New Delhi: A new book has deep dived into how B.R. Ambedkar was impacted by the “pragmatism” of John Dewey, his friend and professor, American philosopher, psychologist as well as an education reformer.
Author Scott R. Stroud follows Ambedkar’s progress from Dewey’s Columbia University classes in 1913 to 1916 to his later years in India in the 1950s — when he rewrote the history of Buddhism — in “The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: An Intellectual Biography of B.R. Ambedkar”.
Professor John Dewey was one of Ambedkar’s best friends from Columbia, who he mentioned in his alumni newspaper from 1930. On 2 June, 1952, when Ambedkar was visiting Columbia University to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater after being invited for his contribution in drafting the Indian Constitution, his flight was delayed, and by the time he arrived in New York, Prof. John Dewey had already died of pneumonia on 1 June.
Stroud looks into how pragmatism influenced Ambedkar’s fight against caste injustice in terms of both his persuasive strategies and the commitment to reconstruction and the meliorism of the movement.
At the same time, the author takes care to highlight the ways in which Ambedkar rejected Dewey’s paradigm and created his own strategy for dealing with problems in India. The end result is a thorough examination of one of India’s most significant social reformers.
Scott R. Stroud, a leading international expert on Ambedkar and has extensively studied his writings, offers new perspectives on the economist’s ideas. He is also an associate professor of communication studies and program director for media ethics at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas in Austin. Earlier, he has written about John Dewey in “John Dewey and the Artful Life: Pragmatism, Aesthetics, and Morality”. He also wrote “Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric”, based on the German philosopher.
Writing a praise for the latest book, historian Ramachandra Guha, said, “This intellectual biography of Ambedkar focuses on his relationship with, and debt to, his Columbia teacher, the great American philosopher John Dewey. The book is original in conception as well as fascinating to read, with much new material.”
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