Ambedkar converts to Buddhism at Nagpur

Who: Dr B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader; his wife; and many thousands of Mahars and other Dalits. On the Sikh side, the leaders he met when Sikhism was one of the faiths he weighed.

What: On 14 October 1956 Ambedkar formally converted to Buddhism at a public ceremony in Nagpur. He took the Three Refuges and Five Precepts from a Buddhist monk, then gave his followers the 22 vows. Estimates of how many converted with him run from about 365,000 to half a million. He died in his sleep on the night of 5 to 6 December 1956, about seven weeks later.

The search for a new faith had begun 21 years earlier. At Yeola on 13 October 1935 he vowed that he would not die a Hindu. On 13 and 14 April 1936 he addressed the Sikh Mission Conference at Amritsar and repeated that he meant to leave Hinduism. Wikipedia's account says that after meeting Sikh leaders he concluded that he might receive second-rate status as a Sikh. The Tribune, drawing on the memoir of Harcharan Singh Bajwa, reports that in January 1948 Ambedkar told an Akali delegation of Bajwa, Bhupinder Singh Mann and Giani Kartar Singh to ask for a Punjabi-speaking state, because a demand for a Sikh state would go unheard.

Where: Nagpur, Maharashtra, at the place now called Deekshabhoomi. Amritsar is where the Sikh option was discussed in 1936.

Why it mattered: For the Panth, Nagpur marked the end of the period, opened at Yeola and Amritsar, in which Sikhism was a live option for a mass Dalit conversion. Ambedkar later argued that Buddhism was the only path to equality for the Untouchables. His advice to the Akali delegation in 1948 shows that his dealings with Sikh leaders went beyond the question of conversion.