Balu Sreedhar retweetledi
“Buy, Borrow, or Steal" — this was Ambedkar's motto in the war against gatekeeping of knowledge.
For centuries, gatekeeping education was one of the ultimate tools of caste subjugation. As a child, Ambedkar was forbidden from studying Sanskrit — the "language of the Gods" — for being an 'untouchable'. He squatted on a gunny sack in the corner of his classroom, his notebooks untouched by teachers who openly questioned why a lowly Mahar boy needed to learn English.
His response: a radical, insatiable hunger for learning. Books became his weapon against Brahmanical monopoly. At Columbia on Sayajirao Gaekwad's scholarship, he took 29 economics courses, 11 in history, 6 in sociology, 5 in philosophy, stretching his days to 18 hours, surviving on $1.10 daily — coffee, 2 muffins, 1 meat or fish dish —spending every penny on books, scouring Manhattan's secondhand bookshops, amassing 2,000 volumes in 3 years. In London, he survived on fish, tea, and bread, substituting lunch with just a piece of bread while devouring volumes in the British Museum from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Between 1923 and 1929, he proudly recalled stuffing books into his coat pockets and walking out of libraries — justifying the "theft" as no sin, since the hoarded knowledge would be used to liberate oppressed people. Between 1930 and 1946, he borrowed countless books from the Bombay Government and University libraries and simply never returned them. The bibliophilia became an absolute obsession that drove him into severe debt; he was eventually forced to sell one of his properties, "Char Minar," just to pay off his book-related debts.
But Ambedkar never hoarded knowledge for himself. He founded the Bahishkrut Hitkarini Sabha with the motto "Educate, Agitate, Organize," established the People's Education Society, and started Siddharth College. Drawing on his own struggles, he scheduled classes from 7:30 to 10:30 a.m. so that students from impoverished backgrounds could work in mills or offices during the day and pursue their degrees in the morning.
For Ambedkar, education and reading were the ultimate tools for anti-caste rebellion — a reclamation of the intellectual capital violently denied to his ancestors.
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