The Surplus Man and Woman ‘Caste and class are next door neighbours’
Ambedkar was born on April 14, 1891 in Mhow in the Central Provinces and died in Delhi on December 6, 1956 soon after converting to Buddhism. This was also the date the Babri Masjid monument was demolished in 1992. Here we republish an early paper by Ambedkar presented at an anthropology seminar at Columbia University in May 1916 and published the following year.
, 1987)
Many of us, I dare say, have witnessed local, national or international expositions of material objects that make up the sum total of human civilization. But few can entertain the idea of there being such a thing as an exposition of human institutions. Exhibition of human institutions is a strange idea; some might call it the wildest of ideas. But as students of Ethnology I hope you will not be hard on this innovation, for it is not so, and to you at least it should not be strange.