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Gail Omvedt is a scholar-activist ards with new social

movements, especially women’s groups and farmers’
organizations. A Ph.D from the University of California, she has
been a citizen of India since 1982. She has been actively involved
in anti-caste campaigns since the 1970s. Her academic writings
include several books and articles on class, caste and gender
issues, most recently Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements
in India (1993) and Dalits and the Democratic Revolution (1994). She is
a consulting sociologist on gender, environment and rural
development and lives in Kasegaon in southern Maharashtra.
TRACTS FOR THE TIMES

EDITORIAL BOARD
Romila Thapar
EDITOR
Neeladri Bhattacharya

INE SERIES
Crisis as Conquest: Learning from East Asia
Jayati Ghosh and C.P. Chandrasekhar

Hindi Nationalism
Alok Rai

People, Parks and Wildlife: Towards Coexistence

Vasant Saberwal, Mahesh Rangarajan, Ashish Kothari

Who Wants Democracy?

Javeed Alam

Cover Design: Bindia Thapar

Cover Photograph: Dilip Banerjee
TRACTS FOR THE TIMES / 8

Dalit Visions
The anti-caste movement and the
construction of an Indian identity

(Revised edition)

GAIL OMVEDT

B®
Orient Longman
DALIT VISIONS

ORIENT LONGMAN PRIVATE LIMITED

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© Orient Longman Private Limited 1995, 2006

First published 1995
Reprinted 1996
This revisied edition 2006

ISBN 81 250 2895 1 See rem seen ee

1:ypeset by |{| 4 67| d g

| tn Set
Scribe Consultants ERS i
New Delhi UNIVE
SUSS sEX ghey R
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“eran
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Published by
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Contents

Preface vii
Editorial Preface ix
Introduction
The Construction of Hinduism
Hinduism as Brahman Exploitation:
Jotiba Phule 17
Hinduism as Patriarchy:
Ramabai, Tarabai and Others ao
Hinduism as Aryan Conquest:
The Dalit Radicals of the 1920s 34
Hinduism as Counter-Revolution:
B.R. Ambedkar 43
Hinduism as Delhi Rule:
Periyar and the National Question 53
Brahman Socialism and the Hindu Rate of Growth 63
Hinduism as Feudal Backwardness:
The Dalit Panthers tZ
10. The Logic of Dalit Politics 81
is Conclusion: Sita’s Curse, Shambuk’s Silence OZ
Notes 102
Preface

This tract deals with the way in which the Dalit movement
and other social forces have confronted and contested
brahmanic Hinduism not only its most virulent form of Hin-
dutva, but equally the more liberal forms that have provided
the dominant interpretation of Indian society and history. It
does not deal, except in passing, with the economic and ma-
terial base of the “Hindu” construction and the challenges to
it. What are the economic foundations of caste and religion?
What were the material forces that allowed brahmanic Hin-
duism to gain hegemony in the Indian subcontinent, that
allowed “Hinduism” to be constructed as it was during the
colonial period, that allowed Congress rule to be consol-
idated? What are the material and economic forces today
that make Hindutva so virulent and powerful? And on what
material basis and with what political forces can it be fought?
While these are all important questions that will have to
be answered, they do not come within the purview of this
particular tract. The symbolic and cultural sphere, whether
we consider it to be “secondary” to the material base or of
equal weight, has a logic of its own. This is true even if it is
seen as interwoven and interacting with economic and
political forces. Indian leftists have not paid adequate atten-
tion to cultural and symbolic issues. They have thus not

vii
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

confronted the meaning and forms of the brahmanic

hegemonizing of Indian culture. This has been done by the
dalit/anti-caste movement and to some extent the other so-
cial movements of the recent decades. The time has now
come to learn from this history of contesting Hinduism.
In destroying the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, the
forces of Hindutva issued a declaration of caste war, not sim-
ply an assault against the Muslim community. The act and
the statements surrounding it made it clear that the VHP,
Shiv Sena and sections of the BJP were not prepared to re-
spect the decisions of the courts or the laws of the land re-
garding the “birthplace of Lord Ram” and that the “Dharma
Sansad” was being posed as higher than the people’s parlia-
ment. This was a declaration of war against dalits, adivasis,
women, the bahujan samaj, the toiling and productive castes
and classes who have always been held as inferior by var-
nashrama dharma. That war has to be fought, at the level of
culture and symbolism and not simply that of politics and
economics; and not simply with the weapons of “secularism”
but over every inch of the terrain of Indian history and iden-
tity that the Hindu-nationalists have staked a claim to.
The imposition of brahmanic dominance on Indian cul-
ture has produced “Hinduism”; the fight against this has
been as long and old as the story of that imposition. This
tract represents a survey of some of the important moments
of that fight.

viii
Editorial Preface

TRACTS FOR THE TIMES will attempt to provide meaningful

information, critical perspectives, and theoretical reflections
on various themes of contemporary concern. The tracts will
seek to deepen our knowledge of crucial issues, query our
commonsense, re-think old concepts, and analyse the social
and economic problems we confront.
This tract explores and critiques the sensibility which
equates Indian tradition with Hinduism, and Hinduism with
Brahmanism; which considers the Vedas as the foundational
texts of Indian culture, and discovers within the Aryan herit-
age the essence of Indian civilization. It shows that even
secular minds remain imprisoned within this Brahmanical
vision, and the language of secular discourse is often steeped
in a Hindu ethos. The tract sets out to look at alternative
traditions nurtured within dalit movements, which have
questioned this way of looking at Indian society and its his-
tory. It seeks to understand the varied dalit visions which
have sought to alter the terms of the dominant order.
Omvedt shows how different phases of the dalit move-
ment opened up new ways of looking at the structures of
their oppression and the premises of their emancipation.
Jotiba Phule saw the caste system as the essence of Hinduism
and sought to unmask the culture of oppression that it

1X
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

sustained, the brutal slavery that it sanctified. In his reinter-

pretation of the Aryan theory, the Aryans emerge as cruel
and violent invaders who subjugated an egalitarian society
and imposed a hierarchical and exploitative system with
Hinduism as its legitimating ideology. Tarabai Shinde and
Pandita Ramabai unravelled another layer of cultural sub-
jugation. Characterizing Hinduism as patriarchal ideology,
they questioned the traditional morals embodied in
Brahmanical texts, seeing them as the basis of women’s op-
pression and patriarchal domination. By the 1920s anti caste
and anti Brahman movements acquired a more popular ba-
sis. Some of them asserted a dalit identity within terms set
by Brahmanical Hinduism: fighting for Kshatriya status and
the right to enter temples. Others — like the Ad Dharm in
Punjab, Adi Hindu movement in Hyderabad, Adi Dravida
in Andhra and Adi Karnataka in South India — traced the
history of their oppression to Aryan conquest and claimed
that the non-Brahmans were the original inhabitants of these
different regions. Influenced by Marxism, Ambedkar sought
to build a unity of dalits and non-Brahman middle castes
which would be both a class and caste unity against the
brahman-bourgeois Congress. When Hindu communalists
emphasized the link between blood, territory and language
and projected Hindi and Sanskrit as the quintessential Indian
languages, other linguistic groups reacted in the same
mould, and identified themselves as separate nations. The
centralizing tendencies within Hinduism and nationalism
produced a reaction: movements against caste and Brahman-
ism became revolts of the regions against north Indian dom-
ination. The 1970s saw a new turmoil, the emergence of a
new radicalism. The Dalit Panthers attempted to project the
proletarian essence of dalit experience, and explore the inner
connection between cultural and economic struggles.
Omvedt’s argument moves at two levels. At one, she dis-
cusses the different phases of the dalit movement, their

x
 DALIT VISONS

visions and ideals, their understanding of the link between

religion, culture and power, between caste, gender, and class
oppression, between language and identity. At another level,
Omvedt develops her own perspective on dalit emancipa-
tion. In the dialogues with different dalit visions, one can
hear the authorial voice. Omvedt appreciates efforts to forge
a unity between sudras (backward-castes) and ati-sudras
(untouchables): separate and independent movements of
these groups are seen as self-debilitating — the basis of their
weakness and failure. She criticizes those who divide the
issues of economic exploitation and cultural oppression, and
the issues of class and caste; and she endorses the attempts
to transcend these separations.
Omvedt’s conception of Dalit as a category may appear
problematic to many. It emphasizes the congruence of inter-
ests between the backward castes and untouchables where
others may prefer to see conflict and opposition; it focuses
on the affinity in the experiences of these groups where
others may underscore the fact of difference. But this tract
will force us to reconsider our ideas, to question assumptions
and categories which we take for granted, and to re-examine
our conception of history. It will persuade us to listen to
those voices which we often refuse to hear, and understand
those visions which have sought to change the world in
which dalits live.

NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA

xi
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ms See, a aa gene ve 3 Roepe
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Tao “eos ‘ > MS inaih : eee eee we ei . : De

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1
Introduction

For most people, even scholars, “Hinduism” has been a

taken-for-granted concept. Hindus are the people of India.
Hinduism is their religion. Beginning with the Rg Veda to
the philosophers and even contemporary political leaders, it
has been seen as a unique phenomenon of spirituality linked
to a practical life; and with a solid geographical base in a
diversified subcontinent. Although its stability has been
broken from time to time by invasions, conquests and dis-
turbances, it has nevertheless maintained a fair continuity. It
has given birth to rampant and unjustifiable social inequal-
ities but has also spawned the protests against these. Its
greatest virtue has been its elasticity, its pluralism, its lack
of dogma. Hinduism, it is said, has no ‘orthodoxy’ (though
it may have an ‘orthopraxy’). With a core in the religious
tradition going back to the Vedas and Upanishads, it has
brought forth other sister/child religions—Jainism, Bud- -
dhism, Sikhism—all born out of the same fertile continuate
of tradition, all part of India and Hinduism’s contributions
to the world.
This image, encompassing the cultural diversities of the
subcontinent and subordinating them to a Vedantic core, has
pervaded both popular and scholarly writings on India. To
take but one example, two scholars of “religion in

1
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES / 8

Maharashtra” draw together dalit, Marxist and bhakti tradi-

tions in a book entitled The Experience of Hinduism, only to
give Vedantam the last word:
Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Christians, nay even the
Marxists, of today’s India cannot help partaking of
it—they are all Hindu-Bharatiya at heart.... What is it
to be a Hindu-Bharatiya? What does it involve?
Chiefly, the accepting of the other world as well as
this world, the attempt to reconcile the two. But be-
tween the two the other world comes first. Brahman
and maya are both real, but brahman is the ultimate
reality.... This ultimate/provisional duality has been
resolved into a unity in the Vedanta of nonduality.'
There are many, as this tract will demonstrate who
would contest this violently. What is more striking, though,
is that behind the image of flexibility and diversity is a hard
core of an assertion of dominance. “Between the two the
other world comes first’. This assertion leads to the political
line of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad that there may be various
versions of what is defined as the “Hindu tradition” (Sikh-
ism, Buddhism, Jainism, Arya Samaj and Sanatan dharma
are the ones usually mentioned), but there is no question that
the core is “traditional” Hinduism—sanatan dharma.
Out of the pleasantries of the official ideology of Hindu
pluralism and tolerance and under the pressures of contem-
porary material deprivation and economic turbulence, has
grown the modern politics of Hindutva—militant Hinduism,
Hinduism as nationalism. It makes a simple addition to the
claim that Hinduism is the main religion of the people of
India: Hinduism is the national religion, the people’s tradi-
tion in the subcontinent, but it has been attacked, smothered,
insulted, dishonoured, first by Muslim aggressors, then by
British colonialism, and now by the contemporary State
which in its self-definition as “secular” is dishonouring it in

2
 DALIT VISIONS

its own land and pampering Muslim and Christian minor-

ities. Hinduism’s great virtue was its generous tolerance of
other faiths, but its enemies have taken advantage of this;
Hindus must now be strong, fierce and proud, and not hesit-
ate to assert themselves.
Today, large sections of left and democratic forces and all
new social movements are trying to argue and organize
against the growing influence of Hindutva or Hindu-nation-
alism. The majority of these have taken a position against
“communalism” but not against “Hinduism” as such. The
“secular” version of this opposition argues that Indians must
come together beyond their religious identities, as citizens of
a nation and as human beings. It is exemplified in the pop-
ular anti-communal song Mandir-Masjid:
In temples, mosques, gurudwaras
God is divided.
Divide the earth, divide the sea,
But don’t divide humanity.
The Hindu says, “The temple is mine,
The temple is my home.’
The Muslim says, “Mecca is mine,
Mecca is my loyalty.’
The two fight, fight and die,
Get finished off in fighting...
The song goes on to describe the machinations of political
leaders and the perpetuation of exploitation through com-
munalism, but interestingly enough, even its appeal to a
common identity draws on (and reproduces?) the notion that
India is the home of the Hindus while the Muslims find their
loyalties elsewhere.
Another mode of opposing communalism is to re-appeal
to Hindu traditions themselves, a position that has been de-
veloping among several anti-communal Delhi intellectuals
over the last few years. This has been eloquently voiced by

3
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

Madhu Kishwar in a number of Manushi articles which argue

“in defence of our dharma”. Agreeing with the condemna-
tion that Nehruvian and modern left secularism are insuffi-
cient to deal with the need for identity, she appeals to bhakti
traditions as the “true Hinduism”, and argues that the milit-
aristic image of Rama is a distortion, and that much of
casteism is in fact a colonial heritage. This position has ant-
agonized many secular feminists, but there is no denying
that it is persuasive to many, particularly to middle class,
upper-caste Indians. Even the upper-caste left is being in-
creasingly drawn to it. This is illustrated by the poster of the
Sampradayikta Virodhi Abhyan: the mask of Rama, the form
of Ravana. The SVM thus appeals to the “gentle” image of
Rama and takes for granted the demonical quality of Ravana.
These two forms of opposition to Hindutva, the “secular”
and “Hindu reformist” versions, draw respectively upon
Nehruvian and Gandhian traditions. While there is no
reason to doubt the genuineness of their attempts to oppose
the aggressive politics of the Hindutva forces, one can ques-
tion the validity of their picture of Hinduism: the validity of
the general identification of “Hindu” with “Bharatiya”, of
Hinduism with the tradition of India.
Beyond this debate between the secularists and the
Hindu reformists there are many voices in India today which
not only query the BJP/VHP interpretation of Hinduism, but
also contest the very existence of Hinduism as a primordial
force in India. A Tamil dalit scholar-activist, Guna, writes:

The very concept of Hinduism, which took shape in

the north only when the Muslim rule was being con-
solidated ... was never known to the Tamils until the
period of British colonization.... The Brahmans, who
had English education and had the opportunity of
studying abroad, took some threads from the Euro-
peans who conceived of a political entity called

4
 DALIT VISIONS

‘Hindustan’. With the borrowed idea, they could

clumsily merge the divergent cults and Brahmanic
caste apartheid to term it as Hinduism. This concept
... resulted in formulating a pseudo-religious-political
concept called ‘Hinduism’, based on which they
sought to define their myth of a ‘Hindu’ nation-
hood.... The ‘Hindu’ was thus born just two centuries
back; and he is still a colourless, odourless and form-
less illusory artificial construction?
Guna is part of a broader tradition or set of traditions
which have put forth alternative interpretations of Indian
identity(or identities). These have been socially based among
the lower castes, dalits and non-Brahmans, drawing on peas-
ant (and women’s) traditions, mainly in the southern, west-
ern and outlying regions of the subcontinent. In
contemporary times they draw on such leaders as Phule,
Ambedkar, Periyar; they appeal to heroes of revolt such as
Birsa Munda and Veer Narayan Singh; they claim the tradi-
tions of Buddha and Carvak, Mahavir, Kabir and Guru
Nanak and Basavappa; they claim heroes like Shivaji but
contest the Hinduist interpretation of him; they claim the
glories of Mohenjo-daro and the heritage of the pre-state
tribals as opposed to that of plundering Aryan tribes. In con-
trast to the secularist opposition to Hindutva they proclaim
_ a politics of identity, and in contrast to reformist Hindu iden-
tities they define ‘Hinduism’ itself as an oppressive class/caste/pat-
riarchal force.
The dalit movement, based on ex-untouchables and
widening to include non-brahman castes of many southern
and peripheral areas, has in recerit times brought forward
most strongly this ideological challenge, this contesting of
Hinduism. Indeed the impetus to challenge the hegemony
and validity of Hinduism is part of the very logic of dalit
politics.
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

It is insufficient to see dalit politics as simply the chal-

lenge posed by militant organizations such as the Dalit Pan-
thers, the factionalized Republican Party, the rallies of the
Bahujan Samaj Party, or even the insurgenciés carried out by
low-caste based Naxalite organizations. Dalit politics as the
challenge to brahman hegemony took on wider forms
throughout the 1970s and 1980s, its themes sweeping into
movements of “backward castes” (the former shudras of the
traditional varna system), peasants, women, and tribals.
Dalit politics in the sense of a challenge to brahmanic tradi-
tion has been an aspect of “several new social movements.”
Strikingly, if we take 1972, the year of the founding of the
Dalit Panthers, as a beginning year for the new phase of the
dalit movement, it was also a crucial year for many other
new social movements—from the founding of SEWA in
Ahmedabad to the upsurge of a new environmental move-
ment in the Tehri-Garhwal Himalayan foothills, from the
agitations and organizations of farmers in Punjab and Tamil
Nadu to the rise of tribal-based movements for autonomy in
the central Indian region of Jharkhand. These movements
though not as directly as the dalit movement, came to con-
test the way in which the Hindu-nationalist forces sought to
depict and hegemonize Indian culture. They often linked a
cultural critique to a broader critique of socio-economic de-
velopment and an opposition to the over-centralized polit-
ical system. By the late 1980s, an intermixing and dialogue
of all these themes could be seen. The events of 1989-1991
ended with a setback resulting in the renewed aggressive-
ness of the forces of Hindu nationalism, but we continue to
hope that the setback has been temporary.
z
The Construction of Hinduism

Is “Hinduism” only a construction, and a recent one at that?

In a sense all nationalisms and identities are constructions.
It also seems accurate to say that the identification of the
Indian subcontinent with a single people whose religion is
Hinduism was only made in recent history, and only in re-
cent decades has it been projected as a national religion
centring on Rama.
The term Hindu is ancient, deriving from Sindhu, the
river Indus. The Hindu religion as it is described today is
said to have its roots in the Vedas, the poems of the Indo-
Europeans whose incursions into the subcontinent took
place many centuries after the earliest urban civilization in
India. Most archaeologists today doubt that the “Aryans”
were the main force responsible for the destruction of this
civilization, but it seems fairly clear that many of their early
poems celebrated its downfall, with the rain god Indra claim-
ing to be the “destroyer of cities” and the “releaser of wa-
ters.” In any case, whatever we call the religion of these
nomadic clans, it was not the religion that is today known
as Hinduism. This began to be formulated only in the period
of the founding of the Magadha-Mauryan state, in the period
ranging from the Upanishads and the formation of Vedantic
thought to the consolidation of the social order represented

7
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

by the Manusmriti. Buddhism and Jainism (as well as the

materialist Carvak tradition) were equally old, and Jainism’s
claim tracing its heritage back to Mohenjo-daro has some
validity. Hinduism, as we know it, was in other words, only
one of many consolidations within a diverse subcontinental
cultural tradition, and attained social and political hegemony
only during the sixth to tenth century A.D., often after violent
confrontations with Buddhism and Jainism.
It was in this period that the subcontinent as a territory
came to be known throughout the world as Hindustan. But
this did not refer to religion and the Muslim rulers of the
land were also known as Hindustanis. The major strands
within what was later to be called Hinduism were known
separately in the south as Shaivism and Vaishnavism, and
their influence spread throughout southeast Asia as separate
traditions.
The main themes of brahmanic Hinduism, the identifica-
tion of orthodoxy with acceptance of the authority of the
Vedas and the brahmans, along with a tremendous absorpt-
ive and cooptive power as long as dissident elements ac-
cepted their place within a caste hierarchy, can be seen from
this period. The material base of this social order lay in the
village productive system of caste, jajmani and untouchabil-
ity. Nevertheless it is doubtful whether the masses of the
people at this time identified themselves as Hindus. There
were numerous local gods and goddesses who remain the
centre of popular religious life even today; and the period
gave birth to bhakti or devotional cults (sometimes centred on
non-Vedic gods such as Vithoba in Maharashtra) which re-
belled against caste heirarchy and brahman domination. Many
of these in turn developed into religious traditions that consider
themselves explicitly non-Hindu (Sikhism, Veerasaivism).
It was, in fact, only the colonial period which saw a con-
solidation of the identification of India or Hindustan (the
land) and the people who inhabited it, with a particular

8
 DALIT VISIONS

religion known as Hinduism, interpreted as being the primal

and ancient religion of the subcontinent. This was the con-
struction of Hinduism. The Europeans, with their racism, ro-
manticism, fascination with the Vedas and Orientalism,
played an important role in this. But the major work of con-
structing Hinduism was done by Indian elites. In the nine-
teenth century, people like Lokmanya Tilak adopted the
“Aryan theory of race”, claimed a white racial stock for
upper-caste Indians and accepted the Vedas as their core lit-
erature. Tilak was also the first to try and unite a large sec-
tion of the masses around brahmanical leadership, with the
public celebration of the Ganesh festival. Anti-Muslim
themes underlay the construction of Shivaji as the founder
of a “Hindu raj,” a process, incidentally which was
ideologically contested even in the nineteenth century.' By
the end of the century, Hindu conservatives were mounting |
a full-scale attack on their upper caste reformist rivals with
charges that the latter were “anti-national,” and succeeded
in excluding the Social Reform Conference from any coord-
inated meetings with the National Congress.
Significant developments took place in the 1920s with the
founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) by
Hegdewar and the Hindu Mahasabha by Savarkar. Savarkar
was the first to proclaim a full-scale Hindu nationalism or
Hindutva, linking race, blood and territory. He proclaimed
himself an atheist and his theory laid less emphasis on reli-
gion as such; yet his Sanskritic, Aryan interpretation was
clear: he disliked any idea of mixing Hindi and Urdu, re-
fused to admit the linguistic/cultural diversity of India, and
was consistently anti-Muslim in his politics.
Tilak and Savarkar were Maharashtrian Chitpavan brah-
mans, the caste which comprised rulers displaced from
power in western India by the British. The Chitpavans were
already under pressure from a strong non-brahman and dalit
movement by the 1920s. Significantly, the claim to an Aryan

‘)
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES / 8

racial heritage was given a major reinterpretation in the

1930s, clearly under pressure from the non-brahman move-
ment’s reversal of it: Aryanism and the notion of a Vedic,
Sanskritic core to Hinduism was not given up, but it began to
be argued by ideologues like Golwalkar that the Aryans them-
selves had had their original home in the Indian subcontinent?
Nevertheless, Hindu nationalism found its strongest base
in north India, the only place where the emotive slogan
“Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan” made sense. Here, the previous
empire had been controlled by Muslims and there were still
large numbers of Muslims of all social sections. Thus, be-
neath the ideological formulation of ‘Hinduism as national-
ism’ was a growing identification with religious community.
Peasants, artisans and others identified themselves in reli-
gious terms, with “Hindu” and “Muslim” communities
emerging as independent entities out of what had beena
fairly deep linguistic-cultural synthesis, in a process which
Gyan Pandey has described as “the construction of commun-
alism in north India.” Both groups not only formulated their
identities in religious terms but called for political power to
protect them. As Pandey describes the process, “the idea of
a Hindu raj which would reflect the glories of the ancient
Hindu civilization and keep Muslims in their place” was
“matched in due course by the notion of a Muslim Raj which
would protect the place of the Muslims.”? These tensions
gradually led to efforts at organizing an identity at the na-
tional level.
Once it was accepted that two separate communities,
lindus and Muslims, existed at an all-India level, there were
only two possible courses for creating an overriding national
identity. One was taken by Gandhi, the other by Nehru and
the leftists. The Gandhian solution involved taking India as
a coalition of communities, each maintaining its identity but
uniting by unfolding the wealth of tolerance and love which
lay in each religious tradition; the Nehruvian solution

10
 DALIT VISIONS

consisted of forging a secular identity on the basis of mod-

ernity and socialism that transcended, and in the process
rejected, separate religious communal identities.
Gandhi's solution rested on a deep recognition of the im-
portance of popular traditions; indeed throughout most of
his political life his ability to draw upon such traditions
helped make him the most important mass leader of his time
and in formulating an ideal of development that was differ-
ent from the centralized industrial path later followed.
Gandhi identified himself as a Hindu, but gave his own,
sometimes breathtaking, interpretations of what it meant to
be a Hindu. “The Vedas, Upanishads, Smritis and Puranas in-
cluding the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are Hindu
scriptures,” he notes, but then insists on his right to interpret.
He rejects anything that does not fit his idea of spirituality:
“Nothing can be accepted as the word of God which cannot
be tested by reason or be capable of being spontaneously
experiencéd.”* But inevitably this very acceptance of the
Hindu identity meant an absorbing of the caste element of
this identity:
Caste has nothing to do with religion ... it is harmful
to both spiritual and natural growth. Varna and
Ashrama are institutions which have nothing to do
with castes. The law of Varna teaches us that we have
each one of us to earn our bread by following the
ancestral calling... The calling of a Brahman—a spir-
itual teacher—and of a scavenger are equal and their
due performance carries equal merit before God and
at one time seems to have carried identical reward
before man.°
This was a formulation that accepted a hereditary place or
calling for a human being and would obviously be rejected
by militant low castes.
Gandhi's social reformism as well as his proposed

di
 TRACTS
FOR THE TIMES /8

developmental path, a kind of ‘green’ projection of a sustain-

able, decentralized society that grew out of a powerful cri-
tique of industrial society, were in the end tied to a
Hinduism that accepted a brahmanic core: the limitations of
needs in which both technology and sexuality were seen as
tying humans down to desire (maya), and in which the guid-
ing role of intellectuals was accepted. ‘Ram raj’ made Gandhi
ultimately not simply a Hindu but also an indirect spokes-
man for upper-caste interests.
Not surprisingly, Gandhi had his biggest aspirations,
confrontations, and failures on the issue of caste. Gandhi's
clash with Ambedkar at the time of the second Round Table
Conference showed that he put his identity as a Hindu be-
fore that as a national leader.® Many of the lower castes were
in the end alienated from Gandhi's version of anti-com-
munal Hinduism, notwithstanding his courage, or his mur-
der at the hands of militant Hinduism itself. Ambedkar’s
judgement—“this Gandhi age is the dark age of Indian polit-
ics. It is an age in which people instead of looking for their
ideals in the future are returning to antiquity””7—was harsh,
but expressed the dalit choice of modernity over the Hindu
version of tradition.
But the other alternative, Nehruvian secularism, had its
own problems. Like Gandhi, Nehru took the existence of a
Hindu identity for granted. In contrast to Gandhi, his idea
of building a modern India was to ignore religious identity,
seeing it as ultimately irrelevant or of secondary importance
in the modern world. Leftists and Nehruvian socialists alike
tock class as the ultimate reality at the social level, and
sought to transcend this with an abstract nationalism, seeing
all communal/religious identities as feudal. They believed
that economic and technological development would make
such identities redundant. Nehru’s (and the left’s) secularism
thus seems indissoluble from a naive faith in industrial /sci-
entific progress:

12
 DALIT VISIONS

{n my opinion, a real solution will only come when

economic issues, affecting all religious groups and
cutting across communal boundaries, arise.... I am
afraid I cannot get excited over this communal issue,
important as it is temporarily. It is after all a side
issue, and it can have no real importance in the larger
scheme of things.®
Nehru’s secularism, as much as Gandhi's self-professed
Hinduism, was underpinned by Hinduist assumptions about
Indian society and history although he expressed, through-
out his writings, a full appreciation of plurality and divers-
ity. He says again and again that India is not to be identified
with Hinduism, that Buddhism is a separate religion, that
caste is to be condemned. And yet the broad framework of
his thinking saw brahmanic Hinduism as the “national” re-
ligion, setting the framework within which other traditions
could be absorbed:
Previously, in the ages since the Aryans had come
down to what they called Aryavarta or Bharatvarsha,
the problem that faced India was to produce a syn-
thesis between this new race and culture and the old
race and civilization of the land. To that the mind of
India devoted itself and it produced an enduring so-
lution built on the strong foundations of a joint Indo-
Aryan culture. Other foreign elements came and were
absorbed... That mixture of religion and philosophy,
history and tradition, custom and social structure,
which in its wide fold included almost every aspect
of India and which might be called Brahmanism or (to
use a later word) Hinduism, became the symbol of
nationalism. It was indeed a national religion, with its
appeal to all those deep instincts, racial and cultural,
which form the basis everywhere of nationalism
today.’
sis
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES / 8

This had disturbing elements in common with the Hin-

dutva discourse. Along with this, while Nehru condemned
caste wholeheartedly, he disliked to see any intrusion of it
into politics; he thought that demands (such as reservations)
raised by non-brahman and dalit groups were divisive, and
tried to ignore them. His historical discussion of caste sees it
as essentially functionalist and integrative; it is clear that
whatever the superficial influence of Marxism, his view of
Indian society did not genuinely encompass a sense of
exploitation and contradiction:
Thus caste was a group system based on services and
functions. It was meant to be an all-inclusive order
without any common dogma and allowing the fullest
latitude to each group.... The organization of society
being, generally speaking, competitive and nonac-
quisitive, these divisions into castes did not make as
much difference as they might otherwise have done.
The Brahmin at the top, proud of his intellect and
learning and respected by others, seldom had much
in the way of worldly possessions...
Merchants, he argues, had no high standing, the vast major-
ity of the population were agriculturalists with rights to the
land who gave only a sixth share to the king or state: “Thus
in a sense, every group from the state to the scavenger was
a shareholder in the produce.”!?
Nehru’s secularism then, shows the degree to which the
“construction of Hinduism” in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century had succeeded in making a brahmanical
interpretation of Indian social history hegemonic, not only
for those who militantly identified as Hindus but for those
who prided themselves on avoiding such an identification.
In refusing to give legitimacy to the challenge of the anti-
caste radicals, in ignoring the actual meaning of such con-
structions as “Hindu culture”, the Indian left and

14
 DALIT VISIONS

progressive elites allowed the maintenance of brahmanic as-

sumptions of superiority and authority, the right of the elites
to rule, and to assume the role of guardians. Nehruvian as-
sumptions which saw communal harmony or “secularism”
as achieved from above by a powerful state fit in easily with
the statism that was to mark India’s version of industrial
development. As Pandey puts it,
By the 1930s and 1940s, the importance of an ‘en-
lightened’ leadership was thus being stressed on all
sides as the critical ingredient that was required in the
bid to advance the ‘backward’ peoples... It had taken
great leaders, a Chandragupta Maurya, an Ashoka, an
Akbar, to actualize the dreams of Indian unity in the
past and they had done so in the great states and
empires that they had established. It would take
great leaders like Nehru and Patel to realize the
newly created unity of India, and the state would
again be their major instrument. The twentieth cen-
tury liberal ... could do no better than to turn to
statism.!?
_ What the “construction of Hinduism” successfully ac-
complished was to establish Hinduism as a _ taken-for-
granted religion of the “majority” linked to the backward
peasant core of a pre-industrial society. In this context
Gandhi identified with it, and with the peasantry as he un-
derstood it; Nehru saw both as backward and inferior. Both
accepted the brahmanic core of Hinduism and the need for
a paternalistic enlightened leadership. Both responses ulti-
mately failed; failed in overcoming a “Hindu” identity, in
reforming it sufficiently to allow a full participation in its
religious centre by the low castes, in preventing the growth
of a virulent and aggressive form of the religion, interpreting
it as the national identity of India. By the 1990s both Gand-
hism and Nehruism were reeling under the blows of popular

15
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

disillusionment and the rise of the most virulent forms of

“Hindu nationalism”.
Right from the outset, though, a more fundamental chal-
lenge to Hinduism was taking shape. Its earliest major prot-
agonist was a shudra (peasant) caste social radical from
western India, Jotiba Phule.

16
.
Hinduism as Brahman Exploitation:
Jotiba Phule

The extreme fertility of the soil of India, its rich pro-

ductions, the proverbial wealth of the people, and the
other innumerable gifts which this favourable land
enjoys, and which have more recently tempted the
cupidity of the Western Nations, attracted the
Aryans... . The original inhabitants with whom these
earth-born gods, the Brahmans, fought, were not in-
appropriately termed Rakshasas, that is the protectors
of the land. The incredible and foolish legends regard-
ing their form and shape are no doubt mere chimeras,
the fact being that these people were of superior stat-
ure and hardy make.... The cruelties which the Euro-
pean settlers practised on the American Indians on
their first settlement in the new world had certainly
their parallel in India in the advent of the Aryans and
their subjugation of the aborigines.... This, in short, is
the history of Brahman domination in India. They
originally settled on the banks of the Ganges whence
they spread gradually over the whole of India. In or-
der, however, to keep a better hold on the people they:
devised that weird system of mythology, the

bid
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

ordination of caste, and the code of crude and inhu-

man laws to which we can find no parallel among the
other nations. !

Phule’s Gulamgiri, written in Marathi but with an English

introduction, was published in 1885, the year of the founding
of the Indian National Congress, but before the full-scale up-
surge of Hindu nationalism, also before that principal pro-
ponent of radical nationalism, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, had
become identified with social orthodoxy. The Brahmans
whom Phule attacked so strongly were very often ‘moder-
ates,’ liberals and reformers, grouped in organizations such
as the Prarthana Samaj, Brahma Samaj, Sarvajanik Sabha and
Congress. All of these were seen by him as elite efforts, de-
signed to deceive the masses and establish upper-caste hege-
mony. Caste was to him slavery, as vicious and brutal as the
enslavement of the Africans in the United States, but based
in India not only on open conquest and subordination but
also on deception and religious illusion. This deception was
the essence of what the high castes called “Hinduism”.
Jotiba Phule (1826-1890) was himself not a dalit, but a
man of what would today be described as an “affluent OBC”
caste, the Malis, gardeners by traditional occupation and
classed with the Maratha-Kunbis as people of middle status.
While he developed a strong dalit following, his main organ-
izational work was in fact among the middle-to-low non-
brahman castes of Maharashtra, traditionally classed as
shudras and known till today as the bahujan samaj. He began
as a social reformer establishing schools for both girls and
untouchable boys, and founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in
1875, which organized the non-Brahmans to propound ra-
tionality, the giving up of brahman priests for rituals and the
education of children (both boys and girls). His major writ-
ings include plays, poems and polemical works—poems at-
tacking brahmanism, a ballad on Shivaji, and three books:

18
 DALIT VISIONS

Gulamgiri which mainly focuses on caste; Shetkaryaca Asud,

describing the oppression of the peasants; and Sarvajanik
Satya Dharm, an effort to outline anew, theistic and egalitar-
ian religion.
At the theoretical level too, Phule sought to unite the
shudras (non-brahmans) and atishudras (dalits). He argued
that the latter were not only more oppressed but had been
downgraded because of their earlier heroism in fighting
brahman domination. More importantly, he argued that
shudras and atishudras together represented an oppressed
and exploited mass, and compared their subordination with
that of the native Indians in the Americas and the Blacks.
Phule’s broadsides are, in fact, an expression of a theory not
simply of religious domination and conquest, but of ex-
ploitation.
The Aryan race theory, the dominant explanation of caste
and Indian society in his time, provided the framework for
his theory. This had been made the centre of discourse by
the European “Orientalists’ who saw the Vedas as an an-
cient spiritual link between Europeans and Indians, by the
British administrators and census takers who classified the
society they ruled, and by the Indian elite, people like Tilak
who used it to justify brahman superiority. Phule turned it
on its head, in a way somewhat akin to Marx standing
Hegelian dialectics on its head, to formulate a theory of con-
tradiction and exploitation: brahmans were indeed descend-
ed from conquering Indo-Europeans, but far from being
superior, they were cruel and violent invaders who had
overturned an originally prosperous and egalitarian society,
using every kind of deceit and violence to do so, forging a
mythology which was worse than all others since it was in
principle based on inequality and forbade the conquered
masses from even studying its texts.
By inverting the traditional Aryan theory, Phule took his
critique of brahmanism and caste to a mass level. He used it

19
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

to radically reinterpret puranic mythology, seeing the vari-

ous avatars of Vishnu as stages in the conquest of India,
while taking the rakshasas as heroes of the people. Central to
this interpretation was the figure of Bali Raja. In Phule’s re-
figuration of the myth, Bali Raja was the original king of
Maharashtra, reigning over an ideal state of beneficence,
castelessness and prosperity, with the popular gods of the
regions (Khandoba, Jotiba, Naikba, etc.) depicted as his offi-
cials. The puranic myth in which the brahman boy Waman
asks three boons of Bali and then steps on his chest to send
him down to hell is taken by Phule as a story of deceptior
and conquest by the invading Aryans. This reinterpretation
had a strong resonance with popular culture, for in Ma-
harashtra (as in other parts of south India, particularly Ker-
ala) Bali is indeed seen as a popular and “peasant” king, and
is remembered with the Marathi saying, ida pida javo, Balica
rajya yevo (“let troubles and sorrows go and the kingdom of
Bali come”). Similarly, the popular religious festivals of the
rural areas are fairs centring around non-Vedic gods, all of
whom (except the most widely known, Vithoba) continue to
have non-brahman priests. Phule’s alternative mythology
woven around Bali Raja, could evoke an image of a peasant
community, and his anti-Vedic, anti-Aryan and anti-caste
equalitarian message with its use of poetry, dialogue, and
drama, could reach beyond the literate elite to a wider audi-
ence of non-brahmans.
Phule’s was not simply a focus on ideology and culture;
he stressed equally the factors of violence and conquest in
history (those which Marx had relegated to the realm of
“primitive accumulation of capital”) and took the peasant
community as his centre. Violence and force were overriding
realities in all historical processes; the “Aryan conquest” was
simply the first of a series of invasions and conquests of the
subcontinent, the Muslim and the British being the other ma-
jor ones. It was, if anything, worse than the others not for

20
 DALIT VISIONS

racial reasons but for the fact that the “Irani Arya-bhats”
solidified their power using a hierarchical and inequalitarian
religious ideology. Brahman rule, or bhatshahi, was a regime
that used state power and religious hegemony to maintain
exploitation. The key exploited class/group was the peas-
antry, the key exploiters the bureaucracy which the brah-
mans dominated even under colonial rule. Taxes, cesses and
state takeover of peasant lands were the crucial mechanisms
of extracting surplus, supplemented by moneylending and
extortion for religious programmes. Phule’s graphic descrip-
tions of peasant poverty, his sensitivity to issues of drought
and land use and to what would today be called watershed
development, and his condemnation of the forest bureau-
cracy make him strikingly modern in many ways.
Phule’s theory can be looked at as a kind of incipient
historical materialism in which economic exploitation and
cultural dominance are interwoven. In contrast to a class the-
ory, communities become the basis for contradiction (the
shudra-atishudra peasantry versus the brahman bureaucracy
and religious order); in contrast to changing property rela-
tions, conquest, force, state power and ideology are seen as
driving factors.
Phule is today taken as a founding figure in Maharashtra
not simply by the anti-caste but also by the farmers’,
women’s and rural-based environmental movements. Apro-
pos women, his personal life stands in contrast to the com-
promises made by almost every other social reformer and
radical: he not only educated his wife, Savitribai and encour-
aged her to become a teacher in a school for girls, but also
resolutely withstood all community pressures to take a se-
cond wife in spite of their childlessness. His writings as-
similiated women into his general theories of conquest and
violence (seeing them as the primary victims of force and
violence, emphasizing the miserable life of peasant women).
However, in his later years and under the influence of the

21
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES / 8

great feminist radicals of his day such as Pandita Ramabai

and Tarabai Shinde, he took a stronger position describing
male patriarchal power as a specific form of exploitation. The
“double standard” which oppressed women was prevalent,
he argued, not only as seen.in the pitiable conditions of Brah-
man widows, but also in the patriarchy of shudra house-
holds in which the woman was expected to remain a loyal
pativrata while the man was free to have as many women as
he wanted.
Like all major dalits and spokesmen for the low-castes,
Phule felt the need to establish a religious alternative, and
his last major book, Sarvajanik Satya Dharma, details a noble-
minded equalitarian theism, which also projects a strong
male-female equality. In contrast to a secularism which as-
sumes a Hindu majority and ignores all the problems asso-
ciated with it, Phule attacked Hinduism at every point,
challenging its legitimacy and questioning its existence.
What is striking in his works is his refusal to even recognize
“Hinduism” as such: to him it is not a legitimate religion but
superstition, a bag of tricks, a weapon of domination. Thus
he can refer in Sarvajanik Satya Dharma to the ideal family in
which the father becomes a Buddhist, the mother a Christian,
the daughter a Muslim, and the son a Satyadharmist—no
scope for a “Hindu”.* He never treats brahmans as simply a
racial category, a group which is unalterably evil; but to be
accepted they would have to give up their claim to a religion
which makes them “earth-gods”:
When all the Arya-bhat Brahmans throw away their
bogus scriptures and begin to behave towards all hu-
man beings in the way of Truth, then there is no
doubt that all women and men will bow down rever-
ently before the Creator of all and pray for the welfare
of the Aryas.°
Analyses of Phule’s thought are only beginning. He

22
 DALIT VISIONS

wrote almost entirely in Marathi and in his time was little

known outside Maharashtra. For a long time the lack of a
_ communication network among low castes and the revulsion
for his writings felt by most of the brahman elite made his
work inaccessible. Even dalits often ignored him (“the prob-
lem with Phule is that he has no caste behind him,” as one
non-brahman radical activist commented) and although
Ambedkar acknowledged him as one of his “gurus”, very
little of Phules’s influence is actually seen in Ambedkar’s
writings. The Phule-Ambedkar centenary year (November
1990 marked Phule’s death centenary and April 1991
Ambedkar’s birth centenary), however, saw an upsurge of
interest throughout India. Recently, the feminist scholar
Uma Chakravarti has described Phule as a forerunner elab-
orating the theory of “brahmanical patriarchy”,* while in a
centenary year seminar organized by the Centre for Social
Studies at Surat, G.P. Deshpande argued “that Phule was the
first Indian system builder” providing a “logic of history,”
as Hegel did in Europe:
Phule’s thought proved that socio-political struggles
of the Indian people could generate universal cri-
terion. Phule also talked about knowledge and power
much before Foucault did. In fact, Foucault’s post-
modernist analysis comes at a time when Europe has
literally seen the ‘end of history’ whereas Phule’s ef-
forts were to change. the world/ society with the
weapon of knowledge.°
Phule’s argument that knowledge, education and seience
were weapons of advance for the exploited masses, was in
contrast to all elitist theories that sought to link western sci-
ence and eastern morals and argue that Indians could main-
tain their (brahmanical) traditions while adopting science
and technology from the west for material development. For
Phule, rather, vidya or knowledge was in direct contrast with

23
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

the brahmanic, ritualistic shastra and was a weapon for

equality and human freedom as well as economic advance.
He constantly stressed the need for shudras and ati-shudras
to stand forth and think on their own, and his response to
the ideological confusions of his day sounds strikingly “post-
modern”:
All ideologies have decayed,
no one views comprehensively.
What is trivial, what is great
cannot be understood.
Philosophies fill the market,
gods have become a cacophony;
to the enticements of desire
people fall prey.
All, everywhere it has decayed;
truth and untruth cannot be assayed;
this is how, people have become one
everywhere.
There is a cacophony of opinions,
no one heeds another;
each one thinks the opinion
he has found 1s great.
Pride in untruth
dooms them to destruction —
so the wise people say,
seek truth.°

24
+
Hinduism as Patriarchy:
Ramabai, Tarabai and Others

Due to the efforts of Pandita Ramabai there was a

beginning of education for girls and many great
learned Arya Brahmans began to educate their help-
less ignorant women to redress the errors of their rishi
ancestors, but there may be many negative results of
our critical writing about the tyrannical statements of
the merciless Aryan bookwriters on women. Mainly
this: fearing that when the cruel wickedness of the
Aryan books come to the attention of the daughters
and bhat-brahmans they will make mincemeat of all
the legends of the temples and gods and mockingly
reject them, and that besides, in most Brahman famil-
ies a continual quarrel between mothers-in-law and
daughters-in-law will arise and cause numerous ten-
sions, many bhat-bhikshuks will stop sending their
daughters and daughters-in-law to school and natur-
ally will not give them even so much a glimpse of our
Satsar book.’
Phule wrote this in a pamphlet in 1885 in response to
attacks on two women, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita
Ramabai. In 1882 Ramabai had come to Pune, founded the

25
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

Arya Mahila Samaj and then, shortly after, departed for Eng-
land where she converted to Christianity. For this, she was
condemned by even the moderate brahmans who had ori-
ginally sponsored her efforts. Tarabai, a daughter of one of
Phule’s Maratha colleagues in the Satyashodhak Samaj, had
written a bitter and hard-hitting attack on Hindu patriarchy,
Stri-Purush Tulna (“Comparison of Women and Men”) in
1882. Both women evoked waves of reaction, Ramabai in the
wider world of the English-educated brahman intellectuals,
Tarabai in Phule’s own Satyashodhak circles; and Phule
defended both.*
Pandita Ramabai was by far the better known of the two
women and, in spite of her conversion to Christianity, ac-
cepted much of the framework of the brahman intellectuals
of the time. She called her organization (undoubtedly the
first autonomous women’s organization in India) the Arya
Mahila Samaj and focused her main English book on “the*
high-caste Hindu woman”. She also continued to retain
many brahmanic habits, in particular vegetarianism, as a
symbol of her Indian identity—perhaps a necessary symbol
' for her in the face of often racist church pressure—and ac-
cepted the identification of “India” with “Hindu” and the
Aryan model justification for caste hierarchy, arguing that
the complete dependence and ignorance of women had been
the cause of “the present degradation of the Hindu nation.”?
Without doubt, ‘caste’ originated in the economic di-
vision of labour. The talented and most intelligent
portion of the Aryan Hindus became, as was natural,
the governing body of the entire race.
In spite of this and for all the frequent mildness of her
language, it was Pandita Ramabai who was the first to pro-
claim, with great clarity, backed by her personal refusal to
remain a Hindu, that the Sanskritic core of Hinduism was
irrevocably and essentially anti-woman:
26
 DALIT VISIONS

Those who diligently and impartially read Sanskrit

literature in the original, cannot fail to recognize the
law-giver Manu as one of those hundreds who have
done their best to make women hateful beings in the
world’s eye... I can say honestly and truthfully, that
I have never read any sacred book in Sanskrit liter-
ature without meeting this kind of hateful sentiment
about women.°
Thus her conversion testimony stressed that there were
. only two things on which all those books, the
Dharma Shastras, the sacred epics, the Puranas and
the modern poets, the popular preachers of the pres-
ent day and orthodox high-caste men, were agreed:
that women of high and low caste as a class, were
bad, very bad, worse than demons, as unholy as un-
truth, and that they could not get Moksha as men
[could].®
In other words, in spite of her initial acceptance of most
of the assumptions of Hindu nationalism, when it came to
her own experience, this daughter of a wandering and re-
formist brahman, the only woman of her time to have been
educated in the sacred language, who had fought her way
forward to be recognized by the intellectuals of her time, had
come to condemn the core of Hinduism as fundamentally
patriarchal.
Harsher than Ramabai’s writings were those of Tarabai
Shinde. We know little of her life and virtually nothing of
what happened to her after she wrote her book. It is clear
that she did not go on to achieve the autonomy she so clearly
strove for, and whether she ever managed to carve out even
a small space for herself in the confined world of the nine-
teenth century Maratha landholding elite is something we
shall perhaps never know. (Such spaces did exist, but were

ae
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

available to very few.) Stri-Purush Tulna is her sole known

testament, and the sound of a voice not-so-far-heard is its
beginning:
Since this is my first effort at writing, being helpless,
bound and without a voice in the prisonhouse of the
endless Maratha customs, this essay has extremely
harsh language. But seeing that the new terrible ex-
amples of men’s arrogance and one-sided morality
that appear every day are ignored and all blame is put
on women, my mind has been filled with the pride of
women’s position and gone into utmost turmoil.”
Tarabai was referring to the debate on widows who were
blamed for trying to dispose their babies, the implications of
sexual assaults on them being ignored. She was concerned
about more than just atrocities; she attacked the whole pat-
tern of life laid out for women.
What is stri dharma? Endless devotion to a single hus-
band, behaving according to his whims. Even if he
beats her, curses her, keeps a prostitute, drinks, robs
the treasury, takes bribes, when he returns home she
should worship him as a god, as if Krishna Maharaj
himself had come from stealing the milk of the
Gavalis... There are a million reasons for breaking
pativrata.
And she went on from this to a scornful, satirical attack on
the gods and rishis of the puranas themselves:
Now, even with five husbands didn’t Draupadi have
to worry about Karna Maharaj’s intentions?... [What
about Satyavati and Kunti?] One agreed to the whims
of a rishi in order to remove the bad odour from her
body, the other obeyed a mantra! What wonderful
gods! What wonderful rishis!®

28
 DALIT VISIONS

Stri Purush Tulna takes the form of a diffuse and bitter

polemic. It is not a reasoned, direct critique of the Hindu
scriptures based on conceptual analysis, but a satirical attack
on them in a language of familiarity. This was in fact the way
in which many working class and peasant women talked
about the stories they were so familiar with. The Ramayana
and the Mahabharata were a part of the lives of the majority
but this did not necessarily make them part of a religion, as
was made out by religious spokesmen. When Hindu theor-
ists began to turn such texts into “scriptures”, women like
Tarabai and Ramabai had to attack and reject them. Ramabai
tried to create a different institutional framework with dif-
ferent human relations, and spent a lifetime in the service of
high (and low) caste widows, whose position represented
the most dire fate of women at the time. Tarabai, who was
not in a position to do as much, expressed her rebellion in a
bitter rhetorical attack on the structures of patriarchy:
It was a woman, Savitri, who went to the court of
Yama in order to save the life of her husband. But
leave aside Yama’s court, have you heard of any men
who have gone even a step on the path towards it?
Just as a woman loses her auspiciousness and so has
to bury her face like a convict and live all her life in
darkness, do you have to shave your beard and live
like a hermit the rest of your life if your wife dies? If
any smart alec god gave you a certificate to take an-
other woman on the tenth day after your wife has
died, then show it to me!?
In their different ways, women like Tarabai and Ramabai
were already, in the nineteenth century, raising their voices
against what Partha Chatterjee has described as the “nation-
alist resolution of the women’s question.” This rested on
separating the material and cultural spheres and making
women the guardians of the home, its moral and spiritual

2g
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES / 8

essence: “What was necessary was to cultivate the material

techniques of modern western civilization while retaining
and strengthening the distinctive spiritual essence of the na-
tional culture.”!° In looking to this solution of “eastern
morals and western science”, there seems to have been no
qualitative distinction between reformist Hindus and Hindu
nationalists. This was insufficient for women who wanted to
be considered complete human beings, since it was the “east-
ern morals” which oppressed them. (Whether “western
morals” also did so is another issue; in fact Ramabai, to take
the most obvious example, found herself in many conflicts
with her Christian guides regarding attitudes towards
women after her conversion.)
Unlike the Arya Samajists, for instance, Ramabai could
not see the present state of women simply as “degeneration”.
Unlike the Brahmo Samajists and men like Gandhi, she could
not turn to idealized versions of the Vedas and Upanishads
to convince herself that the “essence” of Hindu spiritualism
could be saved from its casteist and patriarchal excrescences.
Ramabai, like Phule and the later militant dalits, had to reject
Hinduism. Similarly, Tarabai could not see rishis and gods
as symbols of divinity without accepting her own position
as an inferior. Yet how is it that so many of the later and
more highly placed women activists came to compromise on
these issues? The answer is partly, of course, that they were
forced to: compromise was a way to make some small gains.
After the upsurge of Hindu nationalism in the late nine-
teenth century had forced even the moderate social reform-
ism of the upper castes to retreat, the women’s movement
slowly took on an organized form. It emerged with some
autonomy in the 1920s with the founding of the All-India
Women’s Congress and similar organizations. These upper
caste and elite women’s organizations worked within the
Hindu framework and spoke of Sita and Savitri as ideals for
women, not as symbols of male oppression. They praised the

30
 DALIT VISIONS

freedom of the Vedic period, and depicted purdah and other

evils as resulting from the social conditions of the Muslim
invasion, if not from the Muslims themselves. They fought
for (and eventually got implemented in some form) a new
Hindu code giving substantial, though hardly equal, rights
to women in such sensitive areas as property and divorce.
But they were embarassed by the fact that a dalit, Ambedkar,
was the chairman of its drafting committee; and they had no
organization to combat the street demonstrations organized
by the fundamentalists. Further, by leaving Muslim women
out of the bill, they left a dangerous legacy for the fomenta-
tion of communal feelings in later years.!! .
Peasant women seem to have had their own forms of
action that reinterpreted tradition more actively but very
often also remained within the framework of the Hindu dis-
course while building an organizational space for women.
Kapil Kumar describes the role of women led by Jaggi (a
Kurmi) in the Oudh Kisan Sabha, supported by Baba
Ramchandra (a Maharashtrian brahman). This led to the
founding of a women’s front, the Kishanin Sabha, which fo-
cused both on giving women land rights, and attacking male
polygamy and reforming family relations. Like Phule, the
Kisanin Sabha argued for monogomy. Its rules stated that all
relationships should be treated as legitimate and that women
should be respected even if they did not produce children.”
In addition, while using local religious traditions (like celeb-
rating a success with a yagya to a village goddess), there was
also a reinterpretation of tradition. Thus Kaikeyi was praised
for sending Rama to the jungle, and Sita was viewed as a
woman who acted on her own: “Did not Rama tell Sita not
to accompany him to the forest but Sita on her own decided
to go?”!8
There is very little historical evidence, and even less
effort to uncover what may exist, of the actual discourse and
actions of working class and peasant women throughout this
31
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

period while their elite sisters were yielding to the male for-
mulations of Hindu nationalist themes, whether those of
Hindu raj or Ram raj. Sumanta Banerjee offers a clue to what
could be done in his depiction of lower class women’s cul-
ture in nineteenth-century Calcutta, while talking of the
kheur, a popular form of songs on the Radha-Krishna theme,
which evolved into a kind of drama of repartee. He cites one
example in which Ambalika protests when her mother
Satyavati urges her to have union with Vyasa to beget a
child:
People say
as a girl you used to row a boat in the river.
Seeing your beauty, tempted by your lotus-bud,
the great Parashar stung you, and
there was a hue and cry:
You've done it once,
You don’t have anything to fear.
Now you can do as much as you want to,
no one will say anything.
If it has to be done,
Why don’t you do it, mother?'4
Such forms of expression were used by many lower class
women. Similar biting dialogues were apparently also used
in the Satyashodhak tamashas of the 1920s in Maharashtra
and seem to have been common to tamasha culture in most
parts of India. The logical style of the Ambalika song (if you
think it’s so great, do it yourself) provoked an uproar a cen-
tury later in the intellectual circles of Bombay (at the time of
the founding of the Dalit Panthers in 1972) when a promi-
nent Marathi writer said that “prostitutes do work necessary
to society and so should be given respect”, and Raja Dhale
won himself temporary fame, saying, “If Durgabai thinks the
work deserves so much respect, why doesn’t she do it her-
self?”

Oz
 DALIT VISIONS

The powerful critiques of the early feminists, women like

Ramabai and Tarabai and their male supporters, focused on
crucial issues of patriarchy and sexuality, attacking the
double standard of pativrata. Many women upheld the value
of monogamy and others used legends and mythology to
mock all impositions of sexual standards, though no explicit
claims to sexual freedom were raised among reformers and
radicals. Later leaders of the women’s movement during the
colonial period, identified with the dominant Hindu reform-
ist cultural trend underlying the Congress organizations and
in so doing, accepted the basic framework of brahmanical
patriarchy. But it was early feminists like Ramabai and
Tarabai who were closer to the general attitude of lower
class and peasant women in taking the puranas as stories and
not scriptures, and seeing them as representing the many
facets of male oppression rather than as divinely-ordained
ideals of human relationships.

33
o)
Hinduism as Aryan Conquest:
The Dalit Radicals of the 1920s

The mobilization of the oppressed and exploited sections of

society—the peasants, dalits, women and low castes that
Phule had spoken of as shudras and ati-shudras—occurred on
a large scale in the 1920s and 1930s, under varying leader-
ships and with varying ideologies. They took part in nation-
alist campaigns, some of them hailing Gandhi as a kind of
messianic figure; they organized unions and kisan sabhas;
they staged strikes, anti-rent campaigns and revenue/tax
boycotts; they fought for forest and village commons. It was an
era, following the first World War and the Russian Revolution,
when the masses were coming on to the stage of history.
Inevitably, the specificities of caste exploitation could not
be ignored in India. Many low-caste activists of the 1920s,
organizing as non-brahmans and dalits, were drawn to an
anti-caste, anti-brahman, even anti-Hindu ideology of the
kind that Phule had formulated. Since few outside Ma-
harashtra had heard of Phule, most likely it was the Tamil
non-brahman movement which had the most influence as
the strongest initiator of “non-Aryan” themes. Yet so pervas-
ive were these that it is clear the themes struck a deep mass
resonance everywhere. The very use of “Aryan” discourse

34
 DALIT VISIONS

by the elite was evoking a common response which, in its

turn, was to force the elite to revise this discourse signifi-
cantly. The non-brahman movements in Maharashtra and
Tamil Nadu, as well as the dalit movements arising in places
as distant as the Punjab and Karnataka, all began to argue
in terms of the Aryan conquest and brahman exploitation
through religion.
Even the names of most dalit movements—Ad-Dharm in
Punjab, Adi-Hindu in U.P and Hyderabad, Adi-Dravida,
Adi-Andhra and Adi-Karnataka in south India—indicated a
common claim to being original inhabitants. This was exem-
plified early in Maharashtra, where a pre-Ambedkar dalit
leader, Kisan Faguji Bansode (1870-1946), warned his caste
Hindu friends in 1909 that:
The Aryans—your ancestors—conquered us and gave
us unbearable harassment. At that time we were your
conquest, you treated us even worse than slaves and
subjected us to any torture you wanted. But now we
are no longer your subjects, we have no service rela-
tionship with you, we are not your slaves or serfs...
We have had enough of the harassment and torture
of the Hindus.!
Bansode, an educator and journalist, represented a gen-
eration of educated Mahar leaders that arose in Nagpur,
where Mahars often had some land and formed forty per
cent of the workers in an emerging textile industry. He, like
many other of the regional Mahar leadership, later turned
away from such themes, identifying with Hinduism through
devotion to the Mahar saint Chokamela, and Ambedkar in
fact had to fight this group to establish his own leadership
in Vidarbha.? However, by the 1920s, the new dalit or “adi”
movements, with an ideological claim to being heirs of a
“non-Aryan” or “original Indian” equalitarian tradition,
began to take off in many regions of India.
35
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

In Andhra, where the process was affected by the milit-

ant Dravidianism of the Madras presidency, the commercial-
ized coastal areas produced both a mobile dalit agricultural
labourer class and a small educated section. A proposed con-
ference of dalits in Vijayawada in 1917, sponsored by reform-
ist Hindus, was to be called the First Provincial Panchama
Mahajana Sabha but changed its name, in a mood of revolt,
to the Adi-Andhra Mahajana Sabha on the grounds that “the
so-called Panchamas were the original sons of the soil and
they were the rulers of the country.”° The dalits were in a
militant mood; the major temple in the city closed down for
the three days of their conference. For over a decade and a
half after that, until they became absorbed as “harijans” into
the Congress and Communist movements, coastal Andhra
dalits held conferences as Adi- Andhras. By the 1931 census,
nearly a third of the Malas and Madigas of the Madras pres-
idency had given their identity as Adi-Andhra.
The Vijayawada conference was presided over by
Bhagyareddy Varma (1888-1939), a Hyderabad dalit origin-
ally named Madari Bhagaiah, who had been organizing Adi-
Hindu conferences since 1912. Hyderabad had a vigorous,
though factionalized, petty bourgeois dalit group, which be-
gan to pick up the Adi-Hindu identity in the 1920s. By 1930
the state census indicated a rather vigorous cultural debate:
The Adi-Dravida Educational League argued that,
judged by the history, philosophy and civilization of
the Adi-Dravidas, the real aborigines of the Deccan,
the depressed classes are, as a community, entirely
separate and distinct from the followers of Vedic re-
ligion, called Hindus. The League’s contention was
that Hinduism is not the ancestral religion of the ab-
origines of Hindustan; that the non-Vedic communit-
ies of India object to being called Hindu because of
their inherited abhorance of the doctrines of the

36
 DALIT VISIONS

Manusmruti and like scriptures, who have distin-

guished themselves from caste Hindus for centuries
past, that the Vedic religion which the Aryans
brought in the wake of their invasion was actively
practiced upon the non-Vedic aborigines, and that the
aborigines, coming under the influence of the Hindus,
gradually and half-consciously adopted Hindu ideas
and prejudices.*
In Hyderabad, thus, Tamil dalits identified themselves as
Adi-Dravidas. Telugu-speaking dalits called themselves Adi-
Hindus but a large section of them gave this a militant, anti-
brahman interpretation. Bhagyareddy Varma was a major
figure in this group, later identifying with Buddhism and
giving tacit support to a younger generation of radicals who
became followers of Ambedkar. In faraway U.P. too; where
Varma travelled for conferences, a new radical identity
arose. Its leading ideologue was an untouchable ascetic from
Mainpuri district who had briefly been a member of the
Arya Samaj. He left it out of disgust and began to organize
the dalits on the basis of an Adi-Hindu identity. Calling him-
self, rather defiantly, Acchutananda, he argued:
The untouchables, the so-called harijans, are in fact
adi-Hindu, i.e. the original or autochthonous Nagas or
Dasas of the north and the Dravidas of the south of
the subcontinent, and they are the undisputed, heav-
enly owners of Bharat. All others are immigrants to
the land, including the Aryans, who conquered the
original populations not by valour but by deceit and
manipulation ... by usurping others’ rights, subjugat-
ing the peace-loving and rendering the self-sufficient
people indigents and slaves. Those who ardently be-
lieved in equality were ranked, and ranked lowest.
The Hindus and untouchables have since always re-
mained poles apart.°
oF
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

In Punjab, a dalit named Mangoo Ram, also originally a

part of the Arya Samaj, began an Ad-Dharm movement in
which the dalits by 1926, had proclaimed themselves a separ-
ate quaum (community) in a conference in a village of
Hoshiarpur district. As the report of the Ad-Dharm Mandal
described the Aryan conquest:
During this time of great achievements, the Aryans
heard about the original land’s civilization and came
there. They learned the art of fighting from the local
inhabitants, and then turned against them. There were
many wars—six hundred years of fighting—and then
the Aryans finally defeated our ancestors, the local
inhabitants. Our forefathers ... were pushed back into
the jungles and the mountains ... from that time to
this time the Hindu Aryans have suppressed the
original people.®
Again there was a concern for official record of identity. By
the 1931 census, nearly 500,000 Ad-Dharmis were reported.
Mangoo Ram, Acchutanand, Bhagyareddy Varma and
Kisan Bansode were all of a generation slightly older than
Ambedkar. They represented a new movement, they organ-
ized on the basis of some mobility of village untouchables—
some going into new factories and industries, some overseas
to plantations or as soldiers in the Indian army, others claim-
ing small holdings of land deriving from traditional village
service-claims or even acquired from factory or other earn-
ings. Spearheading the dalit organizations was a growing,
though still small, educated or semi-educated leadership.
Various activities were taken up in this period. On the one
hand, social reform included efforts to abolish devadasi tra-
ditions and sub-caste differences, and giving up drinking or
meat-eating. On the other hand, organizing occurred on eco-
nomic issues concerning factory and mill workers and efforts
to acquire land.

38
 DALIT VISIONS

While much of this involved linkages with reformist

Hindus and acceptance of a basic Hinduist discourse, it was
the “adi” ideologies, based on non-Aryan racial theories, that
provided the framework for the most militant expressions. It
was not that all dalits, let alone all militant non-brahmans,
accepted this; there were in every region those who chose
instead to identify themselves as Hindus, fighting for temple
entry, for instance. A significant set of dalit leaders even
went over to the Hindu Mahasabha. But the adi ideologies
were pervasive ideas that won a popular base, as census
reports show, and expressed the powerful emotional resist-
ance to brahmanism and caste hierarchy that was embodied
in dalit organizations everywhere in the colonial period.
(They also had links with the themes of the non-brahman
movements of the Madras and Bombay presidencies, and
most of the militant dalits also had some kind of alliance
policy with the non-brahmans.)
However, while these expressions bore similarities to the
ideology of Phule, there were crucial differences from
Phule’s period that were reflected in the 1920s’ non-brah-
man-dalit versions of the non-Aryan themes. First, a whole
period of the construction of Hinduism had intervened, with
the formulation of an increasingly sophisticated ideology of
Hindu nationalism and its spread. The founding of major
organizations such as the Hindu Mahasabha and the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) occurred in this period.
While the RSS remained an aloof, indrawn cadre organiza-
tion, organizations like the Mahasabha and the Arya Samaj
undertook campaigns to win over low castes. The shuddhi
campaign (designed to “purify” dalits or convert them back
from Islam) was carried out primarily in the Punjab, but the
ideological appeals that went along with this had a much
wider spread. These identified dalits as part of the “Hindu
fold”, and began to emphasize the low-caste origin of figures
such as Valmiki and Vyasa to show that dalits too had a part

39
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

in the “creation of its great literature”. Hindu nationalist up-

per castes were revising and reinterpreting the racial aspect
of their identity to stress a Hindu unity encompassing the
caste hierarchy. By the 1930s, it was clear that this reinter-
pretation had an appeal: not only were large sections of non-
brahmans identifying themselves as Hindus and claiming
kshatriya status through the medium of caste conferences,
but many important dalit leaders were also won over, with
some like M.S. Rajah of Tamil Nadu and G.A. Gavai of
Nagpur even ready to join the Hindu Mahasabha.
On the other hand, the dalit activists, peasants and
workers of the time confronted the formulation of a radical
class ideology by a new left intelligentsia. Young Indian so-
cialists and communists led militant struggles that attracted
large sections of the exploited and gave them a vision of an
equalitarian society, but they avoided the recognition of
caste and stressed a mechanical class framework that sought
to override traditional identities rather than reinterpret
them. It is striking that in the painful confrontation between
Gandhi and Ambedkar after the second Round Table Con-
ference, when both Gandhians and Hindu Mahasabhaites
tried to mobilize forces against the followers of Ambedkar
and promote their solution to the issue, there was no prom-
inent leftist even concerned about caste. Nehru in his auto-
biography remarks again and again that he saw Gandhi's
harijan campaign as diversionary. It led to the diversion of
the people’s attention from the objective of full inde-
pendence to the mundane cause of the upliftment of hari-
jans.”
There were many aspects of this resistance to dealing
with caste. There was an inability to even recognize identit- _
ies such as the Adi-Andhra; the communists universally
adopted the Gandhian term “harijan”\without much concern
for whether it would appeal to the people concerned. They
also saw themselves, without much trouble, as Hindu

40
 DALIT VISIONS

(perhaps as “Hindu atheists”). At the same time, communist

class ideology defined the industrially-employed working
class as advanced, while peasants (so crucial to Phule) were
seen as backward, either feudal or “petty bourgeois”. State
exploitation (such as the exploitation of the peasantry by
means of taxes and land revenue) was ignored, while only
private property owners (moneylenders, zamindars, etc.)
were the appropriate objects of class, as opposed to “na-
tional” struggle.
As G.P. Deshpande has argued, Phule was making an
effort to formulate a kind of universalistic ideology. He did
not identify the oppressed and exploited shudras and ati-
shudras as a set of castes so much as a peasant community,
nor was the community strictly identified in racial terms.
Non-Aryan was, after all, a negative category. In the 1920s,
in contrast, the communists were putting forward another
universalistic ideology. This one did not recognize commu-
nity/caste as a node of exploitation; it threw all non-class
categories into the realm of the superstructure, relegated to
secondary consequence since they were only cultural/ideo-
logical constructs. The formation of a class ideology of this type
created a caste ideology of a specific type in reaction, one which
set up caste in opposition to class as a cultural/social factor,
a non-economic factor.
In this context, with the strong ideological winds of
Hindu nationalism (even in the modified form of Gandhism)
and class struggle blowing all around them, the alternative
“adi” identity theories put forward by dalit radicals became
racial ones. This can be seen in the above quotations. The
Aryans as a people with one religion (Hinduism) were seen
as basically confronting (conquering and enslaving) the non-
Aryans as a people with a different religion. Sometimes the
conquering Aryan caste/community was seen in larger
terms (as “all-caste Hinduism”), sometimes in smaller terms
(only as the “upper castes”), but, more often, it was

4]
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

increasingly seen as a racially and religiously solidified

group, “the Hindus” Phule had refused to legitimize Hin-
duism even as the religion of the supposed upper castes,
seeing it only as a tool of exploitation. The later radicals also
condemned Hinduism but began to see it more and more as
a reality.
The communists saw the national movement as basically
the only valid non-ciass struggle of the period, progressive
because imperialism had to be fought in order to achieve a
democratic revolution that would advance the development
of the productive forces (i.e. industrialization). This resulted
in the dalit and non-brahman movements being stigmatized
as pro-British, the communists refusing to recognize the
legitimacy of taking the fight against the Indian elite (or
“Indian feudalism”) as central.
Thus two opposing ideologies prevailed among the toil-
ing masses, one arguing from the standpoint of being ori-
ginal inhabitants or non-Aryans, and the other basing itself
on the theory of class struggle. With the failure, in particular,
of the more all-encompassing Marxist theory to incorporate
the problems of caste in India, the broad movement of the
oppressed was split into a class movement and a caste move-
ment. There was no synthesis, no development of an inte-
grated ideology and, as a result, those lower castes/classes
who did get drawn into the national struggle or the left-led
working class movement, gave up the sharpness of their
anti-caste fight. Beneath the folds of the Congress and its
hegemonic claim over almost all other political movements,
a large number of forces and identities simmered but re-
mained unconnected and ineffective.
The most significant attempt to transcend this fragmenta-
tion in the 1930s and 1940s was made by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar,
one of the great democratic leaders of the twentieth century.

42
6
Hinduism as Counter-Revolution:
B.R. Ambedkar

It must be recognized that there never has been a

common Indian culture, that historically there have
been three Indias, Brahmanic India, Buddhist India
and Hindu India, each with its own culture.... It must
be recognized that the history of India before the
Muslim invasions is the history of a mortal conflict
between Brahmanism and Buddhism.!
Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956; known as
“Babasaheb” in the movement) came into politics claiming
the heritage of the non-brahman movement. Between 1917-
20 he returned to India after getting his degree in law in the
U.S. He gave up service in Baroda state after insults were
heaped upon him as an untouchable. Settling in Bombay as
a professor at Sydenham College, he associated with Shahu
Maharaj of Kolhapur (notorious to nationalists as anti-brah-
man and pro-British) in his initial political organizing. The
autonomy of the dalit movement was his concern, but it was
to be an autonomy in alliance with non-brahmans. At the
first Depressed Classes conference in Nagpur in 1920, which
he attended in the company of Shahu Maharaj, he attacked
not only nationalist spokesmen, but also Vitthal Ramji

43
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

Shinde,the most prominent non-dalit social reformer claim-

ing to lead the “uplift of untouchables”
Ambedkar’s emergence into politics was cautious. Very
gradually he gathered a team around him, of educated and
semi-educated Mahar boys, as well as a few upper-caste
sympathizers, forming the Bahishkrut Hitakarni Sabha,
which began to hold conferences around the province. In
1926, an explosive movement resulted when a conference at
Mahad in the Konkan ended with a struggle to drink water
from the town tank. The Mahad satyagraha, the first “un-
touchable liberation movement,” did not succeed in getting
water but did end with the public burning of the
Manusmruti. The campaign was partly spontaneous and
partly planned; Mahad had been chosen as a place where
Ambedkar had significant caste Hindu support, where a ten-
ant movement uniting Mahar and Kunbi peasants was be-
ginning (which developed into the biggest anti-landlord
movement in Maharashtra in the 1930s), and where the mu-
nicipality had already passed a resolution to open public
places to untouchables.
By the time of the Simon Commission Ambedkar had
clearly emerged as the most articulate dalit leader in the
country with a significant mass base, and it was natural that
he should be invited to the Round Table Conference. This
led to the clash with Gandhi over the issue of an award of
separate electorates to untouchables. For Gandhi, the integ-
rity of Hindu society with the untouchables as its indissol-
uble part was a central and emotional question. The
confrontation over Gandhi's fast and the Poona Pact (1932)
disillusioned Ambedkar once and for all about Hindu re-
formism, it inaugurated his radical period which ied to an
announcement in 1935 that he was “born a Hindu but would
not die a Hindu” and the founding in 1936, of the Inde-
pendent Labour Party (ILP), a worker-peasant party with a
red flag. The “conversion announcement” set off ferment

44
 DALIT VISIONS

throughout the country, while the ILP went on to become

the biggest opposition party in the Bombay legislative
council.
The 1930s was a decade of ferment, with growing nation-
alist agitations and workers’ and peasants’ struggles. The ILP
grew and became the only party in India which led struggles
against capitalists and landlords along with agitations
against caste oppression, calling for a radical opposition to
the “brahman-bourgeois Congress” and seeking to pull in
non-brahmans as well as dalits. While Ambedkar himself did
not support a non-Aryan theory of dalit-shudra identity,
poems and songs published in his weekly Janata show how
pervasive these ideas were, and how they linked anti-caste
radicalism with calls for class struggle:
Bhils, Gonds, Dravids, their Bharat was beautiful,
They were the people, the culture was theirs, the rule
was theirs;
The Aryas infiltrated all this, they brought their
power to Bharat
and Dravidans were suppressed...
Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, all became owners
Drinking the blood of slaves, making the Shudras into
machines.
The Brahmans, Kshatriyas and Banias got all the
ownership rights.
All these three call themselves brothers, they come
together in times of crisis
And work to split the Shudras who have become workers.
“Congress,” “Hindu Mahasabha,” “Muslim League” are
all agents of the rich,
The “Independent Labour Party” is our true house...
Take up the weapon of Janata
Throw off the bloody magic of the owners’ atrocities,
Rise workers! Rise peasants! Hindustan 1s ours,
45
 TRACTS FOR THE TIMES /8

Humanity will be built on labour,

This is our birth right!?
The ILP led some major combined struggles in this
period. The most notable of these was the anti-landlord
agitation in the Konkan region of Maharashtra which
brought together Kunbi and Mahar tenants against mainly
brahman (but also some upper-caste Maratha) landlords, cli-
maxing in a march of some 25,000 peasants to Bombay in
1938. This was followed by a massive one-day united textile
workers’ strike against the “black bill” of the Congress gov-
ernment which outlawed strikes. Communists were in-
volved in. both of these, and at the massive peasant rally
Ambedkar proclaimed, though very ambiguously, an
admiration for Marxism:
I have definitely read studiously more books on the
Communist philosophy than all the Communist
leaders here. However beautiful the Communist
philosophy is in these books ... the test of it has to be
given in practice. And if work is done from that per-
spective, I feel that the labour and length of time
needed to win success in Russia will not be so much
needed in India ... in regard to the toilers class
struggle, I feel the Communist philosophy to be closer
to us.
The 1930s was thus the period in which Ambedkar ex-
pressed most strongly his major themes of unity and milit-
ancy: unity of workers and peasants, of dalits and
non-brahmans (shudras), and unity with opposition parties
against the Congress. It is striking that all through this
period (as later) it was the dominant caste peasants who
were the main perpetrators of atrocities against dalits in vil-
lages, and the latter under Ambedkar fought this vigorously.
Nevertheless at a broader level he called for and tried to

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