In those heady Marxist-Maoist days, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar was not known as a thinker even to us. Ambedkar’s life story was never part of any school textbook. Unlike Gandhi and Nehru, Tagore, and so on, Ambedkar’s was a deliberately undermined life before the Mandal movement. Among the communist circles at best, he was known as the writer of the Indian constitution, which we dismissed as ‘bourgeois’ and did not appreciate very much. In the organization structures, the Indian constitution was seen as a bourgeois constitution. Several times this question came up for discussion in Left forums that I was part of. Invariably the Indian Constitution was condemned as bourgeois, which should be replaced with a socialist constitution. He was not even on our reading list and not a single book of his was known to us. We were more familiar with the European Renaissance and Reformation than the lines on our own palms. Though I was reading all about the world, the sense of shame of a worthless name—a very, very local name that constantly gets humiliating reference but not reverence—while living in a university, kept haunting me. As students of Marxism, we knew more about the family and personal lives of Marx and Mao than that of our own. Their names appeared to be more culturally respectable than that of any Indian upper-caste or Hindu name. While we were bitter critics of European imperialism and colonialism, we had more respect for their culture, character and civilization. Their names appeared civilizationally far superior to that of Gautam Buddha, communist leader Puchalapalli Sundaraiyya, leave alone Ambedkar. There was hardly any discussion about the Islamic heritage. In my M.A. course I studied about the Nizam period but the communist organizations never discussed Indian Islamic culture so that they would handle it before and after the revolution. Quite unfortunately the communist leaders and activists do not seriously study the religious cultures of the world even today.