Empathy: Bhimrao Ambedkar

 

Empathy is not just a soft stirring of the heart at the sight of another’s suffering. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar showed that it is the courage to feel deeply, understand honestly, and above all, act decisively.

Born in a caste of so-called untouchables, Ambedkar experienced humiliation every moment of his life. He was made to sit apart in classrooms, refused water by those who believed that his touch would defile it, and reminded constantly of his ‘place’ in a rigid social hierarchy.

Ambedkar grew up and transformed personal suffering into a profound sensitivity towards the suffering of others. His life became an answer to a silent question: What does one do with pain? His answer was: Enlarge it into empathy.

His concept of empathy was, however, not a soft feeling, but a radical, political, and reconstructive force. It was a force that led thousands of Dalits, people who were oppressed for centuries by the brutal caste system, in a peaceful procession to the Chavdar Lake in 1927.

In 1923, the Bombay Legislative Council passed a resolution allowing untouchables to take water from any public source. But the upper caste people of Chavdar resisted.

“We are not going to the Chavdar Lake merely to drink its water,” Ambedkar told his followers whom he led to the lake four years after the resolution was passed. “We are going to the Lake to assert that we too are human beings like others.”

We too are human beings like others. The empathy that underlay Ambedkar’s vision was a revolutionary force that challenged an age-old social system. Such empathy is certain to cause social upheavals. The upper caste people of Mahad reacted violently. When the Dalits left the place, the upper castes performed a “purification” ceremony of the lake by pouring 108 pots of a mixture of the urine, dung, and milk of cows into the water. Bizarre are the ways of religion sometimes.

Ambedkar responded to that religious ritual too. On 25 Dec 1927, Ambedkar, along with his followers, burned the Manusmriti, the ancient text that provided the ideological basis for caste discrimination and stipulated the rituals like the one that had been performed at Mahad.

Ambedkar was a fighter. With empathy. His vision was radically different from the philosophy of Krishna’s Gita.

Krishna’s Gita systematically suppresses empathy, according to Ambedkar’s essay, Krishna and His Gita. Krishna’s intent was to serve a specific social and political agenda.

Arjuna’s hesitation on the battlefield is a profound moment of human empathy. Arjuna doesn’t wish to harm others with whom he feels a shared sense of humanity. Krishna’s counsel extinguishes that empathy. Krishna uses philosophy as a “noble lie” employed for the sake of maintaining the status quo of the social order. The Gita’s doctrine of Svadharma – doing your duty as stipulated by your caste – is inherently anti-empathetic, in Ambedkar’s view. True empathy requires the freedom to question and change one’s relationship with others, whereas the Gita fixes those relationships in a divinely ordained hierarchy. 

Ambedkar argues that Krishna’s act of redefining Arjuna’s empathy as weakness and elevating caste dharma as a noble virtue with yogic disregard for emotional involvement are all philosophically troubling. Krishna legitimises harmful actions as long as they are performed in the name of duty. Empathy faced a thousand deaths on Krishna’s Kurukshetra.

A duty that silences compassion, forget empathy, ceases to be moral and becomes blind obedience. After the horrors of the Holocaust came to light, many Nazi officials defended themselves with a chillingly simple line: “I was only following orders.” In other words, they were doing their duty, as Krishna advised.

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026

Previous Posts in this series

Authority	Bigotry
Courage	Dissent

 

Tomorrow: Faith – Swami Vivekananda