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How did Ambedkar’s engagement with this text by American philosophers John Dewey and James Hayden Tufts inform and shape his quest for social justice in India? Here is what Scott R. Stroud discovered

Russell’s influence on Ambedkar amounted to pushing Ambedkar to develop and work out his own pragmatist philosophy of reform and activism. Ambedkar was taken by Russell’s ethos of activism, but he worried about how Russell’s Western critique of violence tied into many of the Hindu ideologies that he saw as oppressive and quietistic, especially as they ignore or implicate caste-based social arrangements

What will break the spell of the sanatan or the eternal is reflective thought, which Ambedkar understands in a classic Deweyan manner. Most of our life is unreflective and habitual, he says. Only a situation that presents a dilemma forces us to reconsider our habits and the philosophical assumptions that support those habits

Ambedkar is best understood as a pragmatist following in the line of John Dewey’s philosophy, but with emphases and creative additions that could only come from his status as a Dalitbahujan located in the Indian context

In his short reign of 28 years, Shahu succeeded in introducing radical social and legal reforms that had far-reaching consequences for the marginalized and the dispossessed. In the process, he also took the mantle from Phule and passed it on to Ambedkar