Salim Yusufji was a schoolteacher for fifteen years and an editor with Navayana. He is the editor of Ambedkar: The Attendant Details, a selection of reminiscences by people in close proximity to B R Ambedkar. He coedited Battling for India: A Citizen’s Reader and translated Gyan Chaturvedi’s Baramasi as Alipura.
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This book is an attempt at intimacy with B.R. Ambedkar in his hours away from history and headlines. The aim here is to recover the ephemera that attended Ambedkar’s life and died with him—his pleasure in his library and bookcollecting, his vein of gruff humour, the sensation of seeing him in the flesh for the first time, or of stepping out of a summer storm into his house and hearing him at practice on his violin. Here, we have his attendants, admirers and companions speak of Ambedkar’s love of the sherwani, kurta, lungi, dhoti, and even his sudden paean to elasticated underpants. We meet Ambedkar the lover of dogs and outsize fountain pens, proponent of sex education and contraception, antiprohibitionist teetotaler and occasional cook.
