Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Evolution of Pragmatism (and Buddhism) in India

Scott R. Stroud, University of Texas at Austin

Pragmatism’s international evolution is well known. It reached beyond the American context into Italy, England, Japan, and China. But is there a story of pragmatism in India? The story of pragmatism in China often starts with Hu Shih; a little-known fact to this story is the young man sitting next to Hu in Dewey’s 1915-1916 political philosophy course at Columbia University was the person who would bring pragmatism to India: Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956). As an “untouchable,” Ambedkar felt the weight of centuries of oppression on his shoulders. But he also saw the value in education and eventually, the new philosophy being propounded by Dewey while they shared the campus at Columbia. He was India’s leading civil rights activist, as well as a major figure in the drafting of India’s democratic constitution in the 1940s. As a young man at Columbia, Ambedkar dreamed of combining and reconstructing Buddhism with the pragmatist view of democracy elaborated by Dewey. This talk will chart the engagement of Ambedkar with Dewey’s pragmatism and show how Ambedkar’s new form of—navayana pragmatism—also created a new form of navayana Buddhism. Ambedkar saw this “new vehicle” of Buddhism as a social gospel that could energized societies toward democratic reform, and as one that could counter the Marxist form of communism gripping the world in the 1950s.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Scott R. Stroud is a Professor of Communication Studies and Program Director for Media Ethics at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes on various topics in ethics, rhetoric, and philosophy. He is the author of John Dewey and the Artful Life and Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric. Stroud is the co-founder of the first “Center for John Dewey Studies” in India at Savitribai Phule Pune University. His most recent book is The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction (University of Chicago Press), which was also published as The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: An Intellectual Biography of B.R. Ambedkar by HarperCollins India. He’s currently at work on his next book focusing on Ambedkar as a democratic theorist for our divided times.