Bhagwan Das (1927–2010): Ambedkarite, Buddhist, and Fighter for Dalit Rights
By Maren Bellwinkel-Schempp
Translated from German to English
Bhagwan Das was born in 1927 in Shimla. He belonged to the Chuhra or Lal Beghi community, as the street sweepers and latrine cleaners of Punjab are called, named after the rebellious prophet of the Bhangis. The term "Bhangi" itself is derogatory, literally meaning those who consume bhang (cannabis) as an intoxicant.
During colonial times, some of them were closely associated with the British-Indian military. Lal Beghis were employed as servants, cleaners, and also as waiters and cooks in the military. These roles allowed them to bypass some of the discrimination inherent in the traditional caste system. Bhagwan Das grew up in a garrison where his father worked at the telegraph office. The family could afford to send their children to good private schools with English as the medium of instruction. This quality education enabled him to join the Royal Indian Air Force at the age of 16 after completing his matriculation (10th grade) in 1943. At that time, British India was embroiled in World War II, with the Imperial Japanese Army, supported by the Indian National Army, attempting to advance into the Indian heartland from the eastern front. Bhagwan Das was trained and deployed for the newly developed radar surveillance. His excellent command of English allowed him to get along well with British comrades and officers, earning their respect. He would have liked to stay in the Royal Air Force after the war, but his family could not afford the 5,000 rupees required for an officer’s commission.
Ambedkarite and Buddhist
Bhagwan Das had heard of Babasaheb Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the great statesman and leader of the Untouchables, during his school years. In 1943, he had the opportunity to meet Ambedkar in Shimla for the first time. This encounter led to an enduring connection, culminating in Das serving as Ambedkar’s private secretary in 1955–56. Bhagwan Das offered to assist Ambedkar with compiling his writings, speeches, and lectures, working a few hours a day without compensation. This work, interrupted by Ambedkar’s death in 1956, later resulted in a four-volume publication, Thus Spoke Ambedkar, published by Das between 1963 and 1980 in Jalandhar through Bhimpatrika Press, run by Lahori Ram Balley. This publication is significant as one of the first collections of Ambedkar’s works, long before the Maharashtra government published Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches.
As a young man, Bhagwan Das was strongly influenced by Christian missionaries. He openly shared how he would visit a Methodist missionary every morning to pray before going to work. Remarkably, he noted that the missionary never pressured him to convert to Christianity.
In the months following Bhagwan Das’s death on November 18, 2010, at the age of 83, numerous obituaries have highlighted his significant contributions to the Dalit movement in India. He was undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the Dalit movement in North India, playing a key role in spreading Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar’s ideas. His great achievement was making the movement accessible to those at the very bottom of the “Untouchable” castes: latrine cleaners and street sweepers. Additionally, he successfully internationalized the issue of “Untouchability,” notably by advocating for the Burakumin in Japan, a group similarly discriminated against as India’s street sweepers and latrine cleaners.
Several years before Dr. Ambedkar’s famous conversion to Buddhism in October 1956, Bhagwan Das had already embraced Buddhism, influenced initially by Bodhanand Mahastavir (1874–1952) in Lucknow and a group of Buddhists in Delhi, originally inspired by the Arya Samaj in Punjab. This group held regular weekly prayer and sermon sessions at the Ambedkar Bhawan and in private homes.
Bhagwan Das recounted how, in Lucknow, a group of Buddhists, led by Pragyanand, arranged his marriage to a well-educated woman from the Dhanuk caste—“for my own good,” as he emphasized. This was likely one of the first Buddhist weddings among Dalits and was notable for being a cross-caste marriage. The Dhanuk are a smaller Untouchable caste, often working as pig herders or vegetable farmers. Bhagwan Das’s wife was a primary school teacher, supporting the family while he pursued law studies and later became a lawyer. They had two daughters and a son. Their eldest daughter, Zoya Hadke, is a senior civil servant in the Indian Administrative Service; their son, Rahul Das, is a doctor; and their younger daughter, Shura Darapuri, is a professor at the BBAU University of Lucknow, dedicated to publishing her father’s works in 23 volumes.
Thirst for Knowledge and Struggle
Like his father, Bhagwan Das was driven by a thirst for knowledge. Following the example of his mentor, Babasaheb Dr. Ambedkar, he bought many books and read extensively, including entire encyclopedia articles in libraries to deepen his understanding of specific topics. For Dalits, who were traditionally excluded from knowledge under the Brahmanical caste system and relegated to servitude, access to education was of immense importance. It was not just about understanding the world but about changing it and securing a rightful place for Dalits in the democratic and socialist independent India. For both Bhagwan Das and Ambedkar, this was a lifelong mission.
In his later years, Bhagwan Das lived with his wife (who passed away a few years earlier), his son Rahul, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren in a small fourth-floor apartment in Munirka, a settlement developed by the Delhi Development Authorities near Jawaharlal Nehru University. Whenever I visited Delhi in recent years, I stopped by to see him. He was unpretentious, requiring only a phone call to arrange a visit. Guests were received in his living and working room, filled floor-to-ceiling with books, mostly legal texts. Conversations always went straight to the point, focusing on the situation of Dalits, the Buddhist movement, and human rights. He was an inspiration and source of knowledge for many academics and activists, including Walter Hahn, coordinator of the Dalit Solidarity Platform, social scientist Martin Fuchs, and Indologist Heinz Werner Wessler.
Internationalization
Bhagwan Das’s major contribution was internationalizing the Dalit issue. As a Buddhist, he was a founding member of the World Conference of Religions for Peace (WCRP), established in Kyoto in 1969 and meeting every four years. Ambedkar had sought to place the Dalit issue in a global context, comparing Dalits to slaves in the Roman Empire or Black communities in American ghettos, though these analogies were imprecise. Bhagwan Das, however, made a significant impact in 1979 at a WCRP conference in Princeton by comparing the plight of Dalits in India to that of the Burakumin in Japan. The Burakumin, traditionally confined to segregated neighborhoods, were assigned “dirty” jobs like waste disposal and carcass processing, excluded from education, and considered impure—paralleling the situation of Dalits.
In August 1983, supported by several Dalit organizations, Bhagwan Das testified before the United Nations Subcommission on Human Rights in Geneva about the ongoing discrimination against Dalits, challenging India’s official stance that such discrimination, prohibited by the Constitution and laws, was an internal matter. He also played a leading role in the International Dalit Conference in Kuala Lumpur in 1998, a precursor to the World Conference Against Racism in Durban (South Africa, August 31–September 7, 2001).
Bhagwan Das was closely linked to the beginnings of the German Dalit Solidarity movement. In 1993, under the aegis of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Bonn, a conference was held on the situation of former “Untouchables” in India, attended by Dalit representatives from Christian, Muslim, Sikh, and Buddhist communities. Bhagwan Das represented the Buddhists, and during this event, the Dalit Solidarity People was founded, marking the first Indian coalition with international support. This set the model for subsequent networks, culminating in the establishment of the International Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN) in 2000.
In 2001, three years after the formation of India’s National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), the German Dalit Solidarity Platform was established, initially hosted by the Protestant aid organization Bread for the World, and now a permanent institution. Key figures like Ruth Manorama, S.K. Thorat, and Martin Macwan carried forward Bhagwan Das’s legacy.
His most significant book, Main Bhangi Hoon (I Am a Bhangi), written in Hindi, is a fictional social history of street sweepers. It vividly describes how Bhangis were oppressed, displaced from their land, and rendered homeless through wars and devastation over millennia. Despite being marginalized, Bhagwan Das shows, they retained their pride and ethos. This was undermined by the Arya Samaj’s shuddhi (purification) campaigns, which sought to assimilate them into a conformist Hinduism, renaming them “Valmikis” to tie them to a Brahmanical tradition. Bhagwan Das vehemently opposed this, advocating for an emancipatory Buddhism inspired by Ambedkar.
In 2005, Walter Hahn, the longtime coordinator of the Dalit Solidarity Platform, invited Bhagwan Das to the annual conference in Bonn, followed by a lecture at Bonn’s Indology Department. This was a moving experience for Das, as Babasaheb Dr. Ambedkar had enrolled at the University of Bonn in 1921 to study economics and hoped to learn Sanskrit under the renowned Indologist Hermann Jacobi—a pursuit denied to him in India as a Dalit. Though Ambedkar’s plans were thwarted by lack of time and funds, Bhagwan Das was impressed by documents from Ambedkar’s time in Bonn, including a handwritten letter in German. He marveled at the Sanskrit collection in the university library. A visit to Bonn’s Haus der Geschichte sparked discussions on the culture of remembrance, noting the scarcity of museums or memorials dedicated to Dalit oppression and the Dalit emancipation movement in South Asia.
Even in 2005, it was evident that the strength of this lifelong fighter for Dalit human rights was waning. Yet, he remained lean and active, rising early to work and rejecting retirement. Full of plans for further publications, he regularly attended events at the Panchasheela Institute, which he co-founded in Munirka, and welcomed friends, journalists, and scholars in his modest study. Some projects, including a planned sequel to his fictional history of the Bhangis, remained unfinished. However, he lived to see the publication of his memoirs, In Pursuit of Ambedkar. A few months later, on November 18, 2010, Bhagwan Das—one of the last to have personally known and been directly inspired by Babasaheb Dr. Ambedkar—passed away.
