaitan mentioned by Tara Prasad as his father in the manifest be this Kali Prasad Khaitan? If you happen to know more about Khaitan Tara Prasad, feel free to reach out to me. 

Let’s move on from the ship’s departure manifest to the corresponding manifest prepared at the arrival port in New York and see if we can glean more information. 

• The first page of the arrival manifest gives Ambedkar’s travel number as NI 2829 (a number very close to other passengers’ numbers) which is also recorded as being issued from London early that year (12 February 1931). I do not think this was his passport number as the passport numbers used to be about five or six digits long (case in point: Jinnah’s passport and other vintage British India passports). Unverified pictures of Dr Ambedkar’s passport, with similar 5-6 digits in passport number, have also been widely circulated in the past on social media, but without the date of issuance.
• The second page of the arrival manifest provides information on the “aliens” arriving in the United States. This might provide more clues to the purpose of the visit. The duration of stay was mentioned as about 2 months (“2M”). The nearest relative in London is mentioned as “SIR SAMUEL HOARE, SECR. OF STATE, LONDON”. Ambedkar must have interacted closely with him during the Second Round Table Conference; and under “… relative or friend to join in US. ..”, he had mentioned “PROF. J. T. SHOTWELL, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT, NEW YORK”). This is the same professor who Dr Ambedkar had once described as being one of his “best friends”. Prof Scott Stroud agrees that Dr Ambedkar spent time around Columbia on this trip.
• It was two months after this trip that Gandhi started writing to Sir Samuel Hoare and (Reference: Dr Ambedkar’s “Essays on Untouchables and Untouchability” under Chapter 6 titled “Gandhi and his Fast” ) Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald to ensure that Depressed Classes would not get separate electorates as demanded by Dr Ambedkar. The demand however was accepted. Gandhi would declare a fast unto death while enjoying a diet of milk and fruits in Yerwada Jail (The Times of India, 19 September 1932) and blackmail him into withdrawing his demand.

As mentioned in my previous work, I was able to pull up more details about the arrival of Dr Ambedkar by SS Europa:

Let’s move on to the record of Dr Ambedkar’s return trip. He sailed the ship SS Bremen of the Norddeutscher Lloyd Bremen Line from New York and arrived at the port of Southampton (UK) on 3 January 1932. One could estimate that if SS Bremen retraced the route SS Europa took on its way to New York, a steamship of that age and period would have taken a week to cross the Atlantic. Hence, Dr Ambedkar must have sailed from New York around Christmas, making it a three-week tour of America. One final note about these three records is that two of them note his age correctly: 38. But the passenger manifest for SS Europa says 39, which I believe was a clerical mistake. 

6) Final Trip to the West

This was the final trip that our 60-year-old, severely ailing, Dr B.R. Ambedkar made to the West – the West that had moulded him in ways others from his community weren’t, living as they did their entire lives under the tyranny of the Caste Hindus. I have written about this historic trip based on the archives of the New York Times. This came to fruition when the vice-president of the University chose Dr Ambedkar for conferment of honorary degree of Doctor of Law. There is an interesting sequence of events that Dr Sairam has described, based on the letters in the public domain, that I wish to share with you to give a full picture of how this came to be:

In 1950, the trustees of Columbia University Dr Gregg M. Sinclair, Prof Carnan, and A.H. Sulzberger formed a consensus to award an LLD degree to Dr Ambedkar.

A major impetus for this decision was the recognition of the fact that one of its preeminent alumni was an architect of the Constitution of the newly born India. The trustees had in their possession a very interesting article on Dr Ambedkar, published in the Reader’s Digest in March 1950, which told his fascinating story. Pursuing it further, an invitation had been sent to Dr Ambedkar, who was the law minister at the time, to accept the honour by visiting Columbia University. But Dr Ambedkar had to politely request to postpone the honour investiture owing to his preoccupation with the making of India’s Constitution and the piloting of the Hindu Code Bill.

On 30 January 1952, the proposal to honour Dr Ambedkar was renewed by the trustees of Columbia University. This time, Dr Grayson Kirk, vice-president of Columbia University, reached out to Babasaheb and requested that he accept the honour at the university’s 198th commencement anniversary. Dr Ambedkar replied to Dr Kirk on February 24 and consented to his request by noting, “I count this as a great honour.” In the same letter, Dr Ambedkar mentioned that it would cost him around 15,000 rupees for his to-and-fro journey (including his stay in New York City) and that he could recoup this expense by giving public lectures that would interest the American audience – on the Indian Constitution, Buddhism, the caste system in India and so on. A month later, he received a reply from Dr Kirk, who noted that it might not be practical to arrange a public lecture series owing to the fact that the institutions of higher learning would be closed in June (the month of the commencement). Dr Kirk suggested a few more ways to arrange for the expenditure, but eventually they too proved to be ineffective.

Luckily, the determined Dr Kirk explored all possibilities and sent a telegram to Dr Ambedkar nearly a month later suggesting that he was able to arrange money for his travel through the benefaction of friends. In response, Babasaheb thanked Dr Kirk and said that he would attend the commencement ceremony. 

On examination of the letters that were written by Dr Ambedkar during this period, one gets the impression that he was a bit unwilling to embark on his journey to New York. The major reason for his unwillingness could have been his ailing health. 

On 1 May 1952, he wrote a letter to Bhaurao Gaikwad, saying, “I am sorry; my having to go to America is almost certain. I don’t like it very much. Since my return from Bombay, my health has deteriorated considerably.” Dr Savita Ambedkar, who would accompany Dr Ambedkar wherever he went, couldn’t join him on the trip owing to lack of finances. There has been propaganda to project that Dr Ambedkar was a wealthy bourgeois who owned a lot of property. Where would these haters hide their faces after reading the aforementioned details?

When Babasaheb announced to the press that he would be visiting New York City to accept the honour, few papers covered the news. Commenting on this, he wrote to Kamalakant Chitre: “The announcement regarding my going to New York was sent out yesterday. In Delhi, it has appeared only in the Statesman. Other papers have ignored it. Even the Times of India has not printed it. You were right that the newspapers might hatch a conspiracy of silence. We can’t help it.”

Be that as it may, if there was one thing that kept up the spirit of Babasaheb amid his ailing health and the difficulties of arranging the finances for the trip, it was his hope to meet his beloved guide and mentor, Prof John Dewey. (The impact of Dewey on the life of Babasaheb is well known. Prof Scott Stroud has recently written a book on it.)

But unfortunately, Prof Dewey breathed his last during Babasaheb’s layover in Rome. After reaching New York City, he penned an emotional letter to Dr Savita Ambedkar, saying, “He (Dewey) was a wonderful man; I owe my intellectual life to him.” If Babasaheb had accepted the honour in 1950 itself, he would have met his mentor, Dewey. History has missed this momentous embrace of the two greats of the modern world. It’s our terrible fate.

Instead of sailing for weeks, which would have been detrimental to his health, Dr Ambedkar flew to the US, as the Bombay airport, built in the early 1940s, was fully operational by then. I managed to find the flight manifest. On 1 June 1952, he took the Trans World Airlines (a major airline in the 1930s and later acquired by American Airlines) flight number 907/01 from Bombay, which had stops in Geneva, Paris and Idlewild (now called JFK International Airport, which is a major airport serving New York). I’m thankful to Dr S.P.V.A. Sairam for pointing out Scott Stroud’s note on the flight that it was a bumpy ride (“Introduction” in “The Evolution of Pragmatism” by Scott Stroud). Apparently, the aircraft ran into bad weather and the flight circled for two hours before returning to its departure point – this is according to Stroud’s account and he thinks it was Bahrain. But, according to the flight manifest, after departing from Bombay, it was supposed to have the following stops: Basra (Iraq), then flying South to Dhahran (Saudi Arabia), back on its course towards north-west in Cairo (Egypt), continuing further up north to Rome (Italy) by 2 June 1952, followed by its northward course to Geneva (Switzerland), then up north to Paris (France); and then what seems to have been hurriedly scrawled on the manifest is that it had Shannon (Ireland, I believe), further up north, as an unplanned stop before landing in New York (scheduled on 2 June 1952, but delayed to 3 June 1952 at 6:38 am). 

Unfortunately, the flight manifest isn’t as detailed or revealing about the passengers as the ship manifests used to be. The only picture available of him boarding the flight to the US is reproduced below:

(I’m told by my co-authors that this might be the first attempt to document Dr Ambedkar’s travels using manifests and immigration and census records. I’m happy that I could collaborate with them to bring this project to fruition. Although I’m not a writer or researcher, I believe I have done my best to describe his travels. These records that I present here speak louder than any hearsay we often read in books, with little to no reference, for example, in the work of C.B. Khairmode. Dr Sairam says that a powerful, authoritative biography of Dr Ambedkar, one that is based solely on hard, verifiable evidence, and not hearsay, is yet to be written. I fully agree with him. I hope our small, one-of-a-kind project is a contribution to that high-quality, well-researched biography of the future by whoever dares to embark on writing it. Until then, I hope you enjoy these records linked to a small part of Dr Ambedkar’s epic life journey, and cherish the new findings!)

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