In numerous writings about the life and work of Dr. BR Ambedkar’s scientific and political legacy was discussed. However, most of them never took into account the work of caring that supported his intellectual pursuits. Babasaheb: My Life with Dr Ambedkar (2022) is a deeply personal and intimate memoir written by his second wife Savita Ambedkar, affectionately known as Maisaheb. It documents their relationship as well as the last years in Dr. Ambedkar’s life as his health deteriorated. In doing so, it offers a poignant account of the care, work and companionship she gave Dr. Ambedkar gave him round-the-clock support when she became his wife. Furthermore, while reflecting on her marriage with Dr. Ambedkar openly reveals the lesser-known details of her relationship with Dr. Ambedkar and makes visible the love and care that shaped the last years of his life.
Savita Ambedkar’s memoirs
Savita Ambedkar was born Sharada Krishnarao Kabir in Mumbai in 1909 into a Brahmin family from Saraswat. She was a doctor by profession. Your first meeting with Dr. Ambedkar took place in early 1947 at the residence of SM Rao, another doctor who lived in Bombay. They married shortly afterwards in 1948 and maintained a loving and fulfilling relationship until his untimely death in 1956. The text is a translation of her autobiography Dr. Ambedkaranchya Sahavasat (1990). It was translated from the original Marathi by Nadeem Khan and published by Penguin India in 2022. What is noteworthy is that the book contains several previously unpublished personal letters written between her and Dr. Ambedkar were exchanged and readers were given an insight into Dr. Ambedkar’s late years up to his death.
Savita’s memoir tacitly resists her erasure from history – it is not only a record of care but also an act of remembrance. Since Dr. As Ambedkar’s health deteriorated, Savita took on the role of his carer in a comprehensive sense.
While public memory and popular culture alike have showcased Ambedkar’s impressive political and intellectual contributions, Savita’s memoirs quietly reveal a hidden, gentle dimension. Here we meet not only a man who fought single-handedly, day after day, against unimaginable discrimination and injustice, but also a man who suffered in silence – a man who had never known the love of a mother, a man who was sick, frail, vulnerable and completely alone after the deaths of his wife and four of their five children. Through Savita’s memories, a new side of Ambedkar comes to life; a side that is deeply broken not only by the prejudices and horrors of society, but also by the brutality of life. Savita’s moving narrative doesn’t diminish his stature – it deepens it. Her report is suffused on every page with a sense of respect and trust in Dr. Ambedkar – every word is permeated with love and mutual appreciation. There is a touch of tenderness in the book – the picture of Ambedkar she paints combines the public and the personal – the monumental personality and the deeply broken but loving man.
Care, companionship and the labor of love
From a feminist perspective, the memoir is based on a form of work that is both essential and constantly overlooked: the everyday work of care. Since Dr. As Ambedkar’s health deteriorated, Savita took on the role of his carer in a comprehensive sense. She was instrumental in enabling Ambedkar to complete The Buddha and His Dhamma, as he himself acknowledged in an unpublished preface to the book (1956). However, the memoir captures the gendered nature of Savita’s care work and the ease with which she disappears from public memory and discourse. This work is neither random nor temporary – it is continuous, demanding and almost always invisible, embedded in everyday life in ways that alienate it from its political and economic significance. Even though today we are Dr. Celebrating Ambedkar’s life and work, the care that went into making his work possible is conspicuously missing. By recounting these experiences, the memoir subtly questions the way history is written and told. It questions what is often emphasized and reveals what is often left unsaid. By rightly insisting that care is not peripheral but central, she reclaims a space for care work that history has long made invisible.
Between awe and distrust: The place of Savita Ambedkar
What stands out most strikingly in Savita’s memoir is the quiet, tireless work of caring that Dr. Ambedkar’s last years peaceful and painless. Her care was not in an abstract or sentimental sense—it was ruthlessly strenuous, invisible, and undoubtedly physical. As his health deteriorated day by day, it was Savita who took his medication, monitored his routines and gave him endless emotional and spiritual support. Their work was essential to Ambedkar’s intellectual and political contributions in his later years; But like most care work done by women, it is far too often unrecognized and hidden behind the life and work of her husband. By exposing the ways in which care works in everyday life—in gestures, in sacrifice, and in quiet intimacy—Savita’s memoir forces us to rethink our understanding of care work. In her inimitably gentle way, she asks us to pay attention not only to what we achieve, but also to what makes our successes possible.
Savita Ambedkar and BR Ambedkar. | Wikimedia Commons
Savita’s memoir tacitly resists her erasure from history – it is not only a record of care but also an act of remembrance. In this sense, the book not only recounts events; It gently but succinctly intervenes in the narratives surrounding these events and clarifies their place within them. Always conscious of her perception in public memory, her account covers her accusations of killing her husband because she was a Brahmin and her subsequent expulsion from the Dalit Buddhist movement, through to her re-entry into public life and the restoration of her (rightful) place within it. In this light, the memoir becomes more than a memoir of her life—it is a discreet assertion of reclamation and presence. It insists – as gently as the way she addressed her husband Raja – on her place in a history that has often refused to accommodate her version of her own story. Therefore, Savita does not redefine Ambedkar’s legacy; Rather, it gives it an unprecedented texture and depth.
In the end, Savita’s text consciously encourages us as readers to not only rethink how we approach Dr. Ambedkar, but also how we imagine those who stood at his side – those sadly missing from popular narratives but as important to the man’s emergence as anyone else. The memoir doesn’t try to destroy his legacy; Rather, it gently draws our attention to the forgotten world of life, underscoring the work of a man whose contributions need no discussion. In its pages, the book takes us behind the scenes of the relationship between Savita and Dr. Finally, the book asks us a seemingly simple but deeply political question: whose work do we want to remember, and whose work are the annals of history allowing to vanish into thin air? To this end, we can achieve a comprehensive understanding of care work and better understand its gendered and often caste dimensions by centering the voices of those considered insignificant and marginalized. Only then, I argue, will we be able to recognize its centrality to everyday economic and political life.
References:
Ambedkar, B. R. (1956). “Unpublished foreword”. Accessed March 24, 2026. https://franpritchett.com/00ambedkar/ambedkar_buddha/00_pref_unpub.html
Ambedkar, Savita. (2022). Babasaheb: My Life with Dr. Ambedkar. Penguin books. 2022.