Untouchability status followed Ambedkar even to Parsis who rejected him

Evidence

Ambedkar returned to Baroda in 1917. To repay his scholarship, he was expected to serve as military secretary to the Maharaja. He came back to a very different reception from the one Gandhi received. There were no glittering ceremonies, no wealthy sponsors. On the contrary, from spending hours reading in the university library with its endless books, and eating at dining tables with napkins and cutlery, Ambedkar returned to the thorny embrace of the caste system. Afraid of even accidentally touching Ambedkar, clerks and peons in his office would fling files at him. Carpets were rolled up when he walked in and out of office so that they would not be polluted by him. He found no accommodation in the city: his Hindu, Muslim and Christian friends, even those he had known in Columbia, turned him down. Eventually, by masquerading as a Parsi, he got a room at a Parsi inn. When the owners discovered he was an Untouchable, he was thrown onto the street by armed men. “I can even now vividly recall it and never recall it without tears in my eyes,” Ambedkar wrote. “It was then for the first time I learnt that a person who is Untouchable to a Hindu is also Untouchable to a Parsi.” — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 298

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading on Ambedkar’s life generally and to the caste-exclusion logics explored across this book; the fact that even his Columbia-trained Hindu, Muslim and Christian friends refused him housing speaks to how deeply untouchability ran.