Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956) is well-known as the architect of the Indian constitution, the document that created the world’s largest democracy when it came into effect in 1950. Ambedkar is also famous, or infamous according to some religious partisans, in the Indian political context for his unflagging and often bombastic advocacy on behalf of India’s so-called “untouchables.” Being a Mahar, an untouchable caste in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Ambedkar knew of the struggles and the religiously underwritten violence that was foisted upon these swaths of Indian society. His struggles in and against the caste system, and the Hindu religious-philosophical system that frequently enabled it, are well documented by scholars of South Asian politics and religion. Accounts such as those of Christophe Jaffrelot and Eleanor Zelliot do an admirable job of sorting out Ambedkar’s political development from a committed reformer within the Hindu system, allied with Gandhi’s methods and aims in the 1920s, to a renunciant of Hinduism and vocal opponent of Gandhi’s intra-Hindu reform efforts starting in the 1930s. 1 As they aptly note, Ambedkar pulls away from Hinduism in 1935, largely spurred on by Gandhi’s coercive fast-until-death against the concessions awarded to Ambedkar and the untouchables after the Round Table Conferences in London. Other accounts analyze what occurs at the end of Ambedkar’s life, namely his exploration of religious options for conversion and his ultimate selection of Buddhism as an emancipatory path for untouchables. Scholars such as Christopher Queen, Adele Fiske, and Christoph Emmrich have undertaken admirable work on the parameters of the sort of Buddhism Ambedkar reconstructs as an answer to caste oppression in India. 2 Others, such as Valerian Rodrigues, analyze Ambedkar’s posthumous “Buddhist Bible” that he wrote to power his movement with a socially responsive Buddhist faith. 3 Others place Ambedkar the political leader in the context of a larger move-