Comments by "Rutvik" (@rutvikrs) on "Ambedkar ripped into Savarkar's ideas in letter: Aakash Singh Rathore on ThePrint's SoftCover" video.

  1. Is that why Ambedkar insisted on a complete population transfer?
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  2. ​​ @lohitroy5938  we can all learn from your insistence on providing evidence. It's truly commendable. That being said, it takes less than a minute to find out his paternal surname was Sakpal, Ambadawe is phonetically distinct from Ambed, the surname is distinctly Chitpavan and Wikipedia is subject to the biases of its editors and is not to be conflated with academic or historical research.
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  3.  @lohitroy5938  1. Anglicisation of Indian names is a later phenomenon. This narrative of his father choosing his surname on his ancestral village is recent Ambedkarite bunkum to remove any association or credit to Brahmins. I have asked multiple Ambedkarites to produce evidence for the claim that his father changed his surname when he joined the school. I have not received any historical evidence of the surname "Ambawadekar" while there is a photograph of the name being written as "Bhiva Ramji Ambedkar" (Bhiva was the childhood name of Bhimrao) preserved at his school at Satara. Krishna ji Keshav Ambedkar was the name of the teacher. There is a recent move by some Ambedkarites to rename his surname to "Ambawadekar". 2. Do you find it plausible that a society that values surnamed would hand them out? What kind of conversation do you envision when his father asked the school clerk or teacher to put down "Ambedkar" on the records? 3. I think you are describing the seeking of upward mobility, Sanskritization is the social process of caste groups changing the nature of worship by forming syncretic beliefs. The Mahars were not undergoing any such change in the time period. Mahars are not necessarily Dalits. Much like the Jats or the Yadav's, they carried local caste capital in area between of MH, MP and CH but a vast majority of them were considered untouchables.
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  4.  @lohitroy5938  I think you may not be acquainted with the regional history so let me provide pop sources: 1. Please read what Sanskritisation entails on its Wiki page. 2. Alt News fact check on Ambedkar and Brahmins in the context of tweets by Bharadwajspeaks. I have a grudge against this portal but you may find it reliable. The last section is dedicated to the name "Ambedkar"
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  5.  @lohitroy5938  1. How do you define Sanskritization then? MN Srinivas was pretty clear. 2. I can't escape the feeling that only a British record can settle the debate. Amitire?
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  6.  @lohitroy5938  The issue is representing a part of the process as the whole of it. Tbf, all sides of the aisle engage in it. On why this is insufficient, let me explain with an analogy. the actor picking up the name Dilip Kumar isn't Hindufication(what I write next is about the process not what the individual should have done or made to do), the change needs to meet other criterion like voluntary partaking in Hindu festivities/activities, adoption of Hindu philosophical or theological axioms that may be counterintuitive to Islam or absent from it; adoption of social norms like dietary standards; mutual acceptance of the change by sections of society. Sanskritisation is often used as the imposition, placation or voluntary subjugation to a Sanskritic nomenclature, which isn't the case with the works of MN Srinivas(I happen to be a distant relative and have met him in person) or later academics. 2. Will try and read the paper(?) you mentioned. Please name the authors if possible. 3. I was merely confirming the standard of evidence. I am surprised you counted a contiguous thread as three, as distinct sources, the way I counted the three distinct threads are: one coming from his own family which doesn't have or like association with Brahmins, one by his biographer and another recorded instance of him mentioning it, recorded in early Ambedkarite literature. I think this is as good as it gets when it comes to an evidentiary standard. I am even affording you the rather proposterous idea of disregarding local information. 4. Your methodological critique isn't exactly suited for Indian history because of where we find ourselves. Treat history like a forest of competing plant species. With European history they had hundreds of species of historians who always relied on local information, hearsay and mythology as the initial root. They built their own narratives, won some debates and lost some, developed tools, theories and epistemologies. The forest has grown in height with just a dozen survivors but the outcome of this is a refinement that was never seen in any age. With India, we don't have a forest, we have a singular tree of Nehruvian history and a vine of Ambedkarite history. The Nehruvian tree used state control to kill any competing threads using the imported methodological tools and ruse of evidentiary standards. We need Hindutva history, Jain History, Tamil history, Kannada history, Sanskrit history, trad history, casteist history, racist history and any other forms for us to have a forest. It's shocking to learn that everything we know in the Indian academia and society comes from less than 200-300 translated Indian works when Sanskrit alone has a estimated library of a million distinct works that have gone untranslated.
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