Chapter One - Ambedkar and Dewey at Columbia University /

the few Indians living in colonial India to seek an education in America, as opposed to solely a European education, and he was in all likelihood the first Dalit intellectual to receive advanced degrees from an American university. The intellectuals he encountered in New York included his ad- viser, Edwin Seligman, an expert on finance and the history of economic thought; the ornery anti-Marxist socialist and part-time gardener Vladimir Simkhovitch; perhaps Vladimir's wife, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, who ran a settlement house and was a friend of Dewey's; and a range of other leading lights in economics, sociology, and beyond. Books could be writ- ten on each of these figures and what each meant to Ambedkar's later writ- ings and pursuits.

If the recollections aired in the introduction are accurate, one of the more important figures in this intellectual community-making exercise that was Ambedkar's education in the West was John Dewey (1859-1952), "Ambedkar's most influential professor at Columbia University." Dewey- perhaps the foremost thinker in American philosophical circles of his time-impressed Ambedkar. About this, most biographers and scholars of Ambedkar agree; the few details we know of this relationship, however, leave inquisitive minds hungry for more. As we shall see in this book, the young Indian student would see in Dewey and in his ideas and method a vision of deep community and real democracy, an antithesis to collections of individuals that would still leave some feeling lonely, abused, and dis- empowered. Ambedkar surely felt out of place in some ways while in New York, but in other ways the space was cleared for ideas and philosophies to collide with the views bequeathed to him by Hindu tradition.

Young Ambedkar was steeped in a progressive environment during his time at Columbia and in New York City. But what of his specific experiences with his beloved teacher, John Dewey? What was Dewey like in the classes that Ambedkar took in 1914 and 1915-16, and what did the young student from India learn from this prominent philosopher? While we don't have accounts of their classroom interactions from Ambedkar, we do have ac- counts from other students of Dewey that help us flesh out what Ambedkar must have experienced in these classes. To put it politely, it must have been the message and philosophy that so grabbed Ambedkar when he was in Dewey's presence, because by all accounts Dewey was no dynamic orator." As we shall see throughout this book, Ambedkar did become a captivat- ing speaker and orator, able to command audiences of many thousands of rapt listeners. In class, however, Ambedkar was confronted with a speaker whom Sidney Hook remembers as largely boring: 

He [Dewey] made no attempt to motivate or arouse the interest of his audi- tors, to relate problems to their own experiences, to use graphic, concrete illustrations in order to give point to abstract and abstruse positions. He rarely provoked a lively participation and response from students, in the ab- sence of which it is difficult to determine whether genuine learning or even comprehension has taken place. Dewey presupposed that he was talking to colleagues and paid his students the supreme intellectual compliment of treating them as his professional equals.... Dewey spoke in a husky mono- tone.... There were pauses and sometimes long lapses as he gazed out of the window or above the heads of his audience.

Other students recall similar experiences with Dewey. Horace Kallen noted that there "was a kind of withdrawn quality in all his communication," both inside and outside the classroom, and that it seemed as if Dewey "was much more at ease in communication with his typewriter than he was face to face, person to person." The lack of dynamism in Dewey's style and the halting cadence of his lectures was perceived by some, however, as integrally connected to Dewey's image as a profound thinker. As James Gutmann recalls, "I think there was no other teacher I ever had who gave such a sense that for fifty minutes you were watching a man think."" This impression was not unique to Gutmann; Sidney Hook refers to and agrees with Ernest Nagel's description of "Dewey in the classroom" as "the ideal type of man thinking."10

Dewey's image as a thinker-based as it was on many texts and ideas that were profound-seemed to outweigh or countervail any lack of orator- ical skill he might suffer from during his teaching or speaking. Ambedkar was selective, at least when it came to his philosophers at Columbia; his transcript indicates that he dropped the two-course sequence in 1915-16, Philosophy 179-180, Present Day Philosophy and the Problem of Evolu- tion, taught by William Pepperell Montague, a colleague and philosophical opponent of John Dewey." When it came to his philosophical preferences, Ambedkar voted with his feet.

It is no wonder that the serious and studious young Ambedkar fell into what was to be a lifelong intellectual relationship with the thought of Dewey; Dewey's classroom was not meant to grab and convert the philo- sophically uninterested, but it could function as an experience of sustained thinking about pressing problems. And as was the nature of Dewey's prag- matism in these courses, philosophy always arced toward the practical, a feature that also surely attracted Ambedkar toward its ideas and ideals.