Full Name=Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (born Bhimrao Ramji Sakpal, later known by the honorific Babasaheb Ambedkar, and popularly called the Father of the Indian Constitution) Profession=Indian jurist, economist, social reformer, prolific author, educator, political leader, and statesman who served as the first Law and Justice Minister of independent India and chaired the Constituent Assembly's Drafting Committee that produced the Constitution of India; he was also a professor of political economy at Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai, a trained barrister called to the Bar at Gray's Inn in London, a pioneering champion of Dalit civil rights, founder of the Independent Labour Party and the Scheduled Castes Federation, founder of the Buddhist Society of India (Bharatiya Bauddha Mahasabha), and a deeply influential scholar whose writings on caste, economics, religion, and political philosophy continue to shape intellectual and policy discourse across South Asia and beyond Nationality=Indian Born=14 April 1891 Birthplace=Mhow military cantonment, Central India Agency, British India (now officially renamed Dr. Ambedkar Nagar, in Madhya Pradesh, India), born the 14th and last child of Ramji Maloji Sakpal, a Subedar in the British Indian Army, and his wife Bhimabai Sakpal, with the family tracing its ancestral roots to the village of Ambadawe in the Mandangad taluka of Ratnagiri district in present-day Maharashtra Generation=Lost Generation (those born broadly between 1883 and 1900, a cohort that came of age during a time of profound global upheaval including the First World War, the collapse of colonial empires, and sweeping social transformations worldwide) Chinese Zodiac=Metal Rabbit — born in the Chinese year 1891, which corresponds to the Year of the Rabbit, a sign traditionally associated with elegance, wisdom, caution, keen sensitivity, and a deep sense of justice, qualities strikingly reflected in Ambedkar's meticulous, reasoned, and compassionate approach to law, scholarship, and social reform Zodiac Sign=Aries (born April 14, placing him firmly under the sign of Aries the Ram, the first sign of the zodiac, ruled by Mars, and associated with bold initiative, fierce independence, courage, and a pioneering spirit — characteristics that profoundly mirror Ambedkar's relentless drive to challenge entrenched social hierarchies and forge entirely new legal and moral frameworks for an emerging democracy) Age in 2026=135 years old (as calculated from his birth year of 1891 to the current year 2026, though he passed away in 1956 at the age of 65) Marital Status=Married twice — first to Ramabai Ambedkar (née Ramabai Bhimrao Sakpal), whom he wed in 1906 in a match arranged by both families according to prevailing custom when she was nine years old and he was approximately fifteen, and who remained his devoted partner through decades of poverty, discrimination, and ceaseless struggle until her death from prolonged illness in 1935; and second to Dr. Savita Ambedkar (née Sharada Kabir), a qualified medical doctor holding the MBBS degree whom he met while seeking treatment in Bombay and married on 15 April 1948 at his home in New Delhi on the recommendation of physicians who advised him to have a medically trained companion and caregiver, Savita adopting the name Savita Ambedkar and lovingly caring for him until his death in 1956, after which she continued to honor and propagate his socio-religious legacy until her own death on 29 May 2003 in Mumbai at the age of 93 Children=Ambedkar and his first wife Ramabai had several children together, the vast majority of whom died in infancy or very early childhood due to poverty, illness, and the brutal hardships of life as untouchables in colonial India; only one son, Yashwant Bhimrao Ambedkar (affectionately known as Bhaiyasaheb Ambedkar), survived to adulthood, going on to serve as the 2nd President of the Buddhist Society of India from 1957 to 1977 and as a member of the Maharashtra Legislative Council from 1960 to 1966 before his own death in 1977; Yashwant's son Prakash Yashwant Ambedkar continued the family's public mission by leading the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi political party and serving in both houses of the Indian Parliament, while another grandson, Anandraj Ambedkar, leads the Republican Sena Description=Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar stands as one of the most extraordinary and consequential figures of the twentieth century, a man who rose from the very bottom of one of humanity's most rigid and cruel social hierarchies to become the principal architect of the world's largest democracy's founding legal document, a towering polymath whose intellectual range encompassed economics, law, political science, sociology, philosophy, history, and religious studies, and whose personal story of relentless self-improvement against seemingly insurmountable odds made him a symbol of dignity, resilience, and the transformative power of education for hundreds of millions of people across generations; born the fourteenth and last child of a low-ranking army officer in the Mhow military cantonment in 1891, Ambedkar was immediately consigned from birth to the most stigmatized and legally dispossessed stratum of Indian caste society as a member of the Mahar Dalit community, whose members were classified as "untouchables" and subjected to systematic social, religious, economic, and physical exclusion so absolute that as a schoolboy young Bhimrao was not permitted to sit inside the classroom alongside upper-caste children, was barred from touching the communal water vessel and had to wait for a school peon to pour water from a height so that it would not be "polluted" by his touch — a humiliation he recorded in his autobiography Waiting for a Visa under the poignant phrase "No peon, No Water" — and was required to sit apart on a gunny sack that he had to carry home with him each day; despite these crushing conditions, the young Ambedkar displayed exceptional academic aptitude and, with the crucial early encouragement of his Brahmin teacher Krishnaji Keshav Ambedkar who gifted him his own surname and whose gesture was one of the rare acts of cross-caste solidarity in his youth, he became the only member of his Mahar caste to complete high school at Elphinstone High School in Mumbai; in 1912 he earned a degree in economics and political science from Elphinstone College at the University of Bombay, and in 1913, at just twenty-two years of age, he was awarded a prestigious Baroda State Scholarship worth eleven pounds and ten shillings per month for three years by the progressive maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, enabling him to travel to New York City and enroll at Columbia University — one of only a handful of Indian students to do so in that era; at Columbia he came profoundly under the intellectual influence of the great American philosopher and educationist John Dewey, whose philosophy of pragmatism shaped Ambedkar's lifelong belief in rational inquiry, democratic values, and the capacity of education and institutional reform to reshape human society; he earned his first MA in 1915 with a thesis on Ancient Indian Commerce, presented his landmark paper Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development at a seminar by anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser in 1916, and completed a second MA with a thesis on the National Dividend of India the same year, before enrolling simultaneously at the London School of Economics and at Gray's Inn, London, where he pursued doctoral and legal studies, though a temporary return to India forced by the expiry of his scholarship set him back when his entire book collection — dispatched on a separate ship — was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine during World War I; undeterred, he returned to London at the first opportunity, completed an MSc in 1921 with a thesis on The Problem of the Rupee: Its Origin and Its Solution, and in 1923 was awarded both a D.Sc. in Economics from the University of London and was called to the Bar by Gray's Inn — a remarkable triple accomplishment that made him arguably the most formally educated Indian of his generation and, as economist Narendra Jadhav later described him, "the highest educated Indian economist of all times"; his academic credentials and intellectual depth did not, however, shield him from the pervasive caste prejudice that awaited him upon every return to India: when he took up a teaching post at Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai in 1918, fellow professors objected to sharing even a drinking-water jug with him; undaunted, Ambedkar channeled his outrage into organized action, founding the periodical Mooknayak (Leader of the Silent) in 1920, establishing the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha to promote Dalit education and welfare, and launching a succession of satyagrahas and public movements that directly challenged the structures of untouchability — most memorably the 1927 Mahad Satyagraha in which he led thousands in asserting the right of untouchables to draw water from the Mahad tank, and the ceremonial public burning of the Manusmriti (the ancient Hindu legal text that codified caste hierarchy) on 25 December 1927, an act of radical symbolic defiance that is still observed annually as Manusmriti Dahan Din by Ambedkarites and Dalits; he testified before the Southborough Committee preparing the Government of India Act of 1919, where he argued for separate electorates and reservations for untouchables, and was appointed to the Bombay Presidency Committee to work with the Simon Commission in 1925; in 1932 he was thrust into the most dramatic political confrontation of his career when Mahatma Gandhi, then imprisoned at Yerwada Jail in Poona, began a fast unto death to protest the British government's award of a separate electorate for the Depressed Classes, viewing it as a division of Hindu society, while Ambedkar argued passionately that without independent representation, Dalits would remain forever at the mercy of caste Hindu voters; after tense negotiations, the two leaders signed the historic Poona Pact on 25 September 1932, which replaced the separate electorate with reserved seats within the general Hindu electorate but significantly increased the number of seats guaranteed to Dalits from 71 to 148; in 1935 he was appointed Principal of the Government Law College in Bombay, a position he held for two years, and the same year his beloved first wife Ramabai died after prolonged illness, a loss that deepened his resolve to build the world that Ramabai had been denied; at the Yeola Conversion Conference in Nasik in October 1935, Ambedkar made the electrifying announcement that although he was born a Hindu, he would not die as one — a declaration he would fulfill only weeks before his death two decades later; in 1936 he published Annihilation of Caste, arguably his most celebrated work, a blazing intellectual indictment of the caste system and of those within the nationalist movement who, in his view, perpetuated it under a veneer of progressive politics; the same year he founded the Independent Labour Party which contested and won seats in the 1937 Bombay elections; in 1940 he wrote Thoughts on Pakistan, a landmark 400-page analytical tract on the concept of partition that, according to scholar Venkat Dhulipala, "rocked Indian politics for a decade" and shaped the critical dialogues between the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress; upon India's independence on 15 August 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited Ambedkar to serve as the Dominion of India's first Law Minister, and within weeks he was appointed Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution for the future Republic of India — perhaps the single most consequential institutional appointment in the history of post-colonial South Asia; over the next two years, in conditions of failing health, near-blindness, and chronic neuropathic pain, Ambedkar led the drafting of the Constitution of India with extraordinary rigor, weaving into it guarantees of equality and the abolition of untouchability, protections for freedom of religion, speech and expression, a system of reservations in civil services, schools, and colleges for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes, and extensive economic and social rights for women — a document that scholars Steven Calabresi and Martha C. Nussbaum have called "Ambedkar's Constitution" and that came into effect on 26 January 1950, now celebrated as Republic Day in India; he resigned from Nehru's cabinet in September 1951 after the Hindu Code Bill — his landmark legislative effort to modernize and codify Hindu personal law, extend rights to women, and reform marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws — was defeated in Parliament, a defeat he regarded as a profound personal and political betrayal; in the final years of his life, increasingly debilitated by diabetes and a series of related complications, Ambedkar devoted himself entirely to Buddhism, having studied it intensively since around 1950, traveled to Sri Lanka, Burma, and Nepal for World Fellowship of Buddhists conferences, and founded the Bharatiya Bauddha Mahasabha (Buddhist Society of India) in 1955; on 14 October 1956, in Nagpur, at a vast public ceremony attended by an estimated 500,000 followers, Ambedkar formally converted from Hinduism to Buddhism, accepting the Three Jewels and the Five Precepts, and then administered the conversion along with 22 specially formulated Vows to the assembled multitude in what became the largest mass religious conversion in modern history, simultaneously completing his final and greatest literary work, The Buddha and His Dhamma, which was published posthumously in 1957 and became a foundational text of the Dalit Buddhist movement; in recognition of his incomparable contributions to the nation, the Government of India posthumously awarded him the Bharat Ratna — India's highest civilian honor — in 1990, and a poll organized by History TV18 and CNN IBN in 2012 voted him "the Greatest Indian" since independence, with nearly twenty million votes cast, surpassing Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru; his intellectual legacy extends into economics, where Nobel laureate Amartya Sen called him "father of my economics" and praised his contribution as "marvelous and will be remembered forever," and into constitutional law, where his model of purposive interpretation has guided the Supreme Court of India in expanding the Constitution's reach for justice across the decades; his famous rallying cry to his people — "Educate, Agitate, Organise!" — remains one of the most enduring political slogans in Indian history, and his birthday on April 14, observed as Ambedkar Jayanti, is a public holiday in numerous Indian states on which hundreds of thousands gather at his memorials in Mumbai and New Delhi to honor his memory Cause of Death=Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar died in his sleep at his residence in Delhi on 6 December 1956, just three days after completing the manuscript of The Buddha and His Dhamma, his final and most personal work; the immediate and underlying cause of death was a constellation of severe, long-standing health conditions centered primarily on diabetes mellitus, which he had suffered from since at least 1948, compounded by chronic neuropathic pain in both legs, severe deterioration of his eyesight, and progressive cardiovascular disease including heart failure; he had been bedridden repeatedly throughout 1954 due to medication side-effects and worsening vision, and his health continued to deteriorate markedly through 1955 and into 1956; contemporary medical assessments, official accounts, and subsequent scholarly investigations have consistently concluded that he died of natural causes stemming from complications of diabetes and cardiac failure, likely including elements of coronary thrombosis, after years of heroic struggle to continue his intellectual and political work despite profound physical suffering; his body was cremated with full Buddhist rites on 7 December 1956 at Dadar Chowpatty beach in Mumbai, attended by an estimated half a million grief-stricken followers, and a second conversion ceremony was held on 16 December 1956 at the same location so that those who had attended the cremation could also formally embrace Buddhism in his memory and honor