B.R. Ambedkar studied under John Dewey at Columbia (1913-1916) and built his definition of democracy on Dewey's 1888 'personality' language

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B.R. Ambedkar — later the chief architect of India's constitution and the leading 20th-century voice of the anti-caste Dalit movement — studied under John Dewey at Columbia University from 1913 to 1916, decades before Dewey's separate mentorship of Hu Shih took him to China (see claim-dewey-lived-in-china-1919-1921-invited-by-hu-shih). Ambedkar called Dewey "wonderful," writing later: "I am so sorry. I owe all my intellectual life to him" (Stroud 2023, Tier 2).

Ambedkar's own definition of democracy — "not merely a form of Government... primarily a mode of associated living" — retasks Dewey's teaching as an argument against caste: government form is secondary, Ambedkar argues, to whether a society's members actually live and associate as equals. Stroud traces the "personality" language in Ambedkar's writing to a specific Dewey text, and a direct read of that 1888 essay confirms the root phrase: "democracy means that personality is the first and final reality" (Dewey, The Ethics of Democracy, Tier 1) — Dewey's own words, not a secondary paraphrase, thirty years before Ambedkar arrived at Columbia.