It has taken India a long time to make a film on Ambedkar. How did it come about?
More than a decade ago I was shooting a documentary on Ambedkar at Columbia University, where he studied from 1913 to 1916. Columbia is very close to Harlem, and I began wondering what it must have been like for this man, coming from an oppressed class in India and studying so close to the black district in New York, to find that there was not a single black student attending Columbia University. There were other Indians along with Ambedkar, but no black students. I thought then that if I had actors and could recreate the period, it would be very challenging to do a feature film on Ambedkar. When I was in India years later, my proposal to do a feature film on Ambedkar received support from the government. It’s not that nobody had thought of making a film on Ambedkar; he’s just a very complicated subject. His story isn’t just about him coming from an oppressed class; or that he suffered personal humiliation and struggled for social justice. His life’s work ran parallel to the country’s
