It is in the courage to break the rule and not in the complicity of obedience that democracy lives.

“I am not a part of the whole,” Ambedkar, soon to become a hopeful and fragile republic’s most audacious constitutional theorist, declared in the Bombay Legislative Assembly in 1939. “I am a part apart.” Three years earlier, in his critique of Ambedkar’s revolutionary manifesto Annihilation of Caste (1936), Mohandas Gandhi had sighed in nearly audible relief at the sort of political freedom that often produced Ambedkar’s exemplary declarations of independence. “Thank God,” Gandhi wrote in his newspaper Harijan, “[Ambedkar] is singularly alone.”