Dalits

and the

DEMOCRATIC

REVOLUTION
Copy © Gail Omvedt, 2014
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Eleventh Printing 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Omvedt, Gail
Dalits and the democratic revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit movement in colonial
India/Gail Omvedt.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Untouchables–India–Political activity–History–20th century.
2. Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 1892-. I. Title.
DS422.C3053 954.03'5'08694–dc20 1994 93-11778
ISBN: 978-81-321-1983-8
 
 Now, Now
Turning their backs to the sun, they journeyed through centuries.
Now, now, we must refuse to be pilgrims of darkness.
That one, our father, carrying, carrying the darkness is now bent;
Now, now we must lift that burden from his back.
Our blood was spilled for this glorious city
And what we got was the right to eat stones.
Now, now, we must explode that building which kisses the sky!
After a thousand years we were blessed with a sunflower giving fakir;
Now, now we must, like sunflowers, turn our faces to the sun.

Namdev Dhasal
in Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot (eds), An Anthology of Dalit
Literature (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1992), p. 53.
Contents

List of Tables
Introduction
CHAPTER 1: Towards a Historical Materialist Analysis of the Origins and
Development of Caste
CHAPTER 2: Caste, Region and Colonialism: The Context of Dalit Revolt
CHAPTER 3: Emergence of the Dalit Movement, 1900–30: Nagpur,
Hyderabad, Andhra, Mysore
CHAPTER 4: Emergence of the Dalit Movement, 1900–30: Bombay
Presidency
CHAPTER 5: The Turning Point, 1930–36: Ambedkar, Gandhi, the Marxists
CHAPTER 6: The Years of Radicalism: Bombay Presidency, 1936–42
CHAPTER 7: ‘Ambedkarism’: The Theory of Dalit Liberation
CHAPTER 8: Mysore, 1930–56: The Politics of Ram-Raj
CHAPTER 9: Andhra and Hyderabad, 1930–46: Foundations of Turmoil
CHAPTER 10: Hyderabad and Andhra, 1946–56: Revolution, Repression and
Recuperation
Conclusion
Index
List of Tables

2.1 Land Distribution by Region, 1971

2.2 Land and Occupation by Region, 1921
2.3 Caste and Agrarian Occupation, 1921 (Male Workers)
2.4 Caste and Agrarian Occupation, 1921 (Female Workers)
11.1 Caste and Agricultural Occupation
11.2a Distribution of Rural Households by Landholding
11.2b Estimated Operational Farm Holdings and Area Operated
11.3 Income of Organized and Unorganized Sector Workers, 1981
11.4 Distribution of GDP and Labour Force by Sector
11.5 Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Occupations, 1981
11.6 Representation of Caste Groups in Central Government Services
11.7 Indicators of Untouchability
Introduction

Namdev Dhasal’s poem expresses all the anguish and aspiration of being a
Dalit in India today: the sense of having been the exploited and oppressed
builders of the great Indian civilization and of emerging out of centuries of
darkness to claim their heritage, ‘now, now’. Not unusually, it centres
around B.R. Ambedkar, the legendary leader of the Dalit movement and
one of the greatest of modern Indians; it proclaims a life-giving hope, a
‘new sun’; and it threatens to ‘explode that building’ if this is not satisfied.
Such images of oppression, of darkness and light, of revolt, of smashing
structures of exploitation pervade the poetry of the anti-caste movement.
The image of the sun is frequent. Shripal Sabnis, a non-Brahman poet,
writes of caste that
The sun of self-respect has burst into flame,
let it burn up caste ….2
The title, No Room for the New Sun, used for a recent English translation of
Dalit poems, as well as many of the poems published, express similar
themes.3
This study, an outgrowth of an ICSSR project on ‘History of Dalit
Movements in Maharashtra, Andhra and Karnataka, 1850–1975’, focuses
on the Dalit movement in the colonial period. It defines it as part, in many
ways the leading part, of a broader anti-caste movement which has been a
central democratic movement of Indian society. In the pre-independence
period this anti-caste movement comprised strong non-Brahman
movements in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu as well as Dalit movements in
Maharashtra, Punjab (the Ad-Dharm movement), western U.P. (the Adi-
Hindu movement), Bengal (Namashudras), Kerala (Narayanswami Guru’s
movement), Tamil Nadu (Adi-Dravidas), coastal Andhra (Adi-Andhras),
and Hyderabad (Adi-Hindus). In addition there were non-Brahman
ideological trends elsewhere and weaker or unorganized Dalit assertions in
such areas as Mysore and Bihar. Independent India saw two decades of
quiescence for anti-caste struggles, then a renewed upsurge from the early
1970s, marked by the founding of the Dalit Panthers in 1972. This time the
Dalits and their organizations were clearly in the vanguard, with the non-
Brahman castes, now known as ‘OBCs’ ‘other backward castes’, following.
An account of this phase of the movement is given in my recent study of
new social movements.4
The Dalit and non-Brahman anti-caste movements can be classified as
‘anti-systemic movements’ in the framework of such Marxist theorists as
Immanuel Wallerstein, or, in the language of functionalist sociological
theory, as ‘value-oriented movements’ as opposed to ‘norm-oriented
movements’.5 That is, they challenged and sought to transform the basic
structure of the Indian social system, replacing caste and the accompanying
social oppression, economic exploitation and political domination by an
equalitarian society. There were of course reformist trends in the movement
as in other social movements of Indian society. These were represented
within the Dalit movement by leaders such as Jagjivan Ram of the Congress
and the Hindu Mahasabhaite Dalits such as M.C. Rajah and G.A. Gavai and
their organizations; within the non-Brahman movements the Justice Party
and the Non-Brahman Party of the Bombay Presidency represented
conservative trends in contrast to the more radical Satyasho-dhak Samaj
and Self-Respect movements. Reformist (incorporative, ‘norm-oriented’)
trends were also embodied in Gandhi’s ‘Harijan’ movement, which stood in
the tradition of the broad upper caste social reform tradition which sought
to cleanse Hinduism of its impurities, to ‘lop off the excrescences’ in the
words of M.G. Ranade, i.e., to chop off the diseased branches of the tree
with the intention of fostering its growth.6
In contrast, the anti-caste movement aimed at felling the tree. In this it
was akin to radical Marxism, especially the Dalit-based Naxalite movement
in Bihar in the 1970s, described by a sympathetic journalist in terms of
resurrection and revolution:
This man has risen from the grave: he seems to have gone berserk and is
frenzeidly chopping the branches of feudalism. His desire is to see the
2500-year old tree felled here and now. So far he has only been
humiliated, whipped and slain, denied the status of a man; his wife
treated as a prostitute. Then somebody brought him news of Naxalbari
 and things began to change. The Harijan died, the Koeri was burnt; the
new man who rose from the flames felt that he was neither a Harijan nor
a Koeri but a man.7
A revolutionary message, a will to act against exploitation, a rise from
oppression, from death to life, from darkness to light: the process has been
going on in sporadic ways all over India since the nineteenth century. While
the Naxalite movement has done this for the low castes of Bihar in recent
years, before Naxalism, before even Marxism entered India, a revolutionary
anti-caste movement had begun. In ways that had many parallels with
militant Marxism it described a society based on exploitation; and in ways
similar to that described by the journalist Arun Sinha, it brought a
revolutionary democratic message. Another journalist, a major figure of the
Maharashtrian anti-caste Satyashodhak Samaj (still uninfluenced by
Marxism), writes
India is a strange place which collects all sorts of social groups, divided
by different religions, thoughts, practices and understandings. But
broadly speaking, they can be categorized into two—the majority low
castes who have been devoid of humanity for centuries and a handful
who take their pleasure, call themselves superior and live at the cost of
the majority. One’s welfare is another’s misery; that is their connection.8
In this context,
Such a revolutionary wave reached the lowest classes so that a power of
thought was created among them …. Those who kindled among the
innumerable lower caste majority the light and experience of who and
what is causing us injustice, what are our rights, how we must throw
away the injustice-these were the Satyasamajists.9
The main figures of this larger anti-caste movement, Jotiba Phule,
Babasaheb Ambedkar and E.V. Ramasami ‘Periyar’, with many others
throughout India (Narayanswami Guru in Kerala, Acchuta nand in U.P.,
Mangoo Ram in Punjab) all attacked the system of exploitation at all levels,
culturally, economically and politically.
They challenged the ‘Hindu-nationalism’ which was emerging as a
consequence of the elite organizing from the nineteenth century onward to
define Indian society, and the majority of Indian people, as essentially
‘Hindu’: not only did they criticize distortions and ‘excrescences’; they
attacked Hinduism itself by arguing that it was in essence Brahmanical,
caste-bound and irrational. They asserted that Hinduism had not been the
religion and culture of the majority but rather was an imposed religion; and
that escaping exploitation today required the low castes to reject this
imposition, to define themselves as ‘non-Hindu’ and take a new religious
identity. Phule tried to formulate a new, theistic religion; Periyar promoted
atheism; Ambedkar turned to Buddhism; others in the Tamil Nadu non-
Brahman movement tried to claim Saivism as an independent religion;
Narayanswami Guru formulated ‘one religion, one caste, one god’ while his
more radical follower Ayyapan proclaimed ‘no religion, no caste, and no
God for mankind’. Whatever the specificities, the rejection of Hinduism
remained a feature differentiating the anti-caste radicals from the reformers.
They were also economic radicals, though from different points of view,
identifying themselves not simply with low castes but with peasants and
workers as such. Phule strongly attacked the exploitation of peasants by the
bureaucracy; Ambedkar and Periyar both supported and helped organize
movements of peasants against landlords and workers against capitalists;
and Ambedkar unambiguously identified himself as a socialist.
Politically they opposed the Indian National Congress as controlled by
upper castes and capitalists (as ‘Brahman and bourgeois’ in Ambedkar’s
terms; as that of the ‘Irani arya-bhats’ in Phule’s terminology, as shetji-
bhatji or ‘Brahman-Bania’ in the language of the later non-Brahman
movement) and sought for an alternative political front that would represent
a kind of left-Dalit unity with a core base of workers and peasants. They
(particularly Ambedkar) also insisted that this had to lead to the
empowerment of Dalits and other exploited sections. In the language of the
Dalit Panther’s manifesto, ‘We don’t want a little place in Brahman alley;
we want the rule of the whole country.’
This anti-caste movement, with its Dalit leading section, was part of the
broader revolutionary democratic movement in India, along with the
national movement and communist- and socialistled working class and
peasant movements. Ideologically and organizationally, it both overlapped
and contended with these movements. In particular, Gandhism, which was
prominent if not hegemonic in the National Congress, and Marxism,
exemplified both in the communists and in the Nehruvian left within the
Congress, provided the important context of this movement and its
developing ideology.
 Strikingly, while the Dalit movement in India began concurrently with
the upsurge of both nationalism and Marxism, it is experiencing a second
upsurge today in an era of the crisis of nationalities and of socialism.
Nationalism is in crisis, with both Third World societies and former
socialist countries buffeted by divisive ethnic struggles and by internal
groups claiming their own ‘nationality’; socialism is in crisis after the fall
of the regimes and the development model that claimed to be based on
Marxism.
This process involves new dilemmas and possibilities for the Dalit/anti-
caste movement itself—the necessity of formulating new ways forward in
regard to economic strategy, political structures, cultural interpretation. It
requires a rethinking of the way in which the movement has been
understood.
We have argued that the Dalit movement in particular and anti-caste
movements in general should be seen as ‘value-oriented’ or ‘anti-systemic’
movements. This, however, has not been generally accepted, for these
movements have been seen as basically reformist by the dominant left
intellectual trends in India, while academic social sciences in general have
focused their efforts on understanding caste as structure without dealing
with the movements against it. Therefore, to establish our point it is
necessary to establish a framework for the analysis of all social movements
in the colonial period and today.
The major framework within which these movements have been
interpreted, even by academics, has been highly influenced by the Marxism
of the twentieth century. This has had two important assumptions, first that
‘class’ (defined in terms of holding or not holding the means of production,
or private property) has been the most important factor determining
exploitation and oppression, hence both social structures and the
movements to transform these; and second, that beyond simply class itself
the ‘national movement’, defined as the anti-imperialist movement against
colonial rule and characterized in terms of its main organizations (such as
the Indian National Congress) has been the overarching movement of the
Third World countries in the era of imperialism.
Within this perspective, Dalit and anti-caste movements could only be
seen as diversionary. Marxists in India have veered between a rather
sectarian pure class perspective (represented for instance by B.T. Ranadive
and the CPI in its ‘class sectarianism’ period) and a pro-Congress
nationalism (represented by the CPI in other periods and by neo-Marxist
academics such as Bipan Chandra). Analysis of the Dalit movement has
suffered from both interpretations. It has been seen as diversionary either
from the economic class struggle because of its argument for the necessity
of struggling against social oppression, or in terms of the needs of a
national struggle because of its insistence on putting the needs of the most
oppressed/exploited group first and because of its willingness to treat the
Indian elite, not foreign powers, as the ‘main enemy’.
Interpreting the Dalit movement in ‘class’ terms, Marxists have been able
to see it as basically progressive due to its working class and poor peasant–
agricultural labourer base, but hampered by ‘petty bourgeois’ leadership. In
the colonial period, however, all Marxists along with most nationalists saw
it as basically ‘divisive’ and dangerously pro-British. This was due to the
belief that the ‘main contradiction’ was that of the oppressed Indian
nationality and imperialism; as the historian Bipan Chandra puts it, the
nationalist movement stood at the centre of the broad democratic revolution
in India, and the National Congress was the core of this, with other major
movements including working class and peasant movements having a
complex relation to the Congress and only ‘communal and casteist
movements’ forming ‘an alternative stream of politics … not nationalist or
anti-imperialist but [with] loyalist pro-colonial tendencies’10 This position
rests on two assumptions, first that the dominant trend of the National
Congress was not only anti-imperialist but democratic and secular, and
second that the ‘nation’ was a reality that could be taken-for-granted. In the
words of Shashi Joshi, ‘Anti-imperialist nationalism is historically given.
Nationalism as an emotive force is intrinsic to being a victim of national
oppression’.11
Within the mind-set that takes an overriding ‘national oppression’ as self-
evident, Ambedkar’s justification for compromise with the British on the
grounds that ‘we cannot fight all enemies at once’ could seem only a
betrayal.
But what was the ‘nation’ and what was ‘national oppression’ and the
way to overcome it?
In contrast stands Baburao Bagul’s assessment,
The national movement was turned into a form of historical,
 mythological movement and ancestor worship …. Those who
propounded inequality and did not wish society to be democratic, started
eulogizing history, mythology and ages gone by because, in those
mythological and historical ages, they were the supreme victors and
leaders. The intelligentsia now harked back to and worshipped the past
because of this. People such as Phule, Agarkar, Gokhale and Ranade who
talked about misery and servitude of the Shudras and Atishudras, who
criticized the varna system, and demanded social, economic and political
reconstruction, were declared enemies and attacked from all sides. The
intelligentsia won; they succeeded in turning the Indian liberation
struggle into a lop-sided fight, and in reducing the other movements to a
secondary status.12
This question, of identity and existence of the ‘nation’, was precisely the
point taken up by Phule in the nineteenth century in opposing the elite-led
nationalist project at its very beginning. His argument was that a society
divided by caste could not constitute a genuine nation and that those
claiming to represent the nation were in fact its destroyers since they not
only ignored these hierarchical divisions but actually sought to maintain
them as a basis for their power. It is, in fact, in regard to what constitutes
the ‘Indian identity’ that the anti-caste movement has its basic strength
today, in contrast to the now barren record of Nehruvite secularism, as a
counter to the communalization of Indian politics.
The anti-caste movement was in its own way nationalist and anti-
imperialist; it saw opposition to colonial power as fundamentally connected
with the struggle against what Marxists and nationalists would call
‘feudalism’, or the caste system; both, to it, were parts of a fundamental
national struggle. It seems necessary to move beyond the narrow ‘class’
approach as well as the understanding of ‘nationalism’ only in terms of
political opposition to a foreign power.13 This involves taking a ‘revisionist
Marxist’ approach at two levels: in terms of the relationship between
‘superstructure’ and ‘base’ (the ideological and the economic) and in terms
of a vastly expanded analysis of the economic structure itself.
In terms of ideological issues and their relationship with economic
structures, particularly as regards the ‘new social movements’, the recent
influential writings of neo-Gramscian theorists such as Laclau and Mouffe
seem important. These emphasize the ‘democratic revolution’ as a major
global revolutionary ideology. The ‘discourse-analytical approach’ of
Laclau and Mouffe, for example, stresses the struggle for ideological
hegemony, without privileging class actors or particular class positions,
arguing that even working class struggles will not be revolutionary or
progressive unless they are articulated in a context of general emancipation.
This context of emancipation has to be provided by an ideological
discourse; as they put it,
Serf, slave and so on, do not designate in themselves antagonistic
positions; it is only in the terms of a different discursive formation, such
as the ‘rights inherent to every human being,’ that the differential
positivity of these categories can be subverted and the subordination
constructed as oppression.14
Arguing for the increase of both repressive and emancipatory forces with
the spread of capitalism, they see the emancipatory project as connected to
the spread of a broad democratic ideology with values of freedom, equality
and autonomy; these are inherently subversive of all forms of subordination
and inequality, though subversion may be a slow and protracted process.
From this perspective, the Dalit movement and the overall radical anti-caste
movements were a crucial expression of the democratic revolution in India,
more consistently democratic—and in the end more consistently
‘nationalistic’—than the elite-controlled Indian National Congress.
In drawing our attention to the importance of ideology and ‘discursive
formulations’, Laclau and Mouffe stress the understanding of ideological
struggles and the way in which ‘democratic’ ideologies undergo
transformations and deepenings; in this study we shall focus primarily on
the development of ideologies of Dalit liberation (particularly that of
Ambedkar) and their relationship to Marxism, as understood in the Indian
context, and Gandhism.
However, a revised ‘historical materialism’ cannot limit itself to
discussing the relationship between economic structure and ideology; there
also has to be a deepened understanding of economic structure itself, and of
the way in which world capitalism (which after all has provided the
overarching framework for anti-caste movements) has operated not only in
terms of the dialectic and contradictions between capital and wage labour,
but has also incorporated and adapted non-wage forms of production. Here
the new discussions of the ideological characteristics of the ‘new social
movements’ have failed to confront the inherent flaws of a ‘class analysis’
that remains caught in orthodox emphases on control of the means of
production (private property). In contrast, from within the new movements,
theorists have raised the issue of seeing women’s unpaid domestic labour
and even ‘natural’ provisions of the ‘conditions of production’ as crucial to
the accumulation of capital,15 while ‘worlds systems theorists’ like
Immanuel Wallerstein have stressed the role of non-wage labour (in his
analysis, in particular serf and slave labour, while we would add petty
commodity production, and caste-mediated forms), in being central to
capital accumulation from the beginning. In these models also, not simply
‘economic subordination’ to holders of property but cultural/community
forms and force and violence play a major role. On this basis we can
construct at least the elements of a revised historical materialist
understanding not only of the linkage between the ‘economic base’ and the
‘superstructure’, but of economic processes themselves.
Such a framework will form the basis for the discussion of the pre-
independence Dalit movement in this book.
This study focuses on Dalit movements in three major linguistic regions
of India—Maharashtra, Andhra and Karnataka—and on the interaction of
these movements with the nationalist movement and the ‘class’ struggles of
the workers and peasants, as well as with the major ideologies of Gandhism
and Marxism which guided these. Chapter 1 gives a background analysis of
the caste system in South Asia along with a discussion of the main points of
a revised historical materialism in the context of Dalit and left movement
analyses. Chapter 2 discusses the particular regional context as well as the
role of colonialism in structuring the movements. It also deals with the
major ideological–political founder of the anti-caste movement in India,
Jotiba Phule.
Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the 1920s, the period of emergence of the
Dalit movements as organizational forces in many regions of India, taking
up the different situations in the five regions (Bombay Province, Andhra
delta in Madras Province, the Nagpur–Vidarbha region of Central
Provinces, Hyderabad state and Mysore state) that the Telugu, Kannada and
Marathi-speaking areas were divided into during colonial rule. Chapter 5,
focusing on the 1930–32 period as a ‘turning point’, describes the
confrontation of Ambedkar and the issues of caste raised by the Dalit
movement with Gandhi, on the one hand, and the ideology of the Indian
Marxists on the other. Chapter 6 deals with the ‘years of radicalism’ in the
Bombay Presidency, from 1936 to 1942, when Ambedkar’s Independent
Labour Party was standing forth as a party of workers and peasants in
opposition to the ‘bourgeois-Brahman’ Congress, and was actively involved
in leading struggles. The failure of this period to develop into a broad
movement unifying economic and anti-caste struggles was perhaps decisive
for the future of independent India.
Inevitably, a study of the ‘Dalit movement’, necessarily means a study of
Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s role in it. Being its historic leader and the
formulator of its enduring ideology, Baba-saheb Ambedkar was the
dominating figure and active organizer of the movement in the Marathi-
speaking regions. By the 1930s and 1940s he came to dominate the all-India
movement as well, though his organizations never attained as strong a
hegemony outside of Maharashtra. In spite of the organizational weaknesses
of the Scheduled Caste Federation and the successor Republican Party, it is
still ‘Ambedkarism’ as a broad trend which dominates the movement, and it
is beginning to have an impact within social movements and circles outside
the anti-caste movement as such. For that reason Ambedkar’s theoretical
framework is treated in a separate chapter.
Chapter 8 focuses on developments in Mysore (the Kannada-speaking
region) during the 1930s and 1940s, while chapter 9 deals with the part of
India that had the greatest rural communist strength and a major peasant
revolt at the time of independence, Andhra. Here again we see a strong,
mass-based oppositional movement proclaiming socialist goals, this time
one taking insurrectionist forms, but again, as in the case of the Dalit
movement in Maharashtra, meeting with organizational failure and political
incorporation. Finally, a conclusion evaluates the achievements of the
movement in the pre-colonial period, suggests the background for its re-
emergence in the 1970s, and poses the problems it confronts today.
I would like to thank those whose support, intellectual stimulation and
research aid was crucial in completing this work. Surendra Jondhale, V.
Laxminarayan, G. Gnaneshwar, Vasanti Rasam, Madhav Deshwal and
Meena Seshu provided important research assistance. Activists connected
with Dalit Voice provided important research material. Through the years,
discussions and interactions with activists and intellectuals of the Dalit
movement and other social movements have been essential in helping me
sharpen and formulate my perspective: I owe thanks to A.R. Desai, Sharad
Patil, Bojja Tharakam, Vasant Moon, Gangadhar Patavane, Bhaskarrao
Jadhav, Sudhakar Gaikwad, Kancha Ilaiah, Narendra Jadhav, Namdev
Dhasal, Arun Kamble, Eleanor Zelliot, S.K. Limaye, Sudhir Bedekar,
Sharad Joshi, and many others. Innovators in Marxist theory the world over
have been part of the developing perspective here, and their names are too
numerous to mention. Most of all, the arguments and critiques of Bharat
Patankar have helped to bring to some kind of fruition this perspective on
‘class and caste’.
Finally, I would like to thank the Department of Politics and Public
Administration of Poona University and the Society for People’s
Participation in Eco-system Management (SOPPECOM) for providing
facilities for completion of this manuscript.

NOTES
1. Namdev Dhasal, ‘Now,Now’, translated by Jayant Karve and Eleanor Zelliot, in Mulk
Raj Anand and Eleanor Zelliot (ed.), An Anthology of Dalit Literature (New Delhi:
Gyan Publishing House, 1992), p. 53.
2. Shripal Sabnis, in Barbara Joshi, (ed.), Untouchable Voices of the Dalit Liberation
Movement (London: Zed Books, 1986), my translation.
3. Arjun Dangle (ed.), No Room for the New Sun (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1992); this
is the separately published poetry section of Poisoned Bread: Translations from
Modern Marathi Dalit Literature.
4. Reinventing Revolution: India’s New Social Movements (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993).
5. See Immanuel Wallerstein’s original paper, ‘The Rise and Future Demise of the World
Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis.’ Comparative Studies in
Society and History 16, 4 (September 1974). More recent brief statement’s of
Wallerstein’s view of anti-systemic social movements (which he defines broadly as
‘class’ movements and ‘national’ movements), see ‘Anti-Systemic Movements and the
Three Worlds’, Lanka Guardian, 1 June 1985 and ‘Patterns and Prospects of the
Capitalist World Economy’ Contemporary Marxism No. 9, Fall 1984. For more
conventional sociological functionalist analysis, see the most well-known work by
Neil Smelser, A Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press of Glencoe,
 1963).
6. Cited by Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London:
Zed Books, 1986), p. 80.
7. Arun Sinha, ‘Class War in Bhojpur’, Economic and Political Weekly, 7 January 1978.
8. Mukundrao Patil, Din Mitra, June 1913; cited in Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a
Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India 1873–1930, (Pune:
Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976), p. 157.
9. Referring to the cultural background of nationalist revolt in one of the strongest centres
of the 1942 movement, this is from a Marathi booklet on Nana Patil, the leader of the
‘parallel government’ in Satara, cited in Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, p. 122. The term I
have translated as ‘lower caste majority’, is bahujan samaj, literally ‘majority
community’, but while the language of exploitation is Marxian the reference is to the
Dalit and Shudra castes.
10. Bipan Chandra, ‘Introduction’ to Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya
Mukherjee, K.N. Panikkar and Sucheta Mahajan, India’s Struggle for Independence,
1857–1947 (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1989), p. 28.
11. Shashi Joshi, Struggle for Hegemony in India, 1920–1947: The Colonial State, the Left
and the National Movement, Volume I: 1920–1934 (New Delhi: Sage Publications,
1992),
12. Baburao Bagul, ‘Dalit Literature is But Human Literature’, in Arjun Dangle (ed.),
Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature (New Delhi:
Orient Longman, 1992), p. 24.
13. For a discussion of African democratic movements that stress the role of both political
and ‘social’ organizations in the independence struggles and the consequences of
narrowing down the definition to only the political, see Mamdani, ‘Africa: Democratic
Theory and Democratic Struggles’, Economic and Political Weekly, 10 October 1992.
14. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso,
1989), p. 154.
15. See in particular Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London:
Zed Books, 1985) and James O’Connor, introduction to Capitalism, Nature, Socialism,
1, 1, 1988.
 CHAPTER 1

Towards a Historical Materialist

Analysis of the Origins and Development
of Caste

• INTRODUCTION: THEORIZING CASTE IN INDIA

Theories of caste are developed by social scientists in the academy for
various reasons ranging from the analysis of a village or local society to the
project of developing a general social theory. They marshall empirical data
in their support, frame hypotheses, elaborate conceptual frameworks, and in
general seek to work within the framework of a scientific paradigm laying
claim to testifiable validity.1
Theories of caste also exist within the societies characterized by caste.
They exist at two levels, one in the fragmented, unarticulated normally
unconscious rules of behaviour embodied in the social relations
characteristic of caste societies, and second in the articulated and elaborated
ideologies which are used by those seeking to maintain or contest
hegemony within the society or to challenge that society in a basic way.
These marshall arguments, sometimes with an empirical reference but just
as often with moral and spiritual references, to maintain support for the
dominant structures of that society or to mobilize support for its change. In
this way theories of caste have been both part of the on-going processes of
Indian society and part of the movements (national, social) seeking to
change the society.
Dalit and non-Brahman movements developed their own theories of
caste, drawing upon the debates and theories put forward by those around
them (from those of scholars to the theories of caste dominance to the
arguments of those in other major social movements of their time), but with
the specific focus of using theory as a guide for achieving the abolition of
caste and the exploitation and oppression it involved. In taking this as their
goal they made certain assumptions, i.e., that caste had an origin in history,
and just as it had an origin it could have an end; that action of the oppressed
and exploited could be effective in aiding this process. These constitute
quite ‘modern’ assumptions and place them at odds with any theories
assuming that caste is not only unique to South Asian society but is
effectively eternal and unshakeable or existing at a level which large-scale
social action cannot affect. They are basically assumptions I agree with, and
there is no harm in describing the framework of this study as drawing not
only on Marx but upon what is increasingly being called (at least in western
India) ‘Phule–Ambedkar thought’.
These theories of the non-Brahman and Dalit movement confronted two
types of ideologies used to legitimate caste society. First were the
traditional religiously-based ideologies, developed primarily by Brahmans,
harking back to the laws of Manu and the ‘creation hymn’ of the Rig Veda,
expressed, elaborated and ideologically glossed in the Puranic myths and
renditions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. At this level they debated
both the validity of the sacred texts (shastras, smritis, etc.) and what they
really meant. Upper-caste social reformers (from nineteenth century
activists like Rammohan Roy and Agarkar to Gandhi) tried to argue for
scriptural justification for a change in or even abolition of the jati and varna
systems, whereas social revolutionaries like Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar
agreed with the conservatives that the Hindu scriptures necessarily implied
observation of caste hierarchy and used this to denounce them as irrational
and exploitative.
With colonial rule another important theoretical approach entered the
ideological arena to serve first as an ideological legitimation of the system
of caste hierarchy replacing or supplementing an increasingly questioned
religious basis, and then, reversed and turned against its earlier proponents,
as a theory to oppose caste domination. This was the ‘Aryan theory of race’,
originated by European Orientalists, propagated by British administrators in
their censuses and provincial studies of caste groups, picked up by early
modernist Brahmans as a way of asserting their equivalence with the white-
skinned conquerors and their superiority to the darker-skinned lower castes,
and then taken up by Jotiba Phule and later radicals. These theorists agreed
that the majority middle and low castes (Shudras and Atishudras or
outcastes in the varna interpretation) were descendents of ‘non-Aryan’
original inhabitants while Brahmans, Ksatriyas and Vaishyas were
descendents of their Indo-European (Aryan, Vedic) conquerors, but argued
that this meant the opposite from what the Brahmans claimed: it was the
Shudras and Atishudras who embodied the values and national integrity
necessary for a new India, while the upper castes and their scriptures
represented only a society of exploitation, superstition, irrationality and
backwardness.
Phule’s was the first historical materialist theory of caste,2 and it heralded
major themes of the Dalit and non-Brahman movements that were to
develop in the twentieth century. In Phule’s hands it was much more than a
simple ‘racial theory’; rather Phule used the dominant racial framework of
the ‘Aryan theory’ to evolve a total depiction of the role of violence and
community; it has even been argued, by the historian G.P. Deshpande, that
Phule was the first Indian ‘system builder’ … [the] first to attempt at
transforming plural categories of history into singular or universal …
[he] talked about knowledge and power much before Foucault did. In fact
Foucault’s post-Modernist analysis came at a time when Europe has
literally seen an ‘end of history’ whereas Phule’s efforts were to change
the world/society with the weapon of knowledge.3
Later movements, however, lost these nuances and tended to assert it as a
simple racial ideology of superiority against the increasingly aggressive
(and sophisticated) ideologies of caste legitimacy used by the growing
Hindu revivalist movement. In effect, emphasizing racial/ethnic
contradictions became a weapon against those who stressed racial/ethnic
solidarity of ‘Hindus’.
The 1920s saw the emergence of Marxism, asserting a new theory of
exploitation and liberation, claiming to have a total analysis applicable to
India as to any society. It was rapidly picked up by a group of young,
educated and mostly upper-caste radical nationalists searching for a mass
base of the movement and eventually founding new communist and
socialist parties. It also began to assert a powerful influence on the thinking
of left Congressmen such as Nehru and his colleagues.
‘Marxism’ as a theory and ideology came into India and existed for fifty
years (with the solitary exception of D.D. Kosambi) in a fairly mechanical,
vulgarized form; its contribution to all liberation movements was its firm
assertion that social systems and relations are historical (they have come
into existence, change and will come to an end), material (they have a solid
base in production and collective, non-ideal social forces), and
characterized by conflict, contradiction and exploitation. Its disadvantage
was that it took the overriding reality of ‘class’ and ‘class struggle’ so
strongly as to assert the fundamental irrelevance of every other sociological
category. Indeed, at first the power of the ‘class’ metaphor seemed so strong
both for analysis and as a guide to action that it was easy for the proponents
of Marxism and socialism to treat family, kinship, the state, gender, and in
India of course caste, as not only secondary but practically non-existent
factors. Its influence lay in its seductive strength, and it was an influence
exerted not only on Indian activists but also on academics, to the extent that
a large number of the Marxist-influenced theoretical and empirical studies
even during the 1970s and 1980s identified their radicalism with their
assertion that behind the apparent reality of caste ultimately lay class and its
dialectics, a ‘class content to a caste form’. 4
This Marxist mechanical materialism not only succeeded in becoming the
primary ideology guiding or at least uniting the developing working class
and peasant movements of the country at a national level; it also exerted a
powerful influence over the anti-caste movement. For even when this
movement challenged Marxist thinking to assert the centrality of caste, it
tended to do so with an acceptance of the fundamental framework exerted
by Marxism. For Phule, economic and social and political domination, and
exploitation had been interwoven factors (which is one reason why it is
inadequate to call his a ‘racial’ theory), but Marxism set up, for decades to
come, the paradigmatic polarities of ‘class and caste’, ‘base and
superstructure’, ‘economic and social/cultural ideological’. For communist
and socialist activists (and for Nehruvite progressives) this meant taking
class/the base/economic as primary; and for the anti-caste radicals it meant
simply turning the polarity around. In doing so, in asserting that
superstructure/cultural/ideological factors were primary they identified
‘caste’ with the cultural/ideological sphere in contrast to the economic
sphere, and argued for the secondary role, if not ultimate irrelevance of,
‘economics’ and ‘class’. This happened in part with Ambedkar himself, as
we shall see in chapter 7, and also with the Lohiaite socialists; though the
socialists as much as communists seemed to assume the irrelevance of caste
in the pre-independence period, once they came to theorize it as important
in Indian society they too analyzed it as a non-economic cultural category.
Paradoxically, the influence of Marxism on anti-caste trends was thus to
widen divisions. Rather than lead to an integrated theory combining
economic/political/cultural factors, these were separated; activists theorized
only about ‘caste’ and took ‘class’ for granted. Phule himself had had no
theory of economic development or changes in mode of production as part
of his overall analysis; but Ambedkar (and his contemporaries) also
developed little of an independent economic analysis; they took from
Marxism a broad economic radicalism and Ambedkar himself wrote
considerably on financial issues, but little of this was integrated into their
social-historical interpretations of the caste system, which was treated as an
altogether independent field of analysis.
The equation of class/caste-base/superstructure also held when new
Marxist thinking on caste emerged in the 1970s in the face of a challenge
from a renewed Dalit and anti-caste movement. This again took the form of
reasserting the importance of caste as a cultural/ideological factor. If the
Naxalite trend in India seemed the most ready (by the 1980s at least) to pay
attention to the social reality of caste, this was in part because the Maoist
framework of ‘contradictions’ could allow an understanding which saw
cultural or political factors as at times playing the ‘leading role’ in a
contradiction. Similarly, Althusserian influence on academic Marxists could
stimulate a view of the superstructure (including caste in India) as
‘dominant’ if not determinant in a pre-capitalist society. This led to an
analysis (for instance that of my earlier works) which argued that in pre-
colonial Indian society there were unique features of the structuring of
economic relations as a result of caste, with jajmani (balutedari) relations
being a central feature; in ‘caste-feudal society’ thus castes and class were
interwoven while in contrast in the capitalist mode of production economic
classes and castes could be seen as separating themselves from each other. 5
Generally these revisionist attempts took for granted the basic ‘class’ or
economic theories of Marxism, including the analysis of the capitalist mode
of production and the Stalinist ‘five stage’ theory of history (primitive
communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism), simply
identifying caste as the superstructure of feudal society.6 They accepted the
identification of the proletariat as vanguard and the peasantry as basically a
backward, feudal class designed to disintegrate (or ‘differentiate’) under
capitalism into a basically proletarianized agricultural labourer/poor peasant
class and a basically bourgeois rich peasant/capitalist farmer class. They
accepted the notion that not only socialism but also capitalism laid a basis
in the forces and relations of production for eradicating caste relations.
Thus they tended to argue that while caste is an important superstructural
feature of capitalist society (important in the sense of requiring specific
struggles to abolish it (a position that differentiates them from more
traditional Marxists) its main function is to exercise a retarding role on the
development of class struggle (for instance, when rural rich farmer elites
from ‘dominant castes’ use caste ties to split the rural poor).
Within the new Dalit and anti-caste movement itself attempts to present a
combined ‘class–caste’ approach gained prominence after 1970. An
important recent version is that of Sharad Patil, who has put forward a
combined approach based on what he claims is a new methodology of
‘Marxism-Phule-Ambedkarism’, which focuses not on caste as an
ideological system but on jatis as entities, arguing that in pre-capitalist
societies jatis themselves were basic units of production and exploitation.7
In this approach, ‘caste conflict’ or jati sangarsh is seen as being equivalent
to ‘class conflict, not simply a distraction or obstacle to the real struggle and
progressive in the sense of a fight against the basic exploitation of the
system. Patil also identifies caste with ‘feudalism’ and argues that following
the British conquest class relations associated with capitalism came into
existence, so that a compound class–caste struggle is necessary today.
A major problem with this approach is that even in pre-British society,
castes (jatis) were only superficially more concrete than ‘class’. It is true
that ‘classes’ cannot be simply identified in pre-British India, but neither
did (or do) jatis exist as solid and delimitable social units. Sub-castes, as
many anthropologists have pointed out, were the real units of endogamy
and interaction, while the broader jati was often a category or identity rather
than an actually existing group. Thus there were many different kinds of
Kunbi-Marathas, Jats, Okkaligas, etc., and they acted in different ways in
different areas. Further, the notion of jati sangarsh does not answer the
question: which were the jatis in struggle, which were the fundamental
exploiters and which exploited? This is not so simple. Brahmans might
easily be identified as exploiters, Dalits and balutedars (Shudra service
castes) as exploited. But what about Kunbis, Kapus, Vokkaligas, etc? Were
they exploited or exploiters? Were they, as a ‘dominant caste’ in the village,
exploiting Dalits and artisans, or were they an exploited peasantry? Sharad
Patil’s methodology, however much it is elaborated into a compelling
account of ancient Indian history, has not even attempted to pose this
question, let alone answer it; nor has it provided an obvious logic for his
historical periodicization.

• THE PRINCIPLES OF A HISTORICAL MATERIALISTIC THEORY OF

CASTE
The problem with attempts such as those of Sharad Patil to develop a
‘class–caste’ analysis, as well as the recent ‘ecological’ theories of caste
such as those of Madhav Gadgil and Ramchandra Guha,8 is that they take
too much for granted, in simply adding ‘caste’ to accepted class categories
of workers, peasants, capitalists and landlords, without questioning the
traditional conceptualizations of stages of history or modes of production.
‘Class–caste’ analyses have proved rather sterile as indeed have all the
‘additive’ theories (class and race, class and patriarchy, etc.) put forward in
reaction to the new social movements of today.
In spite of the many problems with existing Marxist theories of class and
economic exploitation, the basic approach of Marxist methodology is useful
for an adequate understanding of the structure and role of caste in South
Asian society. The basic guideline for any analysis in the interests of the
oppressed people is to ask: who are the exploiters and who are the
exploited? How can the exploited organize their struggle to move in the
direction of liberation? And what is the relation of the structures of
exploitation to the historical possibilities of moving in the direction of
liberation from exploitation?. In the words of Marx. ‘Philosophers have
only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.’9 And to answer this
question, he does not begin with ‘class’, which is really a derived and
secondary concept in the total theory, but looks at how humans organize
their production and how what they produce, the surplus product
embodying their surplus labour, is extracted and appropriated by the non-
producing sections of society. In his words,
The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped
out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled ….
It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of
production to the direct producers—a relation always naturally
corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of
labour and thereby its social productivity—which reveals the inner-most
secret, the hidden base of the entire social structure and with it … the
corresponding specific form of the state. 10
This methodology leads us to look at the concrete forms of production in
any society, the concrete forms of the production, expropriation and
accumulation of surplus labour. In pre-British Indian society, for example,
we can answer the question of whether ‘dominant caste’ peasants were
exploiters or not by this criterion. Dalits and balutedars or artisans
apparently worked for the ‘village community’ or the ‘dominant’ peasants.
They produced tools, ploughs, ropes, etc., for agricultural production; they
often worked as labourers on the land. But if we analyze what happened to
their surplus labour, we can see that it was embodied in the crops grown by
the peasants and that the greatest share of these crops was taken by the
representatives of the state (jagirdars, rajas, deshmukhs, sardars, zamindars)
and of religion (Brahmans). These exploiters therefore appropriated the
surplus labour not only of peasants but also of the craftsmen, field
labourers, etc. Therefore we can identify exploited jatis as the peasant castes
(Kunbis, Kapus, etc.) and the Dalits, balutedars and others. And in
identifying the exploiters, we have to note that it is not so easy to identify
them in terms of jati, except for Brahmans who almost never laboured and
always claimed an important share of the surplus. Besides Brahmans, the
major exploiters were the holders of state and political power, and these
included households not only from the ‘peasant’ jatis but also many from
‘lower’ jatis as well. But they were exploiters not as members of such a jati,
but as holders of state power.
In this methodological approach, we do not begin with ‘class’; the more
basic concept is that of exploitation and the ‘specific economic form in
which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of direct producers.’ In the strict
sense, classes come into existence only with capitalism and then only in the
capitalist ‘core’ areas of factory production; peasantries, tribal
communities, etc., are ‘class-like’ but their relations of exploitation are
interwoven with community/tribal/kinship features in pre-capitalist systems
and even when these are linked to capital accumulation in a capitalist
world-system; thus their fight against exploitation takes place through
communities, tribes, castes and kinship groups. Sharad Patil objects to the
application of ‘class’ to pre-British India; but in fact the same objection
applies to any pre-capitalist society.
‘Class’ as defined solely in terms of the ownership of private property
and the ownership or control of the means of production does not explain
major aspects of exploitation and capital accumulation. A theory of
historical materialism applicable in current circumstances will have to
incorporate the elements of violence, force, domination, knowledge
suggested by (among others) Jotiba Phule. Certainly the issues arising out
of the ‘fall of socialism’ in Eastern Europe, the general crisis of statist
societies, implies this need for broadening, as does increased thinking about
the ‘conditions of production’ stimulated by ecological issues; the analysis
of caste in India also does so. Rethinking the workings of the capitalist
system as such, in relation not only to caste but also to patriarchy,
environmental issues, the peasantry and other ‘classes’, is on the agenda for
today.
In analyzing how the caste system or jati vyavastha works, we would
argue that it should not be seen merely as ideological or superstructural;
neither should it be identified simply as a cluster of concrete and interacting
jatis. It is a ‘system’. Of what? Of a set of basically kinship-like social
practices and the rules that surround them. The former are ‘material’; the
latter are ‘ideological’ but in the sense of often ‘unconscious’ rules of
behaviour as contrasted with a conscious system of ideology (a distinction
used by many anthropologists). For instance, the conscious ideology of
varna-shrama dharma constituted a religiously-authoritated system used to
interpret and support the caste system and the economic exploitation
involved in it; but it is different from the actual rules of behaviour defining
expected behaviour among and between members of different jatis.
Thus, the endogamous principles and practices that constitute the jatis,
the purity–pollution behaviour rules and occupational tasks governing the
relations of hierarchy and exploitation existing among them, are the
practices and rules that constitute the caste system. This set of practices and
rules has its own dynamics and has deeply shaped Indian society and the
Indian economic system; but it has also been shaped by changing economic
relations, by conquest and the changes in state formations, by involvement
with the market and wage labour—to mention a few of the non-caste
aspects interacting with caste.
A few comments can be made about this methodological approach and
our conceptualizations of the Dalit movement.
First, this definition of case takes in both the jatis and the system of
hierarchical relations (from exploitation to purity–pollution rules) among
them. A definition of ‘caste’ focusing only on jatis, even seen as existing in
a hierarchy, tends to imply that ‘caste struggles’ or ‘caste movements’ are
movements of a jati or set of jatis for rising in the system; they are not
necessarily against the system and may result in leaving it intact. In this
sense it is quite natural that ‘caste movements’ would not be seen as
progressive. The system is not conceptualized at all. On the other hand,
looking at the system only ideologically (even when the ideology is one of
inequality) does imply that the exploited classes have an interest in
overthrowing the caste system—but it tends to imply that all the exploited
sections (workers, agricultural labourers, peasants, middle and low castes)
have an equal interest in doing so and in preventing caste-created divisions
among themselves. It fails to identify those groups with the greatest interest
in being anti-caste. And caste becomes apparent only in terms of a
backward ideology having a retarding effect on class struggle.
However, if we realize that the caste system both constitutes units of
struggle (castes or jatis or collections of them) and that rules of hierarchy
and domination are essential to their constitution, then the lowest castes
have an inherent interest not simply in rising in the system but in
overthrowing it (‘middle’ castes also have an interest in overthrowing it, but
not so great). Any real movement of the most oppressed section, the Dalits,
will have to confront the entire system. This is not to say that all collective
actions by Dalits will do so; their actual development depends on the
possibilities of the situation, question of alliances, support of middle castes,
etc. But Dalit movements will have an inherent interest in moving in a
radical direction.
Further, to the extent that jatis and the caste hierarchy define/ constitute
the relations of surplus production and extraction (which they do in varying
ways and degrees at different historical periods), the anti-caste struggle is
inherently also a ‘class struggle’, that is a struggle against economic
exploitation.

• THE SPECIFICITY OF CASTE: WHY SOUTH ASIA?

The caste system exists in the South Asian subcontinent and there only.
While Brahmanic Hinduism strengthened it, even gave it its full
‘realization’, caste exists also in Muslim Pakistan and Bangladesh and
among the Buddhist Sinhalese, while on the other hand the long historical
influence of ‘Hinduism’ (Vaishnavism, Saivism) on South-east Asian
societies did nothing to create a caste system there. Thus, caste is a social
system characteristic of the subcontinent.
This fact by itself refutes oversimplified interpretations of almost any
type. The identification of caste, for instance, as caused by, in some sense,
Hindu religious ideology, cannot explain the fact that the system appears to
have its origins before the consolidated dominance of Hinduism as a
religion in India. Similarly, ‘racial theories’ of Aryan conquest, or theories
describing caste as a simple crystallization of what was originally an
economic division of labour, fail to explain why this happened in South
Asia and not in other regions of the world: conquest, the development of
economic surplus and an increasing division of labour, etc., are
characteristic of almost all regions, not only of South Asia. Further, the
Vedic Aryans or Indo-Europeans were not uniquely insistent on divisions
by birth or race. Why only here did a caste system emerge?
The situation suggests that there were certain social-cultural features of
the subcontinent itself, existing prior to the development of a surplus and
prior to conquest, that pushed social evolution in a particular direction. This
is the position of one of the most stimulating recent discussions of caste
origins by Morton Klass, who argues that a particular system of interacting
tribal social groups (‘equalitarian’ enclosed tribal groups) existed
throughout the subcontinent and as economic inequality increased with the
development of an agricultural surplus, a process took place in which,
rather than each tribe becoming internally stratified, different tribes entered
into exchange processes for the surplus, transforming themselves into jatis,
some becoming landholding cultivators, some offering various types of
services or labour but remaining corporate groups. According to Klass,
South Asia as a whole became characterized by spreading rice and hard-
grain cultivation in certain ecological zones, while other zones (as today)
were characterized by hunting and gathering, shifting agriculture, herding
and so on. This totality is the arena for sociocultural change …. I propose
that the caste system came into existence not in Bengal or the Malabar
Coast or the Indus Valley but over the entire subcontinent. Different
regions and peoples participated in different and unequal ways,
sometimes making a contribution and at other times remaining peripheral
to developments. 11
This locates the most important causal feature (or more accurately, a
necessary condition for the emergence of caste) in the specific
characteristics of pre-state South Asian society, prior to the Indus
civilization and prior to the Aryan conquest. There is some archeological
evidence for this uniqueness. Archeologists stress that since ancient times
the subcontinent has had groups inhabiting different ecological niches and
carrying on varying practices of food production/extraction (hunters,
fishers, collectors, later agriculturalists) with some form of inter-community
relations involving exchange of products. Stone tools in the subcontinent
are frequently found in ‘large factory sites’, indicating that they were made
by one group for much wider use, with some form of exchange. According
to the Allchins,
One of the distinctive features of South Asian culture in historic and
recent times is the way in which it has encapsulated communities at
many different cultural and technological levels, allowing them, to a
large extent, to retain their identity and establish intercommunity
relationships. Early Indian literature makes it clear that this was a feature
of northwest Indian society during the first millennium B.C. It seems
highly probably that its roots, like those of the cultural regions, extend
back much further ….12
Gregory Possehl, analyzing Lothal, a port town of the Harappan period,
writes of an alliance of the settlers with nearby hunting and gathering
peoples. This relationship
 suggests … that within the late third and early second millennia B.C. a
complex interlocking cultural mosaic was developing in South Asia …
which suggests a growth of interdependence between sociocultural
groups with fundamentally different systems of settlement and
subsistence, material culture and presumably diverse cultural traditions.
This is a form of cultural integration still found in India … This
interlocking relationship is also generally applicable to one of the
essential aspects of caste organization if viewed as a total system. 13
These various groups may be seen as proto-castes, and it may well be
that they had the corporate–equalitarian features hypothesized by Klass:
once a surplus developed, processes of conquest took place and states and
cities were established, these groups, tribes becoming jatis, were integrated
gradually into a hierarchical order that included relations of exploitation,
domination and ideo-logical concepts and practices of purity and pollution.
Certainly crucial ‘tribal’ features are retained in jatis, ranging from closed
boundaries between tribes to the retainment of ‘clan’ sections within many
jatis.
But if India (in the words of anthropologists) is a ‘tribal society
rearranged to fit a civilization’, this was possible because of the unique
features of its tribal (pre-class) society. In an important critique of the
concept of ‘tribe’, Morton Fried has argued that in fact ‘tribes’ as such
(bounded economic–political units) did not exist prior to the formation of
states; pre-state societies were much more fluid and amorphous than the
concept of ‘tribe’ allows for, and ‘tribes’ as units came into being primarily
in defensive reactions to state encroachment.14 ‘Tribal closure’ may be a
specific South Asian feature, but it is not a necessary characteristic of
‘tribal’ societies.
Can we trace this tendency to any broader ‘ethnic’ stream in South Asia?
South Asian society is constituted, ethnically, of diverse strands—Aryan,
Mundari (Austro-Asiatic), Sino-Tibetan, Dravidian. Of these the Mundari
groups appear to have had a more equalitarian and matrilineal culture from
earlier times: the Khasis today show the remnants of this in India; the Hos,
Santhals, etc., are patrilineal but this is very likely an adoption from the
surrounding ‘Hindu’ society over the years. Aryans or Indo-Europeans,
while patrilinear nomadic warriors in their first appearance on the historical
scene, were not ridden with caste-like distinctions until after they made
their entry into India. Sino-Tibetan groups to this day have less of caste
distinction.
This leaves the Dravidians. Can it be said that a tendency to closed-group
formation and purity–pollution hierarchies had their origin among these,
perhaps the most ancient peoples of the subcontinent? Tamil Sangam period
literature, as described by George Hart, while relatively recent in historical
times, gives some interesting indications because of the relatively low
‘Aryan’ impact in this period. 15
First, very much embedded in Tamil social conceptualization is the
theory of the five tinais, different types of environment inhabited by people
have different productive relations to the land. These were described in
about the third century AD as follows:
1. … tribes of ploughmen (uluvar) inhabiting fertile, well-watered tracts
and living in villages called ur;
2. hill people who are foresters, make charms and tell fortunes, and may
come out of the forest to work in the panai;
3. pastoralists, also called ayar (cowmen), kovalar (shepherds) and
idaiyar (cowhered or shepherd);
4. fishing people …;
5. People of the dry plains called eyinar, maravar and vedar who are
hunters of both the dry plains and the forests.16
With this, the relationship between communities suggested in archeological
writings became conceptualized in Dravidian culture.
Second, not only were there discrete groups practicing different
occupations (proto-castes); boundaries between them seem to have been
most striking among the groups lowest in the social scale. Many of these
groups were seen as polluting, and Hart argues that in fact the Brahmans
(seen as of Aryan/northern origin) picked up concepts of purity/pollution
from the indigenous Dravidians and then exaggerated them to maintain
their own superiority. 17 The origin of the purity/pollution hierarchy is seen
in the notion of sacred power, which is potentially dangerous if it cannot be
checked:
Among those called low in the example just given there is one factor that
virtually all share: they are rendered dangerous by the sacred power with
 which they come into contact in their occupations. The leather worker is
infected by the soul of the cow whose skin he works; the man at the
funeral by the spirit of the dead man; the washerwoman by the dirt (and
especially the menstrual discharge) on the clothes she cleans; and the
pulsitti by the dangerous gods who possess her. The drummers and bards
were rendered dangerous by the gods who were thought to reside in their
drums and lutes, and by their occupations, which involved controlling
dangerous forces by playing during battle.18
Women were especially liable to polluting contact, and Hart views most of
the extreme Hindu oppression of women, including widow seclusion and
sati, as deriving from Dravidian traditions that attributed a sacred power to
women that was dangerous if uncontrolled by patriarchal bondage.19
A final element in Tamil Sangam society is important for the analysis of
caste. The basic social division was three-fold. The anthropologist Tyler has
called it a division into ‘the dominant, the dependent and the degraded’—
the canror or warrior elite, the ilicinar or toiling commoners, and the
unclean pulaiyar.20 A recent study of caste at the other end of the
subcontinent, in Nepal, has noted a similar tripartite division into the
‘thread-wearing castes’, the ‘alcohol-drinking castes’ and the ‘water-not-to-
be-taken-from castes’, linking this to the theory of the three gunas.21
Whatever its mythical or scriptural justification, the division describes the
actual social reality of the caste system more accurately than the ‘four
castes’ of the chaturvarnya ideologization. The four-fold division of
Brahman, Ksatriya, Vaishya, Shudra was developed to legitimate the way in
which divisions among the Aryans were solidifying and indigenous groups
were being absorbed into a new system, but it is misleading in suggesting a
simple ‘division of labour’ which has no immediate reference to
purity/pollution concepts, and does not include untouchables.
In contrast, the three-fold division, which was also used by the Dalit and
non-Brahman movements, makes it clear that impurity and with it
untouchability are inherent to the system. The division into ‘dependent’ and
‘impure’ suggests that both those who performed demeaning manual labour
and those who carried on activities having to do with dangerous and/or
polluting occupations were exploited, but that there was a hierarchy and
division among them. It is out of this dualism that the later Dalit and non-
Brahman movements grew: on the one hand, Dalits have an inherent
interest shared with all exploited (specifically with those classed as Shudra,
low, dependent toilers) in destroying the system; on the other, as those
defined as ‘impure’ and relegated to quarters ‘outside the village’ they have
a special oppression and a special interest in a movement against the entire
hierarchy based on purity–pollution. Though ‘untouchability’ only really
solidified after the fourth to sixth centuries AD, its roots can be traced almost
as early as caste in general.
Thus the largest indigenous people of the subcontinent, the ancient
Dravidians, began to culturally conceptualize the relationships between
environmentally specialized and equalitarian groups forming a kind of
proto-caste system. They had, similar to many tribal societies, a notion of
sacred powers in nature which were potentially dangerous, and a conceptual
linkage of these with certain occupations and activities and with women.
Such factors may well have given an initial social superiority to women and
to these groups in early agricultural and herding–hunting–fishing societies.
But as surplus accumulation grew and men and warriors gained dominance,
the link with sacred power was reversed; the ‘dangerous’ became the
‘polluting’ and eventually ‘impure’ and ‘low’. This process clearly had its
beginnings with the largely Dravidian-based Indus civilization, but it
developed only with the impact of the invading Indo-Europeans on the
indigenous culture and the gradual emergence of the Brahmans as a group
systematizing the notions of purity and pollution and the developing caste
hierarchy, with themselves at the top. It climaxed with the constitution of
the caste system, or varnashrama dharma as the dominant social structure
of feudal state societies during the sixth to ninth centuries after a complex
fight with competing religious–ideological traditions. In other words, while
the ‘necessary conditions’ lay in the characteristics of the indigenous
(primarily Dravidian) inhabitants of the subcontinent, we also have to look
to the role of conquest, force and violence in the process of the developing
economic surplus to adequately explain the emergence of caste.

• THE DEVELOPMENT OF CASTE SOCIETY: ‘REVOLUTION AND

COUNTER-REVOLUTION’
While we can identify ‘proto-caste’ features in the early Dravidian culture,
the caste system itself emerged in a process linked with the consolidation of
class (economic) divisions, patriarchy and the rise of the state. The
development of Indian caste society is seen in different ways of different
theories of caste. Generally the more conservative social science theories,
like the legitimizing ideologizations of the system, have little to say about
any processes or ‘stages’ of development but instead take the system as
either essentially existing or evolving in a smooth, harmonious process.
‘Racial’ theories also have tended to take the system as a given; once Aryan
conquest institutes it, the forms of oppression are fixed and remain more or
less unchanged. Even the recent ‘economic’ and ‘ecological’ theories take it
as relatively unchanging.
In contrast the main radical theories, including those influenced by
Marxism, emphasize stages in the development of caste. For traditional
Marxists this means simply seeing caste in terms of the ‘superstructure’ of
the orthodox five stages (primitive communism, slavery, feudalism,
capitalism, and socialism). Modern variations on this include Dipankar
Gupta, seeing varna as the superstructure of Asiatic society and jati as the
superstructure of feudal society. Sharad Patil similarly uses an adaption of
the five stages, which he identifies as matriarchal society, das-slave society
(characterized by varnas; this itself is broken up into various types and sub-
stages), and jati-feudal society beginning with the rise of states. Strikingly,
one of the most interesting adaptions, apparently independent of Marxism,
is Ambedkar’s ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution’, which divides the
pre-Muslim period as divided into stages of (a) ‘Brahmanism’ (the Vedic
period), (b) ‘Buddhism’, connected with the rise of the first Magadha–
Mauryan states and representing a revolutionary denial of caste inequalities;
and (c) ‘Hinduism’, or the counter-revolution which consolidates Brahman
dominance and the caste hierarchy. All of these approaches share a concern
for looking at caste in terms of uneven development, contradiction and
radical and violent changes.
Generally we can identify four main periods following pre-class (or
‘proto-caste’) society, marked by specific features of the development of
Indian social structure (including specific economic structures or ‘class’
forms, caste, patriarchy and the state): (a) the nearly 500 years of the Indus
civilization; (b) the millennia-long period from its fall and the ascendency
of the Indo-Europeans to the Gangetic valley states; (c) a second
millennium stretching up to the consolidation of caste-feudalism and
characterized by conflict between major ‘religious’ traditions of Hinduism,
Buddhism and Jainism; (d) the period of medieval caste-feudalism
characterized by the dominance of Hinduism and the later entry of Islam,
stretching from the sixth-tenth centuries AD to colonial rule. All of these
saw important developments and changes in the caste system.
The Indus civilization—one of the oldest in the world with impressive
achievements in two major cities and numerous towns scattered over a huge
geographical region—was the starting point for what we know as ‘Indian
civilization’. Unfortunately, because its script is not yet deciphered, we
have little direct evidence of its social structure and cultural practices. The
main language was almost certainly Dravidian. It was clearly a stratified
society, with large and small houses indicating a major division into rich
and poor. Yet the relatively weak development of weapons and the absence
of other evidences of state machinery suggest that the major integrating role
was played by cultural–religious unity rather than state power.22 A proto-
Shiva god and a goddess appear on many of the famous seals, and the
earlier numerical predominance of female figurines suggests a matrilineal–
matricentric heritage. Money was absent, and some archeologists believe
that trade was carried on by special groups of wandering nomads, a
development of earlier socially-mediated exchange between different types
of production groups. It has also been argued that the famous granaries of
Mohenjodaro and Harappa were, in analogy to the village grain-heap,
repositories of agricultural produce distributed under administrative control
to different groups who claimed by social tradition a share of the produce, a
kind of precursor of the jajmani system.23
Finally, the uniformity of artisan products over a wide geographical
territory is noted, ‘so marked that it is possible to typify each craft with a
single set of examples drawn from one site alone … the uniformity of forms
and painted decorations which they display cannot be accounted for by
trade’.24 This suggests the existence of caste-like groups of occupational
specialists, maintaining endogamy and cultural traditions over a wide
territory while producing locally.
Thus, while there is as yet no direct evidence regarding the social system
of the Harappans, there is indirect evidence that the ‘proto-caste’ features of
subcontinental and Dravidian culture were carried forward among them.
However, the transformation of the ‘sacred’ and ‘dangerous’ into the
‘impure’, something that has to be dominated and bound, seems to require
the solidification of dominance in state power and warrior control. And
these state and military features were conspicuously minimal in the Indus
civilization, in comparison with all other earlier city–state societies.
After the coming of the Aryans we have better linguistic and literary
evidence, though it has to be cautiously analyzed.25 The Aryan advent
cannot be simply understood as a conquest over equalitarian indigenous
peoples which gave rise to the caste system. Nevertheless, ‘Aryans’ and
‘conquest’ did play a role. The Indo-Europeans were a patrilineal people, in
contrast to local matrilineal traditions, though their patriarchy, tribal and
statist, gave certain freedom to women. Once, however, they absorbed the
notions of ‘sacred power’ and ‘danger’ associated with women and low
castes in the Dravidian tradition, the resulting patriarchal synthesis in the
context of group conflict was far more complete and violent in its control of
women. Similarly, the tribal or lineage inequalities that intensified among
Vedic people as they spread throughout India were not really ‘caste-like’,26
but once they absorbed the ‘proto-caste’ features among the indigenous
culture and various groups fought for dominance of the system, a caste
hierarchy developed. Chaturvarnya did not actually describe existing social
groups, but was rather an ideology overlaying the very different processes
of transformation of ‘proto-caste’ tribal groups into jatis. In this Brahmans
played a key role—Brahmans who derived both ethnically and culturally
from indigenous as well as Aryan priestly groups, but who identified with
the Aryans as they sought to legitimize and extend the total system of
dominance and exploitation associated with caste in a period of developing
production, surpluses and economic inequalities.
There was neither exactly an ‘Aryan invasion’ or an ‘Aryan conquest’; it
would be wrong to see the Aryans as a consistent ethnic group throughout
(many scholars in fact describe two waves of entry, the less patriarchal ‘pre-
Vedic’ Aryans who gave rise to the ‘outer ring’ of Indo-European languages
such as Marathi, Bengali, Oriya, etc., and the Vedic Aryans).27 The Indus
civilization did not fall as a result of Aryan raids, but rather, apparently,
through environmental degradation associated with deforestation and
changing river courses; the Aryans may have given the finishing touch.
They appear on the Indian scene as fairly flexible groups ready to adapt to
local customs. A horse-driving, cattle-herding people, they adopted not only
wheat and rice cultivation from indigenous Dravidian and Mundari peoples,
they also intermarried frequently. Not only do the Shudras derive mainly
from absorbed and dominated indigenous groups, the major twice-born
varnas also had mixed origins. Large numbers of Brahmans were absorbed
from pre-Aryans; the common term for merchant, vani, apparently derives
from a term pani used for the richer of the pre-Aryan enemies; even a
number of Ksatriyas may have had pre-Aryan or mixed origins—and one
linguist suggests that both the terms ‘Bharat’ and ‘Satavahana’ derive from
symbols meaning ‘office-bearer’ used for a Harappan ruling clan.28
With the period of the rise of the state in the Gangetic valley in the
middle of the first millennium BC caste inequalities appear as more
crystallized and began to get the stamp of legitimacy with the development
of Brahmanic Hinduism, symbolized finally in the laws of Manu. In these,
extreme forms of the subordination of women and Shudras were sanctioned,
and Brahmans claimed superiority at the top of a hierarchy of purity–
pollution and occupational specialization.
However, this period of the rise of the Magadha–Mauryan states has been
characterized by Ambedkar as that of the ‘Buddhist revolution’ which was
revolutionary in transcending Vedic tribal particularism and in denying
caste and gender inferiority;29 and at least some evidence shows that it
inaugurated a long period of contention for dominance. As Thapar, for
instance, points out, the Magadha–Mauryan area was seen as anti-Brahman
or mleccha territory,30 while early Buddhist literature (argued by scholars
such as Uma Chakravarty to give a more accurate depiction of the society)
shows inequality neither in the form of varna or jati but rather in ‘class-
like’ categories such as the gahapati and daskammakara groups.31 The
Mauryan state had large areas of statist administration, with state-controlled
lands and factories intermixed with privately controlled production. There
is no evidence of the jajmani system for a long period, rather guilds were
predominant. Further, even when we see signs of caste consolidation in
northern India, the Satavahana era in the Deccan indicates a much more
open, flexible, less caste-ridden society, as we shall see in chapter 2.
It is really only during the sixth to tenth century AD period, which
scholars such as R.S. Sharma and Kosambi identify as the development of
‘feudalism’, that we see the definitive consolidation of Hinduism as the
dominant religion using state power to maintain itself, the jajmani-linked
village economy, land grants to Brahmans (and to other intermediaries) as a
major element in ‘feudal’ tendencies, and the marking out of untouchables
as a separately defined excluded group ‘outside the village’. One scholar
argues, for the case of south India, that this was a violent process:
Tamil literature makes it painfully clear that the foundations of the
medieval synthesis were soaked in blood from battles that established the
temple-centered, devotional Brahmanical religious ceremonial practice at
the centre of the agrarian order …. The Sanskritic and temple-centered
character of Tamil verse during medieval times distinguishes it sharply
from earlier epochs and nourishes a popular belief in Tamil Nadu today
that medieval South India succumbed to an invasion of Brahmans from
the north.32
The long interregnum of a thousand years between the emergence of the
first states in the Gangetic valley and the consolidation of the Brahmanic–
Hindu social order suggests that the identification of ‘Indian’ culture with
‘Hinduism’ is badly mistaken, that the dominance of Hinduism was not so
easily achieved and perhaps not inevitable, and that elements of revolt and
opposition remained strong from the beginning. In this sense, though he
does not take into account changes in production systems and the
exploitativeness of the non-Hindu early states, Ambedkar’s metaphor of
‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution’ makes the crucial point: the caste
system came to dominance in India in a process of turmoil, warfare,
contradiction and conflict. In particular, we may see its consolidation as a
result of the alliance of Brahmanism (including both ideological forces and
the temple and other religious institutions) and state power, of the coming
together of Brahmans and the amorphous set of powerholders, chieftains
and rajas of various caste and tribal origins who had their power confirmed
in the emerging medieval synthesis.

• CASTE-FEUDAL SOCIETY
What exactly was the nature of this medieval synthesis? While Marxist
activists have had no doubt that it was ‘feudal’ and early Marxist historians
such as D.D. Kosambi and R.S. Sharma supported this position, more
recently the notion of feudalism has been attacked. Influential works have
been Burton Stein’s analysis of Chola rule in Tamil Nadu as a ‘peasant
state’ and Harbans Mukhia’s argument that a basically ‘free peasantry’
controlled their own production process and developed improved
agricultural technology while the state appropriated a portion of the surplus
through ‘coercive noneconomic means’, so that conflict between peasants
and powerholders was outside the production process and over the amount
of revenue.33
In the ensuing debate, a number of points have come forward which
make it clear that the Indian agrarian structure has to be characterized as
‘caste-feudal’ to capture its specificity.
1 There seems to be a general agreement, including Kosambi, Sharma
and others, that the caste-defined village economy was becoming
consolidated by the late first millennium: that is, what is known as the
jajmani system in northern India, balutedari in Maharashtra and ayagar in
the Dravidian areas.34 This apparently replaced neither a slave economy (as
Mukhia tends to picture it) nor a more independent economy based on
Vaishya and gahapati peasants (as Sharma depicts it), but a mixed and open
economy with some areas of slave production and in other areas both
peasants and large landowners using hired labour and linked with trade and
artisan guilds. The ‘feudal’ caste-defined village was not really that of a
‘free peasantry’, though peasants and artisans can be said to have controlled
their means of production; rather, there was a strong element of caste-
bondage. Basic producers were split into jatis performing defined caste
duties and having on that basis a presumed right both to shares in the
harvest as well as various social-religious perquisites. It is important to
stress that corvee labour in India, or what is known as vethbegar or vethi
was normally heavily caste-linked and defined in terms of such traditional
caste duties. The degree of actual unfreedom of course varied, by area and
caste, with Dalits suffering the heaviest bondage.
2 The state did not simply appropriate revenue through ‘coercive’
means; legal-ideological formalities playing the same functional role as
‘property rights’ differentiated it from a pure bandit state. While it did not
have ‘ownership’ rights in the land, it did have legitimized claims to a
definite share of the produce and the labour (performed as a caste-duty)
which went into this and which was at times directly given as labour-
service. But the ‘state’ was no bureaucratic machine that simply
appropriated its share, nor was it an amorphous collection of looters;
instead its share of various portions of it were continually alienated to local
power-holders; the claim to be able to alienate rights in this way was, in
fact, as one historian has argued, part of the claim to be a ruler.35 These
claims to the surplus, identified as watan rights in Maharashtra, as amara in
Vijayanagar, were the central feature underlying the ‘legal’ claims of the
intermediaries (later to be identified collectively as ‘zamindars’) in the
Indian version of feudalism.36 Thus coercion linked with its ideological
justification as upholder of varnashrama dharma, the basic Brahmanic
ideology, was central to the medieval Indian state. And the powerholders of
this political system (equivalent to ‘feudal lords’) were, along with
Brahmans, the crucial section of the exploiting class.
3 If we are to characterize the ‘ruling castes’ of the caste-feudal system
as ‘Brahman’ and ‘Ksatriya’, it has to be noted that ‘Brahman’ denotes both
status (varna) and jati (or a set of jatis), while ‘Ksatriya’ denotes only a
status. In most parts of India and for most periods in history these
powerholders were drawn not from recognized ‘Ksatriya’ jatis such as
Rajputs but from Shudra jatis, mainly from the Shudra jatis who were
otherwise peasant cultivators, and sometimes from Adivasi tribes; it was
their holding of power that gave them Ksatriya status. In spite of Burton
Stein, this did not make India a ‘peasant state’ any more than it made it a
‘Shudra state’. These concepts rest on a caste/class confusion. Toiling
members of jatis some of whose members held political power might claim
from this a higher (‘Ksatriya’, ‘sat-Shudra’) status and have pretentions to
share in dominance, but (while such status did make some difference in
daily life relations) this did not make them any less exploited. The blanket
application of such categories as ‘dominant caste’ or ‘managerial castes’
can only be made by avoiding any analysis of production relations and
surplus extraction.
4 This caste-feudal society was not a society of ‘self-sufficient villages’
in which the main exploiters were the dominant elite at the village level.
Such a view neglects the wider context of a complex, highly productive and
politically and socially sophisticated feudal society. First, the material base,
the varied ecological niches and their interrelationship has to be noted.
India had tracts of very rich agricultural production, centred on the river
valleys and deltas and producing a large surplus with a highly stratified
social order as well as drier agricultural areas characterized by a more
egalitarian peasantry; the geographically largest area was under grasslands,
shrub or forests. All of these had not only their own specific forms of
production/extraction, but also material as well as social interrelations.
Caste relations in traditional India included not only the jajmani relations
internal to the village, but also relations of exchange between villagers,
forest dwellers, herders of the grasslands, and various other types of
producers or gatherers. 37 These relations of exchange and most intra-
village jajmani relations, though involving aspects of dominance and
hierarchy, can be distinguished from the relations of exploitation which
involved the extraction of surplus from the land and forest for the
appropriation of exploiting sections.
Where the lines of exploitation lay varied according to region. In the
relatively drier villages the situation is clearest. Here hierarchy existed but
inequalities were less; peasants laboured on their own land; even Dalit
labourers generally had claims to land (usually as watan lands given in
return for their caste-service), while it was only state officials—jagirdars,
inamdars, talukdars, deshmukhs, desais—who could be called anything like
non-labouring ‘land-lords’ or ‘feudal lords’. (Forest-settled tribal villages
represented an extreme case of this type.) The village headmen and
accountants (patils and kulkarnis in Maharashtra) occupied a dual position,
functioning sometimes as the lowest linchpin of the state power and
benefiting from this, sometimes acting as primus inter pares or
representatives of a village peasant brotherhood. Within this ‘formal’
structure, as surplus production grew, individual families could accumulate
wealth and power; Frank Perlin has shown how in seventeenth century
Maharashtra big families of both Brahman and Kunbi-Maratha background
could use the accumulation of such watandari rights to form large estates.
38 But these were clearly different from the majority peasant communities
of the village. They became part of the exploitative feudal structures as
individuals or families, not as members of particular castes (in contrast to
Brahmans, who as a caste were a part of the exploitative sections). Caste
inequality certainly lay in the fact that the so-called ‘dominant peasants’—
Kunbis, Jats, Kammas, Reddis—were more likely to produce families who
attained such power; but the powerholders also came from lower castes,
even on rare occasions from those classed as ‘untouchables’.
In the richer, irrigated villages we do seem to have ‘landlord elites’, at
least by the end of the medieval period, including non-Brahmans as well as
Brahmans. The most notable case are the Rajputs of the Gangetic valley, the
Nairs of Kerala, and the Vellalas of Tamil Nadu who were primarily non-
labouring managers of land and irrigation works, dominating a complex
society and with near slave-like castes of Dalit labourers doing the main
work on the fields. Ludden writes of the latter,
In stark contrast with the dry zone, the wet zone was not a land of rustic
warrior-peasants, but of two distinct peasant strata: one owned land, but
did not labour; the other laboured without owning even, in many cases,
the rights to its own labour power … [But] farms were small, they were
worked with premodern technology; they were worked as a way of life
and not as a business for profit. Farmers were, moreover, subject to
taxation by ruling elites. Many peasant attributes thus apply to farmers
within wet communities, though they comprised two strata, indeed two
classes, defined objectively by relative access to the means of production
and subjectively by their caste identity.39
There was still a fundamental difference between ‘Brahman’ and ‘non-
Brahman’ villages, seen if we look at how the surplus was claimed. The
crop was divided first into the melvaram (‘upper share’) and kilvaram
(‘lower share’). The former was controlled by the ruling elite of the locality,
the nattar and was frequently assigned to Brahmans; out of this in fact the
Brahman-controlled villages came to exist. The nattar were derived from
the local Vellala peasantry, but this did not mean that that peasantry as such
shared in the rule; in fact the division suggests that Vellala landholders
always had to give a share of the crop to the rulers, while Brahman
landholders did not. Peasants who cultivated the land or those who
managed and supervised cultivation got the lower share. It seems the
Vellalas were originally cultivating peasants and only as production and
surplus increased did their role change to managing and supervising
dependent labourers and tenants. The fact that they continued to give a large
‘upper share’ to powerholders showed their on-going subordination;
Brahmans almost always lived off the upper share and only rarely did the
supervisory tasks associated with the lower share.40
Thus, even in the case of the highly stratified villages of the irrigated
river valleys and plains a fundamental distinction can be drawn between
those whose labour contributed to the production of wealth and those who
—as religious functionaries, predators and state officials—lived off this
wealth. Land and its products provided the main source of wealth, but those
who worked and managed the land (even when this involved managing the
labour of inferior workers on the land and taking the products of craftsmen
for use on the land) also had to turn over a major share of this wealth.
It was state power which gave the ability to claim this surplus. Its linkage
to irrigation systems and land management is still relatively unresearched;
while traditional states clearly took a responsibility for the maintenance of
water systems and forests, much of water management activity was carried
on at the village level. Thus, relations of violence and domination embodied
in the state, and secondarily the cultural relations embodied in religious
institutions, played key roles in the extraction of surplus. And this is true
whether we are talking of the extreme village hierarchies of the highly
productive irrigated river valleys and deltas or the less differentiated rural
communities of dry lands, grasslands, forests and hills. In caste terms it can
be said that Brahmans benefited from and lived off this surplus as
communities (jatis) whereas the non-Brahmans who became ‘lords’ and
rulers or state officials in the system did so as powerful individual family-
clans. In this limited sense it can be said that the distinction between
‘Brahman–non-Brahman’ was a fundamental one, and that peasants, even
when they were a ‘dominant caste’, were basically a part of the exploited
sections.
At the same time, wherever we look in the traditional Indian system,
hierarchy and inequality among the exploited stands out clearly. Such
inequality existed among all feudal societies (it has been estimated, for
instance, that in medieval Europe nearly one-third of all peasant families
were landless); but in India it was institutionalized in the caste system.
Cultivating peasants with firm rights to the ‘lower share’ or to supervising
the village distribution of the ‘grainheap’ were at the top of village
hierarchies; artisans and subordinate tenants had rights that were both
institutionalized and secondary; herders and forest-dwelling hunters and
gatherers exchanged sometimes on a basis of inferiority, sometimes with
more independence; but everywhere the lowest castes of
Dalits/untouchables performed the most menial labour and were
fundamentally differentiated from the others in being classed as ‘impure’.

• CONCLUSION: DALITS AND THE ANTI-CASTE STRUGGLE

The lines of exploitation in pre-British India, as defined in terms of the
production, extraction and accumulation of surplus, were structured through
the caste system or jati vyavastha. This identified a particular caste division
of labour involving specific forms of hierarchy among the exploited, with at
least three major groups identified in most villages: toiling peasant castes,
most of whom were simply cultivators but with some ‘village management’
powers held by a dominant lineage (biradari, bhauki); artisans and service
castes performing particular caste-duties within a jajmani–balutedari
system; and (often lowest among those classed as balutedars) a large caste
of general labourers working for the village and its dominant sections and
classed as ‘untouchable’. Tribals and pastoralists outside the villages were
also among the exploited sections.
The unique position of ‘untouchables’ was not simply in living outside
the village and performing the most ‘polluted’ occupations; it was also that
their position within the caste division of labour made them the most
exploited. This is not simply a matter of a traditional ‘caste occupation’.
Looking only at occupation, the Chamars of north India would have their
analogue in the Chambhars of Maharashtra and the Madigas of Andhra in
that all were traditionally leather workers. But more important was the
functional position of Chamars in the caste division of labour, in being
general village servitors, similar to the Mahars of Maharashtra. Nearly
everywhere in India there was one large ‘untouchable’ caste which
performed this role, working as field labourers (and in almost slave-like
conditions in the hierarchical irrigated villages) and as general village
servants working for the village headman as well as visiting ‘state’ officials.
This gave them a key labouring role both in terms of agricultural production
and as servants of the wider state machinery. They were the most clearly
‘proletarianized’ segment of the exploited within a wider system of
exploitation.
 The ‘exploited’ as a whole included a very wide range of castes, the
broad ‘toiling caste’ majority. Clearly it was a system which had built-in
contradictions among the exploited. Dalit labourers suffered from the
domination of village peasants; they also faced exclusion and oppression
from all caste Hindus, even from castes themselves ranked very low in the
hierarchy. In addition there were often two major ‘untouchable’ castes in a
single region (Mahars and Mangs in Maharashtra, Chamars and Chuhras in
north India, Malas and Madigas in Andhra) who were traditionally
competitors, opposed to each other and claiming a higher status in the
hierarchy. These divisions and contradictions to some extent justify the
characterization of caste as having a retarding effect on ‘class struggle’ in
that it institutionalized divisions among the exploited.
However, the other side of the picture must not be forgotten. The
existence of relatively large jatis at various levels among the exploited
represented groups united by social ties who could play a leading role in
revolt around which other groups, large and small, could rally. Both
‘peasant’ jatis (Jats, Kunbis, etc.) and the large Dalit jatis could play this
kind of ‘vanguard’ role, with the difference that the greater
proletarianization of the Dalits would tend to make their struggles more
revolutionary. ‘Peasant’ jatis were also exploited, also had an interest in
revolt; but this was often modified because of their relative privilege even
as exploited toilers and because of the ease for their leaders to gain a share
in dominance. ‘Peasant–jati revolt’, the crucial form of struggle in the pre-
British period, could be a powerful force when directed against central state
power (as in the case of the 1857 revolt, perhaps, or in the rising of Kunbi
peasants under Shivaji), but it could also be directed into simply the
establishment of a new level of feudal intermediaries (as in the thesis that
the eighteenth century was one of a kind of ‘rise of the gentry’ in which
Jats, Marathas under the Peshwas and others simply created new feudal
states).41 (This of course, can also be said of peasant revolt in societies like
China.) Dalit revolt, in contrast, was more likely to be ‘anti-systemic’ and
perhaps for this reason is hard to trace as a collective factor in the pre-
British period.
‘Caste struggle’, like ‘class struggle’ could become revolutionary only
when it could pose an alternative, a more advanced system, rather than
being simply a negative protest or a competitive struggle for more
economic or social–cultural rights within the framework of exploitation.
But whether it could do so obviously depended upon the possibilities of the
historical conjuncture. In the early era of transition when the caste system
of exploitation was being constituted, the limitations of the anti-systemic
role of religions like Buddhism and Jainism were that they could not be
linked to a more productive historical system. (The Buddhist sangha, as
many commentators have noted, embodied equalitarian and collective
features from the tribal period, but only as a refuge from the world;
Buddhism also tended to be linked with the more mercantile, open
kingdoms of the period.) During the period of the medieval synthesis after
the defeat of these ‘heterodox’ religions only a negative rebellion appears to
have been possible, represented by the bhakti cults which embodied
aspirations to equality but accepted a Hindu framework for this-worldly
social interaction.
It was only from the time of British rule and the rise of a capitalist–
industrial society that a more equalitarian and more productive society
became a historical possibility and was posed as such in the ideologies of
radical democracy and socialism. This period saw the rise of new working
class struggles, the taking on of new forms in peasant struggles, but it also
saw a new anti-caste revolt which was increasingly spearheaded by a Dalit
liberation movement.

NOTES
1. For the most important classic studies of caste see Emile Senart, Caste in India: The
Facts and the System (London: Macmillan, 1930; originally published 1896 in
French); Celestin Bougle, Essays on the Caste System, translated by D.F. Pocock
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971, originally published 1908); Max
Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (Glencoe:
The Free Press, 1954); Arthur Hocart, Caste: A Comparative Study (New York:
Russell and Russell, 1950); J.H. Hutton, Caste in India: Its Nature, Function and
Origin (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1969, first published 1946); Herbert Risley,
The People of India (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Company, 1908); Nripendra Kumar
Dutt, Origin and Growth of Caste in India (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trabner,
1931); Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
 1971); McKim Marriot and Ronald Inden, ‘Caste Systems’, Encyclopedia Britannica
(1974) and ‘Towards an Ethnology of South Asian Caste Systems’, in Ronald Inden,
(ed.), The New Wind (Mouton: The Hague, 1977); M.N. Srinivas, ‘The Dominant
Caste in Rampura’, American Anthropologist 61, 1959; ‘The “Untouchables” of India’,
Scientific American December 1965; and ‘A Note on Sanskritization and
Westernization’, Far Eastern Quarterly, 15, No. 4, August 1956; David Mandelbaum,
Society in India, two volumes, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); W.H.
Wiser, The Hindu Jajmani System (Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House, 1936);
Thomas Beidelman, A Comparative Analysis of the Jajmani System (Association for
Asian Studies, Monographs, 1959); Pauline Kolenda, ‘Toward a Model of the Hindu
Jajmani System’, Human Organization, 22, 1, 1963; and Caste in Contemporary
India; Beyond Organic Solidarity (Menlo Park, California: Benjamin-Cummings,
1978).
2. Jotirao Phule, Samagra Wangmay (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1991); for
English translations see Jotirao Phule, Selected Writings, Volume I: Slavery, translated
P.G. Patil (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1991); for accounts of his work see
Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low
Caste Social Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985). For an exposition of Phule’s historical materialism see Gail Omvedt,
‘Jotiba Phule and the Analysis of Peasant Exploitation’, in Jotiba Phule: An
Incomplete Renaissance (Surat: Centre for Social Studies, 1991).
3. See the introduction to Omvedt, p. vi.
4. Important recent Marxist arguments include Joan Mencher, ‘The Caste System Upside
Down, or the Not-So-Mysterious East’, Current Anthropology 15, 1974, and Claude
Meillasoux, ‘Are There Castes in India?’ Economy and Society 3, 1973; the title
suggests the basic perspective, argued in part against the ‘homo hierarchus’ position of
the uniqueness of India: India is like the rest of the world, class and exploitation are
dominant, the oppressed don’t necessarily accept the values of their exploiters and so
on.
5. See for instance, Goran Djurfeldt and Staffan Lindberg, Behind Poverty: The Social
Formation in a Tamil Village (London: Curzon Press, 1972); and Ashok Upadhyaya,
‘Class Struggle in Rural Maharashtra (India): Towards a New Perspective’, Journal of
Peasant Studies, 2, 7, January 1980; Gail Omvedt, ‘Caste, Class and Land in India: An
Introductory Essay’, in Omvedt, (ed.), Land, Caste and Politics in Indian States
(Delhi: Authors Guild, 1982); Partha Chatterjee, ‘Caste and Subaltern Consciousness’,
in Ranjit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies 6 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).
6. In taking ‘varna’ as the superstructure of the Asiatic mode and ‘jati’ as superstructure of
feudalism, Dipankar Gupta simply provided another variation of this basic model; see
From Varna to Jati: The Indian Caste System from the Asiatic to the Feudal Mode of
Production (Montreal: McGill University Working Paper 22, 1978).
7. Sharad Patil, Das-Shudra Slavery, Volume I (Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1980) and Das-
Shudra Slavery, Volume II (Poona: Sugawa Publications, 1990); ‘Caste and Class’,
Economic and Political Weekly, Special Number, February 1979). See also the
writings of Kancha Ilaiah, especially ‘wealth, Patriarchy and Culture’, Frontier, 21
March 1987.
8. Madhav Gadgil and Ramchandra Guha. This Fissured Land An Ecological History of
India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). For an important new discussion of the
relation of caste to India’s economic structure, also essentially arguing for its function
in maintaining a stagnant economy but extending this into a critique of India’s post-
colonial development policies, see Deepak Lal, The Hindu Equilibrium Volume I:
Cultural Stability and Economic Stagnation, India 1500 BC–AD 1980 (London: Oxford
University Press, 1988.)
9. Bharat Patankar, Mudda Ahe Jag Badalnyaca (‘The Point is to Change the World’)
(Bombay: Shalaka Prakashan 1989) gives a Marathi exposition of the general
theoretical approach used here.
10. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 791–
92.
11. Morton Klass, Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social System (Philadelphia:
Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980).
12. Bridget and Raymond Allchin, The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan
(Cambridge: Cambridge World Archeology Publications, 1982), p. 11.
13. Gregory Possehl. ‘Lothal: A Gateway Settlement of the Harappan Civilization’, in
Possehl (ed.), Ancient Cities of the Indus (New Delhi: Vikas, 1974), pp. 217–18.
14. Morton Fried, The Notion of Tribe (Berkeley: Cummings Publishing House, 1975).
15. George Hart, The Poems of Ancient Tamil (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1975).
16. Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press. 1980), p. 56.
17. Hart, Poems of Ancient Tamil, pp. 132–33
18. Ibid., p. 122.
19. Ibid., pp. 93–119.
20. Stephen Tyler, India: An Anthropological Perspective (San Francisco: Good-year
Publishing Company, 1983).
21. G. Kondos, ‘The Triple Goddess and the Processual Approach to the World’, in
Michael Allen and S.N. Mukherjee (ed.), Women in India and Nepal (Australia ANU
Monographs on South Asia, 1982).
22. See Walter Fairservice, ‘The Origin, Character and Decline of an Early Civilization’, in
Possehl, Ancient Cities of the Indus.
23. Tyler, India: An Anthropological Perspective, pp. 68ff.
24. Allchin and Allchin, The Rise of Civilization, pp. 193, 197.
25. Patil’s use of this material ignores many methodological rules, but it brings out some
important aspects of patriarchal and sexual (clan, family) relations that have to be
analyzed in connection with caste. For an important combination of literary–
mythological and archaeological evidence, see Romila Thapar, Ancient Indian Social
History (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1978) and From Lineage to State Social Formations
of the Mid-First Millennium BC in the Ganges Valley (Bombay: Oxford, 1984).
26. See R.S. Sharma, Shudras in Ancient India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980) and
Thapar, Lineage to State.
27. See chapter 2, note 1.
28. See Thapar, Lineage to State; Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History
(Bombay: Popular Prakastan, 1975), and Iravathan Mahadevan, ‘Study of the Indus
Script through Bi-Lingual Parallels’, in Possehl, Ancient Cities of the Indus.
29. B.R. Ambedkar, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India, Writings and
Speeches Volume 4 (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1989).
30. Thapar, ‘Image of the Barbarian in Early India’, in her Ancient Indian Social History.
31. Uma Chakravarti, ‘Towards a Historical Sociology of Stratification in Ancient India:
Evidence from Early Buddhist Sources. Economic and Political Weekly, 2 March 1985
and ‘The Social Philosophy of Buddhism and the Problem of Inequality’, Social
Compass, 2–3, 1986.
32. David Ludden, Peasant History in South India (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1985), pp. 204–5.
33. Stein, Peasant state and Society; Harbans Mukhia. ‘Was there Feudalism in Indian
History?’ Journal of Peasant Studies, 8, 3, April 1981 and the replies published in a
second special issue of this journal 12, 2–3, 1985 on ‘Feudalism and NonEuropean
Societies’, especially R.S. Sharma, ‘How Feudal was Indian Feudalism?’ T.J. Byres,
‘Modes of Production and Non-European Colonial Societies’; Irfan Habib,
‘Classifying Precolonial India’; Burton Stein, ‘Politics, Peasants and the
 Deconstruction of Feudalism in Medieval India’; Frank Perlin, ‘Concepts of Order and
Comparisons with a Divergence on Counter-Ideologies and Corporate Institutes in
Late Pre-Colonial India’; and Harbans Mukhia, ‘Peasant Production and Medieval
Indian Society’ in that issue.
34. Sharma, ‘How Feudal was Indian Feudalism’, p. 36; Kosambi, Introduction, pp. 306–8;
Kathleen Gough, ‘Modes of Production in Southern India’, Economic and Political
Weekly, Annual Number, 1980, reporting a system of paying village servants and
‘slaves’ from the crop share from Chola times onwards (p. 343). Stein, in
‘Vijayanagar’, Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume I (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 110–12, argues that the ayagar system was
consolidated in the Vijayanagar state but had its roots in earlier Hoysala and Kakatiya
kingdoms.
35. Andre Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society Under the 18th Century
Maratha Svarajya (Cambridge: Cambridge Oriental Publications, 1986).
36. Perlin, ‘Concepts of Order’; Kotani Kiroyuki, ‘The Vatan System in the 16th–18th
Century Deccan: Towards a New Concept of Indian Feudalism’, Acta Asiatica, 48
(Tokyo: Toho Gakkai, 1985).
37. Along with Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land, see the section on ‘Caste and
Environment’ in The State of India’s Environment 1984–85; The Second Citizen’s
Report (Delhi: Centre for Science and Technology, 1985), pp. 162–67 and Madhav
Gadgil and Kailash Malhotra, ‘Adaptive Significance of the Indian Caste System: An
Ecological Perspective’, Annals of Human Biology, 10, 5, 1983, pp. 465–78.
38. Frank Perlin, ‘Extended Class Relations, Rights and the Problems of Rural Autonomy
in the Eighteenth Century Maratha Deccan’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 5, 2, 1978.
39. Ludden, Peasant History, Princeton, pp. 93–94.
40. Stein, Peasant State and Society, pp. 167–69.
41. Wink, Land and Sovereignty.
 Appendix: Redefining Class

The ‘class–caste’ question, which is a subject of much political and

theoretical debate today in India, cannot be resolved simply by adding a
conceptualization of ‘caste’ to a taken-for-granted ‘class analysis’. It
requires a rethinking of a total methodology, of class also.
‘Class’, as many have argued, is not a fundamental concept of Marxism;
the analysis of exploitation, of surplus value, of forces and relations of
production, are much more basic. Nevertheless ‘class’ has become, socially,
almost an identifying concept of radical socialist movements and of Marxist
analysis. Socialists are those who believe that ‘all history is the history of
class struggle’; Marxists are those who theorize by giving a ‘class analysis’
which deciphers the meaning of political and social events in terms of the
interests of bourgeois, proletarian, petty bourgeois, etc., groups involved.
Nevertheless, Marxism is in a state of theoretical crisis today, and much
of this is involved with the problem of ‘class analysis’ itself. ‘Class’ in fact
is a term that is used by Marxists in rather different ways. At one level it
has a broad, sometimes almost metaphorical or poetic, meaning referring to
exploitation and the fight against exploitation, contradiction and conflict. In
this broad sense, it indicates an identification with the oppressed and
exploited and with their struggles, an affirmation that their struggles have a
meaning and a reality; we might say that in the broad sense ‘class’ simply
refers to exploitation, to the groups that are defined in the social processes
of production, extraction and appropriation of surplus labour. Any fight
against exploitation is thus a ‘class struggle’ and any movement for
liberation, because it has to confront an exploitative system, must be a class
struggle.
In the more strict sense, ‘class’ is defined in terms of ownership of the
means of production and the argument for a ‘class analysis’ is that the most
important contradiction and process of struggle is between those groups
who toil and do not own the means of production, and those who are able to
appropriate the fruits of toil without toiling themselves on the basis of their
ownership and control.
The basic problem for Marxist analysis today is not so much that features
other than ‘class’ (such as ‘caste’, ‘gender’, ‘community’ or ‘race’) are
appearing as important social realities. If we limit ourselves to recognizing
this we continue to fall into the trap of identifying these other realities as
fundamentally ‘non-economic’. Rather, it can be seen in the non-
coincidence of the narrow and the broad meanings of class. That is. ‘class’
as defined in terms of private property (ownership versus non-ownership of
the means of production) does not explain some very important processes of
exploitation or the appropriation of surplus labour. Some owners are
exploited (e.g., small peasants); some non-owners exploit (e.g., controllers
of state property in societies described as ‘socialist’; lords and upper castes
in certain feudal societies). Proletarian husbands may benefit from the
exploitation of their wives’ unpaid labour. Moreover, many ecologists
would even argue that nature itself can be ‘exploited’ in the double sense
that resources from nature incorporated into the accumulation cycle
increase the accumulation of capital, and that this has a destructive effect on
the ecologies of regions that provide such resources.
Faced with this situation, two responses can be made. One is to try to
extend the definition of ‘class’ to cover all cases of exploitation. There are
various ways to do this. Using the concept of ‘control’ rather than
‘ownership’ the definition of capitalist can be broadened to cover the
managers of state (and private) property who control production and
accumulation and use these positions to enrich themselves. This is done by
many Marxists who want to deal with the class nature of statist societies by
describing them as ‘state capitalist’ or ‘social imperialist’. Similarly,
referring to ‘conditions of production’ rather than ‘means of production’ so
as to broaden the definition of ‘owners’ to include those who possess or
control all the various inputs and factors which make production possible.
In relation to the peasantry this allows us to conceptualize the role of state
officials, industrialists, etc., as capitalists in terms of capital accumulation.
An extensive description of such a way of extending the definition of
both ‘capitalist’ and ‘worker’ particularly with regard to the peasantry, can
be cited from Andrew Turton’s analysis of class relations in rural Thailand
in which great numbers of peasants
who might appear to be possessors or owners of the means of production
… should not be so regarded. For we need to consider what we
understand by effective means and conditions of production in the new
economic conjuncture, and what constitutes effective control over them
…. Even when land is owned with full title … its use and value are often
lost through neighboring mining or plantation activities, through the very
crop imposed, through state forestry schemes, and the often illegal
depredations of private capitalist timber companies, through the
declaration of military training or war zones etc. Irrigation water is lost
through deforestation, especially by capitalist enterprises, through hydro-
electric schemes, preferential sale of water to factories, pollution by
mines, factories and plantations, and even through tourist development.
New inputs have become crucial new factors of production: new seeds,
strains, breeds; fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, machinery and
petroleum products, mostly imported, and so on. These means are not
owned, nor is their reproduction controlled, by the retail credit purchaser,
any more than the crops themselves which are pre-contracted to the seller
of inputs. There is also a whole cartel of controlling factors, including
technology, information and decision making, of which the inputs are the
most visible products. The owners of these means of production are thus
able to control the labour process, time, skill, health, even the family and
community life, of the direct producers.1
In these ways, then, class is redefined so that the ‘new class’ controlling
post-revolutionary societies are essentially capitalists; so are the bureaucrats
and political leaders who control the inputs and access to land and other
factors which make peasant production possible in many Third World
societies; while the ‘peasants’ themselves are viewed as essentially
labourers for capital. In a similar approach, Olle Tornquist’s studies of
communist failures in India and Indonesia, What’s Wrong with Marxism?
use an extended definition of ‘rent capitalism’ to look at state managers as
accumulating capitalists.2
The problem with this form of broadening the definition of class is that it
still accords a privilege to the ‘core’ definition (wage workers producing
surplus value remain the defining centre of any class and accumulation
processes); it is in a sense theoretically imperialist. We might compare it to
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad definition of ‘Hindu’ which asserts that Sikhs,
Jains, Buddhists, etc., are also Hindus but still manages to keep the
‘sanatani Hindus’ taking Rama as their god and following the authority of
Brahmans as the defining centre of the religion. The problem with Marxists
extending the definition of ‘class’ is that, in a similar vein, they are willing
to accord exploited class status to peasants, women and other sections, but
still give the ‘privilege’ in terms of exploitation to the factory proletariat.
There are other problems with the extended definitions. They still do not
face the issue of incorporating ‘nature’ into the analysis of the process of
capital accumulation: is nature exploited or not, in any meaningful sense?3
Nor do they confront the major theoretical point coming out of the work of
Maria Mies and others of the ‘German school of ecofeminists’, that the role
of violence and force in exploitation and the primary accumulation being
that of the forcible extraction of surplus from subsistence producers.4 Even
beyond this it can be argued that the primary ‘relations of production’ are
those between producers and consumers; early non-exploitative societies
are ‘subsistence societies’ in which production is for self-consumption,
gradually extended through kin and other social networks to mediated
exchange; and only with the breaking of these direct links and the
establishment of an alienation between consumer and producer do
exploitative ‘relations of production’ between owners/non-owners,
producers/looters, etc., even begin. One of Marx’s fundamental errors was,
from this point of view, to treat consumption as simply passive, a reflection
of production.
But even if we could extend the definition of class to cover all types of
exploitative relations, there seems little point in doing so. What we are
doing is redefining ‘class’ to be equivalent to exploitation, to positions in
the process of producing, extracting and appropriating surplus (surplus
labour, not surplus value). But if we do this, then it becomes clear that the
concept of class becomes redundant. Using it may add rhetorical force; it
may help us to claim all the emotional fervor that has historically been part
of the conscious organization of ‘class struggle’, but it adds nothing to
analysis. The basic issue is to analyze the processes of exploitation. Once
this is done, the goal is achieved; we have helped define the struggle against
exploitation. Calling the groups involved ‘classes’ and the struggle ‘class
struggle’ adds only to our rhetoric, not to the analysis.
 It seems better, therefore, to use ‘class’ in its narrow (and familiar) sense,
and to make it clear that this does not define all forms of exploitation and
that ‘class struggles’ are not the only forms of struggles against
exploitation. Other struggles (of castes, women, communities of various
types including oppressed nationalities) are also struggles against
exploitation, they have inherently an economic aspect to them and cannot
be defined as ‘superstructural’ and ‘ideological’ in contrast to a privileged
class-economic form. The difference between these struggles and ‘class’
struggles is that they also are explicitly political, cultural, ethnic, etc., but
their economic aspect cannot be sidelined.
‘Class processes’ and ‘class struggles’ then define those processes
involved with the extraction of surplus value; this is certainly a crucial part
of capital accumulation and with ‘capitalism’ as a world system it has
moved to its centre. But being in the ‘centre’ does not mean it is the whole,
and does not mean it can transform the whole. Capitalism as a system is not
simply based upon the extraction of surplus value through wage labour; it
rests fundamentally not so much on wage labour as on the commodity form,
in which the direct links between producer and consumer are broken and
the extraction of surplus from the direct producer in the form of the
commodity (paid through wages or prices or not paid at all) forms and basis
of capital accumulation.
Thus capital accumulation also includes processes of pure plunder, of
extraction and underpricing, in underpricing, from nature, from peasants,
from women involved in subsistence household production, even from
entire communities. The sphere of surplus value and capitalist production in
the narrow sense (manufacturing and processes of wage labour) rests on
another, much larger sphere of exploitation in which natural products and
surplus labour of those outside the spheres of capitalist production are
brought into the cycle. Thus ‘class struggle’ in the narrow sense—of wage
workers resisting extraction of surplus value and fighting to control the
means of production at the centre—is not liberatory and will not break the
system unless it is joined to the struggles of the communities, tribes, castes,
women and others who are on its ‘periphery’.
‘Caste’ refers to the crucial form in which community/ethnic-linked
struggles take in the particular socio-historical context of South Asia; it has
its material aspect in defining the processes of exploitation and
appropriation of surplus labour, but these are also crucially linked to kinship
and ideological factors. With the formation of caste society, direct
subsistence production and equalitarian kinship-mediated exchanges of
productions are replaced by exchange of (and claims to produce) produced
by toilers who are considered duty-bound by birth to a particular function in
the entire production system. Even when these exchanges may be relatively
equal, or not highly unequal, in material terms, they involve oppression in
the form of birth ascription; but they are also normally likely to become
materially unequal, because they include ideological justifications for the
accumulation of surplus by political powerholders who are assumed to play
the role of upholders of the sacred chaturvarnya system and by Brahmans
who are the symbols of purity in a presumed ‘exchange’ with the gods.
Thus the caste system provides for the accumulation and consumption by
non-producers who are the high castes in the system and the controllers of
state power, and with the impact of colonialism these caste forms of
production and accumulating surplus are partially maintained, partially
transformed and utilized for channeling surpluses into the commodity chain
and the centralized accumulation of the capitalist world system.

NOTES
1. Andrew Turton, ‘Limits of Ideological Domination and the Formation of Social
Consciousness’, in Turton and Shigeharu Tanabe (ed.), History and Peasant
Consciousness in South East Asia (Osaka, Japan, 1984), p. 34.
2. Olle Tornquist, What’s Wrong with Marxism? Volume 1: Capitalists and the State in
India and Indonesia (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989) and Volume 2: Workers and
Peasants in India and Indonesia (New Delhi: Manohar, 1991).
3. James O’Connor, introduction to Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 1,1, 1988.
4. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation; Maria Mies, Claudia von Werlhoff and
Veronica Bennholdt, Women; The Last Colony (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press,
1989).
 CHAPTER 2

Caste, Region and Colonialism: The

Context of Dalit Revolt

This study focuses on the Dalit movement in three specific states,

Maharashtra, Andhra and Karnataka. In this chapter the specific context of
the movement will be examined: first, its regional specificity, including
geographical and social features and the most prominent castes among both
Dalits and Shudras; and then the colonial transformation, which provided
the immediate background to revolt.

• THE DECCAN, GEOGRAPHICALLY AND HISTORICALLY

While we will look at similarities and differences among the three states
studied here, it is also important to note what they have in common as a
‘region’ compared to other parts of India. Though one has an Indo-
European language and the other two Dravidian, nevertheless Marathi is
also considered to have a Dravidian ‘sub-stratum’ and there are broad social
structural features common to all three. These include what Iravati Karve
has described as a ‘southern’ type of kinship system with preferential cross-
cousin marriage among the main castes. In addition the ‘three-way’ caste
division (Brahman, non-Brahman, Untouchable) seems particularly
prominent here. There are no recognized ‘Ksatriya’ jatis anywhere in the
south, and the three states (in contrast to the more inequalitarian hierarchies
of Tamil Nadu and Kerala) are characterized by the dominance of large
peasant jatis with landholding rights who historically supplied many of the
zamindars and rulers but remained classed as ‘Shudra’ in the varna scheme.
In addition, all three states have large and vigorous Dalit jatis.1
These three contiguous linguistic regions in many ways constitute a
single larger geo-historical region, centred on the ‘Deccan’, the main part of
penninsular India. In the north the Satpura and Vindhya mountains and the
Narmada and Tapti rivers provided a relative barrier against influences from
the mainly Hindi-speaking regions of north India; after Ashoka the
penninsula was never really effectively ruled by northern-based kingdoms.
From the major watershed of the Western Ghats (Sahyadris) the Deccan
plateau slopes south-eastward, and the major rivers run from west to east. In
the south, a broad dividing line marked by the watersheds of the Godavari
and Krishna rivers (together with its tributary the Tungabhadra) separates
the region from the southern-most Tamil and Malayalam-speaking regions;
these, based on the more inequalitarian rice-growing coastal belts, with
more prehistorical linkages to Sri Lanka and more isolated from the north,
have had a somewhat separate historical development.2
The Deccan supra-region also has its irrigated rice-growing areas, the
high-rainfall west coast (Konkan and Kanara) and the Godavari and
Krishna deltas on the east coast. However, the Deccan plateau itself, with
the Sahyadris blocking much of the monsoon rainfall, is hot and semi-arid.
Maharashtra is marked by black lava soils especially in the west, Andhra
and Karnataka by red soils; but the entire region has had as its primary
economic base a herding economy linked to a dry-crop agriculture (millet—
primarily jawar, bajra and ragi).
Historically and prehistorically, this region also has had a unique identity.
The Allchins write that
it cannot be overemphasized that in Karnataka, Maharashtra and the
Southern Nuclear Region the settlements of the third-second millennia
appear to be ancestral to those which we encounter there from the
beginnings of [written] history.3
They describe sites contemporaneous with the early Indus cultures of the
north-west and centred on cattle-herding, or ‘neolithic cattle pens’ found in
many forested areas. The latter have been located primarily in Kannada
areas, but evidence for a cattle-centred herding economy is found
throughout, and even after cultivation began (after about 2000 BC) herding
still remained a crucial feature. The humped Indian cattle is believed to
have been domesticated within this region, and, as Romila Thapar points
out, ‘Yadava’ puranic traditions were associated with a western–southern
India diffusion of cultures linked with a pastoral economy. Later ruling
lineages (the Tulus, Rashtrakutas, Hoysalas, Yadavas of Devagiri and, it
may be added, the later Mysore British-supported royal family, the
Wodeyas) all claimed Yadava descent, and Thapar writes that ‘the interest
of this tradition lies in the coincidence of the diffusion of Black and Red
Ware associated with the megalithic culture in the peninsula during the first
millennium BC.’4
Prior to this period a ‘chalcolithic’ culture had developed mainly in the
north Deccan (now Marathi-speaking), using copper and stone tools,
growing various gains (rice, wheat, barley, etc.) and pulses, herding sheep
and goats as well as cattle, using some cotton. Northern influences are
visible in this and it is argued that Indo-European speakers may have
arrived around this time (ca. 1500–1000 BC). However the important period
of historical transition is what Thapar refers to as that of ‘megalithic
cultures’ in the period 1000–500 BC, associated with the adoption of iron
tools and weapons, a common pottery tradition, and the building of large
megaliths or funerary monuments. Iron made possible the clearing of
forests in the more fertile river valleys and thus a greater development of
cultivation, and this laid the basis for a more settled village economy and
the extraction of its surplus by a state-centred ruling class. Many
archeologists believe that it was in this period of the spread of settled
agriculture (rice in the coastal areas and millet and gram in others) that the
major Dravidian languages stabilized in roughly their present area.5
This first Deccan civilization involved a mixture of northern influence
and a Dravidian base. In this process the Dravidian element appears as
dominant. Southworth has argued that even the term ‘Yadava’ is likely to
have been Dravidian in origin, deriving from yadu-van or ‘herding people’.
Noting the contrast, established by linguists such as Grierson, between the
‘outer group’ of Indo-Aryan languages (Marathi, Bengali, Oriya, etc.) and
‘inner group’ languages such as Hindi, he describes the former as
the earlier arrivals, who mixed more freely with the indigenous peoples,
learned their language and adopted many of their customs (including
cross-cousin marriage). The ‘inner group’, were the Vedic Aryans, the
ones who from the beginning defended and propagated the ideas of caste,
purity and hierarchy (as well as patriarchy).
These outer-ring languages, Southworth argues, embodied an amalgamation
of cultures and ethnic streams from the time of the Indus Civilization. The
‘pre-Vedic Aryans’ were very likely present in the later phases of the Indus
Civilization, among pastoralists who provided meat and milk to Harappan
cities. After their fall, these mixed, outer group languages spread
throughout much of India in the period 1700–500 BC ‘as the most viable
forms of intergroup and inter-regional communication’. With the rise to
hegemony of the Vedic Aryans in north India in the same period,
the stage was set for the consolidation of Aryan-speaking kingdoms
throughout northern India, and the struggle between the orthodox
Brahmanical Hinduism (propagated through Sanskrit) and the various
dissident groups who used the more ‘evolved’ forms of Indo-Aryan.6
The greater equalitarianism and flexibility of southern society is also
suggested in its first great state, that of the Satavahanas. While the Guptas
may have represented (in Ambedkar’s terms) a ‘Hindu Counter-Revolution’
in the north following the decline of the Mauryan empire, it was the Deccan
that produced the largest empire in India for quite a long period:
In 27 BC Magadha was conquered by the explosive power of the mighty
Andhra (or Satavahana) dynasty of south India. Apparently originating
somewhere between the penninsular rivers Godavari and Krishna,
homeland of the Dravidian Telugu-speaking people … the great Andhra
dynasty spread across much of south and central India from the 2nd
century BC to the 2nd century AD. Conquering the northwest Deccan
region of Maharashtra, the Andhras later established their capital at
Paithan on the Godavari …. The elder Pliny wrote of the ‘andarae’ as a
‘powerful race’ controlling numerous villages and at least thirty walled
towns plus an army of 100,000 infantry, 2000 cavalry and 1000
elephants. For four and a half centuries after 200 BC, the mighty dynasty
ruled India’s midland, ranging north of the Vindhyas … and south to the
Tungabhadra and Krishna rivers which divided them from Tamilnadu.
Amravati on the banks of the Krishna, which was later the southeast
capital of the Satavahanas, flourished in its trade with Rome, Ceylon and
Southeast Asia, and may well have been the most prosperous city of
India during the second century of the Christian era.7
Though they are called ‘Andhras’, the first known capital of the
Satavahanas is Paithan in Maharashtra, and it is the Satavahana king Hala
who is supposed to have been the author of the Sattasai or Gatha
Sapthasathi, the first major work of Maharashtri Prakrit. This had important
similarities in metre and theme with Tamil Sangam literature; indeed,
according to Hart the main difference from early Tamil is in the lack of
concern with chastity. The Kamasutra, that work of a luxuriant court life,
was also composed under the Satavahanas, and Kosambi has argued that
most of the Jatakas in fact come from this region and period. When it is
added that the one Sanskrit play that depicts a peasant revolt against an
unjust king (and centres around a courtesan, a woman depicted as leading a
quite independent life), the Mrchhakatika or ‘Little Clay Cart’ also comes
from this region, a general picture emerges of a less caste-ridden, more
open and commercialized, relatively non-patriarchal, flexible society.8 This
may give some substance to Sharad Patil’s argument that the Marathi region
was characterized socially by matriarchy and matrilineal tribal social forms
and religiously by the predominance of tantric cults.9
Along with this cosmopolitan orientation depicted in the literature, a
religious pluralism seems evident. The patron deity of the Satavahanas was
Khandaka (Khandoba), and while this fact seems sufficient for historians to
describe them as ‘Hindu’ it is evident that Buddhism and Jainism
flourished; the great caves of the Western Ghats, primarily Buddhist and
Jain throughout this period, were carved in this time.
As the location of the caves indicates, an important base for Satavahana
prosperity was extensive trade with Rome, the Arab countries and South-
east Asia, carried on through both west coast and east coast ports. The
economy appears to have been highly commercialized, with craft
production in guilds more than the jajmani-based production. Very likely it
was based, agriculturally, on the type of gahapati-controlled production
described by Chakravarti10 in which substantial landholders quite often
worked the land with das-kammakara hired labourers. But large areas were
still under forest or grasslands covered by nomadic herdsmen; here tribal
structures prevailed, though the tribes were in the process of being
converted into jatis and subordinated in one way or another to state control.
Buddhism and Jainism were associated with the commercialized agrarian
economy, while it appears that ‘hero cults’ (or the bhuta cults as Da Silva
describes them for Kanara) such as the gods Khandoba, Jotiba, etc., in
Maharashtra were often associated with the transitional rural and forest-
based or pastoral groups.11
The resurgence of Brahmanic Hinduism after the Satavahanas came in
open and often violent combat with the ‘heretical’ religions of Jainism and
Buddhism, which denied both god and the authority of the Vedas; but it
could only compromise with and absorb the various indigenous hero cults
and local gods and goddesses. In the far south the stabilization of
Brahmanic Hinduism is linked to Pallava rule (sixth to ninth centuries),
coming after the ‘Kalabhra’ interregnum, described in Brahmanic religious
writings as a period of terror in which rulers were warrior-kings linked with
Jainism from the semi-arid zones. Here we see violent and uncompromising
confrontation linked to peoples of different areas as well as to religion and
caste.12 In the northern part of the penninsula, the kingdoms that succeeded
the Satavahanas—the Chalukyas, the Rashtrakutas, etc.—also appear more
clearly as ‘Hindu’; the Rashtrakutas, who dominated the Deccan between
the eighth and tenth centuries are renowned as builders of the great rock-
hewn Kailasa temple of Siva at Ellora. However the Siva tradition with
which they linked themselves could also express equalitarianism, as it did
particularly with Basava of Karnataka (twelfth century) whose social
radicalism involving the rejection of caste and Brahman dominance led to
the formation of Veerashaivism, separating itself as a religion from
Hinduism. The Mahanubhav cult in Maharashtra was similarly more radical
than the later, and Vishnu-identified, Vithoba cult centred at Pandharpur.
In general, however, these equalitarian aspirations of the Saivite and
Vaishnavite bhakti cults came later, after the absorbed popular cults were
used to establish the hierarchical caste society. The dominance of
Brahmanic Hinduism also meant feudalization, including the gradual
emergence of a landlord ‘gentry’ (zamindars) through the land-grant
process; the consolidation of the jajmani/balutedari-based village economy;
the crystallization of untouchability with its definition of a most polluting
and servile group; and the general use of the ideology of varnashrama
dharma to legitimize the authority of Brahmans at the top and of the state
which maintained dharma, and the performance of servile labour by the
Shudras and Atishudras at the bottom. This dominance was crystallized
with the rise of the regionally-based Hoysala, Yadava and Kakatiya
kingdoms from the eleventh century.
 Nevertheless, while these Marathi, Telugu and Kannada ‘nationalities’
were linked with an orthodox Hinduism caste-feudalism, there are powerful
arguments (most recently brought forward for Maharashtra by Sharad Patil)
that there were counter-posed equalitarian ‘non-Brahman’ trends in them, in
Maharashtra marked by the tantric cult and sections of the bhakti
movement, in Karnataka probably by Basava’s Veerasaivism. The rise of
Shivaji in the seventeenth century, in contrast to the Peshwa feudal
restoration which followed him, has been described as a peasant-based
revolt, fighting not only the Mughal overlords but Hindu–Maratha
watandari feudalism, and with an intriguing tradition of anti-
Brahmanism.13

• THE JATIS: PEASANTS

One of the most striking common features throughout the three linguistic
regions is, as noted, the nature of their major castes, in particular the most
numerous ‘peasant’ and Dalit jatis.
The main peasant jatis, the Kunbi-Marathas of Maharashtra, the
Vokkaligas in Karnataka (including many Lingayats who are in origin
Vokkaligas) and the Kapus, Kammas, Velamas and Telaga of Andhra, are
named from vernacular terms having to do with agriculture or simply
denoting ‘peasant’: kunbi, kapu, vokkaliga. In all cases there were
numerous internal differences of family, lineage, caste–sub-caste (or
‘marriage circle’, to use Klass’ term), all in some sense and to some degree
overridden by the common identity as land-controlling cultivators. In
Andhra, for instance, there was by British times a crystallization into four
separate castes of Kammas, Kapus, Velamas and Telagas; however
all four of these large castes closely resemble one another in appearance
and customs and seem to have branched off from one and the same
Dravidian stock. Originally soldiers by profession, they are now mainly
agriculturalists and traders, and some of them in the north are
zamindars.14
The differences between peasant jatis included different origin legends,
different linkages to traditional Andhra conditions, and a marked regional
distribution: Kapus were found more in the Telengana and Rayalaseema
region, Kammas only in coastal Andhra, Velamas primarily in Telengana.
In Karnataka, according to James Manor, there were an extremely wide
variety of discrete castes/sub-castes, with little in common except a linkage
with agriculture, who were nevertheless lumped together in the censuses as
‘Vokkaligas’ (from the word vokku meaning ‘to thresh’). This segmentation
leads him to describe them as ‘not a single community but a number of
quite different castes of cultivators.’15 However, as many anthropologists
(for instance, Klass) have pointed out, the jati itself never constituted the
unit within which marriages took place but served as the unit of status-
occupational identification; in this sense Vokkaligas had a common jati
identity which gradually solidified with the economic and political
developments of the colonial period.
In Maharashtra, the term ‘Kunbi’ came to name the broad cultivating
group (similar to Kurmis of northern India), one that has been almost
impossible to ‘split up’ into clearly defined sub-castes. There were major
status gradations among Kunbis, linked to local landed position and to
distinctions between the original ‘shareholders’ in a village and ‘guest
cultivators’ of various types and articulated in claims to being among the
higher lineages— shahhanavkuli, packuli (the ‘96 families’ or ‘five
families’). The more aristocratic of these called themselves ‘Marathas’ and
over a period of time, especially after the non-Brahman movement of the
1920s, this term became applicable to almost all sections of Kunbis in
western Maharashtra. In Vidarbha and in the Konkan there were clear jati
distinctions between ‘Marathas’ and ‘Kunbis’, but elsewhere it was
practically impossible to distinguish, and it was always open for a powerful
and rich but previously low-ranked ‘kunbi’ family to establish marriage
relations with the more aristocratic shahhanavkuli Marathas. (This tradition
has continued in Maharashtra up to the time of its most well-known
example, Y.B. Chavan).
These peasant jatis provided most of the ‘state overlords’, variously
known as deshmukhs, zamindar, nayaka, and these families holding power
and land differentiated themselves from the common peasantry with various
status titles (such as dora in the Telengana region). Yet they never managed
to clearly constitute themselves as separate jatis or to successfully claim
Ksatriya status. At the village level, the oldest and strongest among the
main landholding lineage became the headman, the lowest linchpin in the
state administration. Their title (patil among the Kunbis, gauda among the
Vokkaligas, reddi among the Kapus, chaudhuri among the Kammas) very
often came to be taken as a caste–family name for a much wider group. Yet
this vast majority were exploited peasant cultivators, at best claiming status
precedence and some privileges over the balutedars and Dalits of their
villages, but classified still as Shudras and treated as rustic ‘village idiots’ in
numerous popular proverbs and stories, as these examples regarding the
Kunbis suggest:
The Kunbi caste is crooked as a sickle but by beating it becomes straight.
Kunbis and flour improve with pounding.
A Kunbi has no sense; he forgets whatever he learns.
The Kunbi died from seeing a ghost, the Brahman from the wind in the
stomach, and the goldsmith from bile.
The Kunbi is always planting, whether his crop lives or dies.16
The Shudra–cultivator status was also linked with a relatively more
liberal treatment of women. The ‘aristocrats’ and overlords among them
picked up the purdah and gosha customs of secluding women, including the
imposition of sati upon widows, but the majority of village cultivators had
vigorous, independent women who worked in the fields and who played
important economic and even managerial roles.
Finally it has to be added that, besides being invariably described (by
early British census-writers) as ‘skillful and industrious cultivators’, these
major jatis also had warrior traditions, which they shared with most of the
low castes of the region.

• THE JATIS: DALITS

While the major ‘peasant’ jatis made up 25–30 per cent of the population of
their respective states (and often constituted 50 per cent or more in the
individual villages where they were found), the two major Dalit jatis made
up roughly 15 per cent. And it is striking that the region has almost
everywhere two such relatively large Dalit castes, firmly marked off from
one another and traditional rivals. These were the Mahars, Malas and
Holeyas on one hand (about 10 per cent of the total population) and the
Madigas and Mangs (about 5 per cent) on the other.
 Mahars in Maharashtra, Malas in Andhra and Holeyas in Karnataka were
linked together both by observors and in their own self-identification. They
were the major field-labouring jati throughout the region, and specifically
the jati responsible within the jajmani division of labour for general village
service. As described by Zelliot for the Mahars, these quite extensive
service duties included:
• acting as village watchmen, tracking thieves;
• arbitrating boundary disputes, e.g., over lands claimed by different
peasant families;
• serving as guides and messengers for government officials; escorting
the government treasury;
• calling landowners to pay revenue;
• sweeping village roads, repairing the caudi (village square) and village
well;
• removing dead cattle;
• carrying messages to other villages or houses (especially regarding
deaths).17
All of these duties were done by the Holeyas and Malas in their areas (with
the exception of removing dead cattle, which was done in Andhra by the
Madigas as a result of their connection with leather-work). It may be noted
that they fall into two categories, some involving service to the ‘village’ or
to its majority cultivating caste; while others involved service to higher-
level state officials. It was this complex of labour-services that made the
Mahar–Mala–Holeya group the major category of ‘bonded labourers’.
Besides these, of course, Dalits performed field labour, intermittent and
often wage-paid in the drier and mixed regions, more permanent and slave-
like in the wet coastal areas.
Some of these traditional services, in particular that of arbitrating
boundary disputes, are linked with a long tradition of these castes as ancient
‘sons of the soil’, with a notion that they possess inherent traditional
knowledge regarding the land. For instance one British official wrote in
describing the Holeya kulwadi (it is intriguing that the term is used for
Kunbis in Maharashtra),
All the thousand and one castes, whose members find a home in the
village, unhesitatingly admit that the kulwadi is de jure the rightful owner
of the village. He who was, is still, in a limited sense, ‘lord of the village
 manor’. If there is a dispute as to the village boundary, the Kulwadi is the
only one competent to take the oath as to how the village ought to run.18
These duties carried with them a relatively substantial watan right, or claim
to some portion of the village land in return for their performance. This
meant that in much of Maharashtra and Karnataka, at least, the Mahars and
Holeyas had a foothold as small peasants. As the British and the Mysore
raja recognized this right, by the early twentieth century it was reported that
in Mysore state the Holeyas (and the Madigas in some areas) were at least
subtenants everywhere while a few had risen to comparative prosperity and
even affluence, with some involved in money-lending and coffee
cultivation.19
Mahars in Maharashtra also retained this status. In Andhra these rights
appear less in evidence; it may be the greater subordination of Malas in the
coastal region and the greater ‘feudal’ nature of Hyderabad state had eroded
these land rights by the twentieth century; but even so Thurston notes that
Malas in the western regions (Telengana and Rayalaseema) had a better
position, retaining their traditional lands, and were in some cases well-to-do
cultivators.20 It is also possible that the ‘frontier’ quality of Vidarbha and
Telengana as forests were cleared for cultivation provided some minimal
opportunities for Dalit poor peasants, as well as for the ‘peasant’ jatis.
Economically Malas in eastern Andhra and Mahars in Vidarbha were
also weavers of coarse cloth; women did the spinning, men the weaving,
with cotton often provided by a particular family of peasant cultivators they
worked for. Finally, they shared with other peasant and low castes of the
region something of a military tradition. The Mahars had been employed in
Shivaji’s army to watch the jungles, act as escorts and keep forts supplied
with wood and fodder, while Mahar legends report a special duty of
guarding the palace of Jijabai, Shivaji’s mother. The British army recruited
them while fighting their Indian foes, and in the final battle of 1818 against
the Peshwa army, Mahars made up half the small Indian force killed at
Koregaon, an event which later Dalit movement leaders pointed to with
pride and as an illustration of their hatred for the Peshwas.21 As for the
Malas, Thurston describes them as originally a tribe of freelance warriors of
the hills, ‘who like the tiger, slept during the day and worked at night’, who
were paid mercenaries raiding and looting under the ‘Poligars’ of the
Vijayangar regime. He argued that they ‘belong to a subjugated race and
have been made into the servants of the community.’22
In contrast to the Mahar–Holeya–Mala group (who can also be identified
with the Paraiyas of Tamil Nadu, the Vankars of Gujarat and so on) stand
the Madigas and Mangs (today referred to as Matangs) who were smaller
jatis and somewhat less extensively spread out. These also inhabited
settlements outside the village proper and provided general field labour, but
lacked the traditional status of general village servant and the watan/inam
lands and claims that went with this. As a result they were poorer and more
of them were landless. These castes had specific jati duties, though different
ones: rope-making in the case of the Mangs, leather work for the Madigas.
It is striking that though the Madigas were leather workers and thus in terms
of ‘occupation’ similar to the Chambhars of Maharashtra and Chamars of
northern India, their structural position within the village caste system
identified them with neither of these but rather with the Mangs
(Maharashtrian Chambhars are a smaller caste, slightly higher in status;
north Indian Chamars were, like Mahars and others, general village servants
in addition to their leather working tasks). Their own traditions identified
them with the Mangs and both claimed the heritage of an ancient ‘Matangi’
dynasty.
Differences between the two Dalit castes continued even when they took
up ‘newer’ factory labour or such like under colonial rule. The Mahar–Mala
group managed generally to claim the more skilled and slightly higher-paid
work. Thus Mahars could get a foothold in the textile mills in both Nagpur
and Bombay and in parts of dock jobs, whereas in Andhra Thurston notes
that while both Malas and Madigas took up factory jobs, the Malas often
held more skilled jobs (engine drivers, valve men, moulders, turners)
whereas Madigas did unskilled work.23
Finally, the Mangs and Madigas provided the bulk of lower-caste
converts to Christianity, whereas the Mahars, Malas and Holeyas made up
the main social base for the Dalit movements of the twentieth century.
In spite of differences, the main Dalit castes shared some important
religious customs. These show important aspects of the ‘sexual dynamics’
of the relations among castes. The fundamental aspects are that connection
with mother goddesses is particularly strong; members of these Dalit castes
often served as priests in popular cults and sacrifices; and there was a
prevalence of a particular type of devadasi custom throughout the three
states.
One particularly important sacrifice of buffalos and goats is described in
detail by Thurston for the Telugu areas. This was carried out in the name of
the goddess, particularly in times of famine or to ward off other evil
fortune, and with the participation of all the non-Brahman castes of the
village, with a Madiga serving as the main priest or ‘Poturaza’ but with
Malas also linked with the sacrifices. A Brahmanized explanation of the
custom refers to the legend of Sunkulammia, daughter of a Brahman pandit,
tricked into marriage by a handsome Mala youth who had come to study,
concealing his caste identity. Learning of it, she burnt herself to death:24
Before doing so she cursed the treacherous Mala who had polluted her
that he might become a buffalo and his children turn into sheep, and
vowed that she would revive as an evil spirit and have him and his
children sacrificed to her, and get his leg put in her mouth and a light
placed on his head fed with his own fat.25
These were the details of the sacrifice.
This depiction of the horrors of a relationship of a Dalit man with a high-
caste woman contrasts with the legitimation of its reversal as seen in the
‘devadasi’ tradition. In one sense the now popular term is misleading since
there is a major contrast between the Dalit version of the custom and the
devadasis who served as dancers and performers of many rituals in some
major temples, whose rituals were connected primarily with stories of
Krishna. Their life centred around the temple precincts and they formed
relations mainly with Brahman priests and the kings.26 In contrast, the Dalit
girls were dedicated to the goddess Yellama/Renuka in a ceremony carried
out on full moon nights in temples in Saundatti (Belgaum district in
Karnataka) and in Kurnool district in Andhra and some other places.
Following this ‘marriage to the god’ most of the girls remained in their own
village; they were considered accessible to any man but at the same time
not bound or polluted by sexual relations. They remained independent,
given the status of a man in many family ceremonies; their children usually
took their name; and they had some important ritual prerogatives in village
ceremonies. These girls were known as ‘Murali’ among Mahars, ‘Matangi’
among the Madigas and ‘Basavi’ (said to be from a term basava applying to
a bull roaming the village at will and which is said ‘alludes to the footloose
position of the women’).27 The spits and curses of the ‘Matangi’ at all
castes during such village rituals (even to Reddis and Kammas, though few
Brahmans were involved) were believed to purge them of uncleanliness.28
Whatever the ‘matriarchal’ or ‘matrilinear’ remnants that can be seen in
the custom, by late feudal times it also helped to institutionalize the sexual
accessibility of Dalit women for high caste men. The women who were
classified as ‘Matangi’, ‘Murali’, etc., clearly had independence and some
position in society, socially recognized and ritually affirmed; at the same
time the element of sexual exploitation cannot be denied. The contrast
between such an institutionalization of relationships between Dalit women
and upper/middle caste men and the absolute banning of the reverse
relationship is striking; it shows the ‘dialectics of sex’ that continued to
exist in the relationships between jatis in the villages.

• CASTE AND LAND: INTER-REGIONAL VARIATIONS

Many of the specific characteristics of agrarian class–caste relations can be
linked, we have argued, to local characteristics of climate and land. A
generally more equalitarian, small peasant or peasant-herding economy is
fostered in the drier or ‘mixed’ eco-types, contrasted to the hierarchalized
relations between land-managers and labourers in the irrigated wet-rice
regions.
Broadly speaking, the available data on landholdings and caste patterns,
while limited, back this up. First, we have data on the spread of land owned
and operated by size category, by region within each state (Table 2.1).
While these are from 1971, they undoubtedly indicate a long historical
pattern. They show, first, a relatively smaller average size of landholding
and a higher degree of landlessness in the coastal areas—the Andhra delta,
coastal Karnataka (Kanara) and Konkan in Maharashtra. These were areas
of wet-rice and garden (e.g., coconut, mango) cultivation where even
relatively smaller holdings could provide substantial wealth, and where the
condition of Dalits as field labourers was most oppressive. Extreme
examples of this coastal eco-type are of course Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu
and the Kerala coast; but in our states also Brahmans were the main
landlords in the Konkan and Kanara regions, Brahmans and elite Kammas
and some of the other ‘shudra’ castes in the Andhra delta.
 It can also be noted that average land sizes are the smallest overall in
Andhra, next in Karnataka and largest in Maharashtra, an indication partly
of the relative poverty of agriculture in the dry Deccan plateau regions.29
Finally, in all cases there is more land-lessness in terms of ‘land operated’
than in terms of ‘land owned’, while the opposite is true of the 0–1 acre
category, indicating that these small fragments of land were simply not
cultivated.
Data on agrarian structure (classes or occupational categories) by regions
come from the British censuses of the early twentieth century (Table 2.2),
and to some degree show degrees of landlord-tenant relations that were,
after independence, overridden in the direction of more capitalistic, wage-
labour relations. All the censuses show the broad categories of landlord
(‘income from rent of land’), cultivator and agricultural labourer; but only
for some regions do we have a break-up of these into ‘cultivating owner/
tenant’ and ‘farm servant/field labourer’. For assessment of the degree of
landlordism, figures for tenancy are much more indicative than those of
‘income from rent of land’; unfortunately the tenancy figures are not
available for Hyderabad state. For the areas where they are available,
however, there is clearly higher tenancy in the Delta region of Andhra and
even more so in north and south Kanara and the Konkan. The distinction
between ‘farm servants’ and ‘field labourers’ also indicates a greater degree
of traditional bondage in agrarian relations where there are more ‘farm
servants’, as was true in Telengana and the Delta districts (and in Nagpur–
Wardha as contrasted to Berar, which may be linked to the malguzari
settlement in the former region).
TABLE 2.1
Land Distribution by Region, 1971
 The data on caste and occupation (Table 2.3) are perhaps the most
interesting. These show that while Dalits tended to be agricultural
labourers, there were significant qualifications to this, with regional
variations. The Holeyas (and even more the Madigas) in Mysore state, and
the Mahars and Mangs–Madigas in Bombay Presidency and the Central
Provinces–Berar were economically in a somewhat better position in the
sense that a respectable proportion of them were ‘cultivators’. Mahars in
Bombay Presidency even came close to competing with Kunbis in this
respect. The Malas and Madigas in Madras Presidency and Hyderabad state
were much worse off in having a much higher proportion of workers as
field labourers or in ‘menial service’ and only a small foothold as
‘cultivators’. Similarly Holeyas in Madras Presidency (who were almost
entirely of the south Kanara district) were, in contrast to those of Mysore
state, overwhelmingly field labourers.
TABLE 2.3
Caste and Agrarian Occupation, 1921 (Male Workers)
 Finally, a specific look at the occupational pattern among women workers
is suggestive (Table 2.4). Data indicate low work participation of women
among the Brahman castes in all regions; contrastingly, among the ‘peasant’
jatis it is quite high (except for the Vokkaliga in Mysore state), while it is
highest of all among the Dalits. And everywhere the incidence of female
participation in agriculture is much higher than that of male workers and
more so as ‘field labourers’ than ‘cultivators’. It is clear that women were
substantial ‘economic producers’ along with men and that they tended to be
more proletarianized; though this meant primarily that their wage labour
was mainly as agricultural labourers and as unskilled casual labourers, they
also participated substantially as toiling peasant cultivators (and their labour
on family farms was undoubtedly underestimated, in 1921 as in 1971–81!).
TABLE 2.4
Caste and Agrarian Occupation, 1921 (Female Workers)
 These are twentieth century data on caste and land and it is possible that
some of the patterns they show have been influenced by social–economic
developments beginning with colonial rule. For instance, the greater
economic opportunities in Bombay and Nagpur (the textile industry and
others) apparently helped Dalits even in the rural areas to improve their
landholding positions;30 the greater ‘feudal’ backwardness of Hyderabad
state may have maintained or even worsened low-caste bondage. Still,
many of the patterns are historically quite ancient, and indicate the
relatively more equalitarian traditions of the northern Deccan and the
economic assertiveness of Dalits which helped to lay a basis, in the
twentieth century, for a powerful and revolutionary low-caste movement.

• CASTE AND COLONIALISM

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century when British rule became a
reality five famines occurred that took the life of about a million people.
In the second twenty-five years there were two famines, and about four
hundred thousand dead. In the third twenty-five years there were six
famines and the toll of death became five million. And in the last twenty-
five years of that century what do we see? Eighteen famines! And the
estimated death toll of from 15 million to 20 million! …. Gentlemen,
what must be the cause of this? To put the cause in plain words, it is the
government policy the British have followed. The aim has always
remained to limit the growth of trade and industry in this country. This is
not simply a logical fault; but the effort to rule India in such a way that it
will always remain a customer of British goods. This is the recognized
thread of the British state. It is due to this policy that India has been
turned through ages into a poor country. In the process of establishing
this poverty who have been the main victims? Those dalit peasants who
still cannot fill their stomachs for six months have provided the majority
of victims …. Gentlemen, you cannot sit singing the praises of the British
bureaucracy for simply giving us improved roads, improved canals,
railways, a stable administration and new ideals of geography or for
stopping internal wars. There is scope for praising the maintenance of
law and order. But, gentlemen, nobody including dalits can live by eating
law and order; they live on bread and we cannot forget this …. I would
be the first to agree that the praise given to the British would vanish once
we turned our attention to the forcible extraction of profit by big
capitalists and landlords from the poor working people of this country.
However, I cannot understand how you can expect the British
government to liberate people from the exploitation of the capitalists and
landlords ….
Let us think about this from only your limited perspective. Before the
British came your condition was extremely miserable due to
untouchability. Has the British government done anything to remove
your untouchability? Before the British came you could not take water
from village wells. Has the British government made any effort to give
you that right? Before the British came you could not enter temples. Can
you do that today? Before the coming of the British you could not be
employed in police service. Does the British government give you
 employment now? Before the British came you had no permission to be
in the army. Is this opportunity open to you now? Gentlemen, you cannot
give a positive answer to any of these questions. Those who have ruled
this country for such a long period could have done many good things.
But there has definitely not been a single fundamental change in your
situation …. During the British period the faults of the social structure
and the patches of the varna system have been kept as they were.31
With these powerful remarks, the rising leader of India’s Dalit
movement, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, was giving his reply to those sections of
Dalits and non-Brahmans who believed that colonial rule had been an
unambiguous liberating force. In doing so, he drew on the broad Marxist
critique of colonialism, which had by his day also become the nationalist
critique.
British colonial rule was the force which incorporated India into world
capitalism. What was its effect on caste? It is true that the general Marxist
analysis of imperialism, which stresses the linkage of the exploitation of the
Third World with the development of capitalism in Europe, provides the
best beginning point for any understanding of the processes of caste–class
development in India during British rule. However the standard
interpretation of this focuses too much on the wage labour/capital relation
as the driving force, and sees the main dynamic in the expansion of capital
from the centre. Rather, taking off from Marx’s brief comments on
‘primitive accumulation’ and the role of force and violence in history, we
argue that non-wage forms of accumulation, including women’s domestic
labour; the extraction of cheap natural resources; the extraction of surplus
(primarily from Third World peasants) through slave and serf relations and
petty commodity production, have been equally crucial.32 Within
contemporary interpretations of Marxism, perhaps the most helpful analysis
along these lines, less inherently ‘Orientalist’ in its assumptions about the
stagnation of non-European relations and systems of production, has been
the ‘world capitalist systems’ theory represented by Immanuel Wallerstein
and others. This takes commodity production, not wage labour as such, as
the defining feature of a ‘world capitalist system’. It sees non-wage labour
in the periphery (primarily serfdom and slavery, in Wallerstein’s
interpretation) as playing a major role in accumulation at a world scale. In
doing so it treats the dynamics of the system as not simply deriving from
the impetus of capital formation and the surplus value relation at the
‘centre’ but also from the dialectic between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, with
dynamic also coming from the movements of the exploited in the Third
World. As Wallerstein puts it,
A capitalist world-economy began to form centered on the European
continent in the sixteenth century. From the beginning this involved the
establishment of integrated production processes we may call commodity
chains. These commodity chains almost all tended to traverse the existing
political boundaries. The total surplus extracted in these commodity
chains was at no point distributed evenly in terms of the geographical
location of the creation of the surplus, but was always concentrated to a
disproportionate degree in some zones rather than in others. We mean by
‘peripheries’ those zones that lost out in the distribution of surplus to the
‘core’ zones. Whereas at the beginning of the historical process, there
seemed little difference in the economic wealth of the different
geographical areas, a mere one century’s flow of surplus was enough to
create a visible distinction between core and periphery in terms of three
criteria: the accumulation of capital, the social organization of local
production processes, the political organization of the state structures.33
Thus, colonialism for India meant a political organization that shaped the
traditional caste–feudal structures and Mughal bureaucracies to the needs of
a new British–controlled colonial state; a restructuring of ‘local production
processes’ that meant an increased ‘peasanticization’ as many traditional
crafts were destroyed and peasants thrown back on the land, often to
specialization in crops not for their own subsistence or local consumption
but for the needs of Europe; and an accumulation process that directed
surpluses to countries far from India itself but also helped to strengthen the
political bureaucracy within India. In the process the traditional structures
of caste were used, transformed and in some ways even strengthened.
India was integrated into the system, along with most of the rest of Asia
and Africa, during the period 1750–1850.34 In truth, it had been part of the
‘events’ of world capitalism from the beginning; but Vasco da Gama’s
landing could not produce the conquest and plunder of a subcontinent so
easily as could that of Columbus. By the seventeenth century Europeans
geared to establish foothold; by the eighteenth beginning their real
conquest. The traditional marking dates for the incorporation of India into
the world capitalist system can be said to be 1757 (the battle of Plassey) and
1857, the supercession of the East India Company by the British state and
the ‘first war of independence’ (or the last major resistance war of the
traditional society). Intermediary dates of central importance, particularly
for the area of this study, are the defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799 and of the
Peshwas in 1818, marking the triumph over the strongest enemies of the
British, and the treaty with the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1800.
On conquest, Bombay Province was formed consisting of western
Maharashtra, Gujarat and northern Karnataka. After the defeat of Tipu,
Mysore state was created and given back to a former Hindu ruling dynasty,
but the rich coastal districts were taken away and north Kanara given to
Bombay Presidency (south Kanara along with Malabar went to Madras
Presidency). In 1766–67 the British had already gained control over the
‘Northern Circars’ (Andhra delta) by getting a firman from the Mughals and
checking the Nizam’s efforts at control; the 1800 treaty saw the cession of
Rayalaseema or the ‘ceded districts’ also to Madras Presidency and the
leasing of the relatively rich cotton-growing districts of Berar (Vidarbha) to
the Central Provinces. Thus, though the Nizam was left with the biggest
princely state in the subcontinent, its most prosperous regions were put
under direct British rule.
Thus, the conquest and incorporation of India saw the reorganization of
the Marathi, Telugu and Kannada-speaking regions to fall under three
separate British provinces and two major princely states.
The restructuring of local production processes to allow for accumulation
of capital towards the centre had several major aspects in India.
Politically it meant that the caste–feudal ‘watan’ states were restructured
for surplus production geared to the cycles of a capitalist world economy.
The British adapted Mughal–Maratha and other bureaucratic ruling
structures, maintaining a good deal of feudal privilege. In the zamindari
areas and the princely states they allowed the feudals to directly appropriate
the surpluses and hand over only a portion to the British; while in the
ryotwari areas the continued existence of ‘inam’ (revenue-free) holdings
was allowed (for instance it is estimated that in the classic ryotwari area of
Bombay Presidency at least one-third of the area was under various forms
of non-ryotwari holdings during the mid-nineteenth century).35
Nevertheless, the independent power of feudal rulers came to an end and
the colonial bureaucracy, with the British in command, ruled India for
purposes fundamentally different from those of previous caste–feudal
administrations—as the brightest ‘jewel in the crown’ providing revenue to
maintain a world-conquering army and navy and surpluses for European
consumption and accumulation.
This shift in political power had a complex effect on caste relations. At
the lowest level, in the villages, the traditional jajmani division of labour
survived, and one scholar, Chris Fuller, has argued that the destruction of
the previous feudal state strengthened the position of the village-based
‘dominant caste’:
The granting of private property rights in land to those responsible for the
revenue destroyed the structure of the distributive system. Where there
had previously been a complex hierarchy with many levels, now only its
bottom half, the part within the village (the jajmani system) remained.
The top half vanished and was replaced by a single link between the
owner and the government defined according to principles diverging
fundamentally from those of the past.36
But this did not simply mean a strengthening of the ‘dominant caste’
within the village since in crucial ways the subordination of the village to
the bureaucracy increased. It also meant a shift in power relations within the
ruling bloc; the strengthening of Brahmans relative to ‘Ksatriya’ political
powerholders.37 The power of the state to extract surpluses grew though
gradually, and entry to the state machinery was now via the British
educational system. Former zamindars and maharajas retained a good deal
of their pomp and influence; princely states continued to ‘rule’ over a full
one-third of the country though always under the heavy hand of the British.
But many of the former political powerholding groups and families were in
a sense ‘pensioned off’. As the British bureaucracy extended its hold, it was
its ‘servants’ or ‘employees’ who extended their power, and it was largely
the literate castes, primarily Brahmans, who managed to gain new
monopolies of these bureaucratic positions.
The fact that the British-run courts continued to implement a religious
‘private law’ defining family/gender/caste relationships as interpreted by
Brahman pandits and Muslim mullahs also helped to maintain a caste
orthodoxy over significant spheres of life. Women, for example, could not
open bank accounts and hold control of financial affairs until after
independence; while courts enforced the control of girls by fathers and
husbands.
Economically the commodification process of incorporation into a
capitalist economy meant increased regional specialization and the fostering
of cash-crop exports concurrent with the destruction of much of the
previous regional and national-level self-sufficiency. Mainly this, at first,
meant increased production of crops such as indigo, raw silk, opium and
cotton. Land revenue was both a primary mode of extraction of the surplus
and the financial basis of the colonial state (including the maintenance of
that powerful weapon of empire, the British Indian army) until the 1930s
when peasant struggles very nearly brought it to an end. A heavy revenue
demand from the peasants also forced them into cash cropping to meet their
needs for cash. Money-lenders, who advanced credit on the crop-lien
system and took control of the marketing of the crop in ryotwari areas, were
crucial intermediaries in this process; but its central significance was to
subordinate the entire peasantry (rich, poor, wage labourer, balutedar and
all) to production for the needs of a European market (raw materials for
European industrialization, new ‘luxury’ consumption goods such as coffee,
tea and cocoa for the European middle and working classes). It was a
process of accumulation via the state for a world capitalist system.
The forced specialization in many raw materials, the destruction of many
artisan industries through competition with cheap European manufactures,
all led to what one historian has called the ‘peasantization’ of the
economy.38 Further, the exorbitant revenue demands and the increased
cash-crop production took place in the context of local environmental
destruction. Forests were degraded and occasionally devastated as trees
were cut down to build railways, cultivation was extended into previously
forested areas, and the state gradually brought all forest lands under direct
control to develop a ‘scientific forestry’ aimed, once more, at catering for
world market needs. As a result, forest areas and commons could no longer
provide, to the same degree, ‘inputs’ for agriculture and various subsistence
needs for villagers.39
One result was a significant decline in living standards to a point
considerably below that existing during Mughal times.40 Descriptions by
British observers of the mid-nineteenth century indicate an almost uniform
impoverishment even in regions like East Khandesh which were
traditionally comparatively wealthy:
Beyond the precincts of the towns, and our military cantonments, and out
of the line of high roads, the villages consist, for the most part, of
miserable huts, inhabited by a squalid peasantry whose very appearance
denotes a state of destitution. Even in villages which present a better
aspect the enquirer soon finds that throughout the length and breadth of
the land, the people are struggling against poverty and debt.41
The heavy incidence of famines during British rule, cited so forcefully by
Ambedkar in his 1930 speech, was an indication of the way the entire
peasantry had been forced to the margin of existence. And, as he pointed
out, the heaviest burden of all of this continued to fall on the lowest castes
and on women and children, those who lacked entitlements to the land and
other sources of sustenance.42
Direct wage labour was also exploited. Late to develop, factory
production increased very gradually; in data cited by Anupam Sen there
were 815 factories with an average daily workforce of 350,000 in 1894;
3,400 factories with 1,171,000 workers in 1919, and 10,466 factories with
1,751,000 workers by 1939; not a very large number for the subcontinent.43
But labour was also used in railways and docks and, of course, for all the
construction and irrigation projects built. More significantly, it was used not
only in India itself but throughout the empire, as low-caste, often Dalit
labourers migrated to work in plantation economies, spanning from the
West Indies to South Africa to South-east Asia and Fiji.
This worldwide movement of Indians has been cited by David
Washbrook as a significant factor in the organization of the imperial system.
Washbrook stresses the role of the ‘scribal, military, and trading and
banking groups’ (i.e., the Brahman, Ksatriya and Vaishya varnas).44 But,
while these were junior partners in exploitation, at the bottom of the system,
providing the most exploited producers of surplus, bonded and overworked
to exhaustion and death, were huge numbers of India’s Dalits and Adivasis
who migrated to work in plantations from the West Indies to the Fiji islands.
Colonialism thus had a complex effect on the functioning of the caste
system. It did not simply create ‘classes’ along with ‘castes’. On the one
hand new groups like a factory working class and plantation proletariat
came into existence, and new professionals and some businessmen
developed from high caste Brahmans and Banias. A ‘peasantry’ also
acquired an accentuated existence, increasingly linked to production for the
world market. But while at one level formally non-scriptive openings (such
as education and entry into factory occupations) could mean that a very few
from the lower castes could win their way into non-traditional occupations,
by and large caste channeled workers to segmented labour markets:
Brahmans continued to have near-monopoly control over administrative
positions and professions; merchant castes (Banias, Jains, Chettiars)
became money-lenders, merchants and businessmen; middle Shudra castes
dominated factory occupations, while miners and plantation workers were
drawn from the lowest groups. Caste hierarchy thus remained, with
Brahmans at the top and the most mobile; with the middle ‘peasant’ castes
impoverished and in many ways more attached to villages (except for the
very meagre openings in factories) than they had been before, and with the
lowest castes, especially Dalits, also mobile but so greatly impoverished
and exploited as to find it very hard to benefit from such mobility.

• NATIONALISM AND ELITE RESISTANCE

The intelligentsia, that is the Indian national leadership, divided the
national liberation movement … into two warring factions: a political
movement and a social movement. They also declared those who
organized social movements, those who theorized on agriculture and
industry, to be stooges of the British and traitors. The national movement
was turned into a form of mythological movement and ancestor worship
…. Those who propounded inequality and did not wish society to be
democratic, started eulogizing and sublimating history, mythology and
ages gone by because, in those mythological and historical ages, they
were the supreme victors and leaders …. The Indian intelligentsia do not
wish to accept the present with its revolutionary potential.45
This harsh critique by the Dalit writer Baburao Bagul captures a major
reality of the nationalist upsurge in India. As the ‘English-educated elite’,
i.e., the politically dispossessed Brahman ruling class, began to mobilize,
they had two goals or thrusts: first, to regain their rule in the state as against
the British, and, second, to maintain their position against the masses within
the Indian ‘caste–class’ hierarchy. They organized as ‘nationalists’ to
demand first a greater share in rule of the empire and then aspiring to lead a
movement for complete independence; and they also organized as ‘social
reformers’ to challenge many aspects of tradition. However, their concern
to maintain their own power vis-à-vis the castes and classes below them
meant that nationalism was weakened and social reform primarily came to
mean restructuring the relations of caste and patriarchy to make them
compatible with ‘modernization’. In the process the ideology of caste
hegemony was incorporated within an emerging racially/ethnically based
‘Hindu nationalism’ or hindutva in which upper castes were identified as
‘Aryans’ (equivalent to Europeans) and the Vedas were identified as the
core of Hindu religion.
The Indian National Congress, formed in 1885 after a series of provincial
organizing attempts, was at first only a limited petition-making body whose
perspective fell far short of self-government and democracy, focusing
instead on administrative reforms that would give scope for elite
participation. Its attacks on British racism and raising of the issues of
economic exploitation as in the ‘nationalist economic theory’ evolved by
Moderates which attempted to explain Indian poverty through the drain of
wealth46 did express broad national interests. Its resolutions included
protests against the salt tax, the treatment of Indian labourers abroad, and
the sufferings caused by forest administration, all issues of genuine mass
concern. Yet the social base of the Congress is insufficiently understood by
describing it as ‘middle class’ and implying that its members were detached
from any major interest in the system of production and exploitation. Its
members, whether lawyers, educationalists, journalists, etc., were also
upper castes, overwhelmingly Brahmans, and they invariably had
connection with the land through intermediate tenures and often as
zamindars and money-lenders. Thus powerholders in the Congress up to the
very end tended to oppose anti-landlord legislation and the efforts to protect
peasants and tenants. For instance, though Lokmanya Tilak had sent his
agents from the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha into the country-side in 1896–97 to
popularize the legal rights of peasants affected by famine, both he and the
moderate Gokhale bitterly opposed a Bombay government move to restrict
transfer of peasant lands to money-lenders in 1901. Defending landlordism,
Tilak stated,
Just as the government has no right to rob the sowcar and distribute his
 wealth among the poor, in the same way the government has no right to
deprive the khot of his rightful income and distribute the money to the
peasant. This is a question of rights and not of humanity.47
Thus it was the heirs of Tilak, defending the khots, that Ambedkar
confronted in his leadership of the anti-landlord struggle in the Konkan
during the 1930s; and in similar ways throughout the country both Dalits
and non-Brahman peasants found their needs not only simply ignored, but
at first also opposed, by the Congress nationalists. At the same time, the
‘Brahmanic’ interests of the elite, particularly as against ‘Bania’ traditions,
were consistent with a certain degree of anti-capitalism, demands for
nationalization and the fostering of a state-controlled economy.
Social reform efforts are usually considered more linked to the needs of
the Shudra and Dalit castes. Yet in fact they functioned to provide an
upgrading and ‘modernization’ of high-caste domination. The Prarthana
Samaj in western India avoided such issues as caste and untouchability;
women’s education was taken up and there were hesitant steps forward on
other issues of women’s rights, but always argued for in terms of the needs
of reformed men for a better family atmosphere; independent women
activists such as Pandita Ramabai, Tarabai Shinde and Anandibai Joshi
were nearly all marginalized.48 The approach of the moderate Brahmans of
Maharashtra was perhaps best expressed in the remark of M.G. Ranade that
social reform was in ‘the great Hindu tradition … of seeking out ancient
principles in order to restate them’; instead of destroying the structure the
reformer should ‘lop off diseased overgrowth and excrescences and …
restore vitality and energy to the social organism.’49
Bengal’s Brahmo Samaj was comparatively more radical. It was
thoroughgoing in its attacks on contemporary social customs of caste and
on the subordination of women; it undertook major campaigns advocating
widow remarriage, and it identified with a proclaimed monotheism rather
than either the Vishnuite bhakti movement of Bengal or the Kali ‘mother
goddess’ tradition. For these reasons, its members were segregated as an
independent religious sect, with a separate law applied to them. Yet the
Brahmo Samaj also essentially functioned as a ‘modernizing’ lifestyle for
English-educated upper castes, and it continued to identify, if not with
‘Hinduism’ as such, with an Aryan ‘Golden Age’ in which the period of
Muslim rule could be treated as medieval darkness and blamed for the
degeneration of India.
The Arya Samaj, founded later than the other two, was the most
aggressive in both its social reform and in identification with Vedic
‘Aryanism’. It had its initial base among Punjabi trading castes in contrast
to Maharashtrian Brahmans and Bengal bhadralok, and it sharply attacked
some current Hindu practices including ‘idolatry and polytheism, child
marriage, the taboos on widow remarriage and foreign travel, and Brahman
predominance.’50 But to Arya Samajists the mitigation of casteism meant
seeing all the main Hindu castes as descendants of Vedic Aryans, and
absorbing untouchables within these by a shuddhi or ‘mass purification’
campaign. More than the other two organizations it attained a mass
following, including some Dalits. The effect was both a process of
‘sanskriticization’ and a spectacular rise in membership from 40,000 in
1891 to half a million by 1921.51 This also meant an increasingly militant
confrontation with Muslims and an increasing identification of nationalism
with Hinduism.
Thus, even before Veer Savarkar developed a thoroughgoing ‘Hindutva’
ideology during the 1920s equating ‘Hinduism’ and ‘nationalism’, the
dominant elite ideological trend by the end of the nineteenth century was
that of a revitalized Hinduism equated with nationalism. This was expressed
in a range of ways. There was an organizational upsurge of orthodox forms
of Hinduism, with Hari Sabhas and Sanatan Dharma Sabhas, Kumbha
Melas and a big conference in Delhi in 1900 which started a Bharat Dharma
Mahamandal.52 At the same time ‘moderate’ social reformers were attacked
as ‘anti-nationalist’; the Social Conference was denied the use of the
Congress pandal at the 1895 session by the Tilakites; a storm was raised to
oppose the Age of Consent Bill in 1891 with arguments that foreign rulers
had no right to interfere in social and religious customs.53 Religious
symbols (with implicit anti-Muslim interpretations) were used to popularize
nationalism. Shivaji was depicted as founder of a ‘Hindu raj’, while the
Ganapati festival in Maharashtra and the Kali cult in Bengal were linked to
elite nationalism. Vivekananda, flashy and charismatic, exemplified the
emotional appeal of this thrust: sharp words of criticism for existing
‘degeneration’ combined with passionate evocation of the glories of the
past; emotional appeals for identification with the ‘Daridra-narayana’, the
Shudra and untouchable, without any clear programme; a macho, almost
martial image in which abstention from sexuality was linked to
revolutionary dedication; and institutional efforts (the Ramakrishna
mission) that focused on social welfare without any hint of social reform.54
There were contrapuntal elements in both nationalism and elite social
reform: genuine concern of many of the early reformers to wipe out social
evils; identification by young militants such as Bhagat Singh with
revolutionary mass activity and the working classes. Yet the refusal or
inability, even by the revolutionary militants, to confront Brahmanism and
the reality of caste hegemony weakened their understanding of the masses
they sought to ‘liberate’. Linkages with the exploited low-caste peasants
and workers were normally paternalistic and bureaucratic, while there was
no resistance from the more left forces to the identification of the Indian
majority as ‘Hindu’. The ultimate result was that neither the Nehruvian
‘secularism’ nor Gandhian ‘Ram-raj’ could provide an Indian identity that
was liberatory for Dalits and low castes; in Baburao Bagul’s terms, they not
only harked back to the past but accepted a high caste version of it.

• STRUGGLES OF THE EXPLOITED

The toiling castes—Shudra peasants and artisans, Dalit village labourers,
Adivasi forest-dwelling peasants—were subjected to new forms of
exploitation by colonial rule, with their traditional ‘caste duties’ used for
new forms of surplus production which aided centralized accumulation in
nations far from their homes. Sometimes this meant they were bound to
‘traditional’ forms of village-based production and social relations even
more than before, with an increased ‘peasanticization’ and solidification of
jajmani relations. Sometimes it meant physical mobility as Dalits and
Adivasis migrated thousands of miles to become plantation labourers;
sometimes it involved recruitment into new factory and mining work with
increased collective relations and the potential organizing power of the
‘proletariat’. In most cases of this new labour recruitment, however, the
terrible oppression of the labourers, high mortality rates, lack of education
and maintenance of ties with home villages meant that mobility had few
advantages for organization.
As a result, struggles of the most exploited sections were slow to
develop; initial struggles were those of various types of peasantry, often
under traditional leadership, and the slow organizing of the lowest castes
under a few educated or semi-educated activists for new rights of access to
economic opportunity. Because colonial exploitation involved the
extraction of surpluses mediated through caste and community relations,
very often caste and community became, in reaction, issues and weapons of
resistance for the exploited.
The major form of resistance was through peasant revolts and
movements; these took many and varied forms, ranging from seemingly
traditional ‘restorative’ tribal uprisings to agitations against local exploiters
(landlords and money-lenders) to both sporadic agitations and sustained
campaigns against the British bureaucracy especially on forest issues and
land revenue issues. In the early period these movements and agitations had
only local, traditional leadership drawn from the peasant
castes/communities themselves; later various types of nationalist and non-
Brahman elites began to involve themselves in mass campaigns.
Dalits are not generally thought of as peasants; they were most often
labourers, whether in plantations or (more rarely) factories or in the villages
of their origin. Where they were peasants they were usually poor peasants.
Thus, in left academic discussions of peasant organizing and ‘class
differentiation’ among the peasantry, there is a tendency to consider that
early peasant movements were often those of ‘rich peasants’ with poor
peasants, and particularly Dalits, benefiting little from their agitations.55 Yet
Ambedkar had referred to ‘Dalit peasants’ being the primary victims of
colonial exploitation, and made a major effort to identify his first political
party, the Independent Labour Party, with ‘workers and peasants’. It is
worth, then, examining to what degree the traditional ‘worker—peasant
alliance’ made sense in colonial India, in situations where there was often
extreme hierarchy and fragmentation among the peasantry.
In fact, the formal categorical distinctions between ‘cultivator’ and
‘agricultural labourers’ masked a good deal of overlap, with the poorest
villagers working both on their own land and on that of others and often
migrating for wage-labour during part of the year. Nor were urban
‘workers’ themselves a solidly distinguished category; there was continual
migration from the villages to specific jobs and maintenance of village links
(often with the strong economic aspect that peasant members of the family
in the villages bore the costs of reproduction of labour power). While the
economic processes of production and accumulation of surplus defined
degrees of exploitation and economic interests, it was traditional caste and
community forms that determined the way in which individuals participated
in these various processes.
The distinction between ‘rich peasant’ and the poor peasant-labourers is
also unfruitful as a way of classifying rural struggles. Throughout the
nineteenth century there were complex struggles and efforts of peasants to
resist the worst of their exploitation, and gradually living standards did rise.
But it cannot be proved that this was a ‘rise of the rich peasants’ in the
sense that a polarization was occurring in village society in such a way that
rich peasant gains were at the expense of greater exploitation and
dominance over poor peasants and labourers. For instance, Sumit Guha’s
studies of the rise of the land market in western Maharashtra show that
during the nineteenth century nearly all peasants were so crushed by the
burden of high taxation and low prices that money-lenders were impelled to
use the crop-lien system (i.e., taking control of the crop and selling it
themselves); by the early twentieth century a moderate prosperity meant
that a land market could emerge with some money-lenders gaining control
of land and some peasants able to sell crops themselves, achieve some
prosperity and engage in money-lending and labour-hiring on their own.56
But to say that this ‘rich peasantry’ constituted a new exploiting section as
part of a rising class of ‘agricultural capitalists’ aspiring to be part of the
ruling class (which is the way many analyse such movements as the non-
Brahman movements and the Satyashodhak Samaj) is entirely a matter of
definition. Most studies, including Guha’s, show that there was in fact a
gradation more than a sharp break between ‘classes of the peasantry’ and
that normally the prosperity of the ‘rich peasant’ was precarious and subject
to the buffetings of famine and depression. Gradation in degree of wealth
and access to resources does not itself constitute ‘classes’.
The most detailed study of the Deccan region during the colonial period,
by Neil Charlesworth on the Bombay Presidency, shows that as the
peasantry gained access to economic benefits, the circle of beneficiaries
began widening; while only a minority of peasants upgraded this standard
of living during the late nineteenth century, by the 1900–1930 period wage
labourers and tenants were also sharing in gains due to rising prices, while
the depression, in contrast, tended to increase rural polarization and reverse
‘centripetal tendencies’.57 Charlesworth concludes:
In so far as the first stage of commercialization was pioneered by the
minority with resources—carts, implements, and access to credit—to
latch on to market opportunities, in many localities it developed as a
stealthy process, peripheral to the central concerns of the village
economy. After 1900 commercialization, in the more advanced regions
and localities, had eaten into the heart of the village economy and its
operations, but, coincidentally, the distribution of rewards from
commercial agriculture and economic opportunities in general seem to
have become more broadly based …. The rule may be, then, that more
extensive commercialization tempers social stratification, and this may
apply in other parts of Asia as well as India …. In this way the process of
agrarian change in the Bombay Presidency differs radically from the
classic Marxist ‘agrarian transition’ involving the complementary
formation of a class of rising agricultural capitalists and a landless
proletariat. Instead, it accords more closely with Goodman and
Radcliffe’s ‘second formulation’, drawn from Latin American cases,
where ‘peasant producers may be incorporated into commodity
production and exchange but retain ownership of the means of
production and control of the immediate production processes.’58
While incorporation and commercialization may have ‘tempered social
stratification’ within the village; exploitation and social stratification on the
societal level (between the villagers and the bureaucracy and
national/international bourgeoisie) was in fact intensified.
An example of the broad process of exploitation through
commercialization leading to a broad unity of resistance can be seen in the
Bardoli anti-revenue struggle of 1928. For western India it was the climax
of peasant resistance to expropriation of the surplus via land revenue. It was
also an illustration of the complex hierarchies of caste and community
linked to the struggle, and there has been a debate about its ‘class’ meaning.
Charlesworth himself hesitates in describing Bardoli as a ‘rich peasant’ or
‘middle peasant’ struggle; he rules out the former on the argument that
typical rich peasant politics cannot mobilize the masses of the peasantry, the
latter because Bardoli had become a region of high differentiation and
tenancy by the 1920s.59
 The problem here lies partly in the definitions of ‘rich’ and ‘middle’
peasants in which the one is associated with commercialization, the other
with an unreal image of a purely subsistence non-hiring cultivator. In fact
the very complex population of Bardoli, ranging from the Dalit-tribal
Raniparaj (‘forest-dwellers’, originally called more crudely ‘Kaliparaj’ or
‘black people’) to the Vanias, Anavil Brahmans, Parsis and peasant Kanbi-
Patidars, had in common exploitation through commercialization in which
low prices and high revenue demands combined to squeeze the entire rural
sector. The ground for mobilization in Bardoli was prepared by Gandhian
‘constructive work’ centring among the Patidars and Kaliparaj tribals, and
the struggle itself saw a wide mobilization of peasants, labourers and more
elite commercial classes.60 Charles-worth claims,
Bardoli illustrates the alternative conditions for an assertive peasant
politics. Where the commitment to commercial agriculture was socially
extensive, then fluctuations in demand conditions could create grievances
across different social groups. To be more specific, if the bulk of the
Bombay peasants had been engaged in cash-crop production in the
1920s, then the price falls of the agricultural depression might have
reaped a whirlwind of mass protest.61
Not only did the Bardoli Dalits participate in the struggle but, as we shall
see, Ambedkar himself expressed his support for it. The fact is that the very
unevenness and variabilities of the colonial exploitation processes imposed
on a hierarchical traditional society meant a high degree of differentiation
among the exploited. This did not necessarily mean polarization; instead it
meant a differential impact of exploitation. Thus a broad unity of resistance
could be created but only by linking the varying economic demands of
variously exploited groups, and by articulating these with culture and
community. The ability of any political movement among the exploited to
create such a broad unity and to take up cultural along with economic issues
was to be decisive; in the end it was the Gandhian-led Congress which
succeeded in doing so, not the left aspirants to working class leadership.

• JOTIBA PHULE AND SHUDRA–ATISHUDRA UNITY

Have the Brahman members of the Sarvajanik Sabha ever allowed the
 Mahars to sit along with them in the organization and have they ever
cared to discuss sundry matters pertaining to their unfortunate practice of
eating the flesh of dead animals? or have they ever cared to send a
memorial to the Government about these matters? …. But you will surely
find many petitions in the records of the Sarvajanik Sabha to the effect
that the English government be pleased to appoint Hindus as collectors
….
There cannot be a ‘nation’ worth the name until and unless all the people
of the land of King Bali, such as the Shudras and Ati-Shudras, Bhils and
fishermen etc. become truly educated and are able to think independently
for themselves and are uniformly unified and emotionally integrated.62
To Jotiba Phule (1826–1890), the nineteenth century social revolutionary
and main founder of the anti-caste movement in India, the national
unification of the masses of the people in India required an attack on
Brahman domination and Hinduism itself. This attack he carried on at all
levels, elaborating a theory of history along with a reinterpretation of Indian
mythology, and communicating it to the masses with polemic tracts, songs,
plays and organization-building.
The ‘Aryan theory of race’ constituted the most influential common
discourse for discussing caste and society in Phule’s time. European
‘Orientalists’ used it to assert an ethnic kinship between Europeans and
ancient Vedic peoples; members of the Brahman elite such as Tilak used it
to claim at once a ‘European’-type superiority over the low castes of the
subcontinent. At one level, Phule simply reversed it, arguing that the low
castes, whom he sometimes called ‘Shudras and Ati-Shudras’ and
sometimes simply listed as ‘Kunbis, Malis, Dhangars … Bhils, Kolis,
Mahars and Mangs’, were the original inhabitants of the country, enslaved
and exploited by conquering Aryans who had formulated a caste-based
Hinduism as a means of deceiving the masses and legitimizing their power.
In his hands, though, it was more than a simple theory of racial
oppression; an emphasis on the equalitarianism of the original peasant
community, and on the role of force and violence along with ideology as
factors in history, and a stress on the current exploitation of the peasantry
by the British-headed but Brahman-dominated bureaucracy made it a
holistic interpretation. Phule consciously sought to bring together the major
peasant castes (these were, besides the Kunbis or cultivators, the Malis or
‘garden’ cultivators and Dhangars or sheepherders) along with the large
untouchable castes of Mahars and Mangs in a common ‘front’ against
Brahman domination. The aristocratic sardars among the Kunbis, or
Marathas, were scorned but not directly attacked, while even the merchant
castes were more or less ignored in an effort to focus on the Brahmans as
the primary exploiting money-lenders. Phule was also highly critical of the
British, but generally took the position of appealing to their goodwill, an
early version of Ambedkar’s later statement, ‘we cannot fight all enemies at
once.’ Practically speaking, he succeeded in building a basis of support that
ranged from relatively wealthy contractors to the poor Dalits who provided
some ‘street power’, and made his Satyashodhak Samaj possibly the
widest-ranging organization in India at the time in terms of caste
membership.
The ‘Aryan theory of race’, interpreted in terms of a broader historical
framework of a stress on force and violence in history, gave emphasis to a
theory of exploitation that stressed the peasants as primary producers looted
by the state. Here Phule’s critique of the British colonial state was
thoroughgoing, however much he stressed the domination in this of
Brahmans in the bureaucracy. The state exploited the peasants through
direct extraction in the form of taxes, cesses and ‘funds’ of various kinds,
and indirectly through takeover of their lands; as a result ‘the peasants are
so looted that they have neither bread to fill their stomachs nor clothes to
cover their bodies.’ As his major work, Shetkaryaca Asud stresses, both the
former regime of the ‘Arya Brahmans’ and ‘the current government in its
readiness to give its employees the pay and pensions they want levies all
sorts of new taxes on the heads of the peasants and collects them so
ruthlessly that the peasants have fallen under the burden of extreme debt.’63
In addition, while previously poor peasants had scope for employment with
feudatories as well as free use of forests and grazing land,
now our maibap government officials, using their English wisdom, have
at great expense raised up [sic] a huge new government forest department
taking all mountains, forests, hills as well as wastelands and pasturelands
under its control, so that the poor peasants have not a place left on the
earth to feed their animals.64
Phule’s descriptions of exploitation and his suggestions for economic
development centre around the peasantry and agriculture, in contrast to the
elite’s fascination (even during the nineteenth century) for emphasizing
industrial development. Here the focus is in fact very ‘modern’ in a green
sense: it is on biotechnologies and watershed developments. He
recommends the building of canals, bandhs, small and big dams to direct
water to the fields, with soldiers and policemen providing the labour;
returning to village control of all lands appropriated from them by the forest
department; interbreeding with sheep and goats from other countries to
increase production of organic manures as well as wool; sponsoring
agricultural exhibits and holding training programmes and examinations,
with awards for model farmers, to upgrade traditional skills; and reducing
the pay of ‘both white and black’ government officials except for those in
manual labour.65
Ideologically, the unity, rather the community of the exploited was sought
to be built up first, by emphasizing the attack on Brahmanism and
exploitation through religion, and second, by stressing the necessity of
modern education and the acquisition of scientific knowledge, described as
vidya, seen as in contrast to the Brahmanic and ritual-bound shastra.
Phule’s stress on education and knowledge showed a striking contrast with
the upper-caste efforts to acquire technology while maintaining ‘traditional’
values (similar to the ‘western science and eastern morals’) of many
cultures; he made it clear that education was a weapon to change ‘eastern
morals’ and to bring about a kind of cultural revolution as well as a
technological one. His defence of Pandita Ramabai against the orthodox
Brahmans who attacked her made that clear, as he argued that while she had
been a primary force in encouraging education among girls, Brahmans had
stopped sending their daughters and daughters-in-law to schools since (they
were ‘throwing away the scriptures’ and revolting against family
authority)66.
Phule both wrote new marriage ceremonies, following many peasant
traditions but without the use of Brahman priests, and stressing equality
between men and women, and in the end took the radical step of
proclaiming a new, theistic religion, the ‘sarvajanik satya dharma’, with a
strong, moralistic emphasis. But throughout his stress on rationality and
independent thinking remained, perhaps best expressed in a very modern-
sounding poem:
All ideologies have decayed
 no one views comprehensively,
what is trivial, what is great
cannot be understood.
Philosophies fill the bazar,
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 thinks the opinion
he has caught is great.
Pride in untruth
dooms them to destruction,
so the wise people say,
seek truth.67
And in fact, it was out of an expanding wave of consciousness and quest,
stimulated by the contradictions as well as the opportunities of the colonial
period, that a new Dalit movement was to grow.

NOTES
1. Frank Southworth has given many analyses of Dravidian influences on Sanskritic
languages; see ‘Lexical Evidence for Early Contacts between Indo-Aryan and
Dravidian’ and ‘The Reconstruction of Prehistoric South Asian Language Contact’
(manuscript); and ‘Linguistic Stratigraphy of North India’, International Journal of
Dravidian Linguistics, III, 2 July 1974. The arrival of Indo-European speakers in the
north Deccan is often linked with the ‘Jorwe period’ of about 1500–1050 BC; see
Bridget and Raymond Allchin, The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan
(Cambridge: Cambridge World Archeology Publications, 1982), chapter 10. Certainly
a form of Dravidian appears to have been prevalent in much of the area before this,
except for the east, including Nagpur where Gondi must have dominated and except
 perhaps for a possible original prevalence of Mundari languages in the tribal belt. See
Iravati Karve, Kinship Organization in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1968)
for a discussion of the kinship features.
2. See Clarence Maloney, Peoples of South Asia (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1974), pp. 3–9, 8–10; David Ludden, Peasant History in South India (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 18–19.
3. Allchin and Allchin, The Rise of Civilization, p. 353. See also Clarence Maloney,
‘Archeology in South India’, in Burton Stein, (ed.), Essays on South India (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1975), pp. 98–101.
4. Romila Thapar, ‘Puranic Lineages and Archeological Cultures’, in her Ancient Indian
Social History (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1978), p. 253.
5. Maloney, ‘Archeology in South India’, pp. 9–11; along with many other archeologists
and linguists Maloney also believes that Dravidian was a relatively recent historical
import.
6. See Southworth, ‘Prehistoric South Asian Language Contacts’, pp. 11, 14, 19.
7. Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977),
pp. 75–76.
8. George Hart, ‘Ancient Tamil Literature’, in Stein, Essays on South India, pp. 55; D.D.
Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Bombay: Popular Prakashan,
1975), pp. 275–78, 280–81, 288.
9. See Sharad Patil, Shiavjicya Hindvi Swarajyace Khare Shatru Kon: Mahamadi ki
Brahmani? (Dhule: Satyashodhak Marxwadi Prakashan, 1992).
10. Uma Chakravarti, ‘Towards a Historical Sociology of Stratification in Ancient India:
Evidence from Early Buddhist Sources’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2 March
1985.
11. Willie da Silva, From Rta to Dharma (Kanara: Pragati Publishers, 1985).
12. Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1980), pp. 63–80.
13. Recent Marathi books presenting this interpretation are Govind Pansare, Shivaji Kon
Hote? (‘Who was Shivaji’) (Lok Wangmay, 1988) and Sharad Joshi et al.
Shetkaryanca Raja Shivaji (‘Shivaji the Peasants’ King’) (Shetkari Prakashan, 1988).
Such an interpretation can be justified on the general evidence of Shivaji’s opposition
to and ending of giving out rights in watan; see Andre Wink, Land and Sovereignty in
India: Agrarian Society under the 18th century Maratha Svarajya (Cambridge:
Cambridge Oriental Publication, 1986), pp. 269–70 and elsewhere. For a discussion of
the social implications of various interpretations of Shivaji, see Rosalind O’Hanlon,
 Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotiba Phule and Low-Caste Social Protest in
the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
14. Edgar Thurston, Tribes and Castes of Southern India (Madras Government Press,
1909), Volume III, pp. 94–98, 222–47, and R.E. Enthoven, Tribes and Castes of
Bombay (Bombay: Government Press, 1905).
15. James Manor, Political Change in an Indian State: Mysore, 1917–1955 (New Delhi:
Manohar, 1977), pp. 34–36.
16. Cited in Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman
Movement in Western India 1873–1930 (Pune: Scientific Socialist Education Trust,
1976), pp. 71–72.
17. Eleanor Zelliot, Dr. Ambedkar and the Mahar Movement (University of Pennsylvania:
Ph.D. dissertation, 1969).
18. Thurston, Tribes and Castes, Volume IV, p. 340.
19. Ibid., p. 337.
20. Ibid., p. 367.
21. See Janata, 20 August 1941.
22. Thurston, Tribes and Castes, Volume IV, p. 347.
23. Ibid., p. 292.
24. Ibid., pp. 337–42.
25. Ibid., p. 342.
26. See Frederique Marglin, Wives of the God-King: The Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri
(New Delhi: Oxford, 1985) for the Puri Jaganath temple devadasis. Amrit Srinivasan,
‘Reform or Conformity? Temple “Prostitution” and the Community in the Madras
Presidency’, in Bina Agrawal (ed.), Structures of Patriarchy: State, Community and
Household in Modernising Asia (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1988) shows how
the devadasi-originated dance was appropriated in the twentieth century by Brahmans
and given the name of ‘Bharatnatyam’, with devadasis themselves stigmatized as
prostitutes and barred thereafter from-performing it. Girish Karnad’s inaugural address
to the second session of the Dalit–Adivasi Rural Literatures’ Conference (Walwa, 29
October 1988) stresses this aspect of appropriation of low-caste and female-originated
art forms by a bourgeois–Brahman elite and the need for Dalits and women to reclaim
their heritage.
27. Banhi, August 1986.
28. Thurston, Tribes and Castes, Volume IV, pp. 293–95.
29. According to the All-India Debt and Investment Survey, Assets of Rural Households
(Bombay: Reserve Bank of India, 1975), the average value of land per acre in Andhra
 was slightly higher than that in Maharashtra (though the value of land per cultivator
was lower), but still much lower than that of other states in India, being about one-
fourth that of Kerala and Punjab and one-third of Bihar.
30. Sumit Guha, ‘The Land Market in Upland Maharashtra, c. 1820–1960’, Indian
Economic and Social History Review, 24, 2 and 3, 1987.
31. B.R. Ambedkar, Speech for the Depressed Classes Conference, Nagpur, 1930, in M.P.
Ganjare (ed.), Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkararchi hashane Khand 2 (Nagpur: Ashok
Prakashan, 1974), pp. 78–80 (my translation).
32. See Gail Omvedt, in Economic Review (paper for Delhi seminar on ‘The State, Social
Movements and Democracy’, New Delhi, 5–8 October 1992.
33. Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Development: Lodestar or Illusion’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 24 September 1988, p. 2018, emphasis mine.
34. Neil Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule: Agriculture and Agrarian Society in
the Bombay Presidency, 1850–1935 (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1985), pp. 67–68.
35. Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Incorporation of the Indian Subcontinent into Capitalist World–
Economy’, Economic and Political Weekly, 25 January 1986.
36. Chris Fuller, ‘British India or Traditional India: Land, Caste and Power’, in Hamza
Alavi and John Harriss (eds.), Sociology of ‘Developing Societies’: South Asia
(London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 34–38.
37. For a journalistic interpretation, but one not far from the point, see Girilal Jain,
‘Ksatriya–Brahman Equation: Historic Shift Under the Raj’, Times of India, 27 July
1988.
38. David Washbrook, ‘South Asia, the World System, and World Capitalism’, Journal of
Asian Studies, 49(3), August 1990, p. 480.
39. For studies of forest policy and indigenous resistance to it see Ramchandra Guha,
‘Forestry in British and Post-British India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 29
October and 5 November 1983, and The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and
Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); also J.F.
Richards, ‘Cotton Cultivation and Land Clearing in the Bombay Deccan and Karnatak,
1818–1920’ (Mss. May 1981).
40. Wallerstein, ‘incorporation’, p. 32.
41. Cited in Sumit Guha, ‘Commodity and Credit in Upland Maharashtra, 1800–1950’,
Economic and Political Weekly, 26 December 1987, A-133.
42. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
43. Anupam Sen, The State, Industrialization and Class Formations in India (London:
 Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 78.
44. Washbrook, ‘South Asia’, pp. 488–90.
45. Baburao Bagul, ‘Dalit Literature is But Human Literature’, in Arjun Dangle (ed.),
Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature (New Delhi:
Orient Longman, 1992), pp. 282–83.
46. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 86–95.
47. Ibid., quoted on p. 69.
48. See Vidyut Bhagwat, ‘A Review of the Women’s Movement in Maharashtra’,
published in Marathi in Paramarsh, May 1989, pp. 40–42.
49. Quoted in Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World
(London: Zed Books, 1986), p. 80. See also Gail Omvedt, ‘Feminism and the
Women’s Movement in India’ (SNDT, 1983), Marathi summary in Paramarsh, May
1989.
50. Sarkar, Modern India, p. 74.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., p. 75.
53. Ibid., p. 73.
54. Ibid., pp. 72–73.
55. The most extreme and clear-cut example is that of Jacques Pouchedass, ‘Peasant
Classes in Twentieth Century Agrarian Movements in India’, in E.J. Hobsbawm (ed.),
Peasants in History: Essays in Honour of Daniel Thorner (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1980); but it pervades all Marxist writing.
56. Sumit Guha, ‘Commodity and Credit:’ see also Jairus Banaji, ‘Capitalist Domination
and the Small Peasantry: Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century,’ Economic
and Political Weekly, Special Issue, August 1977.
57. Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule, pp. 218, 223, 230.
58. Ibid., p. 294.
59. Ibid., pp. 282–89.
60. A factor stressed by Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 277–79 and analyzed by many studies of
Bardoli, e.g., Anil Bhatt, ‘Caste, and Political Mobilisation in a Gujarat District’, in
Rajni Kothari (ed.), Caste in Indian Politics (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1970), pp.
299–339. See also, Shirin Mehta, The Peasantry and Nationalism: A Study of the
Bardoli Satyagraha (Delhi: Manohar, 1984).
61. Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule, p. 291.
62. See Collected Works of Mahatma Jotirao Phule, Volume II: Selections, translated by
P.G. Patil (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1991), pp. 25–26, 29.
63. Jotirao Phule, Samagra Wangmay (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1991), p.
279.
64. Ibid., p. 269.
65. Ibid., pp. 329–33.
66. Ibid., p. 372.
67. Ibid., p. 440.
 CHAPTER 3

Emergence of the Dalit Movement,

1900–30: Nagpur, Hyderabad, Andhra,
Mysore

• INTRODUCTION: THE TUMULTUOUS TWENTIES

The decade of the 1920s saw the emergence of the Dalit movement as a
conscious, organized force in the social and political life of Bombay
Presidency, Nagpur (the Vidarbha area of the Central Provinces), Madras
Presidency, and even to some extent in placid Mysore. Though much of the
ground for Dalit advance had been laid earlier in terms of educational and
social activities, the 1920s saw a qualitative leap forward.
At the global level turbulent post-war era was marked by the challenge of
the Russian revolution, and in India by the British promise of new political
powers to the Indians as set out in the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms. It was
a period of advancing mass struggles and ideological upheavals. In India
the working class began its major era of organization with the formation of
the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) in 1920. Peasant struggles
arose, both against government rent levies and landlord oppression, and
local organizations or kisan sabhas were founded in many areas, though it
was not until the late 1930s that an all-India peasant organization was
established. Along with peasant and worker struggles, nationalism itself
was on a rising course: the Indian National Congress attained for the first
time a mass membership and made rapid gains in new provinces and
regions outside the established centres of Bengal, Madras and Maharashtra.
Congress’ new mass base was associated with the dominance of Gandhi and
his particular combination of controlled, non-violent militancy, efforts to
ally with Muslims in anti-British campaigns, and calls for social reform and
‘constructive work’—all linked with the assertion of a Hindu identity, and a
village-orientation justified in terms of an antagonism to ‘industrial
civilization’ itself. But, while Gandhi represented in cultural terms a
reformist Hinduism, rising non-Brahman movements in western and
southern India and scattered Dalit movements throughout the country put
forward a challenge to Hinduism itself with new, low caste, peasant and
regional community identities.
In the context of a growing radical mass nationalism, this increasing
activism of peasants, workers, Dalits and non-Brahmans could have
provided a basis for a militant, combined struggle. But other, more ominous
features existed during the twenties. Most important was the growing
crystallization of Hindu–Muslim identities, increasingly seen as
antagonistic, and the consequent development of religiously defined
nationalism. In the case of Hindus this was marked by the formation of the
Hindu Mahasabha in 1915 in north India and by the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS or ‘National Volunteers Organization’), a
supposedly non-political Hindu cadre body in 1925. By and large it was
these Hinduist elements in the Congress who allied with anti-Gandhian
power-seekers in the 1926 elections to push for ‘Responsive Cooperation’
to run the new councils set up by the British government.1
Worker and peasant struggles, Gandhism, Hindu–Muslim tensions and
the rise of Hindu nationalism, and non-Brahman political formations (the
Justice Party in south India, the Non-Brahman Party in Bombay) all
provided the ideological and organizational environment within which early
Dalit organizing took place. At the same time, Dalit initiatives put pressures
on these sections, making the issue of ‘untouchability’ a politically salient
one. This process was at its most intense in Bombay Presidency,
particularly the Marathi-speaking areas, where all elements—radical
nationalism, Indian capitalism, a turbulent working class, assertive
peasants, separatist non-Brahmans, orthodox Brahmans—seemed to be at
their strongest. However, to some degree it occurred everywhere, in regions
that remained to a significant extent independent of each other at least until
the early 1930s when Ambedkar began to establish his position as an all-
India leader. Thus we can get a better idea of the patterns involved by first
analyzing organizing capacity of the Dalits in Nagpur, Hyderabad, Andhra
and Mysore and then coming back to the awakening in western
Maharashtra, the centre of the strongest Dalit movement, where B.R.
Ambedkar rose to become its unchallenged leader.

• NAGPUR (VIDARBHA)
Nagpur, almost in the exact geographical centre of India, was the city where
some of the most momentous events of the Ambedkarled Dalit movement
took place: the 1930 Depressed Classes Conference which preceded his trip
to London for the Round Table Conference and heralded the social
radicalism of the 1930s; the 1942 Depressed Classes Political Conference in
which the Independent Labour Party was wound up and the All-India
Scheduled Caste Federation was established; and finally the 1956 diksha
ceremony of mass conversion to Buddhism. Today the city remains an
Ambedkarite stronghold with a conscious and militant Buddhist (ex-Mahar)
community. Yet, paradoxically, while the Nagpur-Vidarbha region gave
birth to a Dalit leadership of its own, this leadership tended to be pro-
Congress and even pro-Hindu Mahasabha. Ambedkar had to clash with
already established Dalit leaders in order to establish his own base in the
area, which he had largely done by 1930. It is worth, therefore, examining
early Dalit organizing in Vidarhba.
Nagpur, the ‘city of snakes’, was founded by the Gond raja of Deogarh
during the seventeenth century. This raja was an opponent of the Mughal
emperor; his rival, the Gond raja of Chandrapur a subordinate ally. In 1707,
in a treaty with the Marathas, the Mughal emperor returned lands which he
had previously seized to Shahu Chhatrapati, the grandson of Shivaji, and
gave him the right to collect revenue in both Gondwana and Berar. This
right was in turn assigned to the feudatory Parsoji Bhonsla, whose
descendents in 1743 established their capital at Nagpur aand brought in
Brahman administrators, merchants and traders, and Maratha–Kunbi
soldiers who took up the cultivation of land.2 Thus the Gond tribals of the
region began to be superceded, and it was in this period that Marathi
replaced tribal languages around Nagpur itself, though it remained the
language of the rest of the Vidarbha area for longer.
British conquest linked the Nagpur division (the present districts of
Nagpur, Wardha, Bandhara and Chandrapur-Gadchiroli) with the Hindu-
speaking districts of present-day Madhya Pradesh to form the Central
Provinces. These had a form of zamindari settlement known in Nagpur as
malguzari. In 1903, Berar, a rich cotton-growing tract capable of providing
needed government revenue to an otherwise poor British province, was
leased from the defeated Nizam of Hyderabad and annexed to the Central
Provinces. Legally incorporated in 1935, it included the districts of
Buldhana, Yeotmal, Amraoti and Akola, with a basically ryotwari
settlement. The politics of Central Provinces– Berar were marked until
1935 with rivalries between Hindi-speaking and Marathi-speaking
politicians and between Gandhians and Tilakites to gain control of the
Congress, while in the Marathi-speaking areas both groups confronted a
non-Congress challenge from non-Brahmans and a growing Dalit
movement. Describing this political process, Baker argues that these greater
‘internal’ rivalries among Marathi speakers allowed Hindi politicians to
gain control of provincial politics, though they came from a less-developed
and less ‘politicized’ region.3
A relatively strong and independent Dalit movement grew in the
Nagpur–Vidarbha region, linked to its social-economic characteristics. It
was a relatively prosperous cotton-growing region from the nineteenth
century, with accompanying trade and processing. The mills of Nagpur and
some other major cities provided much needed employment with Mahars
forming a larger section of the emerging industrial working class then in
Bombay, comprising nearly 40 per cent of textile workers in Nagpur itself.4
The commercialization of the agrarian economy laid the basis for
undermining the traditional village balutedari system, and this, combined
with the ‘frontier’ characteristics of eastern Maharashtra, aided the relative
independence of Mahars. Many of the community were weavers, many
more were small cultivators, and a few managed to become relatively
affluent traders and bigger landholders, including four malguzars, two of
whom later became followers of Ambedkar. With British rule and
missionary activity a small but growing section gained access to education,
and by the end of the nineteenth century began establishing their own
schools. These educated and better-off Mahars generated a growing Mahar
leadership, while the Mahar mill-workers, weavers and poor peasants
provided the community’s militancy and the spread of the Satyashodhak
movement among the region’s non-Brahmans helped to give the militancy a
radical ideological edge.
Among the early leaders, the most well-known even today is Kisan
Faguji Bansode (1870–1946), of a rich peasant family of Mohapa (Nagpur
district), who founded his first organization in his village in 1903 and many
educational institutions after that, including a school for girls in 1907. He
also started several papers, the Nirikshak Hindu Nagarik (1910), Vithal
Vidhvasak (1913), Mazur Patrika (1918),and Chokha Mela (1931). Mazur
Patrika was oriented to the increasingly active working class, but the names
of others reflected his leanings towards the bhakti cult of Maharashtra;
Bansode also wrote several books on the Mahar saint Chokhamela. Also
important in this period was Vithoba Ravji Moonpandit (1860–1924) who
concentrated on internal Mahar social reform. Of a slightly younger
generation two men stand out: Ganesh Akkaji Gavai (1888–1974), from
Amraoti district, who began by founding a ‘Mahar Library’ and ‘Mahar
Sudharak Mandal’ in his home village, and Kalicharan Nandagawali (1886–
1962), a less educated but wealthy malguzar, who is credited with founding
the first girls’ school and who became, with Gavai, the first Dalit member of
the legislative council. Another important activist in the educational field
was a woman, Jayabai Chaudhuri, a protege of Bansode.5
Even within the early group, important differences emerged that were to
become clear by the 1920s. Bansode and Gavai, the most prominent
leaders, educated and relatively articulate, were pulled into the orbit of the
Tilakites and a pro-Hindu position, thus getting linked to nationalism;
others remained aloof from what they saw as Brahman-dominated
nationalism and joined Ambedkar along with most of the younger
generation educated Mahars and the rural and urban masses in autonomous
Dalit organizing. This process can be traced through several important
conferences, a 1913 ‘Mahar Conference’, the 1920 Akhil Bharatiya
Bahishkrut Parishad (‘All India Conference of the Boycotted’), and the
1930 Depressed Classes Conference, all held in Nagpur.
The organizers of the 1913 conference were the older Mahar elite,
malguzars, contractors, patils and patwaris, foremen, clerks, teachers and
railway employees; and it represented a coming together of all Mahar sub-
castes with an emphasis on internal reform and educational advance. It
stressed its support for the government, and the organization which was set
up, with Vithoba Ravji Moonpandit as leader; called itself the ‘Loyal Mahar
Sabha’.6
In contrast was the Depressed Classes Association (DCA), organized in
1915 by Kisan Faguji Bansode and G.A. Gavai. This was influenced by
Vitthal Ramji Shinde, a nationalist Maratha leader of western Maharashtra:
the two had met him in 1910 and together joined the Prarthana Samaj;
Gavai had also associated himself with Shinde’s Depressed Classes
Mission. Eventually these two and their younger followers (Raosaheb G.M.
Thaware from Bandhara district, Hemachandra Khandekar from Nagpur
district) joined either the Hindu Mahasabha or the Congress. This was
correlated with the leaning to bhakti reformist Hinduism.
Anti-Hindu militancy had been frequently expressed in the region, with
themes expressed by Bansode himself in a 1909 article:
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 relationship with you,
we are not your slaves or serfs …. We have had enough of the
harassment and torture of the Hindus …. If you don’t give us the rights of
humanity and independence, then we will have to take our own rights on
the basis of our own strength and courage, and that we will do.7
This linkage of the ‘non-Aryan theme’ and the declaration of autonomy
used language that in this period was the common rhetoric of the non-
Brahman Satyashodhak movement with its strong antagonisms to Brahmans
(and Hinduism itself) and to the national movement. Yet Bansode’s life-
long attraction for Chokhamela and the bhakti cult, and his and Gavai’s
involvement in the Prarthana Samaj, seems to have pulled him away from
cultural radicalism.
Politically many forces worked to absorb Dalit protest. The Tilakite
tradition in Nagpur provided patronage links to Hindu nationalism, most
importantly through B.S. Moonje, a Hindu Mahasabha leader, and
Hegdewar, the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Thus Gavai,
who had been involved in many Dalit conferences (including north India
‘adi-Hindu’ conferences) during the 1920s, eventually supported a Hindu
Mahasabha proposal for compromise during the 1932 clash between
Ambedkar and Gandhi. He joined the Mahasabha in 1933 and harshly
criticized Ambedkar’s call for conversion in 1935. Thaware, who was
involved with Gavai in the Depressed Classes Association, also joined the
Hindu Mahasabha in 1941 and became a member of its executive, while
Khandekar—a member of the earlier Mahanubhav bhakti sect—also
became part of the DCA in 1930, opposed conversion, and finally joined
Congress in 1942. Bansode never openly opposed Ambedkar, but after 1930
retreated to writing on Chokhamela and became increasingly irrelevant to
Dalit social and political life.
This process slowly worked itself out during the 1920s. In 1920 itself,
Bansode and Gavai called the Akhil Bharatiya Bahishkrut Parishad with
Shahu Maharaj as president; due to Shahu’s presence a large number of
non-Brahman and Satyashodhak activists as well as Dalit leaders from
western Maharashtra were present. The latter included Shivtarkar, Dr.
Solanki and Shivram Janba Kamble of Poona, but most importantly of all,
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. But Ambedkar clashed bitterly with Gavai, using the
occasion to denounce the Depressed Classes Mission and Shinde’s
hegemony in ‘anti-untouchable’ activity.8
Ambedkar’s support began to grow in Nagpur. The rising generation of
working class leaders, including Revaram Kavade and Dharmadas Nagarare
(who were involved in a major 1919 strike and became part of the executive
of the Nagpur Girni Mazur Sangh founded by Ruikar in 1923) joined him.
So did most of the younger semi-educated generation who became involved
in Nagpur organizations such as the Mahar Tarun Sangh. The group
associated with Bansode and Gavai also wavered; for instance though
Thaware joined the Hindu Mahasabha he continually expressed the fear that
caste Hindus would not give up their injustice against Dalits and that
independent electorates were probably necessary; in 1945 he joined the
Scheduled Caste Federation but was later expelled. Nandagawali, an activist
at points bracketed with the Bansode group, became an important supporter
of Ambedkar, though he did not support the 1935 call for conversion.9
In spite of the prominence they gained as Dalit spokesmen, social
reformers, members of the Legislative Council and many government
committees and commissions, the Bansode–Gavai group could not maintain
a Dalit mass base that was anti-Ambedkar and pro-Congress. Dalits as a
whole remained aloof from the national movement, and rejected the support
networks of both the ‘Gandhian’ and ‘Tilakite’ factions of nationalists,
though they were heavily involved in working class militancy. Efforts to
oppose Ambedkar’s programme failed. Finally by the time of Ambedkar’s
visit of 1932, Gavai (who was by then working closely with Moonje) could
not even make a nominal showing. According to a letter of Moonje,
Mr. Gavai and his men could not muster strength and did not have the
pluck or courage to create disturbances and show black flags as they had
proposed to do …. The ignorant masses and mill hands who have been
embittered and antagonized against the Brahmans and other high caste
Hindus assembled in hundreds.10
‘Hundreds’ were to grow into thousands quite soon and into hundreds of
thousands by the time of Ambedkar’s final conversion ceremony in the
1950s as Nagpur, casting aside the reformist tendencies of its early Dalit
leadership, became a stronghold of the militant Dalit movement.
This was really a clash between two models of advance for the Dalit
movement. One, represented by the Bansode–Gavai generation of leaders,
was basically a model of Hinduistic integration, which included Sanskritic
reforms and an appeal to bhakti religious roots, and linked itself to support
from nationalists and Hindu reformers, even conservatives. The other,
represented by Ambedkar, with roots in the Satyashodhak movement and
expressing an alliance with non-Brahman leaders, was basically an
assertion of dalit autonomy, with an ideology that expressed contradiction
and rejected Brahmanic and bhakti religious traditions.
Was Ambedkar’s victory in Vidarbha so natural, so easily explainable by
his status as the most articulate and powerful leader of the Mahar
community? Localistic tendencies worked against him, and the local Mahar
leaders had both an alliance with locally powerful politicians, and the
weight of popular religious tradition on their side. Looked at in terms of
problems and contradictions faced by Dalits, it could well be argued (as
some do) that natural conflicts of interests between mainly middle-caste
landed non-Brahman leaders and the mainly labourer and poor peasant
Dalits could as easily lead Dalits to make an alliance with a reformist
Brahman elite. But what we find in fact is that where non-Brahman hostility
to a Brahman-dominated Congress nationalism was given up during the
1930s and where the Satyashodhak movement simply vanished as its
activists were absorbed into Congress, the opposite process happened with
the Dalit assertion of autonomy. Autonomy seems to have been the real
issue here; autonomy and self-respect or manuski required a full rejection of
Brahmanic ideology, and what the older leaders are castigated for with most
bitterness is their degrading dependence on the Brahman politicians.
In Vidarbha, the basic interests of Dalits led them to such autonomy and
rejection, while their relatively improved economic conditions built up their
capacities to make this possible. Militancy met the needs of newly
educated youth, an increasingly organized working class and the Dalit small
peasants. And this meant militancy in both a social and economic sense,
including an opposition to capitalism in the mills and landlordism in the
rural areas. Here it was significant that where Punjabrao Deshmukh was
voicing peasant demands and other Satyashodhak activists were involved in
anti-landlord or anti-money-lender revolts at the time, it was the Tilakite
Congress group which resisted any change in the malguzari system11 Caste
and class radicalism were opposed by the Tilakite and Gandhian Congress
leaders, expressed partly by non-Brahmans in the Satyashodhak movement
and non-Brahman party—but carried on by Ambedkar into the 1930s and
1940s. It was not simply the fact that he was a Mahar leader, but that he was
able to voice and organize the developing Dalit militancy, that made Nagpur
a firm Ambedkarite centre.

• ANDHRA (MADRAS PRESIDENCY)

Coastal Andhra shows another variation of the choices between autonomy
and integration, as an independent Dalit movement began to emerge in the
1920s in a situation where agricultural commercialization laid the basis for
a widespread rural movement but without the urban industrial centre found
in Nagpur.
Seven districts of coastal Andhra (Srikakulam, Visakhapatnam, East and
West Godavari, Ongole, Guntur and Nellore) and four districts of
Rayalaseema (Kurnool, Chittor, Anantapur and Cuddapah) were included in
Madras Presidency during colonial rule. These were disparate regions, the
backwardness of dry and sometimes drought-stricken Rayalaseema
contrasting with the economic energy that made the coastal region one of
the most dynamic centres of development in the Presidency. It was
primarily in the latter that a Dalit movement emerged.
 Major irrigation schemes on the Krishna and Godavari rivers launched
during the nineteenth century laid the basis for intensive cultivation of rice
and other cash crops for a growing market; by the end of the 1920s, for
example, over 42 per cent of the rice produced in Guntur district was
marketed, generating fast-growing market towns such as Vijayawada,
Guntur and Kakinadu.12 The area, though formally under ryotwari tenure,
had a considerable degree of zamindari holdings, and though the earliest
industrial entrepreneurs were drawn primarily from large landlord families,
merchants came from the traditional trading castes such as Komatis and
Marwaris. At the same time, the development of agricultural enterprise
provided the base for the assertion of a substantial peasant interest, mainly
based among the Kammas. Commercialization meant unevenness,
economic traumas and even a degree of polarization during economic
crises.13 It also eroded traditional caste and jajmani ties which had bound
the Dalit labourers, and aided in the development of a mobile labour force
with opportunities for some of the Malas and Madigas to move ahead. Mala
migration to Burma from the late nineteenth century onwards was also a
factor responsible for the slow advance.
In these economic circumstances a considerable amount of social change,
cultural ferment and political turmoil occurred. Christian missionaries,
concentrating in the coastal districts, converted a good many untouchables
(mainly Madigas) and provided educational opportunities for many more.
Hindu social reformers followed. Coastal Andhra was the site of one of the
most radical elite-based reform movements outside of Bengal.
Veerasalingam Pantalu was the nineteenth century pioneer, beginning with a
bold widow remarriage movement and taking up issues such as dowry,
prostitution, corruption of officials, and removal of untouchability.14 He
established the Brahmo Samaj in Andhra, and it was through this that the
most important caste Hindu sponsorship of Dalit social advance took place.
Early issues included not only education but acquisition of land; for
instance, a Government of Madras bill on education 1895, called the
‘Magna Carta of Panchama education’, provided for schools, hostels and
giving poromboke (‘waste’ lands) for institutional sites.15 By the early
twentieth century the Brahmo Samaj and other reformers were establishing
ashrams for training untouchable cadre—including a Sevashram at
Gudivada (Krishna district), started in 1912 by Sir Guduru Ramachandra
Rao which called the most well-known ex-untouchable activists of the time
to work in all Telugu-speaking districts. Among those many were to be
active later during the 1920s, including Sundru Venkaiah, Kusuma
Venkatramaiah, Kusuma Dharmanna and others.16
The Congress was dominated by a Brahman elite till the 1930s. However,
beginning with 1917 an emerging non-Brahman movement in Madras
Presidency challenged this dominance, putting forth a radical rejection of
Brahman dominance, and laid the basis for many of the themes influencing
Dalit movements, including a ‘non- Aryan’ or ‘Dravidian’ identity. But the
Justice Party, the political wing of the movement, was in contrast to
Maharashtra more elitist, with an Andhra leadership consisting primarily of
zamindars and larger landholders, giving little scope for the participation of
middle peasant Kammas and Kapus (beginning to identify themselves as
‘Reddis’ in caste associations). Though the Tamil non-Brahman movement
became radicalized under the leadership of Periyar in the middle 1920s,
taking up working class and anti-landlord issues and asserting both atheism
and a radical perspective on women’s oppression, this had little impact in
the Telugu-speaking areas. Instead, in coastal Andhra the peasant Kammas
and Kapu–Reddis asserted themselves organizationally in the 1920s through
N.G. Ranga’s peasant associations and the communist movement.17
Even before this, however, Dalits in coastal Andhra were as-serting their
organizational autonomy.
But, the context they were doing so had powerful, integrative-Hinduistic
pulls. Coastal Andhra also provided the base for an emerging regional–
nationalist consciousness. Demands for a separate Andhra province began
to be heard during the early twentieth century after the Bengal agitation
against Partition and the Swadeshi movement. Many nationalists organized
the Andhra Mahasabha, which held annual conferences from 1913, and also
established a separate ‘Andhra circle’ within the Congress organization
from 1918.18 But this emerging Telugu consciousness remained strikingly
Hinduistic. It had a reformist tinge, with Veerasalingam considered one of
its forerunners as a founder of a modern, mass-oriented literature, with the
Andhra Mahasabha in Hyderabad state associated with anti-untouchability
efforts, widow remarriage and opposition to vethbegar. Yet in spite of this
linkage to problems of the Dalits, Dalits themselves did not participate in
the formation of the ‘Telugu consciousness’, and it evolved first of all as a
Hindu consciousness. Partly this was due to the need to reject the synthetic
‘Deccani’ Hindu–Muslim culture that many in Hyderabad state were
proclaiming. Nevertheless, it firmly identified early rulers such as the
Satavahanas, Chalukyas and Kakatiyas as Hindu, in spite of considerable
Jain and Buddhist influences. Indian unity also became symbolized as a
Hindu unity, and as Hargopal notes, an early twentieth century Telugu poem
described India as a beautiful cow, the Hindus as its calves, and the white
man as the exploiter milking the cow by forcibly closing the mouths of the
calves.19
This Hinduistic and integrationist tendency can be seen clearly in the two
famous coastal Andhra caste Hindu novels written about Dalits:20
Mallepalle (‘Mala quarters’ or ‘Mala village’), by the famous reformer
Unnava Laxminarayan, describes the social and economic effects of
commercialization in the delta and the responses of Dalits to this.
Agricultural labourers are depicted as realizing the manipulative potential
of the new wage system in eroding real wages; use of coercion, preventing
cattle from grazing on private lands, beating of Dalits and the eviction of
poor peasants from their lands are shown, along with a major crisis of
traditional cultural values. As Hargopal summarizes,
The main reason presented for the absence of class consciousness is the
hegemony of the Hindu world-view conditioning the consciousness of
the Harijans. This prevents them from revolting. This theme is presented
through one character who finds several philosophical explanations for
their degenerating living conditions …. His elder son … opts for the
Gandhian model of resistance which broadly fits the Hindu philosophy of
action. He joins the ‘panchama’ movement launched by the scheduled
castes [and] attempts to organize his caste people. But the landlord who
smacks the potential of the movement violently kills him. This act …
gets absorbed by the peaceloving nature of these groups coupled with the
manipulations by the ruling elite and the intervention of the state. This
indicates not only the structural constraints in which the poor Harijans
were locked but the cobweb of consciousness which permitted them little
concerted and organized action.21
Harijan Nayakudu (‘Harijan Leader’) written by N.G. Ranga and
published in 1933 reflected the ideological positions of this peasant leader.
The hero is a ‘Harijan’ social reformer who agitates on various issues,
opposing the violence against and abuse of Dalits, organizing inter-caste
marriages, establishing schools, fighting for entry into temples and use of
public wells. Dalits are depicted as allying with peasant Kammas in contrast
with the Kamma landlords who do not soil their hands.
Hargopal, as a Marxist, critiques the reformist (integrationist)
consciousness depicted in the Dalits’ falling prey to themes of class
harmony and change of heart, in accepting their status as Hindus. But what
even the Marxist did not recognize (and it is striking that even in the 1980s,
and 1990s Marxists throughout India continued to refer to Dalits as
‘Harijans’), is that in the 1920s and 1930s militant Dalits were thoroughly
rejecting both the ‘Panchama’ and the ‘Harijan’ identity and were
organizing themselves as Adi-Andhras.
The term ‘Adi-Andhra’ arose in the post-1917 period when Dalits all
over the south, influenced by the ‘non-Aryan’ themes of the Dravidian
movement, were identifying themselves as Adi-Dravidians, Adi-Andhras
and Adi-Karnatakas, original sons of the soil. For coastal Andhra, the
decisive year was 1917. At this time the reformer Guduru Ramachandra
Rao called a conference in Vijayawada which was labelled a ‘First
Provincial Panchama Mahajana Sabha’, with his protege Sundru Venkaiah
as chairman of the reception committee. But on the evening of the first day,
its president, a Dalit from Hyderabad named Bhagyareddy Varma, argued
that the term ‘Panchama’ was nowhere found in the Puranas or other Hindu
scriptures and that ‘the so-called Panchamas were the original sons of the
soil and they were the rulers of the country.’ The delegates then rejected this
term and constituted themselves as the ‘First Adi-Andhra Mahajan Sabha’.
Resolutions were relatively non-controversial, appealing to the government
to nominate Adi-Andhras to the local bodies and the Legislative Council,
and to establish separate schools and wells in Mala and Madiga areas. But
caste tension showed up in the fact that delegates had trouble getting
accommodation in the town, and for the three days of the conference the
well-known Kanaka Durga temple was closed for fear of an attempted
entry.22
After this Adi-Andhra conferences were held practically every year: at
Gudivada in 1921 with Bhagyareddy Varma and Sundru Venkaiah again
presiding; at Eluru in 1922 with Bhagyareddy Varma and Devendrudu; at
Guntur in 1924 with Kusuma Venkatramaiah and Mutakki Venkateswarlu;
at Anantapur in 1925 with Bhagyareddy Varma (this time a resolution asked
for the rights of untouchables to use water from common wells); at
Venkatagiri (in Nellore district) in 1926 with Devendrudu and Kamatam
Shanmugan; at Narasapuram (West Godavari) with Bhagyareddy and
Gottimukkala Venkanna; once more at Vijayawada in 1929 with Prattipati
Audinarayana and Vemula Kurmayya; and at Anantapur again in early 1930
presided over by Devendrudu.23 Except for Anantapur, all these were in the
coastal Andhra region. After a brief hiatus around 1930, Adi-Andhra
conferences were again held throughout the coastal region for a number of
years in the 1930s.
The decade of the 1920s remains one in which the lack of historical and
written documentation and efforts to uncover the history of the Dalit
movement in coastal Andhra have left large vacuums in knowledge. But the
very spread of the conferences throughout the districts indicates a broad
rural base to the movement. So does the fact that by 1931 the Census
indicated 838,000 people listing themselves as ‘Malas’, 665,000 as ‘Adi-
Andhras’ and 612,000 as ‘Madigas’ in Madras Presidency.24 The Adi-
Andhra consciousness and the broad ideology of autonomy implied in it
were becoming a significant social force in the Andhra coastal region, even
while much of the mass-based Telugu consciousness was taking on a Hindu
colouring and an acceptance of Brahmanism.

• HYDERABAD
Another variation of the ‘autonomy–integration’ theme can be found in the
specialized circumstances of Hyderabad state, where an active but
factionalized Dalit leadership with almost no rural roots emerged during the
1920s.
The British had set up Hyderabad as the largest state in the Indian
subcontinent, but left it with a backward economy. The richer agricultural
regions which the Nizam had earlier controlled—Berar (Vidarbha) and
coastal Andhra—were annexed to British territories. There was little
development either of commercial agriculture or industry until after the first
world war; education was limited, especially for Hindus; land relations
were backward and it may not be inaccurate to call the state the most
‘feudal’ in the Indian subcontinent.
Hyderabad state consisted of nine districts of Telengana (Adilabad,
Hyderabad, Karimnagar, Khamman, Nalgonda, Warangal, Mahbubnagar,
Medak and Nizamabad), five of Marathwada (Bhir, Aurangabad, Parbhani,
Nanded and Osmanabad) and three of the Hyderbad Karnatak (Gulbarga,
Bidar, Bijapur: Of these the Telengana region made up 47 per cent of the
population and represented the largest linguistic unit.
Based primarily on the Deccan plateau, between the Krishna and
Godavari rivers, the state had mainly a dry economy cultivating jawar and
bajra and limited rice, wheat and pulses as the main food crops. Through
the 1920s the only cash crops were groundnut, tobacco and oil seeds
(primarily in Nizamabad, Mahbubnagar, Karimnagar and Warangal
districts). Irrigation and commercial agriculture did not really become
significant until the 1930s when cotton and sugarcane cultivation began on
a larger scale. Throughout the period, there was little growth of
agriculturally-linked trade and business, and little development of roads and
other infrastructure. Only minor industry developed in the towns of
Hyderabad, Warangal and Aurangabad, with some coal mining in the
Telengana region.
Thus it is not surprising that in spite of efforts to ‘modernize’
administration along supposed British lines by ministers such as Salar Jung
in the mid-nineteenth century, the state remained backward. Nearly one-
third of the entire area was under bigger jagirdars, of whom there were
about 1,500 by 1949. In the state-controlled areas of ryotwari type land
settlement, deshmukhs and deshpandes who had previously been revenue
collectors were pensioned-off, but they retained large landholdings and
continued to lord it over tenants and labourers. There was a limited growth
of owner–peasant cultivation after 1930, which some analysts describe as a
‘rich peasant economy’ including immigrant peasants from coastal Andhra,
but for much of the period actual tenancy remained high.25 For the
untouchable Malas and Madigas, this meant that traditional or caste–feudal
forms of subordination retained their full force, and unlike the Mahars in
Maharashtra or their caste-fellows in coastal Andhra, they had little
opportunities to move into freer forms of either industrial or agricultural
wage labour.
The autocratic Nizam regime also effectively repressed political
developments. The Congress and communists alike hardly made a
beginning, even through front organizations, until the late 1930s. Instead
the Arya Samaj took on political importance, and fed into the Congress
movement to give it a ‘Hindu nationalist’ tenor. Local Muslims and some
Hindus (very often Kayasthas, a non-Brahman writer caste who had gained
important bureaucratic posts in the Nizam regime) formulated an ideology
of a multi-religious, pluralistic ‘Deccani Hyderabad culture’ form the
nineteenth century, but this came under attack both form Hindus and those
Muslims who sought to promote a more orthodox Islamic identity. Thus,
even as the Dalit movement developed, it did so within a dangerously
polarizing Hindu–Muslim tension.
Dalits faced pressures on both sides, to identify themselves as Hindus or
with Muslims. In some ways there was a closeness in Dalit–Muslim
relations in the Hyderabad area itself, yet it was a closeness characterized
by ambiguity. The relationship was expressed in a saying quoted by one
Dalit activist, ‘The Dalit colony is the Muslim’s in-laws’ place’, meaning
that Muslims took wives/girls from among Dalits. But this was an unequal
relationship. In the devadasi custom among Malas and Madigas, the basavis
or matangis very often formed relations with affluent or noble Muslims in
Hyderabad itself, and when the Dalit reformers moved to stop the custom in
the 1920s, one result was to increase Muslim antagonism. Muslims were
‘always after our girls’, was a Dalit complaint. The ‘closeness’ thus had a
clear element of sexual exploitation in it, though Muslims did not observe
untouchability, and was symbolized in the naming of Hyderbad itself, after
a Dalit girl (Bhagyamma or Hyder Ali) said to have been brought into the
harem of the founding prince.26 While other exploited sections identified
both Hindus and Muslims as oppressors, and still others were led into the
Hindu fold, there was some Dalit attraction to Muslim culture in
Hyderabad. The period between 1920 and 1940 saw a clear split in the
Hyderabad Dalit community on this issue.
In this narrow and communalized framework, a small but vigorous Dalit
movement developed after 1910, based among Hyderabad Malas. This
particular movement has the advantage of having its organizational history
thoroughly documented by a later activist, P.R. Venkatswamy.27 Two men
stood at the centre of it in the early period, Bhagyareddy Varma and Arigay
Ramaswamy. Bhagyareddy (1888–1939) was originally Madari Bhagaiah, a
steward for a Catholic family who educated him, who became involved
with, and later employed by, the Brahmo Samaj and took the name
‘Bhagyareddy Varma’ to emphasize the rights of Dalits to claim a high
status, ‘Varma” being Brahmanic and ‘Reddy’ indicating high status non-
Brahman.28 His organizing activity began in 1912 when he formed the
Manya Sangam, with members including a building contractor, a
confectioner-baker, the Superintendent of the Hyderabad public gardens and
other employees, a disparate group which gives a sense of the emerging
‘Dalit middle class’, still without much education but, as a colleague
described them, ‘young and enlightened young men’.29 At the same time
Arigay Ramaswamy, who had been an office boy, carpenter and ticket
collector on the railroads, began a social reform group in Secunderabad;
and Madari Audia, the son of a butler, had started another Manya Sangam at
Ghasmandy. All these organizations stressed internal social reform:
attempting to ban drinking of alcohol and meat-eating at social functions,
abolition of the devadasi custom. This group also found itself in conflict
with the traditional ‘caste chaudhuris’ or headmen of the Malas, and
worked throughout the 1920s to reform this system, settling up alternative
‘courts’ to handle disputes outside the state’s courts and in the process to try
to broaden caste customs.
As this emerging, partly-educated Dalit middle class began to enter social
life, the radicalization among Dalits throughout south India brought with it
an identification with the ‘adi’ ideology. It was Bhagyareddy Varma himself
who presided over the momentous conference at Vijayawada in 1913 when
the ‘Panchama’ identity was rejected, and over a number of conferences
after that. Nevertheless, in Hyderabad itself organizing took up an ‘Adi-
Hindu’ theme: four Adi-Hindu conferences were organized between 1912
and 1924, and gradually the main organizers began to use this terminology.
In 1924 Arigay Ramaswamy formed the Adi-Hindu Jatiyonnati Sabha; not
to be outdone, Bhagyareddy transformed his Manya Sangam into the Adi-
Hindu Social Service League. This became the main organization of the
Dalits of Hyderabad, a feat attributed to his energetic organizing and ability
to gain support from liberal Hindu sympathizers. Along with the traditional
aims of internal reform (‘removing social evils, establishing schools,
societies, reading rooms, bhajan mandalis’), the aims of the organization
included ‘removing ignoble appelations and spreading the identity of ‘Adi-
Hindu’.30
What exactly did the ‘Adi-Hindu’ identity connote? This term was
spreading among sections of north Indian Chamars at this time claiming
them to be exploited and conquered original inhabitants,31 and
Bhagyareddy himself travelled to north India for some of the conferences,
notably two in 1927 and 1930, which described the ‘depressed classes’ or
‘adi-Hindus’ as ‘descendents of the original inhabitants of this country who
were rulers and owners of this land of their birth before the advent of the
Aryans to the country.’32
This was familiar anti-caste radicalism. But ‘adi-Hindu’ could also leave
space for an identification as Hindus with simply the assertion added that
Dalits could claim a high position within the total community, that they had
been among the creators of the Hindu epics.33 These were issues debated
and discussed among Dalits, and the 1931 Hyderabad Census reported on
the controversy:
A controversy recently raged in the press as to whether the Adi-Hindus
are Hindus. While the caste Hindus maintained a discrete silence, two
opposing sections of Adi-Hindus entered the arena. 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 religion, called Hinduism. The League’s
contention was that Hinduism is not the ancestral religion of the
aborigines of Hindusthan; that the non-Vedic communities of India object
to being called ‘Hindu’ because of their inherited abhorrence of the
doctrines of the Manusmruti and like scriptures, who have distinguished
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. A section of Adi-Hindus
emphatically repudiated the above arguments in a statement in the press
and deplored the tendency of the Adi-Dravida Educational League to
seek to impose an invidious distinction. The concepts of God, the mode
of worship, the system of rituals and code of customs and the manner of
dress and way of life of the socially depressed classes are identical with
 those of the caste Hindus, and therefore they maintain that religiously
adi-Hindus are Hindus.34
This was a clear posing of the ‘autonomy-integration’ dichotomy in terms
of religious–cultural identities.
But who exactly was taking which side? The term ‘Adi-Dravidian’
indicates a Tamil group; all the Telugu-speaking Dalits were describing
themselves as ‘Adi-Hindu’, but there were differing trends among them.
Arigay Ramaswamy, according to Venkatswamy’s account, who was
himself religiously inclined and adopted the pose of a guru, seemed to have
had tendencies towards an incorporative position:
‘In our meetings he used to instill in us the sense of self-respect and to
feel proud of ourselves as we were the aboriginals and masters of this
land. The foreign invaders hostilely dubbed us as ‘Rakshasas’ in their
Shastras and Puranas. At the same time he insisted that we should give
up the social evils which crept into our society and due to which we were
contemptuously treated by the Hindus …. From Hindu platforms he
talked of Vedanta, defects in the social structure, criticized Brahmans and
recited atrocities against the Panchamas and the inhuman treatment
meted out to them in the abominable Manusmriti.35
This was by and large an integrationist position. In later times Ramaswamy
opposed Ambedkar’s 1935 call for conversion and joined the nationalist
Andhra Mahasabha, staying with the ‘right wing’ of Gandhian Congressites
when the split occurred between them and the communists. Later he
followed his Congress connections to become part of the All-India
Depressed Classes League (also called the ‘Harijan League’) led by
Jagjivan Ram.36
Bhagyareddy’s rejection of tradition was more radical. In treating
untouchables as the original ‘sons of the soil’, in seeing Brahmans as
outsiders pushing all the original Indians down to south India, he was said
to have used the term ‘Adi-Hindu’ in a way in which ‘Hindu’ did not refer
to religion but was given by foreigners to those living in India. He opposed
temple entry movements generally, and at one of the important Adi-Andhra
conference disputes in 1938 in East Godavari, refused to preside until all
there agreed not to support a bill for temple entry then being introduced in
the Madras provincial council by M.C. Rajah. He was also an ardent
admirer of Buddha and celebrated Buddha jayanti for the first time in 1913
and again in 1937, two years before his death. While politically inactive
during the 1930s, he gave his support mainly to the Ambedkarite group of
Dalits in Hyderabad.37
The ‘autonomy versus integration’ dispute which we have seen in the
Nagpur–Vidarbha region was playing itself out among the Dalits of
Hyderabad in a context in which an appeal to identity as ‘original
inhabitants’ dominated discourse. However, the limitations of the
Hyderabad organizing efforts have to be noted. Almost all organizing
contacts were limited to Hyderabad city, in contrast to Maharashtra and the
Andhra areas. Although leaders like Bhagyareddy Varma made trips to
north India and coastal Andhra, there is little evidence from accounts such
as Venkatswamy’s of vital rural contacts in Hyderabad state itself, though
some village schools were said to have been founded. There was also
clearly no working class of the type which lent such vitality in Nagpur and
Bombay, and no sign of much thinking on economic issues during the
1920s.
Hyderabad Dalit politics was marked by intensive competitive struggles.
During the 1920s these were primarily between Arigay Ramaswamy and
Bhagyareddy Varma, founding rival ‘Adi-Hindu’ organizations, rival
reformed caste panchayats, with occasional physical confrontation and
fights between the factions. During the 1930s similar battles took place
between B.S. Venkatrao and Arigay Ramaswamy, and later between
Venkatrao and Subbiah. While there were ideological–political differences
embodied in these disputes, the personal competition for leadership is
striking.38 In all of this none of the Hyderabad leaders seemed to be in a
position to organize any mass movement. During the 1930s, Ambedkar’s
movement was to attain some significant mass base in the Marathi-speaking
regions of the state, while the communists won a foothold in the rural
Telugu districts using some of the same issues the Ambedkarites were using
in other terminology—opposition to vethbegar and land for the landless.
But the Telugu-speaking Hyderabad Dalit leadership appeared aloof from
this; when they went as Dalits to the rural areas in the 1940s they most
often went to Marathwada and there had to speak the language of
Ambedkarism; they had little organic connection of their own. Perhaps
because of this, for all the initial impulse towards an autonomous Dalit
identity, in practical political terms the main Dalit organizations and leaders
of Hyderabad were to be divided, in later years, between Hindu
(Congressite) and Muslim (pro-Nizam) orbits.

• MYSORE
In stark contrast to feudal, autocratic Hyderabad, Mysore state represented
the epitome of reformism among the Indian princely states: reformism in
taking up Gandhian ‘constructive work’, including untouchable-uplift
programmes; reformism in providing for limited electoral participation; and
reformism in its tradition of state-guided economic development. In spite of
the very unGandhian implications of industrialization, Gandhi himself, who
was a state guest several times, called it the nearest approximation to ‘Ram-
raj’.39
After the British victory over Tipu Sultan, the state had been restored to
its earlier Hindu rulers, the Wodeyars, who had originated from a small low
caste which claimed Yadava descent. In 1830 there was a revolt in the
northern part of the state by its turbulent feudatories, the poligars. In
suppressing it the British took over direct administration of the state. After
1861 a reformist governor used state funds for restoring irrigation works,
repairing tanks, giving incentives to coffee production and building the
beginnings of a railway system. Even so, the exploitation of the peasantry
through commercial agriculture and high revenue demands in cash resulted
in one million dead in a famine in 1876–78.40 Shortly after this, in 1881, the
state was restored to the Wodeyars and in spite of some tension over the
amount of financial subsidy paid by the state to the British, the British
alliance with Indian princes was little disturbed. While the Mysore
maharaja became a hero to nationalists and contributed to Congress funds,
its dewan Mirza Ismail, who represented it at the 1930 Round Table
conference, was an important initiator of the ‘federation’ proposal for
relations between the princely states and British India which became a
centrepiece of the Government of India Act of 1935.
Common themes can be traced underlying all this British, princely and
Gandhian paternalism. In Mysore the Hinduistic guiding spirit of this
‘politics of petition and patronage’ was given in a letter by Vivekananda
written to the Maharaja on 23 June 1894:
 The only service to be done for our lower classes is to give them
education to develop their individuality. That is the great task between
our people and princes …. Priest power and foreign conquest have
trodden them down for centuries, and at last the poor in India have
forgotten that they are human beings. They are to be given ideas, their
eyes are to be opened to what is going on in the world around them, and
then they will work out their own salvation …. My noble prince, this life
is short, the vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who
live for others …. One such high noble-minded and royal son of India as
your highness can do much towards raising India on her feet again and
thus leave a name to posterity which should be worshipped.41
On the one hand a smothering paternalism while on the other was an
economic development which managed to avoid major social turmoil. A
certain amount of industrialization took place in Mysore, with some
spectacular schemes after 1900, including electricity, the railway, textile
mills, and a major iron and steel works. Most of this was centred in
Bangalore, with only three other towns involved (Kolar with gold fields;
Bhadravati with the iron works, and Mandya with a sugar factory). The
overwhelming proportion of the working class was Tamil, and though many
of these were Dalits and formed a base for a radical Dalit movement, there
was a glaring social gap between them and the Kannada Dalits, little
linkage with the Kannada rural areas.
In spite of major cash crops (oil seeds, coffee, sugarcane, mulberry,
arecanut, cotton, tobacco), the rural economy was less differentiated, with a
relatively small proportion of agricultural labourers, an insignificant
proportion of tenants to owner-cultivators and of farm servants to field
labourers. Both Holeyas and Madigas seem to have been well represented
among ‘Cultivators’ (see Tables 2.2 and 2.3). The 1891 Census report
indicated that although the Dalits were chiefly employed as labourers, still
both Holeyas and Madigas held the status of landholders and ‘as subtenants
were found everywhere’; it also noted that many were revenue payers (that
is, independent cultivators) and that they contributed a total Rs. 3 lakh
towards land revenue, with Holeyas accounting for two-thirds and Madigas
for one-third.42 Dalits in Karnataka were relatively better off economically
and freer socially compared to coastal Andhra and feudal Telengana, with
more claim to the land, and less bondage to it.
 The decade of the 1920s was dominated politically by the Brahman–non-
Brahman conflict in Mysore state, but this was elite-based, with no rural
connection, little articulation of a broad ideology and no effort at mass
organizing. Caste associations formed after 1905 included the Veerashaiva
Mahasabha, the Vokkaliga Association, the Adi-Dravida Abhi-Vruddhi
Sangha, the Kuruba Association and the Central Muslim Association. These
began to contest Brahman dominance in the Mysore administration. In 1918
they submitted a memorandum to the government, and the Miller
Commission that year issued a report which was accepted by the
government in 1919; this gave representation to the ‘Backward Castes’ but
generally ignored the Dalits.43 In a related development, a Praja Mitra
Mandal, inspired by the Madras non-Brahman movement represented the
interests of an alliance of non-Brahmans (primarily Lingayats and
Vokkaligas) and Muslims, with some connection to the Muslim dewan
Mirza Ismail; it remained pro-government and anti-nationalist. After the
1927–28 ‘Bangalore disturbances’ among Hindus and Muslims, Brahmans
used anti-Muslim communal sentiments to force Ismail to resign.44 A more
nationalist leadership emerged in 1930 to form the Praja Paksha; this
merged with the Praja Mitra Mandal to form the People’s Federation which
ultimately merged with the Congress in 1937. A rural orientation began to
be visible, with a linkage to district politics, the voicing of agrarian
grievances, and a proposed programme of ‘ryots conferences’ in early 1935
which was abandoned after a government ban. But these broad linkages,
mild even in the 1930s, were totally absent in the 1920s.
Thus, Mysore shows the same broad trends of political organization and
development as other areas, but at a much lower level of turbulence,
organizational and ideological activity. Above all, the ‘non-Brahman
movement’ in the state was no movement at all, rather a lobbying effort of
the non-Brahman castes which ignored Dalit interests and did not take up
mass-based issues or provide any ideology or any broad-level sponsorship
for Dalit organizational activity. The only non-Brahmans who played
important roles in Dalit organizing—C. R. Reddy and Murugesh Pillai—
were non-Kannadigas.
Nevertheless the Mysore case shows a particular aspect of responses to
the issue of untouchability: Brahman sponsorship of Dalit organizations as a
strategic reaction to the threat of non-Brahman political domination. From
the 1920s ‘Adi-Karnataka’ movements (which we might distinguish from
the ‘Adi-Dravidian’ tendencies among Tamil Dalit workers in Bangalore
and Kolar) to the ‘Harijan’ activity of the 1930s, this role of Brahman
patronage is clear. While Dalits got little from the limited Mysore type of
non-Brahman organizing. Brahmans moved to fill the gap, offering a guided
form of ‘Harijan uplift’ and an ideology of integration. Why did this
happen? According to Manor, Brahmans could not hope for power in
competition with the numerous non-Brahman castes, and so they contented
themselves with ‘the theatre of politics … in the satisfaction of being
associated with a higher cause’ of reformism. He also notes ‘a tendency of
some Congressmen to clothe Brahman communal sentiments in Gandhian
wrappings.’45 Another political scientist, Hettne, writes,
In terms of mobilization, the Harijans on the whole were as backward as
in other respects. The Harijan movement had not been a movement of the
Harijans, but a movement among caste Hindus, primarily Brahmans with
Gandhian leanings, who devoted themselves to the ‘uplift’ of the
depressed classes. The ‘movement’ had brought the Harijans within the
Congress fold.46
However, there is no reason to assume that this Brahman activity had only
symbolic political significance. A forward looking strategy could easily see
that, against the Lingayats and Vokkaligas (who were to be 20 per cent and
13–14 per cent respectively in the unified Karnataka state), an alliance of
some kind with the Dalits (who were 17–18 per cent) and other low castes
was a natural strategic option.47
In this context, there was a fair amount of activity by the 1920s, though
little of an independent Dalit movement.
Educationally some progress was made. By 1904–05 there were 76
schools for depressed classes, 37 government schools, 36 government-aided
mission schools, and three unaided.48 In 1915 there was a famous test case
in which the government ordered a schoolmaster in the Sringeri jahagir to
admit untouchables; there was protest from both caste Hindus and Muslims
who withdrew students, but C.R. Reddy, then administrator of schools,
prevailed upon the maharaja to declare that education was everyone’s right.
In 1919 the order was generalized to allow ‘Panchamas’ into all schools;
again in spite of protest the maharaja stood firm.49 By the 1920s a small
educated section was making a limited entry into government employment:
statistics showed there were 165 Dalits in 1918 of a total of 4,234; after the
Miller Committee report they were only 13 of 1,051 new appointees up to
1924.50
Two Dalit organizations came into existence. The Adi-Dravida
Abhivruddhi Sangam was led by Murugesh Pillai and apparently Tamil-
based, though it sought to include Kannadigas; the Adi-Jambava Sangha
was based on Madigas. Both organizations were limited to Bangalore and
Mysore. Pillai, an assistant woolen master in Binny Mills, Bangalore, and
apparently a Tamil non-Brahman who was active as a Dalit spokesman for
three decades, was part of the Praja Mitra Mandal for a while and in 1917
supported the Miller commission, but later distanced himself from non-
Brahman activities. Chikhahamanthaiah and Cheenigaramaiah were among
the Kannada Dalits associated with the Adi Jambava Sangha. The former,
with support from Murugesh Pillai and the Tamil Brahman reformer
Gopalswamy Aiyar (most prominent of the early Brahman patrons of Dalit
causes) organized a ‘political conference of Panchamas’ in 1920. Ambedkar
was invited for this but could not attend this due to a state ban on his entry.
Other conferences were organized in 1923 and 1925 by the same group,
with M.C. Rajah attending. These conferences passed resolutions on using
the Adi-Karnataka and Adi-Dravida terminology. In 1921 an Adi-Karnataka
Sangh (AKS) was registered with Gopalswamy Aiyar as president and the
majority of other executive members being non-Dalits. The programme for
the AKS included getting students admitted to educational institutions,
access to tank water and temple entry.51
This activity functioned within the framework of ‘the politics of petitions
and patronage’. As shown in a statement presented to the maharaja in 1920
by ‘Adi-Karnatakas and Adi-Dravidas of Mysore’ (apparently
Gopalaswamy Aiyar was a prominent figure behind this):
On behalf of the 11 lakhs of the Panchama population of the state and in
the name of the Adi-Dravida Abhivruddi Sangam, I beg to submit our
deep spirit of devotion and loyalty … for the great act of emancipation
graciously extended to our community …. we are an ancient community
with a civilization, philosophy and history of which we reasonably feel
proud. We are confident that our present unfavourable conditions are the
outcome of our economic degradation. We are confident also that our
social conditions will automatically improve with the improvement of
 our economic situation …. Our foremost need is education—more
education, universal education …. Our next need is an opportunity to
earn a decent living. We pray that at least one special agricultural
settlement be organized in each district granting to each settler an extent
of at least 5 acres dry and 1 acre wet garden land … advancing the
necessary agricultural capital in some cases. As an additional safeguard
we propose that such lands may be declared inalienable for two
generations of holders in order to ensure the development of a prosperous
agricultural community.52
The ideological themes here did not go beyond the ‘Panchama’ identity, the
proclamation of an ancient greatness and an ancient community degraded
only because it was poor; there was little mention of oppression and
exploitation, no hint of any inevitable conflict due to caste, an avoidance of
the issue of untouchability. This set the tone for most of the activity of the
1920s and after.
Dalits hardly spoke in their own voices in this process. When ‘anti-
untouchability’ issues, defined as ‘social issues’, began to be taken up from
the end of the 1920s, it was by caste Hindu organization, primarily
Brahman-dominated like the Mysore League against Untouchability (a joint
organization of the Praja Paksh and Congressmen which pressed for an anti-
untouchability bill between 1930 and 1935) and the Harijan Sevak Sangh.
These called for the right of Dalits to use all temples, roads, public places
and tanks, joined with support for limited economic demands (getting
government lands), and stressed internal reforms such as cleanliness, giving
up meat-eating and drinking of alcohol, and the propagation of a Brahman
Hinduism. All this was illustrated in a government statement in the Mysore
assembly in June 1927 that
The aim should be to ‘Hinduize’ them more and more, for they belong to
the Hindu community really, and to offer them every facility to remain in
the fold …. Alienated, they will introduce an additional element of
heterogeneity which will in future complicate the already difficult
problems of administration.53
In response a Dalit representative, Doddaiah, pleaded that ‘with a view to
promote the principles of Hindu Sanathana Dharma and Bhakti among the
Adi-Karnatakas and Adi-Dravidas government should grant free sites and
building materials for bhajan mandalis.’54
 Still, within this integrationist model, some crucial economic issues were
being taken up, and some assertion of Dalit rights was made, with hints of
conflicts at the village level. Such conflicts, for instance, were rising over
the traditional caste duties as Dalits refused work as thotis and talaris. In a
1925 assembly debate Murugesh Pillai claimed that Dalits were being asked
to do all types of menial services, and were harassed and boycotted if they
refused. He asked that they be relieved entirely of these duties or else paid
directly by the government out of a special cess collected from peasants.
The Revenue Commissioner (in a forecast of the Bombay government’s
response to Ambedkar’s similar demands regarding the Mahar watan)
replied that a salary could not be given, arguing that different forms of
traditional remuneration existed, with Dalits given inam lands in some areas
in return for their services, in others only traditional miras payments from
the peasants. Some non-Brahman speakers in this debate accused Dalits of
not working, remarking that if they were given lands they would not do the
village work.55 In placid Mysore, as everywhere, the caste form of
vethbegar and the participation of the state in the exploitation of this labour
was clearly emerging as an issue.
From the 1920s onwards Dalits were also asking for government
wastelands and other lands for cultivation. They asked for land at
concessional rates in the newly irrigated tracts of the Irwin Canal, but this
was refused.56 In October 1931 the Dewan made a major speech claiming
that the government’s programme of settling Adi-Karnatakas on land and
giving them a proprietary interest ‘is making very satisfactory progress’,
with 9,763 acres given that year.57 In this case Murugesh Pillai also appears
as a spokesman for getting such benefits as rights and not ‘grants’ for
‘uplift’, remarking that ‘A large proportion of the land revenue … is on
account of the labourers who are all Panchamas, and it is but right that the
government give them all the required facilities.’58
But such language of ‘rights’ was rare. Even in the assembly debates,
Dalits spoke out very little themselves on social issues; they were more
vocal on economic issues such as land, education, traditional caste duties,
while the ‘social’ issues were presented in a conservative, Hinduizing
fashion with Brahmans dominant as spokesmen and non-Brahmans (with
the exception of a few individual reformers) silent or opposing. There was
no organizing of any campaigns, though some local clashes had been
reported over the issue of tank water by the late 1920s in the various
villages.59
A capacity for struggle clearly existed among the rural Dalit masses, but
there were no leaders to organize it. The Kannada educated Dalits remained
powerless and relatively voiceless. Without an industrial base or a vigorous
political life, they had no access to an independent political organization.
The limitations of the non-Brahman movement in princely Mysore
deepened this weakness of the Dalit movement; the gap between the Tamil
working class and the Kannada-speaking rural areas and educated middle
class also exemplified an important absence. The ‘Ram-raj’ that was
Mysore finally meant a stilling of Dalit advance—perhaps a symbolic
killing of Shambuk. The Mysore maharaja’s ban on Ambedkar’s entry into
the state, in contrast to the honoured guest treatment given to Gandhi,
shows the nature of reformism and the constraints on politics in the state.
Dalits were unable, in the entire period before independence, to break
through this, to achieve autonomy.

• SUMMARY: POLITICAL CHOICES BEFORE DALITS

The preceding sections have surveyed the growth of the Dalit movement up
to 1930 in regions mainly outside the scope of Ambedkar’s early influence.
The overview makes it clear that organizations, struggles and activists were
emerging out of very different political and socio-economic conditions,
from the largely backward political autocracy of Hyderabad state to the
agriculturally-based commercial development of coastal Andhra to the
industrial-agricultural centre of Nagpur–Vidarbha. These movements shared
several features in common: they were nearly all based (and often limited
to) on the largest ‘untouchable’ caste of the region, the caste which was
traditionally assigned to ‘general village service’; they emerged at first with
sponsorship from caste Hindu social reformers; and they all had an
inclination to the adoption of a ‘non-Aryan’ ideology, the claim to being
‘the original inhabitants—sons of the soil’ which was at that time sweeping
the lower castes of south India.
Within this broad framework two distinct trends can be traced,
representing the first and most basic choice for any Dalit in the twentieth
century India. The first was a trend towards a radical assertion of autonomy
from ‘Hinduism’ and from the social and political organizations of caste
Hindus; the second was a trend towards integration. The first choice was
represented by leaders like Bhagyareddy Varma of Hyderabad and by much
of the ‘Adi-Andhra’ organizing of the 1920s; the second by Arigay
Ramaswamy in Hyderabad, by Kisan Faguji Bansode and G.A. Gavai in
Nagpur, and by most of the Mysore leaders. To some degree the ‘adi’
identity could lead back into an integration into Hinduism, exemplified for
instance in claims by the Telugu poet Boyi Bhimanna that Dalits were the
writers of ‘Hindu’ scriptures such as the Ramayana or Mahabharata: ‘These
are our literature; you have taken them from us; Vyas is one of us, Valmiki
is one of us.’ These were claims that were often coupled with a ‘non-
dualistic’ spiritualism and some very strong anti-Muslim attitudes.60 The
trend towards re-absorption into Hinduism often led via identification with
the bhakti movement, with saints such as Chokamela, as well as with
linkages to one or more Hinduistic social reform organizations, the
Prarthana Samaj or Arya Samaj in contrast to the Satyashodhak Samaj or
Brahmo Samaj.
It can be argued that both paths were open to Dalits; there was no
foregone conclusion that they would form an enduring autonomous
movement that self-consciously defined itself as ‘non-Hindu’ any more than
non-Brahmans in Madras and Bombay presidencies were able to do. There
were in fact two paths, and while the basic social oppression and economic
exploitation of the Dalits pushed them to a radical autonomy, at the same
time there were powerful pressures for absorption: the sheer social and
political power of caste Hindus and their organizations, the readiness of
reformers to make some concessions, the Hinduistic tendencies that came to
dominate even movements opposing class exploitation.
Two choices existed, two paths. They led in fundamentally different
directions. The second path forced Dalits to confront further choices in a
way that the first path did not. Reabsorption into Hinduism after all
included the acceptance of Hindu leadership; and there were many around
to make the claims of leading the ex-untouchables and providing an
ideology for their advance, whether it was Gandhi’s idealized village-
centred ‘Ram-raj’ or the communists’ interpretation of class exploitation
and an industrialized classless socialism. In contrast, a radical assertion of
autonomy not only impelled Dalits to form their own organizations; it also
forced them to deal independently with some basic issues. Radical
autonomy after all did not mean a separation from the rest of Indian society;
it meant that Dalits themselves would have to redefine and reconstitute their
relations with the whole of Indian society, with its various social groups, its
historical and cultural traditions. As untouchables, who were they
historically? The question cried for both a religious answer and a social-
historical interpretation. If they were not ‘Hindus’, then what? In fact a
‘non-Hindu’ choice seems to have led naturally towards identification with
a religion such as Buddhism, which had a historical reality in the Indian
context; various other answers to the religious question— Phule’s
sarvajanik satya dharma, Periyar’s atheism—did not seem to have a mass
appeal, while religions like Islam and Christianity had no link with ancient
Indian tradition.
Historically, what was the explanation for caste and the exploitation and
degradation of untouchables? Here the ‘non-Aryan theory’ held the field in
the 1920s: they were original inhabitants enslaved by conquering Aryans.
This had the advantage of being a historical and apparently scientific theory
which dealt directly with caste in contrast to Marxism; but it was racial in
its implications and left troubling questions.
An impulse to radical autonomy left important political choices
unresolved. Forming their own organizations and leading a movement of
their own meant that Dalits had to confront, on their own, all the questions
that lay before any politically conscious Indian. It was not enough to simply
characterize the Congress or the Hindu Mahasabha as being in the hands of
Brahmans; they had to have a stand about British imperialism, including
some kind of concrete response to the various proposals and reforms put
before the people. They had to have some kind of analysis of economic
exploitation and a policy of relating to the kisan sabhas and unions through
which people were organizing economically, both because these included
significant numbers of Dalits and because they represented new political
forces impregnated with a new analysis of exploitation.
Finally, they had to confront political choices about who were their allies
—which parties, which social groups. At times, as reflected in Ambedkar’s
remark that ‘we cannot fight all our enemies at once’, this meant making
difficult choices about the ‘lesser evil’, for instance as between Muslims,
the Congress, British imperialism. At other times it meant seeing forces or
political parties as positive allies (the communists? the non-Brahman
parties? the Muslims?). In terms of the traditional caste structure even once
Dalits had defined themselves as separate and taken an
‘untouchable/touchable’ distinction as providing the first ground for action,
they still had to look at the rest of the caste structure in a sharper sense:
were all ‘touchables’ equally enemies or should one make distinctions,
taking ‘Brahmans’ as the ‘main enemy’ while ‘non-Brahmans’ or ‘Shudras’
were potential allies even if they currently accepted Hindu ideology, even if
they were at times the most direct exploiters of Dalits. Dalits faced such
choices much as—to make a crucial comparison—communists faced
choices of defining their relation with the national movement. And for
Dalits, like communists, action in the face of such choices had to be based
on some theoretical understanding of the total situation in which they found
themselves, some ideology.
It was Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar who was to provide this ideology and
the leadership of the emerging autonomous Dalit movement and for this
reason much of this analysis centres on his thought and work. Nevertheless
the choices were faced by all activists and movements in India, and
Ambedkar had to exert his leadership in the context of a varied pattern of
responses, given by a vigorous mass-based movement.

NOTES
1. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 233–37.
2. See D.E.U. Baker, Changing Political Leadership in an Indian Province: The Central
Provinces and Berar, 1919–1939 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 12–13.
3. Ibid., pp. 3–7, 190–93.
4. Interview, Vasant Moon, 9 October 1989.
5. The most important sources for the early movement and the situation of Mahars in
Vidarbha-Nagpur are Vasant Moon, Dr. Ambedkarpurva Dalit Calval (‘Dalit
Movement Before Dr. Ambedkar’) (Pune: Sugawa Prakashan, 1987); Eleanor Zelliot,
Dr. Ambedkar and the Mahar Movement (University of Pennsylvania: Ph.D.
dissertation, 1969). See also M.E. Bhagwat, ‘Vidarbhatil Dalit Vicharanci Netrutva’, in
P.L. Joshi (ed.), Political Ideas and Leadership in Vidarbha Publisher (Nagpur, 1980);
 Suganda Shende, ‘Guruvarya Kisan Faguji Bansode’, Bahumat, 18 February 1979, and
Baker, Changing Political Leadership, pp. 115–17.
6. Moon, Ambedkarpurva … Calval, pp. 20ff.
7. Quoted Bhagwat, ‘Vidharbhatil Dalit …’, p. 297.
8. Moon, Ambedkarpurva … Calval, p. 47.
9. Ibid., pp. 11, 47; Bhagwat, ‘Vidarbhatil Dalit …’, p. 305.
10. Quoted in Baker, Changing Political Leadership, p. 47.
11. See Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non Brahman Movement
in Western India, 1850–1935 (Poona: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976),
Chapter 11, esp. pp. 220–21; and Bhagwat, ‘Vidarbhatil Dalit …’ pp. 302–4.
12. For background on Andhra see Carol Upadhyaya, ‘The Farmer-Capitalists of Coastal
Andhra Pradesh’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2 July 1988; Nata Duvvury,
‘Commercial Capital and Agrarian Relations: A Study of Guntur Tobacco Economy’,
Economic and Political Weekly, 26 July 1986; G.N. Rao, ‘Canal Irrigation and
Agrarian Change in Coastal Andhra: A Study of Godavari District c. 1850–1890’,
Indian Social and Economic History Review, 25, 1988; N.G. Ranga, Economic
Organization of Indian Villages (Bombay: Tarapoorewala Sons, 1924); G. Hargopal,
‘Class–Caste Dimensions of Dalit Consciousness: The Case of Delta Andhra’, Paper
prepared for Class–Caste Seminar, Lonavala, December 1987) and ‘Dimensions of
Regionalism: Nationality Question in Andhra’, in Nationality Question in India (Pune:
TDDS, 1987).
13. This is stressed by Hargopal in ‘Class–Caste Dimensions’.
14. Hargopal, ‘Dimensions of Regionalism’, pp. 373–74; John Leonard, ‘Symbolic
Conflict: Social Reform and Local Politics in South India, 1874–1892’ (unpublished
manuscript, University of California, Berkeley, 1970).
15. Uma Ramaswamy, ‘Self-Identity Among Scheduled Castes: A Study of Andhra’,
Economic and Political Weekly, 23 November 1974, p. 1963; see also Ramaswamy,
‘Scheduled Castes in Andhra: Some Aspects of Social Change’, Economic and
Political Weekly, 20 July 1974, and ‘Protection and Inequality among Backward
Groups’, Economic and Political Weekly, 1 March 1986.
16. M.B. Gautam, ‘The Untouchables’ Movement in Andhra Pradesh’, in Andhra Pradesh
State Harijan Conference Souvenir (Hyderabad, 10–12 April 1976). While this is the
most detailed, other useful articles in the same volume are those of N.G. Ranga,
‘Reminiscences of Harijan Welfare’; J.R. Raju, ‘The Champions of the Downtrodden
in Andhra Pradesh’; and Y.B. Abbayasulu, ‘Harijan Uplift in Andhra Pradesh:
Yesterday and Today’. See also Abbayasulu, Scheduled Caste Elite (Hyderabad, 1976).
17. Carolyn Elliot, ‘Caste and Faction among the Dominant Caste: The Reddis and
Kammas of Andhra’, in Rajni Kothari (ed.), Caste in Indian Politics (New Delhi:
Orient Longman, 1970).
18. Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 129–30.
19. Hargopal, ‘Dimensions of Regionalism’, p. 375.
20. Both are summarized in Hargopal, ‘Class–Caste Dimensions’.
21. Ibid., pp. 2–3.
22. Gautam, ‘The Untouchables’ Movement’, pp. 67–68.
23. Ibid., and Abbayasulu, Scheduled Caste Elite, pp. 25–27.
24. Census in India, 1931, Vol. XIV, Madras, Part I: Report (Madras: Superintendent of
Government Press, 1933).
25. On Hyderabad and especially the Telengana land system see Akhil Gupta, ‘Revolution
in Telengana, 1946–51 (Part One)’, South Asia Bulletin, 4, 1 Spring 1984; D.N.
Dhanagare, ‘Social Origins of the Peasant Insurrection in Telengana (1946–1951)’,
Contributions to Indian Sociology, 8, 1974; and Barry Pavier, The Telengana
Movement, 1944–51 (Delhi: Vikas, 1981) and the review by Dhanagare, ‘Telengana
Movement Revisited’, Economic and Political Weekly, 18 December 1982.
26. Interview, Jagamba Jaganathan, Hyderabad, 24 June 1987.
27. P.R. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation, 2 volumes (Secunderabad:
University Art Printers, 1955).
28. Interview, Gautam, 20 June 1987.
29. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle, Volume I, p. 10.
30. Ibid., pp. 13–40.
31. On North India see Owen Lynch, The Politics of Untouchability (New York. Columbia
University Press, 1969); Mark Juergensmeier, Religion as Social Vision: The
Movement Against Untouchability in Twentieth Century Punjab (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1978) and R.S. Khare, The Untouchable as Himself: Ideology,
Identity and Pragmatism among the Lucknow Chamars (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984).
32. Resolution No. 6 of the All-India Adi-Hindu (Depressed Classes) Conference,
Allahabad, 16 November 1930; from the collection of M.B. Gautam.
33. An approach expressed by Boyi Bhimanna, interview, 21 June 1987.
34. Census of India, 1931, Volume XXIII, Hyderabad State, Part I: Report (Hyderabad-
Deccan: Government Central Press, 1933), p. 258.
35. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle, Volume, I, p. 20.
36. Ibid., Volume I, pp. 75–78.
37. Interview, Gautam, 20 June 1987.
38. Venkatswamy’s account makes this clear, and he ends with a bitter comment about the
factionalism caused by the ‘narrow and selfish interests’ of the leaders; Our Struggle,
Volume II, pp. 662–63.
39. James Manor, Political Change in an Indian State: Mysore, 1917–1935 (Delhi:
Manohar, 1977), p. 13.
40. Bjorn Hettne, The Political Economy of Indirect Rule: Mysore 1881–1947 (New Delhi:
Ambika Publications, 1978), pp. 30–55.
41. Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (New Delhi 1950, Volume IV, p. 363.
42. Census of India, 1981, Volume XV, Mysore, Part I, Report (Bangalore: Government
Central Press, 1893), pp. 250–53.
43. D.S. Chandrasekhar, Social Background of Mysore Politics: Some Insights (Kannada)
(Bangalore: Ankara, 1983), cited by V. Lakshminarayana, report.
44. Manor, Political Change, pp. 63–65.
45. Ibid., pp. 92–93.
46. Hettne, Political Economy, p. 341.
47. Ibid., p. 336.
48. Chitra Shivkumar, Education, Social Inequality and Social Change in Karnataka
(Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Company, 1982).
49. Chandrasekhar, Social Background.
50. Proceedings of the Mysore Representative Assembly, October 1924, p. 289.
51. Chandrasekhar, Social Background, p. 67.
52. Speeches of R.S. Dhurina, M. Kantahanage, Proceedings, p. 275.
53. Ibid., June 1927, p. 5.
54. Ibid., October 1927, p. 239.
55. Ibid., September 1925, p. 158.
56. Ibid., October 1930, October 1931, June 1932, p. 88, and June 1933, p. 181.
57. Ibid., October 1931.
58. Chandrasekhar, Social Background.
59. Chandrasekhar, Social Background, pp. 8–10.
60. Boyi Bhimanna, interview, 21 June 1987.
 CHAPTER 4

Emergence of the Dalit Movement,

1910–30: Bombay Presidency

If it is impossible to conceptualize the Dalit movement in India in the

absence of Ambedkar, it is equally difficult to imagine, sociologically,
Ambedkar coming out of any other region than the Marathi-speaking areas
of Bombay Presidency.
These included three districts in the Konkan (Thana, Kolaba and
Ratnagiri), five in western Maharashtra (Poona, Satara, Ahmednagar,
Sholapur and Nasik) and East and West Khandesh (present-day Jalgaon and
Dhule). Along with the Gujarati and Kannada-speaking districts, they
comprised both the most industrialized and the most politically and
sociologically vigorous of the provinces of British India. Bombay was the
site of the first session of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and
provided some of its leading politicians in both ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’
factions. It was the site of the most radical and mass-based of the social
movements, Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj, though its Brahman elite was
more wavering in its social reformism than the Bengali bhadralok and,
from the time of Tilak, had also provided a strong base for Hindu
revivalism in the form of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh. Bombay also nurtured both early Indian capitalism
and the militant working class which gave the Indian communist movement
its first mass base. And finally, in the decade of the 1920s, in the context of
rising working class and peasant organizing and the growth not only of
nationalism but of a non-Brahman political party, Bombay Presidency saw
the most vigorous Dalit movement in India emerge under the leadership of
B. R. Ambedkar.
The reason for this social and political vitality of the Presidency and
particularly its Marathi-speaking districts can be linked both to its relatively
late conquest by the British and to the particular nature of its rural–urban
linkages. The Marathi-speaking hinterland provided the army of industrial
labour working in Bombay, in contrast to Calcutta where till independence
the working class largely comprised of Hindi-speaking immigrants from
north India while it was the dominant bhadralok (basically the three upper
castes) with their landlord base who spanned rural and urban areas in
Bengal. The Marathi Deccan had, as shown, a relatively equalitarian and
less caste-stratified village economy; this had underlain the outburst under
Shivaji during the seventeenth century and continued in spite of later
Peshwa feudalization.
On top of this, the ryotwari settlement laid a basis for a vigorous peasant
assertion under the strains of commercial exploitation, bursting out in
various ways throughout the nineteenth century. Landlordism, of course,
continued to exist, but it was relatively less dominant than in the other
major area of commercialized agriculture dealt with in this study, the
Andhra delta. And with a large percentage of the landlords being Brahmans
they were socially more vulnerable in contrast to the non-Brahman
(Kamma, Velama, etc.) zamindars dominant in Andhra. This relatively
equalitarian village economy (suggested in Tables 2.2 and 2.3) provided a
material base for a more vigorous unity of non-Brahman Kunbis and
balutedar castes with the Mahars against the dominant Brahman landlords
and Marwari and Vani money-lenders. It also gave the Dalits themselves, in
particular the Mahars, the strongest rural base of any untouchable section in
India. The peasant assertion of the Kunbis and related castes together with
their access to industrial employment in Bombay provided a basis for a
relatively ‘proletarianized’ militant ideology and organizational forms,
while the position of the Mahars (of whom nearly 49 per cent were listed as
‘cultivators’ compared to 23 per cent ‘field labourers’ in the 1911 Census)
gave them some strength to deal with the Kunbis (often their immediate foe
if strategic ally) and organize for a more long-term radical struggle. This
vigorous village economy linked to a turbulent industrial metropolis was a
unique configuration. In contrast to the view of on-going peasant linkages
as ‘holding back’ a true proletarian radicalism, in this case such linkages
provided the main social foundation for the broad democratic movements of
Maharashtra.
 At the heart of the Bombay industrial centre was the textile mill area,
which provided the most organized and politically conscious working class
vanguard in Bombay, including not only economic struggles but social and
political struggles such as the historic 1908 strike at the time of Tilak’s
sentencing. In 1918, according to Richard Newman, the average daily
workforce in the Bombay mills was 121,129, made up of 94,601 men,
24,108 women and 2,510 children; this number rose to over 150,000 in
1922 and then declined to 138,000 in 1928 (of course including badli or
temporary and other workers, the total number of those who were ‘textile
workers’ was greater than this). Mahars made up slightly under 10 per cent
of this workforce, mainly from the districts of Satara, Ratnagiri and
Ahmednagar.1 They were concentrated in the spinning department and
menial forms of work, since the more highly paid weaving department
barred them from entry due to pollution prejudices (the practice of holding
a broken thread in the mouth while repairing it) that in the end were broken
by automation rather than any struggle. Since weavers were the most
solidly organized in the Girni Kamagar Union and other working class
organizations, Mahars, along with Muslims and north Indians, tended to be
relatively less involved in working class organizing.2
Similarly, Mahars were probably over-represented among the casual and
unorganized sections of labour in the city as a whole. They were prominent,
according to Zelliot, in construction, sanitary forces and the docks. Here a
1941 study revealed that recruitment was linked not only to caste but also to
region: for dock workers, Satara Mahars dominated in shore labour;
Sholapur, Poona and Satara Mahars in coal labour; Nasik and Ratnagiri
Mahars in the dock railways. Mahars as a whole were 12 per cent of shore
labour on the docks but 98 per cent of the lower-paid, more menial coal
labourers.3 This type of caste/village/region-linked recruitment also applied
in the mills and continues to operate to the present day. In the city as a
whole, by 1921, according to Zelliot, Mahars were 12 per cent of the
workforce.4
This emerging Mahar working class, however exploited and
discriminated against, nevertheless had enough collective concentration to
constitute a relatively strong base for a social movement, one with on-going
links to villages near and far. If the textile workers were the centre of
Bombay working class life, it was Byculla and Kamathipura just south of
the textile area that were the city centres of the Dalit movement.5
Ambedkar’s home through much of his life was located here, and even
when he built a house of his own, ‘Rajgraha’, it was in Dadar at the
northern side of the textile area. Even for poor workers Bombay provided a
significant resource base, and as Ambedkar’s biographer Khairmode notes,
as Dalit consciousness and the movement grew, people stopped spending on
Ganapati and other religious festivals and began to support a different kind
of cultural assertion. And these resources and this assertion were transferred
back and forth from city to villages, back and forth from an emerging
educated section to the worker and poor peasant masses. In contrast to
Hyderabad, where in spite of desires for autonomy Dalit leaders remained
isolated from any rural base, the Dalit leadership in Bombay Presidency
continually grew under pressure of the increasing demands of their people.

• MAHARS BEFORE 1917: THE DOWNFALL OF ‘UNTOUCHABILITY

RELIEF’
There was some limited independent Dalit organizing before the 1920s.
This took two forms. First, there was an agitation, of the usual petition-
oriented type of the period, for continuing the recruitment of Mahars into
the army and lower grades of government service. Gopal Baba Walangkar,
speaking in the name of a Ratnagiri-based group, sent a petition as early as
1894, while two later ones sent on behalf of the Mahars of the Konkan and
Deccan in 1904 and 1910 were organized by Shivram Janba Kamble, a
retired Ratnagiri army man living in Poona. The first petition claimed
untouchables were former Ksatriyas but was sent in the name of the Anarya
Doshpariharakham of Dapoli, thus making a ‘non-Aryan’ claim; the second
mentioned only the recent service of the Mahars as justifying their equal
rights.6
A second trend was the organization in several areas of Mahar caste
associations under the name of ‘Somvanshiya’, a sub-caste of Mahars,
which took up limited issues of internal reform and education. Shivram
Kamble was involved with a Somvanshiya Sabha in Poona, while a
Somawanshiya Hitachintak Mandal was recorded in Ahmednagar, which
V.R. Shinde visited in the process of forming his own mission for the
untouchables.7
Caste Hindu reform efforts, however, held the stage before 1917, though
they were to a large extent inspired and provoked by the independent Mahar
efforts. Among these, of course, the Satyashodhak movement provided
important sponsorship for Dalit organizing and did so with a perspective of
alliance and autonomy much more than the patronage-control of the more
conservative upper-caste elite.8 Nevertheless the organizational base of the
conservatives was strongest, and their most important effort in the period
before 1920 was the Depressed Classes Mission of Vitthal Ramji Shinde.
Shinde was a member of the Prarthana Samaj and the most prominent of the
‘nationalist Marathas’ who opposed the non-Brahman party and attempted
to draw the Maratha community into the Congress movement.9 His
Depressed Classes Mission performed the same function for the Dalit
community, and drew them not only into the Congress but into Hindu
revivalist associations such as the Hindu Mahasabha.
The Mission was founded in 1906, after Shinde had returned (in 1903)
from an abortive educational trip to England and had toured India surveying
other efforts at untouchability reform. Shinde was the secretary and
Narayanrao Chandavarkar, a prominent Brahman reformer, the president. It
focused on education and on propagation of a reformed Hinduism. By 1908
it was reported to have 15 day schools, 6 Sunday schools, 5 bhajan
societies, 4 industrial schools and seven ‘missionary’ propagandists in
Bombay presidency.10 In October 1912 an Asprushata Nivaran Parishad
(‘Untouchability Relief Conference’) was organized by Shinde in Poona
under the presidentship of Dr Ramakrishna Bhandarkar; the
Shankaracharya of the Kolhapur math, Dr Kurtkoti, took part, and for three
days there was interdining among the untouchables and caste Hindus who
attended.11 Shinde made energetic efforts to secure support for his work,
from various maharajas, from even the Tuskegee Institute of Booker T.
Washington in the United States, and by 1917 it had won recognition both
among the mainly Brahman social-political elite and the British government
as the leading organization working among untouchables.
However, 1917 saw the beginning of the downfall of such caste Hindu
patronage and the rise of a new self-directed Dalit movement. The context
was the political turmoil of the 1917–20 period, when almost all
communities were being mobilized around the issues raised by the
Montague–Chelmsford reforms; the immediate issues were those of who
would represent untouchables, but the implications were to be much more
profound.
The main agent of the new movement was the young Mahar graduate,
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Ambedkar had graduated from Elphinstone
College and spent three years at Columbia University and one at the
London School of Economics with financial support from the Gaikwad of
Baroda. He had worked for a brief period at Baroda on his return, but then
left in anger at the treatment he received as an untouchable and became a
professor at Syndenham College. Highly educated and articulate, from the
very moment of his return in 1917 he was looked to as a leader of the
community.
The stimulus of the reforms provoked the Maharashtrian elite into
mobilizing untouchable support. But a series of ‘untouchability relief’
conferences called in 1917 were conspicuous by their lack of success in
involving untouchables. The first meeting was called in December 1917 by
Chandavarkar and Shinde, with Chandavarkar presiding and with the
proclaimed purpose of honouring Ambedkar as a returned Mahar graduate
as well as demanding political rights for untouchables. But Ambedkar
disassociated himself from the meeting and refused to accept the honour.
The meeting passed a resolution supporting the Congress and Muslim
League (their Lucknow Pact being a current focus for nationalist
expressions), but not before even so pro-Hindu an untouchable as G.A.
Gavai had caused some turmoil by expressing doubts about what the
Congress was actually doing for untouchables.12
The second was a major conference with Sayajirao Gaikwad, the ruler of
Baroda, presiding and involving many well-known nationalist leaders,
including Bipin Chandra Pal, Vitthalbhai Patel and Lokmanya Tilak, and
with telegrams from the Shankaracharya and from Gandhi. Again demands
were raised for the removal of untouchability and resolutions expressed
support for the Congress. The meeting became well-known for Tilak’s
speech expressing his opposition to untouchability (he put it in terms of
caste distinctions being disregarded in ‘wartime’) and his claims that he
ignored it personally. But Tilak was afterwards harshly criticized, charged
with avoiding the publication of his speech in Kesari and not being able to
document any claims of his own disregard of pollution; and it was noted
that he subsequently refused to sign a petition brought by Shinde. The
Shankaracharya was criticized for avoiding attending the conference. And
at the meeting itself, a Maratha reformer, Krishnarao Arjun Keluskar, raised
a fuss by charging the delegates with only staying in the cities and ignoring
the real problems of untouchability in the rural areas, citing as one example
Ambedkar’s experiences in Baroda.
The final blow to the ‘untouchability relief’ campaign of the elite came
when such a conference was held as a part of a general Congress social and
political conference during 5–8 May 1918 at Bijapur. This time Gandhi was
in attendance. Asked to move the resolution expressing untouchable support
for the Congress, he asked untouchables who were present to raise their
hands. When no one did, he inquired how this could be called ‘a conference
of depressed classes’ and refused to move the resolution.13

• AMBEDKAR EMERGES: AUTONOMY AND ALLIANCES

Given these events, it is not surprising that politically conscious
untouchables should feel they were being used by caste Hindu leaders. It
was now that Ambedkar made his claim to an alternative leadership, in
three steps: submitting testimony to the Southborough Committee on
Reforms, appearing at two major conferences of untouchables during 1920,
and initiating a journal, Mooknayak (‘Voice of the Mute’). The testimonial
involved a conscious attack on Shinde; as Khairmode writes, ‘untouchables
were tired of Shinde’s effort to hold a dictatorial monopoly over the
movement.’ He added that neither the government nor the Chandavarkar–
Shinde group felt the need for the untouchables themselves to testify, and
whereas Shinde was invited to testify, Ambedkar himself had to write to the
government volunteering his submission.14
Ambedkar’s written statement, as was to be true of all his political
expressions, was argued at length and with force and eloquence. In contrast
to Shinde, who had asked for reserved seats for untouchables in general
constituencies, he asserted categorically that ‘Untouchable Hindus’ and
‘Touchable Hindus’ represented social groups as completely different as
Hindus and members of other religions. In an eloquent assertion of identity
and claim to autonomy,
 The right of representation and the right to hold office under the state are
the two most important rights that make up citizenship. But the
untouchability of the untouchables puts these rights far beyond their
reach. In a few places they do not even possess such insignificant rights
as personal liberty and personal security. These are the interests of the
untouchables. And as can be easily seen, they can be represented by the
untouchables alone.15
In arguing for more than a token representation, he stated,
The Sultan will not, though he can, change the religion of Mahomad just
as the Pope will not, though he can, overthrow the religion of Christ. In
the same way a legislature composed of high caste men will not pass a
law removing untouchability, sanctioning intermarriages, removing a ban
on the use of public streets, public temples, public schools …. This is not
because they cannot, but chiefly because they will not.16
And he was bitterly scornful of caste Hindu reformism, referring to the
‘farce of a conference for the removal of untouchability’, describing the
rejection of a resolution by Dadabhoy Naoroji in the Imperial Legislative
Assembly, and condemning Shinde’s Depressed Class Mission in scathing
language:
The mission it must be said was started with intention of improving the
condition of the Depressed Classes by emancipating them from the social
tyranny of their high caste masters. But the mission has fallen on such
bad times that it is forced to advocate a scheme by which its wards or
their representatives will be bounded slaves of their past masters.17
The British met none of the demands of the various claimants to grant
representation to untouchables, and the Montague– Chelmsford reforms
provided for only one nominated member in the Bombay Legislative
Council. But the political assertion of Dalits had begun. Ambedkar and his
colleagues decided that a public challenge to Shinde’s leadership should be
put forward in an independent conference of untouchables. The result was
the Akhil Bharatiya Bahishkrut Parishad (also known as the All-India
Depressed Classes Conference) held at Nagpur on 30–31 May 1920 with
Shahu Chhatrapati of Kolhapur as president. The famous anti-Brahman
maharaja had already helped launch Ambedkar’s political career with a
conference held at the Kolhapur state village of Mangaon on 20 March
1920.18
 The Nagpur conference condemned the Depressed Classes Mission and
its resolutions of support for the Congress, and, according to Ambedkar’s
longtime co-worker S.N. Shivtarkar, so great was Ambedkar’s power of
persuasion that even Shinde’s disciple in Nagpur, G.S. Gavai, was forced
into seconding it and expressing his own unhappiness with the Mission. The
argument used was that no untouchable representative chosen by a caste
Hindu majority could ever move against chaturvarnya; with this it was
clear that to Dalits the assertion of autonomy distinguished a programme for
the ‘removal of untouchability’ from the destruction of caste itself.19
Shinde’s political career as a representative of the Dalits was finished with
this conference, though the final blow came only later (which was after
Ambedkar returned from London a second time) when Dalit students in his
hostel revolted at his autocratic ways. He died, reportedly, disillusioned and
embittered, unable to sustain a position as a pro–Hindu nationalist Maratha
caught between the cultural arrogance of the Brahman elite and a Dalit
movement determined to fashion its own path.20
As noted, a choice by Dalits for a radical assertion of autonomy led to the
necessity of making further choices. In Ambedkar’s case, in the context of
Maharashtrian politics, this clearly involved one major political choice: a
rejection of the existing nationalist politics and an alliance with the non-
Brahman movement. Ambedkar sought help from the most controversial
figure of Bombay Presidency, the maharaja of Kolhapur. And he maintained
this stance throughout, seeking allies among the various leaders of the non-
Brahman movement (often while being scathingly critical of them),
working with them on various campaigns (as he did with S.K. Bole on the
issue of khoti in the 1920s), unequivocably identifying with the
Satyshodhak Samaj,21 and writing in his introduction to Who Were the
Shudras? that ‘it is well known that there has been a nonBrahman
movement in this country which is a political movement of the Shudras. It
is also well known that I have been connected with it.’22
Behind this identification with the non-Brahman movement lay the logic
of a movement that was essentially anti-caste and not simply a movement
for ‘untouchability removal’. Even assuming a radical assertion of the
existence of ‘untouchables’ as a separate social group, it was not accurate to
view other Hindus as an undifferentiated mass, all equally opposed to the
Dalits due to their ‘Hindu-ness’. An analysis of the caste system led to a
focus on the hierarchy in it, with Brahmans at the top as the ‘main enemy’.
And if Brahmans (or the twice-born) were the main enemy, then the masses
of non-Brahmans were potential allies, even if they presently accepted a
Hindu identity, even if they too practiced untouchability.
The question was a poignant one, since non-Brahmans, especially the
main peasant castes like the Kunbi–Marathas, often appeared as direct
exploiters, the main perpetrators of atrocities on the Dalits. In Ambedkar’s
time as today, many put forward the thesis that ‘dominant caste’ groups
such as the Marathas were the main enemy, and that an alliance with them
was harmful if not impossible. As Eleanor Zelliot has written,
the caste difference between the two groups and their social situation—
the Marathas were a landowning dominant caste, the Mahars a nearly
landless minority—worked against any real cooperative effort between
them. Although the Mahar grievances were voiced chiefly against the
Brahmans, as it was the Marathas who dominated at the village level, the
village protests in the form of quitting balutedar duties or claiming some
form of social equality in fact got directed against the latter …. Just as
the Justice Party in Madras failed to include significant numbers of
Untouchables, the non-Brahman movement in Maharashtra could not
make common cause with Untouchables.23
But this analysis, which has become popular today as opponents of caste
reservations for the ‘backward castes’ argue that they are the greatest
perpetrators of atrocities against the Dalits, is directly contrary to that of
Ambedkar. Although Ambedkar and his coworkers at times spoke of ‘all
caste Hindus’ or all ‘villagers’ as the enemy, and while they frequently and
scornfully criticized the hypocrisy of non-Brahman leaders, they never gave
up attempts at alliance. If Marathas and similar groups were the ‘dominant
caste’ at the village level, Ambedkar and others never had any doubt that
Brahmans were the ‘dominant caste’ in the system as a whole. Thus he
constantly attempted to make distinctions, to direct the thrust of organizing
and rhetoric against the Brahmans (or big landlords and capitalists), to rally
support from the Shudra castes. In this the non-Brahman movement, in
particular its radical core, the Satyashodhak Samaj, had a crucial role to
play because its ideology sought to arouse the Shudras or bahujan samaj
not only against the Brahmans but against caste itself. Just as non-Brahman
social radicals from Phule onwards had a qualitatively different approach to
untouchables from the patronizing, incorporative attitude of the Brahmans
(or Brahmanized reformers such as Shinde), so Ambedkar had a different
attitude towards them. In a real sense he was the heir of Phule’s call for a
movement of Shudras and Atishudras.
The refusal of patronage and the assertion of independence in this has to
be stressed, however, and the spirit of ‘Ambedkarism’ is perhaps best
illustrated in a speech he gave on a celebration of the Mahad campaign held
in March 1940. Addressing the Kunbis present, Ambedkar said, ‘If we want
to speak only of Maharashtra, then the time has come to say that only
Mahars and Brahmans really understand politics.’ Asking how many
Kunbis were in positions of authority in government service, he went on,
The Mahar community has become resolute; it will not be suppressed and
will no longer remain beneath your feet. This you must keep in mind.
Now you yourselves at least should become conscious. In spite of being
70–80 per cent of the population, should you go on spending all your
lives simply doing coolie work? Even if you go into Congress, Congress
will not let you behave independently; you will have to toil as slaves of
the Congress.24

• THE MAHAD SATYAGRAHA: DALIT LIBERATION BEGINS

While the events of 1920 represented the beginning of the Dalit movement
in Maharashtra, the decisive step that made it a liberation struggle was the
1927 Mahad satyagraha. This established Ambedkar as a leader of a
growing movement; but at the same time illustrates a certain holding back
with regard to crucial religious–cultural choices.
Ambedkar did not immediately begin organizing. He returned to England
at the end of 1920 to complete his law degree, coming back to India only in
1923. Much of his time was taken up with personal life (including its
tragedies, the death of four children), and the problems of survival. He
worked as a lawyer and continued to teach at Sydenham College. He
founded the Bahishkrut Hitakarini Sabha in 1924 as a forum for gathering
people and organizing occasional forays into the countryside for
conferences and meetings; and he was one of two new untouchable
representatives nominated to the Legislative Council in 1926. But the main
activity through much of this time seemed to be that of reading
voluminously and thinking through the problems of untouchability and
Indian/Hindu society—and of gathering people around him (students,
workers, the newly educated elite) and putting forward the message of self-
respect. He was rapidly becoming the focal point for the surging aspirations
of the Dalits, as untouchables throughout western Maharashtra wrote to
him, seeking to find an outlet to publish the struggles they were waging, the
atrocities they faced. Like all ‘charismatic leaders’, Ambedkar was the
creation of the movement he led as much as its creator.
The Mahad tank satyagraha illustrates both the role of mass readiness for
action and the genuis of Ambedkar in giving leadership to it. The occasion
was a ‘Kolaba Zilha Bahishkrut Parishad’ (Kolaba district conference of the
boycotted) on 19–20 March 1927. This was the first mass rally of the
Bahishkrut Hitakarini Sabha (BHS), and Mahad, a taluk town in the
Konkan, had been carefully selected as a place where Mahar migrants to
Bombay had strong connections and where there was nucleus of solid caste
Hindu support. These included A.V. Chitre, a CKP (Kayastha) activist of
the BHS, G.N. Sahasrabudhe, a Brahman of the Social Service Legue, and
Surendranath Tipnis, another CKP who was president of the Mahad
municipality; Chitre and Tipnis were later to be elected as MLAs in
Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party, while Sahasrabudhe went on to
become the editor of Ambedkar’s weekly Janata.
The 1920s saw a sustained agitation for the opening of public places,
particularly wells and tanks, to untouchables. It seems that Ambedkar had
some kind of direct action in his mind from the beginning; Mahad
municipality itself had already passed a resolution to open the Chawdar
tank, though it had not been implemented. However, the actual resolutions
passed at the conference were very general, and it was only after seeing the
mood of the crowd of about 1,500 and after a good deal of discussion
among the organizers on the morning of the second day that direct action
was proposed. This was done suddenly: at the end of the meeting, rising to
‘give thanks’ to the organizers of the conference, Anantrao Chitre (‘as
decided beforehand I threw a bombshell’) proposed to move to the tank and
drink the water. The crowd surged forward and drank; after they had
returned they were attacked by aroused caste Hindus fearing a further
‘onslaught’, this time on the temple. Drinking of the tank water, the rioting,
the police complaints afterwards, and the subsequent ‘cleansing’ of the tank
by horrified Brahmans all caused the event to resound throughout
Maharashtra.
Ambedkar seized the opportunity to establish Bahishkrut Bharat, his
second weekly, and rally sympathy and mass support. A further ‘satyagraha
conference’ was planned in December to re-establish the right to drink
water. This brought a vastly increased mass of Dalits—between 10,000 and
15,000—and featured the famous burning of the Manusmriti, a dramatic
symbolic act that took away the sting from the fact that Ambedkar
honoured the injunction of the district magistrate not to take water from the
tank by calling off the ‘satyagraha’. Later both events were known as the
‘Mahad satyagraha’, but it was the first day, 20 March, that was celebrated
for a long time as Asprushya Swatantra Din or ‘Untouchable Independence
Day’, the day of the mass struggle of Dalits to assert their human rights.25
The Mahad satyagraha was thus the foundation for the liberation struggle
of Maharashtra Dalits. Nevertheless, for some time even after this,
Ambedkar was in some ways marking time, though he was involved in a
tremendous amount of activity (including submitting a book-length
testimonial to the Simon Commission in 1928 and writing a critique of
linguistic provinces in response to the Nehru report in 1929) and was
becoming more and more visible as a public leader. He continued reading
voraciously, including social and religious literature on Hinduism. Closely
following the fast-moving developments, he watched the temple entry
movements go on and took cognisance of the various new reform efforts by
caste Hindus as also of the Gandhian trend within the nationalist movement,
the new communist movement and worker and peasant organizing.26 He
was still in the process of defining his attitude towards Hinduism and the
Congress. While critical of Gandhi for not giving as much weight to
untouchability removal as to Hindu–Muslim unity, he nevertheless had a
soft spot for him: the tent for the December ‘satyagraha conference’ at
Mahad featured Gandhi’s photo, and as Ambedkar put it in a 1925
‘Bahishkrut Parishad’ in Belgaum, ‘where no one else comes close, the
sympathy shown by Mahatma Gandhi is by no means a small thing.’27
Perhaps he saw in Gandhi and other new (and non-Brahman) leaders in the
Congress the potentiality of a qualitatively differnt force.
The wait-and-see element of his attitude towards Hinduism was put in so
many words when he explained why he refused to advise Dalits not to
convert to Islam after a minor fracas over the conversion of four Mahars in
Jalgaon: ‘even if Ambedkar feels that it may be possible for untouchability
to be removed while remaining in Hinduism, and is ready to wait and see
for some time, this doesn’t mean everyone can be convinced of this.’28 It is
also noteworthy that the resolutions at the second Mahad conference spoke
in the name of parmeshwar and of the rights of Hindus, and put the stress
on Hindu society purifying itself by removing untouchability.29
It is still true that from the very beginning Ambedkar was highly critical
of Hinduism as a fundamentally inequalitarian religion, and was
considering conversion as perhaps the only way out, as illustrated in an
early speech at a ‘Bahishkrut Parishad’ at Barsi in May 1924 which Moon
views as a predecessor of Ambedkar’s 1936 speech on conversion.30 And
his absolute indifference to temple entry movements is clear. This contrasts
with the incorporativist attitude of Dalit leaders such as Kisan Faguji
Bansode. Zelliot cites the ‘militant’ attitude of a 1934 poem.
Why do you endure curses?
Choka went into the temple resolutely,
Why do you, ashamed, stay far off?
You are the descendents of Choka.
Why do you fear to enter the temple?
Brace yourself like a wrestler, come,
Together let us conquer pollution.31
The point is not that Bansode’s interests were ‘religious’ or that those
desiring temple entry were ‘militant’ or ‘passive’ (there were both among
Dalits in the 1920s and 1930s); the point was that temple-entry was the
symbolic high point of ‘incorporation’ into Hindu society, and even before
they came to denounce it, leaders striving for an autonomous movement
like Ambedkar or Bhagyareddy Varma of Hyderabad were almost always
uninterested in it and perhaps emotionally resistant to it.
Nevertheless, in many respects Ambedkar seemed ready to a certain
degree in the 1920s to give Hindu society the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps
this has something to do with the fact that he did not ask for separate
electorates before the Simon Commission at a time when almost all other
untouchable organizations were doing so (16 out of 18 who testified
apparently demanded separate electorates, including G.A. Gavai) but for an
increased number of reserved seats and adult suffrage.32 And, he kept silent
on the cultural–historical issue of Dalit identity, particularly regarding its
most popular theme, the ‘non-Aryan’ identity in which Dalits claimed to be
original inhabitants.

• CLASS STRUGGLE: WORKERS, PEASANTS AND DALITS

While in some ways the late 1920s was a period of indecisiveness on
cultural and religious issues, Ambedkar’s basic outlook on economic and
class issues appears more or less formed. This was clearest in regard to
peasant and working class struggles. There is a kind of parallelism in the
issues as they confronted Ambedkar and other leaders, and he approached
them with the basic viewpoint of autonomy–plus–alliance. In both cases
Dalits were workers and they were peasants; but as workers they were
invariably in the lowest paid and most unskilled industrial jobs and as
peasants they were likely to be landless or poor peasants who spent most of
the time working as wage labourers as well as toiling on the caste-imposed
tasks of untouchables. In both cases the ‘problem of entry’—of getting jobs
and getting land—could sometimes override the question of organizing as
workers and as peasants. In both cases they faced problems of caste
discrimination, unwillingness of caste Hindu workers and peasants to
accept Dalit leadership; the differences were a greater severity in village
customs on the one hand, and the emerging role of communists on the other.
Ambedkar lived among industrial workers for most of his life. He was
not so directly involved with the textile mill workers as the Nagpur leaders,
perhaps because, in comparison, the proportion of Mahars was lower in
Bombay. But he was taking note of communist and other organizing efforts,
as well as the basic problems of untouchables being excluded from the
higher paid weaving jobs and being therefore less represented in organizing
efforts. As he said in connection with the historic 1928 textile strike,
In the recent Bombay strike this matter was brought up prominently by
me. I said to the members of the union that if they did not recognize the
right of the depressed classes to work in all the departments, I would
rather dissuade the depressed classes from taking part in the strike. They
afterwards consented, most reluctantly, to include this as one of their
 demands, and when they presented this to the millowners, the millowners
very rightly snubbed them and said that if this was an injustice, they
certainly were not responsible for it.33
Ambedkar here is critiquing an Indian communist tendency to ‘demand’ of
the state something the organized class could and should do on its own.
In the second strike (1929). which resulted in a massive defeat of the
Girni Kamgar Union, Ambedkar did in fact ask the untouchable workers to
go back. This was done, as a 2 May 1929 article in Bahishkrut Bharat
pointed out, with a stress on the discriminated-against position of the
untouchable workers and their sufferings at the hands of the money-lenders
as a result of the strike; the union was condemned for calling it. It
concluded cautiously, ‘because so many untouchable workers have given
pleas about this situation, Dr. Ambedkar has been forced to take the
question in hand and protect the untouchable workers from a misdirected
movement.’34 In other words, in so far as the working class movement was
concerned, the ‘problem of entry’ was taking precedence over organizing
itself in the last part of the 1920s. This was a natural reaction for a leader of
a community systematically excluded from employment (one could
compare Blacks moving into working class jobs in Detroit and taking
advantage of white workers’ strikes to gain entry), and as in all cases, once
entry was gained the Dalits tended to be among the most militant unionists.
Nevertheless, Ambedkar was quite irritated at the communists for ignoring
this issue, and he began to formulate his position against them. Articles
following this in Bahishkrut Bharat argued that the trade union movement
(which had to be supported) must be distinguished from the communist
movement (a political movement aimed at revolution), and that he
disagreed with the communists not about their aim of creating a socialist
society but about the use of violent means to do so.35
On peasant issues and the problems of rural Mahars, Ambedkar’s
position was a presage of his 1930s radical organizing. His stand was pro-
peasant and anti-landlord; he supported the actual movements of the
decade. The first example of this was his opposition to the land revenue tax.
In his first speech as a Legislative Council member in 1927 on the budget,
he criticized the land tax for being imposed even in years when the peasants
could earn no profit, and asked why a progressive income tax was not
imposed which would hit hardest at jagirdars and inamdars.36 This general
position was repeated in the programmes of his later political parties, the
Independent Labour Party and the Scheduled Caste Federation. He also
upheld a small peasant economy. In 1928 when non-Brahmans united to
organize the peasantry in opposition to a proposed ‘small Holdings Relief
Bill’ designed to consolidate holdings, Ambedkar supported them. He
argued that consolidation of holdings would only force the majority of
small peasants into landlessness and lead to a concentration of holdings
which had not previously taking place, adding economic power to the
already existing social power in the hands of a ‘Hindu oligarchy’. Further,
he stated, given India’s lack of capital in agriculture, holdings were not
really ‘too small’ in terms of existing technology; if larger holdings had to
be created it should be done through cooperatives of small farms ‘without
destroying private ownership’.37 A longer related article on the issue saw
the basic solution to a backward agriculture in transferring population from
agriculture through industrial development.38
It is worth noting that these ‘pro-peasant’ policies were held even while
recognizing that non-Brahman peasants were often oppressors of Dalit
labourers. This comes out in the position of Ambedkar regarding the
Bardoli struggle. Following the campaign, Vallabhbhai Patel had come to
Maharashtra to attempt to generalize it with the formation of a Land
League. Non-Brahman leaders called this a ‘landlords’ league’ and accused
the Patidars of exploiting their Duble (‘Raniparaj’) labourers. Ambedkar
cited this as an obvious fact, but went on to remark that the Maharashtrian
Brahmans had not up to that point shown the daring to lead any anti-
revenue movement, and that the non-Brahmans were hypocritical because
the Marathas among them had refused to support the fight of Kunbi and
Mahar tenants against khoti landlords. Ambedkar then expressed his
support for the Bardoli campaign in the following words:
If all other remedies fail and the government refuses to take account of
peasants’ grievances, then are the non-Brahmans saying that the peasants
should not do a peaceful movement against payment of revenue? Would
the Bardoli peasants have been taken note of if they had not had the
support of the norevenue campaign in the Bardoli struggle?39
Aside from this general support for peasant movements, there were two
important ways in which Ambedkar began, in the 1920s, to take up special
problems of the Dalits. One was in fighting the specific caste-exploitation
that was called in many areas vethbegar or vethi: Ambedkar initiated his
campaign against the ‘Mahar watan’, through which Dalit labour was
exploited as the general servant of the ‘village’, of its headman and the state
bureaucracy. His detailed writings on this are a scathing indictment and
revelation of the degree to which the British colonial state confirmed the
existing caste–feudalism and utilised it for capitalist exploitation of the
lowest section of rural toilers. Ambedkar notes that the British had
pensioned-off the inamdars and other feudal landlord sections, giving them
access to rent without claiming any returns from them; that village-level
balutedars such as the patil were simply given their former watan lands as
private ownership and released from duties; but the Mahars and a few
others (Mangs, Ramoshis) were forced to continue their labour with only
the nominal reward of being given land at a lower rate of assessment.
Ambedkar took his first action on the issue when he brought the
‘Hereditary Offices Act Amendment Bill’ before the Legislative Council in
March 1928, which would have turned the Mahars (along with the
Ramoshis, Holeyas in karnataka and Vethias in Gujarat) into paid
government servants, doing away with their various village honorariums
and commuting their watan lands into ordinary private holdings. He warned
the government that if nothing was done there would be ‘a war between the
Revenue Department and the Mahars’, that if the bill did not pass he would
spend the rest of his life organizing a general strike. ‘I have definitely come
to know that the watan is probably the greatest difficulty I have to face in
carrying the Mahar population further’, he said on 3 August 1928.40 In fact
he saw the Mahar watan as a major aspect of Dalit exploitation, and the
false security it provided as a major socio-psychological barrier keeping the
Mahars integrated into an exploitative village community. The Mahar
watan struggle would go on throughout the 1930s and 1940s; it was the
concrete form of the fight against ‘feudalism’ which Marxists in many parts
of India have struggled against with the general term vethbegar.
The other question with which he was concerned was the ‘problem of
entry’; from the point of view of Dalit agricultural labourers it might be
called a ‘problem of exit’. It is noteworthy that throughout his career
Ambedkar adopted almost no programme or campaign for agricultural
labourers as such; his main concern was that the Dalits should cease being
agricultural labourers, that they should escape from their landlessness either
by securing industrial or white-collar employment, or by obtaining land for
cultivation. Here the main type of land he became interested in was
government ‘forest land’ or ‘wasteland’ (much of which had originally
belonged to the village communities). In the late 1920s we can see him
asking questions about this in the Council, in July and again in September–
October 1927. Answers revealed, interestingly enough, that in the period
1923–26, of a total of 62,038 acres of land given for cultivation in the
‘Northern Circle’, 60,038 was given to ‘Depressed Classes’ (Dalits and
Adivasis combined), in the ‘Central Circle’ of 19,168 acres 5,614 were
given to Depressed Classes, while no applications were received for forest
lands in the Kannada-speaking tracts and of the nearly 8,000 acres given in
Pune, Ahmednagar and Satara almost all went to caste Hindus. Thus the
Depressed Classes as a whole got 65,652 acres of land, but it is impossible
to know how much of this went to the Dalits as such; very likely Adivasis
in the Northern Circle got the most.41 In any case, the statistics reveal a
struggle from below going on for land, and again it was to be taken up later
as a more thorough action campaign.

• CONCLUSION
The decade of the 1920s in Bombay Presidency saw the emergence of a
vigorous Dalit movement under the leadership of Ambedkar, almost totally
based on the Mahar caste. This movement decisively rejected the pro-Hindu
‘integrationist’ option represented by the Maratha leader V.R. Shinde and
some of the Nagpur Dalit leaders; it chose instead a position of Dalit
autonomy linked with a policy of general alliance with the non-Brahman
movement, and of support for working class and peasant struggles qualified
with concern to assure Dalits ‘entry’ as workers and peasants by gaining
jobs and land. It also saw, with the Mahad satyagraha, the declaration in the
struggle of the untouchables’ right to live as full human beings.
At the same time, Ambedkar remained aloof from the interpretation of
the Dalits as ‘non-Aryan’ original inhabitants, though this theme was
associated in other regions with a stand for autonomy, annd though it had
been pioneered in Maharashtra itself with the work of Jotirao Phule and was
being expressed by non-Brahman ideologists in Ambedkar’s own time. He
also drew back from a decisive rejection of Hinduism and of the Gandhian
trend within the Congress. This was consistent with the position he was to
take at the 1930s Depressed Classes Political Conference in Nagpur. It was
only later that he made a decision to take a fully anti-Congress stand to
build an independent political party in the context of an anti-Gandhism that
was to remain with him throughout his life. The decisive period, then, was
the second Round Table Conference, the confrontation with Gandhi and the
Poona Pact—the ‘turning point’ of 1932.

NOTES
1. Richard Newman, Workers and Unions in Bombay, 1918–1929: A Study of Organization
in the Cotton Mills (Australian National University Monographs on South Asia 6,
1981), p. 51.
2. Ibid., p. 219.
3. Eleanor Zelliot, Dr. Ambedkar and the Mahar Movement (University of Pennsylvania:
Ph.D. dissertation, 1969), pp. 34–36.
4. Ibid., pp. 35–36.
5. D.B. Khairmode, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (Bombay: Pratap Prakashan, 1955),
Volume II, p. 46.
6. Zelliot, Dr. Ambedkar, pp. 50–53.
7. Ibid., pp. 44–49.
8. For details see Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman
Movement in Western India, 1850–1935 (Poona: Scientific Socialist Education Trust,
1976), pp. 151–52.
9. Ibid., pp. 184–89.
10. Khairmode, Ambedkar, Volume II, pp. 226–27.
11. Ibid., p. 229.
12. Ibid., pp. 225–60 gives a detailed documentation of these conferences.
13. Ibid., p. 257.
14. Ibid., p. 277.
15. Ibid., Appendix, p. 111.
16. Ibid., p. 222.
17. Ibid., p. 224.
18. A full account is provided in a memorial book, Mangaon Parishad: Smruti Mahotsav
 Vishesh Ank (Kolhapur, 1982, edited by Ramesh Dhavare).
19. Khairmode, Ambedkar, Volume I, pp. 280–81.
20. Ibid., p. 237; Moon, Dr. Ambedkarpurva Dalit Calval (Pune: Sugawa Prakashan,
1987), pp. 100–1, gives an account of a united meeting of Dalits held in 1923 that
condemned Shinde and his mission.
21. Ratnakar Ganvir (ed.), ‘Bahishkrut Bharatatil’ Dr. Ambedkarance Sphut Lekh (‘Dr.
Ambedkar’s articles in Bahishkrut Bharat’) (Nagpur: Ratnamitra Prakashan, 1981), pp.
136–37. The Government of Maharashtra has recently published the full volumes of
the newspaper.
22. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Who Were the Shudras? (Bombay, 1970), p. xxi.
23. Eleanor Zelliot, ‘Learning the Use of Political Means: The Mahars of Maharashtra’, in
Rajni Kothari (ed.), Caste in Indian Politics, New Delhi (Poona: Orient Longman,
1970), pp. 44–45.
24. Janata, 7 April 1940.
25. The most authoritative account of the Mahad satyagraha and of some of the varying
interpretations of it (with a strong attack on some caste Hindu distortions) is given by
Ratnakar Ganvir, Mahad Samta Sangar (Jalgaon: Ratnamitra Prakashan, 1981), pp. 1–
65. See also the newspaper and Bombay police accounts cited in Source Material on
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar and the Movement of Untouchables, Volume I (Bombay:
Government of Maharashtra, 1982), pp. 13–33, which give a sense of the degree to
which the campaign became a major event.
26. Articles in Bahishkrut Bharat show this process; they are very wide-ranging in their
scope of coverage, perhaps even more so than later articles in Janata, which perhaps
more clearly focus on promoting the Swatantra Mazur Paksh.
27. M.P. Ganjare (ed.), Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkaranci Bhashane, Volume II (Nagpur:
Ashok Prakashan, 1974), p. 2.
28. Bahishkrut Bharat, 12 July 1919; in Ganvir, ‘Bahishkrut Bharatatil’, p. 206.
29. Ganjare, Bhashane, Volume II, pp. 21–37.
30. Moon, Ambedkarpurva, p. 121.
31. Cited in Zelliot, ‘Learning the Use of political means’, p. 39.
32. Ibid., p. 45. The full text of Ambedkar’s submission and his testimony before the
Commission is given in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Volume II,
edited by Vasant Moon (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra Education Department,
1982), pp. 315–500.
33. Ibid., p. 474 (Ambedkar’s testimony before the Simon Commission on 23 October
1928).
34. Bahishkrut Bharat, 3 May 1929.
35. Ibid., 31 May 1929.
36. Writings and Speeches, Volume II, p. 2.
37. Ibid., p. 129–37.
38. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Volume I, edited by Vasant Moon
(Bombay: Government of Maharashtra Education Department, 1979), pp. 453–79.
39. See ‘Communism paije tar karbandi ka nako?’ (‘If Communism is needed than why not
an end to land revenue?’) in Bahishkrut Bharat, 16 August 1929.
40. Speaking on the ‘Hereditary Offices Act Amendment Bill’ in the Bombay Legislative
Council; in Writings and Speeches, Volume II, p. 87.
41. See Appendices to article on ‘Small Holdings in India’ in Writings and Speeches,
Volume I, pp. 284–88.
 CHAPTER 5

The Turning Point, 1930–36: Ambedkar,

Gandhi, the Marxists

• INTRODUCTION
The years between 1930 and 1936 were a ‘turning point’ in the history of
the Dalit movement in India. These years saw the All-India Depressed
Classes Conference at Nagpur in 1930; Ambedkar’s attendance at the First
Round Table Conference; his clash with Gandhi before and at the Second
Round Table Conference, culminating in the Poona Pact of 1932; and the
famous conversion announcement in 1935, ‘I have been born a Hindu but I
will not die a Hindu’. The events of 1930–32 led to Ambedkar’s final
disillusionment with Hinduism, with even the best and most ‘reformist’ of
the Congress leadership. At the same time these events revealed the power
represented by Ambedkar and by the Dalit movement which had risen with
him and confirmed him as the unparalleled leader of the Dalits, forcing the
Congress leadership to deal with his demands.
Finally the events made it clear that in the search for autonomy in the
face of the fundamentally exploitative nature of class–caste society in India
(which Ambedkar by 1930 named ‘Brahmanism’ and ‘capitalism’), it was
necessary to find ideological and organizational alternatives for the Dalits: a
theory of exploitation and a path to liberation were needed. Having rejected
the ‘non-Aryan’ theory, having forsaken liberalism and religious reformism,
having accepted the exploitation of workers and peasants, with a rational
and secular outlook, the natural direction for Ambedkar to move should
have been left-ward: Marxism, which put forward a coherent theory of
exploitation and the path to liberation, was already becoming a force in
India. But, though it provided many themes against which Ambedkar
reacted and some which he accepted, Marxism in its embodiment in the
Indian communist movement failed to offer a real alternative. This failure
also was clear by the 1930–35 period.
This chapter will examine the process of disillusionment with Hindu as
well as Congress reformism; the power of the Dalit movement; and the
failure of the communist alternative as seen in the events of 1930–35. In a
sense we may look at it as an examination of the interaction of
‘Ambedkarism’, ‘Gandhism’ and ‘Marxism’. However, none of these
should be looked at as fully formed or developed ideologies: Ambedkarism,
in particular, was incomplete, perhaps necessarily so as the ideology of an
individual; and Indian Marxism was badly truncated, and, given the difficult
objective conditions under which Indian communists worked during the
1920s and 1930s, could hardly hope to represent the full possibilities of the
historical materialism which Marx and Engels had originated.

• PATTERNS OF DALIT MOBILIZATION AND AMBEDKAR

Even the limited scope of this study, looking at only three linguistic regions
of India and ignoring important Dalit organizing in Tamil Nadu, Kerala,
West Bengal and north-west India, makes it clear that the Dalit movement
was a widespread social movement aiming at fundamental change of a
system seen as exploitative and oppressive, part of a broader anti-caste
movement, with growing ideology and organization of its own.
The following generalizations can be made about these movements:
1. The Dalit movement did not emerge only in Maharashtra as a result of
Ambedkar’s leadership; there were similar trends, though of varying
degrees of strength, in all regions.
2. The movement was genuinely anti-caste, not merely a caste-reform
movement. Internal reforms (giving up drinking and meat-eating,
rejecting customs which marked the caste as ‘low’ in a Brahmanic
hierarchy, establishment of marriage relations among sub-castes) were
themes everywhere, along with demands for education and entry into
employment and political representative institutions. But beyond this,
some element of cultural radicalism and the assertion of autonomy
from ‘caste Hindus’ can be seen everywhere. In coastal Andhra,
 Hyderabad and Mysore this was associated with the ‘non-Aryan’
ideology which characterized Dalits as original inhabitants enslaved
by oppressive Brahman–Aryan invaders. The theme, originating with
Jotiba Phule, was taken up by the non-Brahman movements; among
the Dalits it was expressed in the southern states with claims to ‘Adi-
Andhra’, ‘Adi-Dravida’, ‘Adi-Karnataka’ and ‘Adi-Hindu’ status. The
same theme can be traced in the writings of early Dalit leaders such as
Kisan Faguji Bansode and Gopal Baba Walangkar, and had a common
currency in the Maharashtrian non-Brahman movement. But because
Ambedkar refused to accept it, it was not articulated in the main
writings of the movement in Maharashtra. Ambedkar’s own cultural
radicalism took other forms.
3. Dalits as exploited workers, peasants and agricultural labourers were
involved with economic or ‘class’ issues everywhere, and these were
expressed in demands made in all the regions. The theme of land
came up through the demand for wasteland/forest land for cultivation,
made in coastal Andhra, Maharashtra and Mysore where Dalit
peasants themselves were often cultivating such lands and their
movement spokesmen were attempting to secure their rights. Similar
attempts may have existed in Telengana and Marathwada, but the
Hyderabad Dalit leadership was too isolated and the political process
too aborted by the Nizam’s autocracy to allow organized expression of
these issues during the 1920s and 1930s. Opposition to vethbegar, that
is, to the feudal form of exploitation of Dalit labour, was also taken up
in the campaign against the Mahar watan in Maharashtra and the
opposition to the thoti-talari system expressed in Mysore.
Involvement in working class struggles by Dalit activists is clear in
Bangalore and Nagpur and in the attention to problems of textile
workers shown by Ambedkar in Bombay.
While these themes were common, important regional differences also
emerge. It is clear, for example, that an autocratic princely state (whether
more heavy-handed and ‘feudal’ as in Hyderabad or reformist as in Mysore)
helped to smother and delay the emergence of an independent Dalit
movement. In particular, connection with rural areas and involvement with
mass movements was more difficult and slow in both Hyderabad and
Mysore. Second, the existence of an industrial working class was an
important factor aiding the emergence of Dalit movements. Dalit presence
in the working classes of Nagpur and Bombay stimulated radicalism and
gave organizational experience in the Central Provinces and the Bombay
Presidency. Radicalism and organization also existed among the Dalits
working in the Bangalore and Kolar gold fields, but these were
predominantly Tamil and the Tamil–Kannada linguistic–cultural gap
prevented the transmission of this to the rural areas of Mysore. In contrast,
Kannada-speaking Mysore, Hyderabad state, and coastal Andhra had no
major industrial area to help provide a mass base and resources for a Dalit
movement.
The difference made by regional variations in the position of Dalits as
peasants and agricultural labourers is harder to assess. On the one hand it
seems that a comparatively strong position (as existed in both Bombay
Presidency and the Central Provinces) helped the Dalits to organize a
movement. But if we look at Tables 2.2 and 2.3. Dalits in coastal Andhra
were badly off by many counts compared to both the Dalits in Mysore and
the Marathi-speaking areas: almost all were ‘agricultural labourers’ rather
than ‘cultivators’ and there was a high percentage of ‘farm servants’,
presumably those more subordinated to a traditional relationship, as
opposed to free labourers. Coastal Andhra also had, historically, a more
hierarchical agrarian society. Yet it gave birth to a vigorous ‘Adi-Andhra’
movement during the 1920s. This was undoubtedly stimulated by the
possibilities opened up by commercialization and mobility. It is noteworthy
that Dalits in the rural areas of Telengana did not mobilize in a similar way,
though they existed in similar circumstances as found in coastal Andhra,
while dalits in the rural areas of Mysore did not organize in spite of their
much ‘stronger’ position (comparable to that of the Marathi-speaking areas)
as independent small cultivators. More research is needed to clarify the
various positions of Dalits at the village level, a comparison which cannot
be easily assessed from crude regional-level statistics given by the censuses
or recent sample surveys.
It is clear, however, that both western Maharashtra and the Nagpur-
Vidarbha region had all the necessary ingredients for a strong and radical
movement: a relatively free political life, with British reforms granting
more and more legislative representation at district and regional levels; a
vigorous industrial working class; a peasantry which was both
predominantly one of small cultivators and one in which the Dalits (in this
case Mahars) had a relatively strong position within the generally
hierarchical and exploitative village framework; and intimate linkages
between workers and peasants. It was these which lay the basis for
Ambedkar’s emergence into prominence as the major Dalit leader of the
country.
Four things stand out about this Dalit movement as a whole:
First, though much weaker in organizational strength and financial
resources, the Dalit movement emerged as a political force at the same time
as the non-Brahman movement and about the same time as the working
class and peasantry were creating their organizational forms. To put it
another way, Dalits as a mass and the middle castes as a mass (as ‘non-
Brahmans’, as ‘workers’ or as ‘peasants’) were entering politics at roughly
the same time and making their presence felt as factors to be contended
with by the leadership of the Indian National Congress and Hindu
organizations such as the Hindu Mahasabha.
Second, the major force of the non-Brahman movement and the peasant
and working class movements were to be politically absorbed into the
Congress in the 1930s, so that the Congress came to be (by the 1940s) an
‘anti-imperialist united front’ in reality and not only in rhetoric. This
process happened with the non-Brahman movement in spite of the historic
opposition to and distrust of the Congress by Phule, in spite of efforts of
Periyar to prevent it; it happened with the working class and peasantry in
spite of continual tensions and betrayals of their interest by the bourgeois-
dominated Congress, and largely because of the political decision of the
communists to work within the Congress as an ‘anti-imperialist united
front’. That this did not happen with the Dalit movement is almost solely
due to Ambedkar. Here we can see the role of the individual in history. If
his leadership was on the one hand the creation of the particularly
favourable conditions facilitating the rise of the Dalit movement in Bombay
Presidency, on the other hand, his genius, his fight for autonomy and a
political–ideological alternative also helped to create history. The trends for
absorption of the Dalit movement did certainly exist during the 1920s: the
appeal of the possibilities of reform; the courting of Dalits by various
Congress factions from the Tilakites to Gandhians through various ‘anti-
untouchability’ programmes; the cultural residues among Dalits themselves
of bhakti and other forms of popular Hinduism. Many other Dalit leaders
followed a path of integration, from M.C. Rajah of Madras and Arigay
Ramaswamy of Hyderabad to the early generation of Mahar leaders in
Nagpur, as well as many western Maharashtrian non-Mahar leaders
(Rajbhoj, Shivtarkar) who were continually swayed towards the Congress
and towards seeing themselves as Hindus. Ambedkar fought this tendency
tooth and nail and maintained the independence of the Dalit movement. In
doing so he was moving towards a total theory of exploitation and to the
practice of building a liberation movement for the oppressed and exploited
in the Indian context; that this was not fully successful is a separate
question.
Third, in taking the stand of building a political alternative to the
Congress, in seeking an alliance with non-Brahmans (a Dalit–bahujan or
Shudra-Atishudra alliance), in seeking to organize peasants and workers,
and in fight for the destruction of the caste system and not just the
‘abolition of untouchability’, Ambedkar was maintaining and carrying
forward a tradition begun by Jotiba Phule. By the end of the 1930s it is true
that his major political thrust was defeated; however this was due to the
decisions and actions of forces beyond Ambedkar’s control, not simply
because of the inherent antagonism between ‘Dalits and dominant caste
peasants’ or the fact that the formation of a new, independent anti-
imperialist worker–peasant party was impossible.
Fourth, Ambedkar’s rejection of the non–Aryan theme, the ideology of
Dalits being ‘original inhabitants’, was an important rejection of a racial
version of a historical–materialist explanation. This rejection is also not an
‘obvious’ thing to happen because the theme was very pervasive among
Dalits and non-Brahmans of the time as an explanation of caste; it has
currency today among all those who go on thinking of Brahmans as being
descendents of Aryan invaders of 3500 years ago and Dalits as descendants
of their conquered Dravidian foes. Ambedkar’s rejection removed the
element of racism from the Dalit movement under his leadership. But it left
a gap, a need for a theory that could explain the historical character of caste
exploitation. Much of Ambedkar’s own historical writings constituted a
search for this. This rejection also obviously gave scope for a different
historical materialism— Marxism—to have an influence on Ambedkar’s
thinking about caste and society in general. What failed to happen in this
regard during the 1930s is as important, finally, as the confrontation with
Gandhism and Hindu revivalism.

• FROM THE DEPRESSED CLASSES CONFERENCE TO THE POONA PACT

On 8 August 1930, in preparation for the First Round Table Conference in
London, Ambedkar called an All-India Depressed Classes Conference in
Nagpur. His presidential speech gives the themes central to the struggles of
the coming decade.1 He began with a discussion of the necessity for
national independence, arguing that the multiplicity of castes, races,
religions and languages did not make India unfit for independence. An
eloquent and scathing indictment of imperialism attacked Britain’s
responsibility for the impoverishment of India, adding that it had done
nothing to lighten either the burdens of untouchability or the exploitation of
peasants and workers. At the same time Ambedkar argued that safeguards,
especially for untouchables, were necessary for self-rule in the case of
caste-divided India. Repeating his position of the Simon Commission
testimony, he did not view separate electorates as necessary but only if adult
suffrage was granted, and reserved seats, employment and strong legal
measures against untouchability and social boycott were provided. Finally,
Ambedkar’s language of ‘capitalists’ and ‘landlords’, his continual
reference to the Congress Brahman leadership as ‘feudalists’ indicates the
strong note of class conflict and struggle.
These were the themes of an emerging ‘Ambedkarite’ politics, and they
were expressed in his testimony at the conference itself. Attending along
with M.N. Srinivasan of Madras to represent India’s untouchables, he was
unequivocable that untouchables needed political power and equally
definite that this could only be gained within the framework of an
independent India. In his opening speech on 20 November ‘to put the point
of view of the depressed classes’, he stated,
The point of view I will try to put as briefly as I can. It is this, that the
bureaucratic form of Government in India should be replaced by a
Government which will be a Government of the people, by the people
and for the people. This statement of the view of the depressed people I
am sure will be received with surprise in some quarters …. We have not
 taken this decision because we wish to throw in our lot with the majority.
Indeed, as you know, there is not much love lost between the majority
and the minority I represent. Ours is an independent decision. We have
judged the existing administration solely in the light of our own
circumstances and we have found it wanting.
Arguing that the goodwill of the British is irrelevant, he went on,
The Government of India does realise the necessity of removing the
social evils which are eating into the vitals of Indian society and which
have blighted the lives of the downtrodden classes for years. The
Government of India does realise that the landlords are squeezing the
masses dry and that the capitalists are not giving the labourers a living
wage and decent conditions of work. Yet it is a most painful thing that it
has not dared to touch any of these evils. Why? … These are some of the
questions raised by the Depressed Classes … We feel that nobody can
remove our grievances as well as we can, and we cannot remove them
unless we get political power in our own hands. No share of this political
power can evidently come to us so long as the British government
remains as it is. It is only in a Swaraj constitution that we stand any
chance of getting the political power in our own hands, without which we
cannot bring salvation to our people … We know that political power is
passing from the British into the hands of those who wield such
tremendous economic, social and religious sway over our existence. We
are willing that it may happen, though the idea of Swaraj recalls to the
mind of many the tyrannies, oppressions and injustices practiced upon us
in the past ….2
Ambedkar spoke at the conference for a unitary state and adult suffrage
with reserved seats and safeguards for untouchables. It was a minority
position. With the Congress absent, the assembled delegates consisted
mainly of representatives of princely states and various minority interests
pushing for separate electorates, plus a few representatives of India’s
‘liberals’ and women’s groups. Yet it was this conference that shaped the
1935 Government of India Act: a federal constitution in which the princely
states could enter as autonomous units; a slightly expanded (from 6.5
million to about 30 million) electorate but hardly adult suffrage; and
responsible government at the provincial level highly qualified by residual
powers given to British-appointed governors.3
 The first conference was followed by the calling off of the Civil
Disobedience movement and the Gandhi-Irwin pact leading to the
appearance of M.K. Gandhi at the Second Round Table Conference, with all
the prestige of the national movement behind him and a claim to be the sole
real representative of the Indian people. Yet what followed was in a sense
remarkable, or at least ironic. The second conference and the Ramsey
MacDonald Award (for separate electorates) developed into, of all things, a
confrontation between Gandhi and Ambedkar. Why should this have
happened? From the nationalist point of view two things were objectionable
about the shape being given to the constitution in the first conference: the
powers left to the princely states (i.e., its ‘federal’ structure) and the
separate electorates for minorities. Of all the participants in the first
conference, Ambedkar’s position (adult suffrage and reserved seats) was
actually the closest to the nationalist one—and had there been any hope of
giving a different shape to the future constitution, some beginnings might
have been made here, in an alliance of nationalists with Ambedkar and
liberal representatives. Yet there was no real resistance from nationalist
forces (as represented by Gandhi, or from organized pressure outside) to
either the ‘federal’ structure or to separate electorates for other minorities,
only in the case of untouchables. Why?
Perhaps the simplest reason was that the nationalists had already
conceded the need for separate electorates to the powerful Muslim minority
and had no strong interest in fighting for democracy in the princely states or
opposing the federalism which institutionalized princely autocracy. When
Ambedkar changed his position to support separate electorates (which he
did when it was obvious there would be no universal suffrage) he came to
represent, very simply, the most vulnerable force among all those claiming
special protection.
However, along with these purely tactical considerations was the attitude
of Hindu Congressmen, and Gandhi in particular, towards the Dalits and the
issues of untouchability and caste.
In between the two conferences, Ambedkar had his first meeting with
Gandhi in London in August 1931, and it took place in a turbulent
atmosphere. According to B.C. Kamble’s description, Gandhi treated
Ambedkar with a lack of even normal politeness, while Ambedkar
responded with a condemnation of the Congress, walking out after a
scathing speech ending with the famous statement, ‘Mahatmaji, I have no
country.’4 This was not dialogue, but confrontation. They confronted each
other again at the conference, each speaking with emotion and eloquence,
with the self-assurance of leaders who can gather masses behind them. Each
claimed to speak on behalf of untouchables. There was a vast difference in
points of view, with Ambedkar stressing the need for political power for the
Dalits, and with Gandhi arguing for reform and protection from above:
‘What these people need more than election to the legislatures is protection
from social and religious persecution.’5 But the emotional quality of the
debate indicates an even deeper clash.
This began with the failure of consensus in the Minorities Committee and
Gandhi’s suggestion on 8 October that it be adjourned. Ambedkar took
Gandhi’s remarks as denying this representative status, and replied,
We cannot deny the allegation that we are the nominees of the
Government, but speaking for myself I have not the slightest doubt that
even if the Depressed Classes of India were given the chance of electing
their representative to this Conference, I would all the same find a place
here …. The Mahatma has always been claiming that the Congress stands
for the Depressed Classes, and that the Congress represents the
Depressed Classes more than I or my colleagues can do. To that claim I
can only say that it is one of the many false claims which irresponsible
people keep on making, although the persons concerned with regard to
these claims have invariably been denying them … the Depressed
Classes are not in the Congress.
Gandhi responded,
The claims advanced on behalf of the Untouchables, that to me is the
unkindest cut of all. It means the perpetual bar-sinister. I would not sell
the vital interests of the Untouchables even for the sake of winning the
freedom of India. I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast
mass of the Untouchables. Here I speak not merely on behalf of the
Congress, but I speak on my own behalf, and I claim that I would get, if
there was a referendum of the Untouchables, their vote, and that I would
top the poll … I would rather that Hinduism died than that
Untouchability lived. Therefore, with all my due regard for Dr.
Ambedkar and for his desire to see the Untouchables uplifted, with all
my regard for his ability, I must say in all humility that here the great
 wrong under which he has laboured, and perhaps the bitter experiences
that he has undergone have for the moment warped his judgment. It hurts
me to have to say this, but I would be untrue to the cause of the
Untouchables, which is as dear to me as life itself, if I did not say it. I
will not bargain away their rights for the kingdom of the whole world. I
am speaking with a due sense of responsibility, and I say that it is not a
proper claim by Dr. Ambedkar when he seeks to speak for the whole of
the Untouchables of India. It will create a division in Hinduism which I
cannot possibly look forward to with any satisfaction whatsoever. I do
not mind Untouchables, if they so desire, being converted to Islam or
Christianity, I should tolerate that, but I cannot possibly tolerate what is
in store for Hinduism if there are two divisions set forth in the villages.
Those who speak of the political rights of Untouchables do not know
their India, do not know how Indian society is today constructed, and
therefore I want to say with all the emphasis that I can command that if I
was the only person to resist this thing I would resist it with my life.6
What was Ambedkar to think of all this? It must have appeared to him as
unbearable arrogance, even as foolish arrogance— for behind Gandhi in the
Congress stood not a band of sincere social reformers but (Ambedkar was
convinced) a class of Brahman and other high-caste Indians concerned to
maintain their monopoly of economic and social power within any ‘swaraj’.
Would separate electorates have been so harmful to the Dalits? Dalits
themselves still debate the issue.7 The point is that Gandhi, who feared a
‘political division … in the villages’ ignored the division that already
existed; in his warning against the spread of violence, he ignored the
violence already existing in the lives of the Dalits. Claiming to speak in the
name of untouchables, claiming to represent their ‘cause’ and their ‘vital
interests’, Gandhi was not speaking from their perspective; he was not even
speaking as a national leader; he was speaking as a Hindu in his appearance
at this Second Round Table conference.
Behind the moralism stood a direct political challenge: Gandhi was
refusing to admit Ambedkar’s representative status, claiming that the Dalits
supported him and the Congress. From the time of this confrontation in
London a political battle ensued in which all the entire Congress elite (as
well as the pro-Congress sections of the press) sought to organize meetings
of the untouchables, manoeuvre or produce Dalit spokesmen (for instance, a
Dalit cricketeer, P. Balu) who took a line opposing Ambedkar, and do
whatever they could to show that ‘untouchables are denouncing Ambedkar’
and that there was a ‘wave of support for joint electorates’.8 Ambedkar and
militant Dalits responded with demonstrations (in which the newly formed
Samta Sainik Dal played an important role) and seeking the support of
various Dalit organizations.9
As far as Maharashtra was concerned, Ambedkar, clearly won the battle
of mobilization; for instance, we can compare Gavai’s failed effort to
organize a demonstration in Nagpur in 193210 with the fact that 8,000
demonstrators who had turned up with black flags on Gandhi’s return from
the second conference could hold their own in a ‘free-for-all’11—not a bad
showing for an exploited section poorer than the majority of caste Hindus.
It was primarily among non-Mahar Dalits that the Congress could make any
impact at all. Outside of Maharashtra, it seems that Ambedkar won the
support of the majority of existing organizations, though the generally low
level of Dalit mobilization meant that neither Gandhians nor Ambedkarites
had much mass base or linkages at the time. An anonymous letter to the
Times of India in January 1933, though exaggerated, put the point:
Hindu politicians now embrace the depressed classes partly because of
the latter’s meteoric emergence into the political life of the country, and
partly because of the apprehension of their own position in the future.
They would now be ready to include the untouchables among Brahmans,
not merely among Hindus, if Dr. Ambedkar wants it. This is the real
condition today.12
In the political process that occurred with the confrontation with Gandhi
in London, the Ramsey MacDonald Award on 16 August 1932, Gandhi’s
fast (begun 20 September) and the final Poona Pact (24 September), one
event that stands out is the ‘Rajah-Moonje Pact’. This represented an
agreement between the Madras Dalit leader M.C. Rajah and B.S. Moonje of
the Hindu Mahasabha, and it was worked out some time in January 1932.13
With Rajah stood G.A. Gavai of Nagpur, and Ambedkar expressed to him
his bitterness at the intervention. Rajah and Gavai had earlier called for
separate electorates; now they were prevailed upon to support the idea of
joint electorates, with Hindu spokesmen claiming that the Depressed
Classes Association, with a supposed membership of 40,000, was the real
all-India organization and Rajah, its longtime leader, the true Dalit
spokesman.14 To Ambedkar, Rajah and Gavai were simply acting as upper-
caste agents in this matter, and he had already condemned the association in
his Nagpur speech of 1930 as a nominal organization existing mainly on
paper. In this he was undoubtedly right, but the DCA intervention illustrates
more than this, and that is the degree to which not only Gandhians but also
the Hindu nationalists were wooing untouchables.
Gandhi’s threat of a fast hastened efforts to reach a compromise, and on
19 September a large conference of ‘Hindu and Untouchable leaders’ was
held in Bombay that included Ambedkar, M.C. Rajah, P. Baloo, Madan
Mohan Malaviya, Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, M.R. Jayakar, Sir Chimanlal
Setalvad, C. Rajagopalacharia, B.S. Moonje and A.V. Thakkar (in other
words, primarily Hindu nationalists and Gandhians). It was at this meeting
that the final agreement was hammered out by Sapru and Ambedkar in
which a two-tier system of voting would allow untouchables first to select a
panel of four Dalits candidates and then the general constituency (including
caste Hindus) would decide among them.15 This provided the basis of the
Poona Pact once it was accepted by Gandhi; the result was finally that
Dalits gained nearly double the number of seats given to them in the
MacDonald Award.
Ambedkar had some reason to be satisfied with the final outcome; the
seats reserved for the Dalits were nearly equivalent to their proportion in
the population. Beyond this, however, the whole process brought out
another reality. While the compromise agreement was hammered out with
Ambedkar, the final agreement, the ‘Poona Pact’, was between Ambedkar
and Gandhi. Gandhi as representative of caste Hindus; Ambedkar as
representative of the Dalits. What Gandhi had sought to deny at the Round
Table conference and what the Congress and Hinduist leaders were
continually denying in their propaganda—Ambedkar’s position as the
unchallenged Dalit leader—was in practice confirmed.
It is also important to note the varied reactions to the fast and the Poona
Pact itself. This is not just a matter of different ‘interpretations’, but of the
fundamentally different perspectives of high-caste Hindus and Dalits
(perhaps with other low castes with Dalits on this). For Gandhi the fast was
one of ‘purification’, of seeking to ‘purge Hinduism’ of the ‘blight of
untouchability’ and thus of motivating caste Hindus to take up the
campaign against untouchability.16 Almost all upper caste Hindus have also
seen it in these terms. The result is that among the upper caste political
trends it has been praised by Gandhians and by those who see it as an
important step in maintaining the integrationist nature of Hindu society. It
was condemned by Hindu revivalists as selling out the interests of Hindus
(many upper castes, especially Bengalis, protested at the time over the
overriding of their interests),17 and criticized by leftists for leading people
into a distraction from ‘real’ anti-imperialist work. For Ambedkar, of
course, the whole issue was very different: the fast was directed against
untouchables, that is, against the separate electorates given to them and in
the interests of keeping them in the Hindu fold, and it was ‘moral
blackmail’ since Gandhi’s death would have provoked a violent backlash
against Dalits throughout the villages. In fact rather than a moral dialogue,
hard power politics was at play in the process of negotiation that settled the
fast (Ambedkar noted that at the beginning Gandhi was not even ready to
concede reserved seats for untouchables).18 It is hard to avoid the
conclusion that this was a far more realistic assessment.
In the final meeting that occurred after the Poona Pact, Ambedkar is
quoted as praising Gandhi’s generosity, saying ‘I am very grateful to the
Mahatma … I must confess that I was immensely surprised when I met him
that there was so much in common between him and me’. At the same time,
he went on to express reservations, including the fear of ‘whether the Hindu
community will abide by it’.19 These few words of Ambedkar have been
taken as showing much more than they really represented. At the same
meeting Rajagopalacharia said, he had
told Mahatmaji that the greatest experiment in Satyagraha in which he
ever succeeded was the conversion of Dr. Ambedkar. He had not
converted Dr. Ambedkar by the coercive element in the fast but by the
‘Satyagrahic’ element in the fast.20
And this interpretation is today given by Ravinder Kumar:
Gandhi had thus achieved what was a true Satyagrahi he always strove
for: he had won his opponent’s heart! … The differences between the two
leaders, one an untouchable by birth, the other an untouchable by
volition, were thus healed …. The agreement between the Mahatma and
Ambedkar saved a society from turning into itself and committing
collective suicide. Indeed, the Poona Pact was a victory won by Gandhi
in the course of a struggle seeking to liberate Hindu society from a
 dangerous malformation lodged in the very core of its social being. It
was, perhaps, the Mahatma’s finest hour.21
This ‘Gandhian’ interpretation, however, is built on sand. A few words,
uttered in the socially obligatory atmosphere of reconciliation that occurs
after any negotiation, do not indicate a ‘change of heart’. Ambedkar was
burningly aware of the real issues of power politics in the process, and
continued to view the fundamental difference as that between Gandhi’s
claim to represent the interests of untouchables by reforming Hindu society
and the need of the Dalits to liberate themselves through political power.
Gandhi’s sincerity may have genuinely touched him, but the moral grandeur
of an individual was never the point.
The differences between the two surfaced as soon as Gandhi started his
League Against Untouchability (which was to become the Harijan Sevak
Sangh) and Ambedkar attempted to intervene. There were two issues:
whether the League/Sangh would be controlled by caste Hindus or whether
the Dalits would have at least a share in control; and whether it would seek
only to ‘abolish untouchability’ or aim at the abolition of chaturvarnya
itself. Gandhi firmly held out for caste Hindu control on the grounds that
since untouchability was an ‘evil’ of Hinduism that had to be purged,
Hindus themselves must do this; he also stressed that he was not against
chaturvarnya as a system.22 It was simply impossible for Gandhi and
Ambedkar to work together on this basis.
The events of 1930–32 were momentous. They showed the strength that
the Dalit movement had achieved during the 1920s, catapaulting Ambedkar
and the issue of untouchability into the centre of the political arena. At the
same time they brought to Ambedkar the final disillusionment with
Hinduism and leading the voice of Dalit militancy, he became convinced
that autonomy would never be achieved within even a reformed Hinduism.
The events made it clear that (a) Gandhi, who represented the best of
Hinduism, would not budge from paternalism and acceptance of
chaturvarnya; (b) in spite of the moralistic atmosphere that surrounded the
fast and Pact it was hard bargaining and power (mobilizing strength) that
counted; (c) large sections of caste Hindus did not support Gandhi in giving
even limited rights and representation to the untouchables, as illustrated by
the storm of opposition to the Poona Pact; and (d) other Dalit leaders could
be used by the upper castes as long as they identified with Hinduism.
 Following the Poona Pact, Gandhians began an anti-untouchability drive
that included temple entry and bills in legislatures throughout the country as
well as the longer-term ‘Harijan campaign’. Ambedkar and his followers, in
contrast, turned to a clear rejection of Hinduism and to economic and
political radicalism, expressed in the conversion announcement of 1935 and
the founding of the Independent Labour Party in 1936.
Ambedkar was confirmed in his belief that the caste system was
exploitative and that autonomy was necessary. ‘Untouchability’ was not just
a peripheral evil that could be removed without basic changes in the
system; the system was inherently exploitative. Since only the exploited can
remove exploitation by destroying a system and fighting their exploiters,
autonomy was necessary; ‘the emancipation of Dalits had to be the act of
Dalits themselves’. This gave Ambedkar a natural tendency to look to
Marxism, the theory and practice of historical materialism which was
reaching India at the time and which also stressed exploitation,
contradiction and the self-emancipation of the exploited. What then did the
Indian Marxists have to offer?

• MARXISM AND THE INDIAN COMMUNISTS

There was a striking absence of any section of left Congressmen in the
negotiating process and no visible involvement of any kind (even in regard
to commentary) by Indian Marxists in the events of the Poona Pact and the
Gandhi–Ambedkar confrontation. This absence of the left contrasts to the
active role of Hindu fundamentalists. This, in itself, is an important
historical fact. It was not because leftists (communists or socialist-minded
Congressmen) were too weak in influence to be involved in such a crucial
political process; it was because they were uninterested in it. Marxists did
not take part because they were unable to, but because they did not see the
issue of caste and untouchability as important. Over 50 years later, E.M.S.
Namboodiripad’s comment in his History of the Indian Freedom Struggle
makes this clear:
However, this was a great blow to the freedom movement. For this led to
the diversion of the people’s attention from the objective of full
independence to the mundane cause of the upliftment of Harijans.23
 This indifference to caste becomes a central lacunae, at a time when
Marxism was penetrating India as a powerful ideology. Though it
sometimes seems that the British feared it to a degree far beyond its actual
strength, there is no doubt that communism entered with something of an
explosive force in the 1920s. However inadequately understood and
formulated, numerous radical intellectuals throughout the 1920s and 1930s
were convinced that something decisive and liberatory had happened in
Russia, and they thrilled to ‘Bolshevism’, ‘communism’ and ‘Marxism’.
Innumerable activists appear to have gained a new dedication from the
ideology, a readiness to work with fervor and self-sacrifice among the
exploited masses of workers and peasants, a dedication to militant and
disciplined organization. ‘Let go of today, tomorrow will be ours; let go of
individualism, organization is our law; let go of death, wealth will be found
in life—the song of revolution is on our lips’, as a Marathi song put it.24
The condemnation of superstition and proclamation of a bold atheism and
secularism which was capable of moving men and women to withstand
suffering and death; the characterization of Indian society in terms of the
exploitation of ‘capitalism’ and ‘landlordism’ and the claim that it was the
toiling workers and peasants who had the true power to overthrow
imperialism—all these were part of the Marxist appeal and corresponded to
many realities of the society and needs felt by an emerging generation of
young, middle class activists.
At the same time, worker and peasant struggles were not only on the rise
in India, they were also posing before their leadership the question of the
interweaving of caste with economic exploitation. Among the working
class, the problem of the Dalits being excluded from the weaving jobs of
the textile mills in Bombay was only the most stark example of a general
phenomenon of ‘segmentation’ of the labour force. The same was true of
the peasantry, with caste often forming the basis of organizing. The split
between the middle castes (the ‘dominant caste’ peasants such as Kammas,
Kapu–Reddis, Kunbi–Marathas, Kanbi–Patidars, Jats, etc.) and Dalits
varied in nature from area to area, so that in some regions (Punjab and
western UP and perhaps in coastal Andhra) the split between ‘agricultural
labourers’ as a category and ‘cultivators’ as a category often coincided with
that between Dalits and caste Hindus, while in other areas (Maharashtra,
Bihar) there was a mixture of castes among agricultural labourers and to
some extent among cultivators. This fact conditioned the formation of
agricultural labourer unions, which emerged more spontaneously where a
strong Dalit or Adivasi caste-community provided their base. In other areas
there was a fairly large ‘backward caste’ section between the peasant–
cultivator dominant caste and the Dalits which had contradictions with both
and was beginning to organize separately by the 1930s. This produced the
Backward Caste League in Madras Presidency which was formed in 1935
and based among Vanniyars, Kallars and Nadards;25 the Ksatriya
Association formed by Baraiyas and Patanvadias in Gujarat in 1937;26 and
the Triveni Sangh formed in 1934 by the Ahirs, Kurmis and Koeris of
Shahabad district of Bihar.27 All of these had some programmes concerned
with peasant struggle and were involved with or fed into the Kisan Sabhas
in Bihar and Gujarat.
Similarly, while the non-Brahman parties of the 1920s had by the last
period of the decade begun to associate themselves with peasant issues,
often in contradiction with the landlord element in the parties, new and
often major regional political parties were formed during the 1930s
combining peasant opposition to landlord or money-lender exploitation
with expressions of anti-Brahmanism. These included not only Ambedkar’s
Independent Labour Party and Periyar’s effort to transform the Justice Party
to an anti landlord, anti-imperialist association, it also included the Unionist
Party in the Punjab and the Krishak Praja Party in Bengal, both of which
won the 1936 elections in their respective provinces. The Unionist Party not
only represented the combined cultivator interests (even though sometimes
characterized as ‘rich peasant’) of Hindu and Muslim Jats, it also articulated
these frequently in anti-Brahman language as being against ‘Brahmans and
banias’ and it won the support of Mangoo Ram of the Ad-Dharm Dalit
movement.28 The Krishak Praja Party, based among Muslim peasants in
opposition to a Hindu bhadralok landlord class, had a similar (if tension-
filled) alliance with Dalit Namashudras.29
There were also some activists concerned with creating worker and
peasant organizations and directly challenging the communists to take up
caste issues. An early example is Dinkarrao Javalkar, the Maharashtrian
non-Brahman who had worked with Jedhe during the early 1920s to form
the nucleus of a nationalist non-Brahman group; it was he who during the
period argued for transforming the Maharashtrian non-Brahman party into a
workers’ and peasants’ party.30 In 1929 Javalkar wrote,
It is the non-Brahmans who need Communism; even Brahmans have
only adopted it as a deception and in the end they will have to sacrifice
all their brahmanism for this. When the revolt was raised against Tsarism
in Russia it was raised also against the bhikshukshahi (priesthood) there.
But since the Communists here are bhikshuks, they are trying to establish
the dominance of bhikshuks.31
In the face of this, the lack of attention to caste by the communist
movement, and by Congress socialists before the Lohiaite intervention after
independence, is striking. This can be seen in three ways: as a failure to
press the issue in the workers’ and peasants’ organizations within which
they worked; as a failure to form any separate organization or front to
represent Dalits or take up struggles on caste issues; and as a failure to
mention programmes for untouchability and caste issues in the political
programmes of the Communist Party or other front parties.
In mass organizations the situation is fairly clear. The All-India Kisan
Sabha, formed in 1936, made no mention of caste or untouchability in any
of its programmes until 1945 when a September meeting of the Central
Kisan Council worked out a ‘Charter of Demands’ that included as one
clause, ‘penalization for enforcing social disabilities on the
“untouchables”’32. Doubtless Dalit issues were taken up (or were
considered to be taken up) in condemnation of ‘pre-capitalist forms of
exploitation’ and ‘feudal bondage’, and of course the campaign against
vethbegar was there from the beginning. But the Marxist language of ‘pre-
capitalist’ and ‘feudal’ did not automatically include caste; while the Kisan
leaders never analyzed the specificity of Indian vethbegar which was so
very often articulated in terms of caste duties.
Similarly, the All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) had brief
resolutions against untouchability in the 4th, 5th and 6th sessions (1924–
26), but then the subject was dropped and not until a unification of forces
occurred in which the AITUC, the Red Trade Union Congress (RTUC)
formed by the communists in their sectarian phase, and the more rightiest-
liberal National Trade Union Federation came together did a large and
comprehensive ‘charter of working class demands’ include ‘abolition of all
discrimination of caste, colour, creed, race and sex’ and ‘equal wages for
equal work without any discrimination of caste, creed, race and colour.’33 In
1942 an amended version of the AITUC included among its objects ‘(h) to
abolish political or economic advantage based on caste, creed, community,
race or religion’; this had not been mentioned in the earlier 1927
Constitution.34 But these references to caste did not constitute an anti-caste
or even an anti-untouchability programme.
The lack of attention paid to caste issues by these two important ‘mass
fronts’ shows that it was not only members of the Communist Party but
other leftists at the time (Congress socialists, Royists and the independents
who later either joined the Communist Party or left the AIKS/AITUC) who
failed to theorize the specificity of caste and see the importance of giving a
programme of struggle for workers and peasants on caste issues.
Further, neither the communists or other leftists considered having a
‘front’ of their own on caste issues, or felt the need to establish relations
with any existing Dalit organizations. This might be considered out of the
question, but it should be remembered that the other two major political
trends (Gandhian and Hindu fundamentalist) did have these. By the 1930s
in fact three ‘all-India’ Dalit organizations had emerged. These were the
Depressed Classes Association, which was the earliest; the Depressed
Classes Federation, which was established by Ambedkar as a nominal
organization in 1930 and build up as the Scheduled Caste Federation from
1942 onwards (in Marathi it was simply known as ‘Dalit Federation’); and
the Depressed Classes League (also known as the ‘Harijan League’) which
was established by Jagjivan Ram in 1936. While none of these functioned at
a vigorous all-India level, at least until the Scheduled Caste Federation, still
the ‘Association’, the ‘Federation’, and the ‘League’ represented clearly
different trends on the all-India level, the one with Hindu Mahasabha links,
the second ‘Ambedkarite’, the third ‘Gandhian’. They provided networks
which locally-based Dalit organizations could associate with. Further,
Gandhian–Congress ties worked at two levels, through the Harijan Sevak
Sangh which was a caste Hindu organization and of course had the greatest
funding and organizational network, but also through the ‘League’ which
sought to mobilize pro-Congress Dalits.
The communists (and other leftists within the Congress) had nothing like
this, nor did they seek to relate to any of the existing organizations by
having cadres work within them (as for instance Communist women
worked within the All-India Women’s Congress). At local levels many
communist cadres were of course involved in anti-untouchability
campaigns, the most famous example being the Kerala communists, and
many communists in their personal lives transcended and ignored caste
distinctions. But there was never a programmatic involvement in ‘social
struggles’; rather, joining the party lessened whatever involvement had
previously existed.
Finally, what did communist political organizations have to say on caste?
‘Protection of Untouchables by legislation’ found a mention in
Singaravelu’s proposed action programme for the 1923 Labour Kisan Party
(notably, he was a non-Brahman) but was not included in the programmes
of the Labour Swaraj Party or the Workers’ and Peasants’ parties formed
after this.35 Not until the second congress of the CPI in 1948 was the issue
taken up in any kind of detail. Then the ‘Political Thesis’ included a
‘Programme of the Democratic Revolution’ of which point (5) was as
follows:
Just and democratic rights of minorities to be embodied in the
constitution: Equality and protection to the language and culture of
minorities; all liabilities, privileges and discriminations based on caste,
race and community to be abolished by law and their infringement to be
punishable by law.36
The ‘Political Thesis’ also contained five paragraphs on ‘The
Untouchables’, the high points of which claimed:
Forming the most exploited and oppressed section of our people, the six
crores of untouchables are a powerful reserve in the struggle for
democratic revolution. The Congress, led mainly by bourgeois leaders
belonging to the upper castes, has consistently refused to champion the
cause of the untouchable masses and to integrate the struggle for social
and economic emancipation of the untouchables with the general struggle
for national freedom. This has enabled reformist and separatist leaders
like Dr. Ambedkar to keep the untouchable masses away from the
general democratic movement and to foster the illusion that the lot of
untouchables could be improved by reliance on imperialism …. To draw
the untouchable masses into the democratic front, to break down the
caste prejudice of the upper caste workers and peasants, to unite the
common people of all castes against their common enemy—such are the
tasks faced by the party. This task will have to be carried out by a
 relentless struggle against the bourgeoisie of the upper castes as well as
against the opportunist and separatist leaders of the untouchables
themselves. We have to expose these leaders, tear away the untouchable
masses from their influence, and convince them that their interest lies in
joining hands with the other exploited sections and that only the victory
of the democratic revolution will emancipate them from social
degradation and slavery. Every discrimination against the untouchables
must be denounced as a bourgeois attempt to keep the masses disunited,
and every just demand of theirs must be fought for as a part of the
common struggle for people’s rights.37
The communists’ fight for untouchable rights thus proposed a confrontation
with Ambedkar, denouncing him as ‘separatists’, ‘opportunistic’ and pro-
British. It also treated ‘caste prejudice’ as only bourgeois divisiveness,
made no effort to go into the specificity of caste exploitation, and asked
untouchables to join the ‘democratic revolution’ (of which they were a
‘reserve’ force, i.e., not the main one) without giving a single concrete
programme for fighting caste or untouchability.
Why did all this happen? Two factors are generally pointed to by Dalits
and others who have been burningly aware of this neglect: one, that the
upper-caste origins of the Indian communists (a ‘bunch of Brahman boys’,
in the words of Ambedkar38) made them unwilling to look at forms of
exploitation which questioned their male, upper caste interests; and two,
that Marxism itself was and is incapable of handling caste or other ‘non-
class’ contradictions.
Both factors have an element of truth in them; yet both are historically
contingent. The fact that communists were mainly upper caste certainly did
influence their interpretations of Marxism and inclined them to ignore caste
issues (just as the fact that they were male inclined them to ignore gender
issues and the fact that they came out of urban petty bourgeois families
inclined them to ignore specific problems of the peasantry). Yet individual
members of ‘oppressor’ groups have always broken away ideologically and
organizationally, depending very much on circumstances and organizational
pressures. Had some initiative been taken by the communists, for instance,
it would have led to more non-Brahman and Dalit recruitment into the party
and this in turn would have led to some transformation of Indian Marxism.
(This process happened with the South African Communist Party, originally
based on white workers and taking a racist stance against the Blacks but
later turning to them, incorporating their problems within the framework of
understanding the issue as a ‘national question’ and recruiting many
African leaders). The failure to recruit Dalit petty bourgeois activists is
striking (for instance, in coastal Andhra where a generation of educated
Dalit youth grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, we can find some being drawn
to the Congress via the N.T. Ranga group, but almost none in the
communist movement, in spite of the fact that communists more than the
Rangaites had vigorous organizing among Dalit labourers). Even non-
Brahmans were few in number. In other words, the problem is not simply
that the communist movement originated as Brahman-dominated (in caste
terms), but that it remained Brahman-dominated, that a process of
transformation did not take place. And to explain this, we need to look
beyond simply the numerical dominance of Brahmans in the party at the
beginning and examine how either Leninist party practices and/or the
pressures of British repression prevented transformation and broadening of
membership.
In regard to the second point, a science of historical materialism, which
Marx had initiated, is not incapable of handling ‘non-class’ factors such as
caste and patriarchy. We find, to make a comparison, that Marx and Engels
themselves did make some crucial theoretical points in the discussion of
patriarchy and the role of reproduction, though these were not brought
forward within the Marxist movement until women independently took up
the issue nearly a century later. Existing writings on women’s oppression
and the ‘origin of the family’ did provide a base for some communist action
on women’s issues in the meantime. That even this much did not happen in
regard to caste, in spite of the tremendous potentialities for an anti-caste
movement in India, was at least partly a result of Marx and Engels’ own
lack of familiarity with India, not a flaw of historical materialism as such.
But there is no question that ‘Marxism’ as it came to exist in the Indian
communist tradition led to a narrowing of vision, not only for members of
communist and socialist parties, but also justified the ignorance of caste
issues by other ‘progressives’ and ‘leftists’ in the Congress. The ‘class’
category provided a marvellous tool for Indian Marxists to interpret what
they saw around them within one grand framework of a theory of
exploitation and liberation, but at the same time blinding them to other
factors in their environment, so that instead of being inspired by the
multifaceted struggles of low-caste peasants and workers to develop their
own theory and practice, they instead sought to narrow these struggles and
confine them within a ‘class’ framework. In one form or another they said,
seize state power, redistribute land and your problems will be solved.
‘Marxism’ was taken in practice as a closed theory, not a developing
science. As a result there could be no dialogue with leaders like Ambedkar.
Thus, when Ambedkar reacted to Marxism, he reacted to it only as a closed
system which was at crucial points not simply indifferent but in opposition
to struggles of the Dalits. He borrowed themes from Marxism, as we shall
see later, but he never took it as a resource for analysis and action.

• COMMUNISTS, NATIONALISTS AND ‘WORKER–PEASANT PARTIES’

The other crucial aspect in the relations of Ambedkar, the Dalit movement
and the communists has to do with their attitude towards nationalism and
political organization. Ambedkar’s primary stress was the necessity for an
independent party of workers and peasants which would also take up anti-
imperialist programmes; the Independent Labour Party was his main effort
in this direction.
For the communists, in contrast, it was difficult to visualize the role of an
independent political organization of the exploited that would be between
the vanguard proletarian political party and the ‘all class’ united front.
During the 1920s, ‘worker and peasant parties’ were projected not simply
as class parties of workers, peasants and petty bourgeois intellectuals, but as
a revolutionary-nationalist alternative to the Congress. M.N. Roy spoke in
somewhat different language of a ‘revolutionary people’s party’.39 As the
introduction to the Communist Party documents puts it,
In the period 1925–30, when these parties were formed, they functioned
both inside the National Congress, fighting for a revolutionary
programme for the national independence movement, and independently,
organizing class struggles and the trade union and kisan movement.40
By the 1930s, largely as a result of changes in international communist
policy culminating in the 1937 Comintern Congress call for a broad ‘anti-
imperialist united front’, this effort was dropped. Up to 1930 communists
like Rajni Palme Dutt had continued to urge Indian communists to form a
‘national revolutionary bloc’, but till 1932 with the ‘Open Letter to Indian
Communists’ there was no mention of this, and the stress was simply on the
formation of an illegal Communist Party; communists were urged to be
militant in anti-imperialist struggles but without any separate open
organizational platform.41 Communists worked inside the Congress, and
they used the Congress Socialist Party (CSP, formed in 1934) as a vehicle
for organizing the masses; the CSP of course was entirely internal to the
Congress. During the 1937–40 period the communists drew all their
activists into the Congress politically, and withdrew them from anti-
Congress political forces such as Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party
and Periyar’s Self-Respect movement. The result was that while the
Communist Party did exist as an underground party, the communists at the
same time gave considerable support to building up the Congress as a
political force. As a result other parties with peasant support base were
deprived of the dedicated radicalism that communist cadres offered.
There is considerable debate about the viability of worker–peasant parties
or whether it was necessary and correct for communists to work within the
Indian National Congress. But the whole debate is vitiated by the tendency
to see the issue as one of class (or caste or gender) oppression versus
national oppression, and to then put it in terms of whether ‘class’ or ‘anti-
imperialism’ constituted the ‘main contradiction’. A policy of working
within the Congress is attacked or justified on this basis; for instance,
Liddle and Joshi have argued that ‘Gandhi recognized the power of the
women and low castes and contained it for the cause of independence,
uniting the nation behind the freedom struggle at the expense of injustice
within class, caste and gender relations.’42 This formulation then leads to
the reply that such a subordination was necessary because the interests of
Dalits, women, etc., required first strengthening the national struggle. But
that is not the main point. The charge against Gandhi, for instance, is not
that he subordinated the interests of Dalits and women in nationalism, but
that he subordinated them to bourgeois, male and Brahman interests. Such
subordination not only weakened class and caste struggles but also
weakened the anti-imperialist movement; a more revolutionary anti-
imperialist movement could have been formed with the promotion of low-
caste, women, worker and peasant interests playing a crucial role. The
charge against the communists is not that they subordinated national to
class interests, or (in a different period) class to national interests, but that
they could not maintain a political organization to project a more
revolutionary unity of all these interests.
The Indian communists did not see it this way; they did not see their role
as communists as being radical anti-imperialists as well as organizers of the
working class. The worker-peasant parties were viewed as simply a legal,
open ‘front’ for the ‘real’ party, the proletarian Communist Party. In this
sense the ‘multi-class’ nature of these parties was to be allowed no real
autonomy and their ‘national revolutionary’ character was thus empty. In
fact, just as a mechanical understanding of ‘class’ blinded the Indian
Marxists to the independent role of ‘caste’ or ‘gender’, so it blinded them,
in a different way, and in spite of their natural inclination to revolutionary
nationalist struggle, to the really independent role of nationality and
national exploitation. Thus while they veered away from working
independently to working entirely within the Congress, at no point was this
guided by the necessity to establish an independent national–revolutionary
political platform. In any case, the fact that by the 1930s they were directing
all their political efforts into the Congress meant a further rejection of
dialogue with Ambedkar and other spokesmen for an independent anti-caste
movement.

NOTES
1. M.P. Ganjare (ed.), Dr Babasaheb Ambedkaranchi Bhashane, Volume 2 (Nagpur: Ashok
Prakashan, 1974), pp. 57–90.
2. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkbar, Writings and Speeches, Volume II, edited by Vasant Moon
(Bombay: Government of Maharashtra Education Department, 1982), pp. 503–6.
3. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (Delhi: MacMillan, 1983) , pp. 336–37.
4. B.C. Kamble, Samagra Ambedkar Charitra, Part 7 (Bombay: Author, 1987), pp. 82–93;
see also Times of India, 18 August 1931, reprinted in Source, Material on Dr.
Babasaheb Ambedkar and the Movement of Untouchables, Volume I (Bombay,
Government of Maharashtra, 1982), p. 52.
5. Writings and Speeches, Volume II, p. 661.
6. Ibid., pp. 661–63.
7. See for example, Raosaheb Kasbe, Ambedkar and Marx (Poona: Sugawa Prakashan,
1985), and Kanshi Ram, The Chamcha Age: An Era of the Stooges (New Delhi:
Author, 1982).
8. Sources, Volume I, pp. 53–83.
9. Almost all newspaper reporting, especially that of the nationalist Bombay Chronicle,
indicates a hostility to Ambedkar; see Sources, Volume I, pp. 74–75.
10. See chapter 3; also reported in Bombay Chronicle, 7 May 1932 and 23 May 1932; cited
in Sources, Volume I, pp. 78–79.
11. Zelliot, ‘Learning the Use of Political Means: The Mahars of Maharashtra’, in Rajni
Kothari (ed.), Caste in Modern Indian Politics (Poona: Orient Longman, 1970), p. 48.
12. Times of India, 2 January 1932, in Sources, Volume I, p. 104.
13. See Sources, Volume I, pp. 72–83 for reports, including Ambedkar’s letters to Gavai.
14. Bombay Chronicle, 2 April 1932 in Sources, Volume I, p. 76.
15. Ravinder Kumar, ‘Gandhi, Ambedkar and the Poona Pact, 1932’, in Jim Masselos
(ed.), Struggling and Ruling: The Indian National Congress, 1885–1985 (New Delhi:
Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1987), pp. 96–97.
16. Ibid., p. 97.
17. See Writings and Speeches, Volume II, pp. 707–29, for details regarding objections,
especially from Bengali Hindus.
18. Times of India, 19 September 1932, in Sources, Volume I, p. 87.
19. Cited in Bombay Chronicle, 26 September 1932, in Sources, Volume I, pp. 93, 98–99.
20. Ibid., p. 100.
21. Kumar, ‘The Poona Pact’, pp. 98–99.
22. See the reports in Sources, Volume I, pp. 101–11.
23. E.M.S. Namboodiripad, A History of the Indian Freedom Movement (Trivandrum:
Social Scientist Press, sd 1986), p. 492.
24. Song by G. Adhikari.
25. See Eugene Irschick, ‘The Right to Be Backward’ (manuscript 1971).
26. See David Hardiman, ‘The Quit India Movement in Gujarat’, in Gyanendra Pandey
(ed.), The Indian Nation in 1942 (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,
1988), pp. 99–101. Hardiman stresses the conflicts between the Patidars and the
Baraiya-Patanvadia group as the reason for the latter not supporting the 1942
movement in Kheda; however they did so in Broach, in spite of similar tensions, where
the Kisan Sabha had mobilized them.
27. See Kalyan Mukherjee, ‘Bhojpur: Dimensions of Caste-Class Conflict’, Paper for
Workshop on Caste and Class in Contemporary India (Bombay, ISRE, April 1979);
 Manju Kala, B.N. Maharaj and Kalyan Mukherjee, Peasant Unrest in Bhojpur’, in
A.R. Desai (ed.), Agrarian Struggles in India after Independence (Bombay: Oxford
University Press, 1986). The role of the Triveni Sangh in opposition to the Bihar Kisan
Sabha still has to be assessed, though at least one Marxist evaluates it positively; see
D.N., ‘Problem of Unity in the Bihar Struggle’ Economic and Political Weekly, 7 May
1988. The Kurmis/Koeris/Ahirs (Yadavas) were the ‘upper’ backward castes,
equivalent to Kunbis/Malis/Dhangars in Maharashtra, but they constituted about 20
per cent of the population compared to 13 per cent for the Bhumihar/Rajput/ Brahman
groups; see Harry Blair, ‘Rising Kulaks and Backward Classes in Bihar’, Economic
and Political Weekly, 12 January 1980.
28. Prem Chowdhry, ‘Triumph of the Congress in South-East Punjab: Elections of 1946’,
Paper for Seminar on Economy, Society and Politics in Modern India, New Delhi:
Nehru Memorial Museum, 15–18 December; Harkishen Singh Surjeet, ‘Lessons of
Punjab’, Nationality Question in India (Poona: TDDS, 1987), pp. 312–14. It is difficult
to find a detailed scholarly treatment of either the Triveni Sangh or the Unionist Party;
see Mark Juergensmeier, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement Against
Untouchability in Twentieth Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1978), for the Ad-Dharm alliance with the Unionist Party, where Mangoo Ram was an
MLA on its ticket until the Unionist defeat in 1946. H.F. Owen in The Non-Brahman
Movements and the Transformation of Congress 1912–22’, in Masselos, Struggling
and Ruling, p. 55, mentions both the Punjab and Bengal’s Krishak Praja Party as
representing non-Brahman interests, analyzing it (like most Marxists) as a result of a
‘rising rural bourgeoisie’.
29. Sekhar Bandhopadhyaya, ‘Caste and Politics in Colonial Bengal: A Case Study’, in In
the Wake of Marx, 4:1, 1988; J.H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 287–97; and Sarkar, Modern
India, pp. 354–55.
30. Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in
Western India, 1850–1935 (Poona: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976), pp.
263–67.
31. Kaivari, 29 January 1929, in Y.D. Padke (ed.), Dinkarrao Javalkar Samagra Wangmay
(Poona: Sri Vidya Prakash, 1984), p. 243.
32. See M.A. Rasul, A History of the All-India Kisan Sabha (Calcutta: National Book
Agency, 1974), p. 123. If there were any earlier resolutions on this they were not seen
as important enough to be included in Rasul’s summary of early AIKS meetings,
conferences and struggles.
33. See Prem Sagar Gupta, A Short History of the All-India Trade Union Congress (1920–
1947) (New Delhi: AITUC Publications, sd 1980), pp. 302–3.
34. Ibid., pp. 95–96, 368.
35. See G. Adhikari (ed.), Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India,
Volume 2 (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1974), pp. 97–166, 591, 689; Volume 3A
(New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1978), pp. 155–83; Volume 3B (New Delhi:
People’s Publishing House, 1979), pp. 31–44, 165–80.
36. M.B. Rao (ed.), Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India (New
Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1976), p. 85.
37. Ibid., pp. 111–12.
38. Quoted in Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, p. 296.
39. Adhikari, Communist Party, Volume 2, p. 98.
40. Ibid., p. 100.
41. See R. Palme Dutt, The Road to Proletarian Hegemony in the Indian Revolution’, The
Communist International, 16:13, 1 December 1930 and 14, 15 December 1930; and
‘An Open Letter to Indian Communists’, in The Communist International, Series II, 9:
10, 1 June 1932.
42. Joanne Liddle and Rama Joshi, Daughters of Independence: Gender, Caste and Class
in India (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1986), p. 35.
 CHAPTER 6

The Years of Radicalism: Bombay

Presidency, 1936–42

From Now On
Freedom loving youth, give up your laziness, from now on;
Breaking the noose of slavery, toil day and night,
The torch of noble self-respect has lit up the battlefield.
Become proud heros, manly lords, with scimitar in hand;
Do you bury your life in dust? from now on …
Cry out freedom’s fight, take on whatever comes,
If all fight with one mind revolution will come to the world.
Then who will have the nerve to stand in your path?
Our ancestors were valorous, they triumphed in the war of Bharat—
For what do you tell these stories of the past?
Gandhi’s superstitiousness will not be allowed;
Why do you ignore the staunch patriots of the nation?
Throw this accursed inequality into the flame of equality,
The powerful wind of inspiration has filled our bodies,
We’ll fight at any time … from now on …
Remain the slaves of no one, take the pride of freedom,
Give your years as sacrifice for this work of truth.
Expell this dirt of inequality from the nation,
Give your ears to hear the sorrows of caste-brothers,
Do you remain bound? from now on …
Feed the future generations with education’s nectar,
Take this resolve within you, ‘Freedom is my birthright.’
In a united Indian nation, ‘Jay Bhim, the Raja of dalits,’
 We are his servants; one leader, fresh proof,
The devotees come, from now on …
Lift to the skies the flag of the Independent Labour Party,
Its symbol the blood of workers, the red flag remains;
Keep its prestige aloft, a garland beyond price,
This is the unity of the nation, immortal welfare, this demand,
Go singing the song of victory, from now on …
(Song by K.A. Dhegade, in Janata, 3 February 1940).

• FORMATION OF THE INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY

On 15 August 1936 the formation of the Independent Labour Party (ILP, in
Marathi the Swatantra Mazur Paksh) was announced. The four momentous
years between the Poona Pact and this event had seen action primarily on
socio-religious issues. These included the final failure of the Nasik temple-
entry satyagraha led by Ambedkar’s lieutenants, Ambedkar’s dramatic
announcement at a meeting in Yeola (Nasik district) that he would give up
Hinduism, and the subsequent tornado of response by caste Hindus
throughout the country. Ambedkar’s speech, ‘Annihilation of Caste’, for a
group of caste Hindu reformers in north India, the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal of
Lahore, was cancelled because it centred on the argument that it was
necessary to destroy chaturvarnya, and that the strangle-hold of the
shastras must be broken in order to achieve this; the argument over this was
the major debate between Gandhi and Ambedkar on the meaning of
Hinduism.1 The debates on religion, the search for an alternative faith, and
the delving into Indian cultural–historical tradition would continue
unabated, but in the years from 1936 through 1942 Ambedkar and the
Dalits were caught up in waves of economic and political radicalism.
Political organization had become a burning necessity for the movement.
The core of the confrontation with Gandhi had been the question of who
represented the Dalits, and by 1936, with general elections declared at the
provincial level, the Dalit movement had to prove its autonomy and power
in practice. Further, in the context of disillusionment with incorporation into
Hinduism, power became even more necessary. At a rally of 15,000 Dalits
in Nasik in 1934 he made the point that:
 the temple entry movement … was started because … that was the best
way of energizing the depressed classes and making them conscious of
their position. [Ambedkar] believed that he had achieved that purpose
and therefore had no more use for temple entry. Instead he strongly
advised the depressed classes to concentrate their energy and resources
on politics.2
Now, with the reforms and the elections, the time had come.
It is significant that the political thrust was made through a party that
projected itself mainly as a party of workers and peasants, not simply of
Dalits. To see the ILP as being simply modeled after the British Labour
Party neglects the Indian context.3 The 1930s was a period of mass
radicalism. Though the Congress socialists and later the communists
decided to organize within the Congress as an anti-imperialist united front,
mass base of the Congress remained volatile. Gandhian satyagraha
techniques seem to have failed and there was a resulting polarization. On
one hand many Congressmen who had established mass appeal,
Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Rajagopalachari, swung to the right; it
was this conservative group, rapidly identifying with the Indian
bourgeoisie, that was consolidating its hold over the Congress machinery.4
As a result, disillusionment with the Congress was increasing among the
radicalized youth, peasants and workers and continued to increase after the
Congress came to power in many provinces and failed to fulfil radical-
reformist promises. In the Indian princely states, also, a new wave of
militancy began in 1937–38, revitalizing a small state people’s movement
and practically going beyond the ability of the Congress to control it.5
It was also a period of alternative political projects, although the
‘worker–peasant’ parties of the communists had been given up. Although
the traditional non-Brahman parties of Madras and Bombay Presidencies
were in disarray, new parties which were established (such as the Unionist
Party in the Punjab and the Krishak Praja Party in Bengal) can be called
peasant-based ‘non-Brahman’ parties. The Unionists organized Muslim,
Sikh and Hindu peasants against the ‘Banias and mahajans’ of the
Congress’ while the KPP organized other Muslims and Namashudras
against the Bengali bhadralok. In this sense the ILP was part of a trend, and
its electoral success (it put up 17 candidates, 13 for Scheduled Caste
reserved seats and four for general seats; of these 11 reserved and three
general seats were won, plus four of 19 reserved seats in Central Provinces
Berar)6 was not so different from the gains scored by the better financed
and broadly based Unionist and Krishak Praja parties.
The Congress did win the 1937 elections on a large scale, with 711 of the
1,585 provincial assembly seats and absolute majorities in five provinces,7
but this was done with the support of the left (communists, socialists,
Royists). In fact the Congress was being challenged both from within and
without during the 1937–40 period, as newly asserting political forces
emphasized the needs of peasants, workers and low castes (minorities and
Dalits) as central to any real anti-imperialist struggle. The ILP was a part of
this process and can only be understood in this context.
The programme of the ILP, published in 1937, described it as a ‘labour
organization in the sense that its programme was mainly to advance the
welfare of the labouring classes.’8 It supported state ownership and
management where necessary, but even for workers its stress was on what is
called today the ‘unorganized sector’, offering land resettlement and public
works to aid the unemployed and landless. It promised measures to save
peasants from the clutches of money-lenders, put up a strong opposition to
land revenue, and campaigned for legislation for a more equitable system of
tax as well as the establishment of land mortgage banks and agricultural
producers’ cooperatives and marketing societies. It also promised protection
to tenants of khot landlords.9 The radicalizing process of the time is seen in
the fact that within two years the ILP went beyond this limited anti-
landlordism to lead the struggles of tenants of abolish khoti.
Janata, Ambedkar’s weekly, which had been founded in 1930, gives a
living picture of how the party was projected. Bold headlines condemning
capitalist and landlord injustices, reports of atrocities on untouchables,
elaborately written and studious editorials presenting a generally socialist
outlook, songs hailing worker and peasant struggles and the freedom
struggles of the Dalits, as well as considerable reporting of meetings and
events were featured on its pages. On 1 May 1937 a first page article on
why a new party was needed after fifty years of the Indian National
Congress put the basic case for the ILP: the Congress itself had decided it
was necessary to build a movement of workers and peasants, but this was
not consistent with its leaders self-interest; only the ILP had the true,
militant and constructive programme for workers.10 Just prior to this, under
the heading ‘Can Workers Cooperate with Congress’ an article had
condemned the argument of Roy and Ruikar that workers should join the
Congress in order to work with other classes in the struggle against
imperialism; this ignored the existence of other imperialisms and the class
which was rejecting imperialism only to gain the right to exploit its own
people.11
An important editorial written at the time of the Manmad Railway
Workers’ Conference in May, titled ‘The Struggle of Workers and
Peasants’, claimed that the Congress was controlled by capitalist powers
and that since it contained mutually opposing interests of capitalists,
landlords, sawkars and peasants and workers, leaders like Nehru could only
claim to praise socialism but do nothing to gain it. The role of caste was
also pointed out:
The Panditji’s claim is that ‘there is no other way than socialism for the
Indian people to become free of their poverty, excessive unemployment,
degradation and slavery’. You can take from any principle of socialism
that a nation cannot really be free without destroying economic
inequality—but is this possible for the Congress of which Pandit
Jawaharlal is president? The Indian working class is completely blinded
by social and religious inequality, and without removing these the class
will never be organized.12
More concretely, editorials condemned Gandhian attempts to organize an
alternative trade union centre based on the Ahmedabad Mazdur Mahajan
and following the ‘trusteeship’ principle; this would cause a ‘Split in the
Working Class Movement’.13 Janata also began, in the early months of
1937, a series of reports on the emerging anti-landlord movement in the
Konkan, and this was stressed in the founding of the Ratnagiri branch of the
ILP: since the interests of the class of capitalists, landlords, khots and
sawkars were opposed to those of workers, peasants and tenants, a
machinery was needed to enable peasants to give voice to their complaints,
and with this aim party branches were being formed.14
Thus, the ILP was projected boldly as a party of workers and peasants;
the fight against casteism was taken as a necessity for creating worker–
peasant unity; and the Congress was condemned as a party controlled by
exploiting classes which would neither end exploitation nor fight vigorously
against British imperialism.
• MASS STRUGGLES: WORKERS AND PEASANTS
The ILP soon became involved in mass struggles of workers and peasants,
in particular the fight for the abolition of khoti landlordism, climaxing in
early 1938, and a one-day general strike of textile workers on 15 November
1938 which saw the united action of Ambedkar, moderate labour leaders
and the communists.
Discontent against the khoti system had been simmering for long in the
Konkan. Along with the malguzar system in Nagpur, it provided the main
exception in the Marathi-speaking areas to a general pattern of ryotwari
settlement. The landlords were Chitpavan Brahmans and high-caste
Marathas, the tenants were Kunbis, Mahars and other Shudra castes such as
the Agris. The caste connections of the landlords with the Maharashtrian
political elite made it difficult for any leadership of the struggle to emerge,
as Tilak’s earlier defense of landlordism had indicated and as Ambedkar
stressed in earlier Bahishkrut Bharat articles.15 Thus, though one British
official had believed in 1890 that Ratnagiri district was ‘ripe for a serious
agitation, which may need the employment of troops if it breaks out’,16
nothing of the sort happened. A tenant strike was reported in salt-rice
villages in Pen taluka in 1920–22, and some agitations in Chiplun in
1925.17 But, though S.K. Bole (an Agri leader of the Non-Brahman Party in
the Bombay Legislative Council) attempted to bring anti-khot legislation in
the 1920s, and Ambedkar supported him in this, nothing came of it.18
Struggles began to erupt during the 1930s, centred on Chari in Alibag
taluk. A.V. Chitre, a CKP activist then connected with N.M. Joshi’s Social
Service League, and N.N. Patil, a local Kunbi leader, had taken the lead in
organizing a ‘peasants’ union’ which was declared illegal in 1932. After the
ban was lifted in 1934 the third session of the Kolaba Zilha Shetkari
Parishad was held on 16 December with Ambedkar presiding. This time
Ambedkar expressed an opposition to the strike method and promised to
push for a fair ‘arbitration board’, but he also took note of the injustices
suffered by the tenants.19 Murders of khots by their tenants were also
reported,20 and it seems from Ambedkar’s references that Bombay workers,
both caste Hindus and Dalits, who had connections with Konkan tenants
were involved from the 1920s in a transmission of militancy.21 The election
campaign of 1937 sparked a renewal of struggle. Three general candidates
(Anandrao Chitre from Ratnagiri West, Surendranath Govind Chitnis from
Kolaba, and Shamrao Parulekar for Ratnagiri East) and two Dalit
candidates (Visharam Gangadhar Savadkar for Kolaba and Gangadhar
Ragharam Ghatge for Ratanagiri) won for the ILP in the region,22
indicating that its victories in general constituencies had behind it the anti-
landlord struggles of peasants, as well as organizing on caste issues.
In September 1937, Ambedkar introduced a bill in the Legislative
Council for abolition of the khoti system, a position more radical than his
party’s programme. This was accompanied by the first ever reported march
of peasants to Bombay, numbering about 500, with working class support.
Parulekar and Chitre, the main organizers of the Konkan struggle, as well as
Gujarati peasant leader Indulal Yagnik and communist organizer S.A.
Dange were the main speakers at the rally.23 An editorial in Janata noted
that a delegation of peasants had come to Ambedkar pleading for abolition
of the system; it stated that while Ambedkar would make all legal efforts,
the peasants themselves had to fight: ‘The Konkan peasant class must not
beg from khots and tyrants but come forward in militant struggle’. Along
with this they should broaden their campaign to counteract the false
propaganda of khots and the Congress that landlords were ‘avatars’
protecting peasant welfare. It was becoming clear to the peasants, the
editorial stressed, that the ILP was their true protector, while the Congress
was the support of shetjis, bhatjis, sawkars and zamindars.24
Following the introduction of the ‘Khoti Abolition Act, 1937’ an
intensive campaign was carried out by the ILP. This included public
meetings of Konkan workers in Bombay, tours by activists such as Chitre in
the taluks of Khed and Chiplun where the struggle was strongest, and a
large public meeting held at Chari on 17 October 1937 which featured a big
procession of 3,000 peasants waving the red flag and included communist
activists such as B.T. Ranadive and G.S. Sardesai as well as Parulekar and
Surendranath Chitnis of the ILP.25
With Dalits, radical caste Hindu activists in the ILP, communists and the
support of Bombay workers, the anti-khot struggle was picking up. A
crucial condition for its success was the unity of Dalit and caste Hindu
tenants, specifically Mahars and Kunbis; dedicated upper caste activists
would not fully substitute for local peasant leaders. And it was after a
Kunbi leader, Raghunath Dhondiba Khambe, joined the movement at the
end of 1937 that the struggle surged forward. Khambe used the slogan adhi
potoba mag Vithoba (‘first fill our stomachs, then worry about the gods’) to
counteract, with economism, traditionalist religious objections to working
with Dalits. Meetings of village representatives were held for Chiplun taluk
(8 October 1937) and Mangaon taluk (18 December), involving 100
villages.26 Then from December, Khambe and his ‘Tillori Kunbi Shetkari
Parishad’ joined and began to tour Mahad, where 5,000 peasants were
reported in a huge procession on 30 December; Khed in Ratnagiri; Chiplun,
where a 10,000-strong crowd gave slogans of ‘Ambedkar and Dadasaheb
Khambe ki jai’ and Dopoli, where a united meeting of 15,000 Tillori
Kunbis, Mahars and Muslims was held.27
The climax was a march of 20,000 peasants to the Bombay council hall
on 12 January 1938, the biggest pre-independence mobilization of peasants
in Maharashtra.28 (It can be compared with the figure of 15,000 claimed for
‘All India Kisan Congress’ rally in December 1936 at Faizpur, also in
Maharashtra, held concurrently with the National Congress session).29 With
slogans of ‘destroy the khot system’, ‘crush sowkar rule’, ‘victory to
peasants’ and ‘long live Dr. Ambedkar’ the peasants and workers heard
speeches by Chitre, Yagnik, D.V. Pradhan (another important CKP associate
of Ambedkar who was organizing municipal workers) and CPI members
Lalji Pendse and S.S. Mirazkar. Finally Ambedkar spoke, calling for a
united struggle in a speech which exemplified his left thrust of the period:
‘Really seen, there are only two castes in the world—the first that of the
rich, and the second that of the poor. Besides that there is a middle class
This class is responsible for the destruction of all movements!’
He went on to claim that while the toiling poor formed 80 per cent of the
population, ignorance kept them from power:
If we understand the power of organization and self-reliance, we can take
all authority in our hands. If we look at the last Civil Disobedience
movement, we can see how the Congress made itself strong with the
toilers’ support. Congress made many promises for the welfare of the
poor. But what do you see today? … Don’t give your votes to Congress
capitalists ….
Just as we have organized and come here today, so we must forget caste
differences and religious differences to make our organization strong.
 Khots are only one to two thousand in the Konkan; you toilers are about
13 lakhs. You are exploited by this handful. Take it into mind that
Congress is supporting those wealthy. Due to casteism, toilers could not
build a single strong organization—but now we see such an organization
growing and this is a very happy thing.
Noting the support of communists, he concluded with ‘a few words to my
communist friends’:
I have definitely read studiously more books on the Communist
philosophy than all the Communist leaders here. However beautiful the
Communist philosophy is in those books, still it has to be seen how
useful it can be made in practice. The test of this philosophy has to be
given in practice. And if work is done from that perspective, I feel that
the labour and length of time needed to win success in Russia will not be
so much in India. And so in regard to the toilers’ class struggle, I feel the
Communist philosophy to be closer to us.30
The peasant march was the climax of the anti-khot struggle of the 1930s.
Though agitation continued after this, including the arrest of an ILP activist
in 1940 for an inflammatory speech,31 Ambedkar’s bill failed and a
subsequent act passed by the Congress gave only minor relief while
maintaining the system.32 Nevertheless, the struggle inaugurated a period of
ILP interest in and effort at dialogue with peasant struggles in other regions.
Before these began, the dramatic 1938 anti-landlord agitation was
followed by another equally dramatic event: a massive one-day textile
workers’ strike under the leadership of Ambedkar and the ILP in alliance
with the communists.33
In contrast to the comparatively unorganized state of the peasantry, the
Bombay working class scene was crowded with political trends—
communist, Royist, Congress socialists, moderate (N.M. Joshi, etc.) Their
conflicts had split the first workers’ federation, the All India Trade Union
Congress (AITUC), and after 1929–30 three sections existed, the AITUC,
the National Trade Union Federation of the moderates, and the Red Trade
Union Federation of the communists in their sectarian ‘class against class’
phase. The Bombay textile workers and their Girni Kamgar Union were at
the centre of both of these splits and of the process of coming together
which culminated in the unity of the AITUC and NTUF at the April 1938
session of the AITUC in Nagpur.34 Shamrao Parulekar, still with the ILP at
the time but on his way into the CPI, attended this conference, which set the
tone for a new wave of working class struggles.
Unity made it difficult for the Congress to simply repress the working
class in the face of a rising crescendo of strikes from 1937 onwards.
Against all their campaign promises and efforts to maintain a pro-poor
image, Congress ministers were considering using Emergency powers to
check the growing influence of communists and other radicals,35 but this
proved impossible. Instead, the ministry introduced an Industrial Disputes
Bill in the Bombay Legislative Assembly on 2 September 1938. The bill,
known as the first of the ‘black acts’ against Bombay workers, made
conciliation compulsory and, under certain very ill-defined conditions,
made strikes illegal.
Ambedkar took the lead in condemning the bill in the assembly.
Describing it as the ‘Workers’ Civil Liberties Suspension Act’, he made an
eloquent defence of the right to strike as ‘simply another name for the right
to freedom’, argued that ‘under the conditions prescribed by this Bill there
is no possibility of any free union growing up in the country’, and made it
clear that he would oppose the ‘bad, bloody and brutal Bill’.36
Parulekar, who had attended an ILO conference at Geneva and returned
to India on 8 September was apparently the first to suggest a one-day
protest strike in an interview to the communist weekly kranti; Ambedkar
quickly seized on this to announce that the executive committee of the ILP
would organize a one-day general strike.37 The Council of Action formed
for the strike included the ILP, the communists and the moderates, while the
socialists and Royists disassociated themselves on the grounds that it was
an anti-Congress political strike.
The strike, held on 7 November was a historic event for the Bombay
working class, with joint tours of leaders symbolizing trade union unity and
with the Samta Sainik Dal (by then reported to be 2,000 strong, made up of
Dalit youth and commanded by a former Mahar army officer) playing a
major role. Its culmination was a public meeting of over 100,000 addressed
by Dange and Ambedkar. Clashes with the police left 633 workers injured
and two dead, an event memoralized in later times by the Ambedkar
movement as jalsas told the story of the strike.38 There was total
participation by Dalit workers as exemplified by the supporting strike of the
Dalit municipal workers.39
 This was the climax of Dalit–left unity, the coming together in action of
Ambedkar’s followers with the Indian communists who were then asserting
leadership of the working class movement. But it proved to be only a
temporary ad-hoc event that did not lead to further dialogue. An assessment
by S.S. Mirajkar suggests why. Though this non-Brahman movement of the
CPI had earlier been more sensitive than other communists to anti-caste
issues,40 he could only describe the significance of the strike as being that
Some 15,000 untouchables workers who for years stood aloof from the
workers and anti-imperialist struggle were for the first time listening to
the inspiring message of the joint national struggle against imperialism.41
This suggested that it was simply assumed that the Congress must be the
leader of the ‘joint national struggle against imperialism’, and that the
communists were strongly putting forward such a political line during the
strike. More important, there is nothing in Mirajkar’s response to indicate
that the untouchable workers had not simply ‘stood aloof’ from united
struggles; they had been kept aloof by their segregation in the workplace
and by casteist oppression. There was nothing to indicate that caste Hindu
workers and the communists themselves might have something to learn
from the ILP message of an all-round liberation struggle, against caste as
well as class and national exploitation. Political–theoretical perspectives
continued to be starkly different.

• ORGANIZATION AND MOVEMENT

Before dealing with the complex dynamic of class/caste/national struggles
in the remainder of the ‘radical 1930s’ it is important to examine the actual
social forces behind the Independent Labour Party. There was a ‘Mahar
upsurge’ arising out of the specific conditions of western India. Within this
context there was an interactive process in which Ambedkar’s leadership
provided ideology and an organizational framework, while the driving force
was that of the continuing assertions and agitations of the Mahar
community (and to some extent other Dalits). The prototype of this can be
seen in the Mahad satyagraha: a period (1920s) of constant proclamation by
non-Brahmans and Dalits of the right to public places and success in
passing many official resolutions to this effect, a near-spontaneous upsurge
by Dalits at the Mahad conference to drink the water of the tank, and then
the ability of Ambedkar to seize the occasion to make it a milestone event,
founding Bahishkrut Bharat for propagating his message in detail and
dramatically burning the Manusmriti to transform the failure to actually get
access to the water into ‘untouchable liberation day’.
Ambedkar has been criticized by some of his biographers for his neglect
of organization-building. In Keer’s colourful analysis,
Ambedkar did not try to organize his political party on modern lines ….
There were no regular annual conferences or general meetings …. When
he wanted his people to assemble under his banner, he simply gave a
clarion call and the organization sprang up like a crop in the rainy season.
In the summer there would be nothing in the field, the banner resting in
his study corner, and the people at home.42
This was clearly not true of the ILP phase of Ambedkar’s political career.
Keer’s agricultural analogy could in fact be used to point out that crops, in
spite of being seasonal and dependent on environmental factors, do not
come up without human effort but require the toil and skill of the peasant. It
is necessary to take into account the difficulties in organization-building in
India at the time: the problem of transportation, the language barrier, the
lack of educated activists to handle ‘modern’ details such as reports,
accounts, correspondence. Ambedkar, like many movement leaders, was
trying to do many things at once: work on an all-India as well as
Maharashtra levels; build up basic theory; comment on current political
events and issues; engage in day-to-day polemic and propaganda; arouse
the masses and build an organizational machinery of activists. The problem
can be seen even today in India in movements of mainly illiterate groups
such as the Dalits, peasants and women; it was compounded in Ambedkar’s
time by the nature of his caste constituency. He simply towered so far above
the rest of the activists working with him that it was difficult to do anything
collectively. The Mahar working class community could provide good
manpower and financial support, but only gradually was an educated
section of Dalits coming up. The fact that a good section of the immediate
co-workers of Ambedkar were drawn from caste Hindus, especially the
‘writer’ caste of CKPs (Kayasthas) showed this.
The seriousness about organizing can be seen in the pages of Janata.
There were organizing tours and formation of taluk branches; While few of
these branches give any idea of membership, the Bombay branch claimed
4,000 members in April 1929 and leaders asserted that this could be
multiplied tenfold.43 Elections to the executive committee were held, at
least in Bombay, in May 1938, with five area offices opened for voting.44
Tours in the Vidarbha–Nagpur area were regularly reported. There were
recurring appeals for a ‘building fund’ and members were constantly urged
to build up Janata as the mouthpiece of the movement. A significant event
was the formation of the Samta Sainik Dal (SSD) as a volunteer squad; it
was active in the textile strike and lead a successful fight against Congress
volunteers in a black flag demonstration against Gandhi in 1932. Indeed in
1932 itself a letter from Ambedkar on his way to the Round Table
Conference noted that all were praising the SSD, including Dr. Moonje who
saw it as the only ‘Hindu’ force which could match the Muslim’s ‘Khilaf
Pathak’.45 Here at least Ambedkar was out-organizing both the Congress
and the communists.
Mahar youth organizations were also started in many areas, and a
‘woman’s wing’ came into existence in the sense that women’s conferences
were held concurrently with general Dalit conferences. All of this is what
any ‘modern’ political party in India does. The fact that the Independent
Labour Party had no formal ‘conference’ or ‘congress’ can be compared
with the lack of any by the Communist Party between one of somewhat
questionable status in 1928 and then 1948; the later Scheduled Caste
Federation did have several formal sessions, while Ambedkar’s other major
political moves were legitimized by the All-India Depressed Classes
conferences which were usually held in Nagpur.
There was also considerable cultural movement activity. Ambedkar and
the ILP leaders were concerned with giving symbols to the movement. A
flag was created, strikingly a red flag: as described in 1940 it had eleven
stars in the upper left corner representing the provinces of British India; this
claimed both an all-India status and a radical identity.46 At the mass level
there were festival occasions. There was a spontaneous tendency to take
‘Ambedkar jayanti’, his birthday (14 April), as a focus for celebration and
assertion of collective identities from 1930 onwards. Ambedkar himself
stayed away from these until his fiftieth birthday in 1941,47 but could not or
would not prevent them. He made an effort instead to establish the
memorial day of the Mahad satyagraha, 30 March, as ‘untouchable
liberation day’,48 but the yearly meetings were outshadowed by the
spontaneous ‘jayanti’.
Today’s powerful Dalit literature proclaims its founding from the mass
cultural activities of the 1930s. Ambedkari jalsas began to be formed in
1938, building on the traditional tamasha from just as the Satyashodhak
movement had done and anticipating communist efforts of the 1940s.49
Poems published from time to time in Janata were another part of this
popular literature. One, Ya Pudhe (‘From Now On’) published in 1940
expressed the Dalit struggle as a liberation struggle (see beginning of
chapter). A ‘Song of Peasants and Workers’ in 1938 depicted the
exploitation of peasants who sow the grain and till the field only to have the
crop taken by the landlord; of workers who make clothes that only the rich
can wear; of miners who dig gold and silver out of the earth to fill the
pockets of the rich; and of armament workers who make weapons to give in
the hands of the powerful. It concluded,
Reap the crops—but don’t give
one grain to the parasite!
Mine the wealth—but don’t give
one particle to the thieves!
Make clothing—but don’t give
even a rag to the idle,
Make weapons—to take in your hands
for your own self-defense!
Victory to peasants, victory to workers,
Long live the red flag!50
Another song, this one in Hindi, titled ‘Our Right’ (paraphrasing Tilak’s
famous saying, ‘freedom is our birthright’), took up ‘non-Aryan’ themes to
describe the transformation of varna into class exploitation:
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 Dravidians were suppressed …
Brahmans, Ksatriyas, Vaishyas, all became owners
Drinking the blood of slaves, making the Shudras into machines.
The Brahmans, Ksatriyas 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 is ours,
Humanity will be built on labour,
This is our birthright!51
This popular culture of the movement expressed an all-around fight
against exploitation which included not only the working class and peasant
struggles described above but rejections of vethbegar and rejections of
traditionally accepted religious rituals as superstitions. The many reports of
atrocities in this period often reflected caste Hindu resistance to such Dalit
effort to reject traditional caste duties; they were beaten and harassed for
refusing to carry away dead cattle, for refusing to take part in village
religious ceremonies. In one case it was reported that when a cholera wave
in a Nasik village spared the Maharwada, people were beaten on the
suspicion of witchcraft; the reporter argued that in fact the Maharwada was
cleaner than the rest of the village and noted that most of its people were
away in Bombay.52 It seems that Dalits were moving up and out, and this
was resented.
A report of a conflict in a Kolaba village during this period shows the
remarkable self-assertion of the Mahars and the interweaving of social and
economic issues—along with their own astute analysis of the contractions
involved. In this village, Mauj Tarode, tensions had grown after the Mahars’
refusal to participate in various ‘Hindu’ festivals; both the caste Hindus
(Marathas and Kunbis) and the Mahars went to the police. The Maratha-
Kunbi tenants allied with the village khot landlord and threatened the
Mahars with retaliation if they did not participate in the Ganapati festival.
The Mahars then made an idol out of flour and filled it with jaggery; they
went to the sea but instead of submerging it as was the custom, they cut off
its head and ate it, challenging the god to produce a miracle! This sparkling
defiance infuriated the Marathas and Kunbis, but they could do little beyond
petty harassment. The letter from the village inhabitants stressed that a
prominent factor in the whole situation was the anger of the landlord due to
the bills for abolishing khoti and the Mahar watan which Ambedkar had
brought up in the assembly, and that he was using his influence over the
Kunbi and Maratha tenants to instigate them against the Mahars; the
Mahars in turn could be relatively free from the khot’s tyranny since they
held their lands directly from the government.53 This ‘people’s analysis’
took both economic and social factors into account and outlined a ‘main
contradiction’ as being with the landlord. Numerous such struggles were
going on throughout the period, but very rarely does such self-analysis
make it into the printed record.
It is clear that while the mass force behind Ambedkar expressed
economic as well as social contradictions, it was articulated along caste
lines. Ambedkar made serious efforts to break out of the limitations of a
movement mainly of the Mahar community; the Dalit movement after all
projected itself as the movement of all ‘Untouchables’. There were direct
appeals to Chamar and Matangs in their own meetings and efforts to bring
together Mangs and Ramoshis in the campaign against the watan system.
ILP activists in the Khandesh area also attempted to join with Adivasis in
land struggles. For instance Daulatrao Jadhav, the MLC from Dhule, fought
for forest land for cultivation for Adivasis as well as Dalits, and 10,000
Bhils were reported to be attending the second session of the ‘West
Khandesh Dalit Conference’ held at Taloda on 10 November 1954.54
The results of these efforts were that several prominent non-Mahars,
including S.N. Shivtarkar and P.N. Rajbhoj, were associated with
Ambedkar. The difference, however was that with the mass of their
communities either inactive or stuck in village tradition, it was much easier
for the few educated members to get co-opted by the Congress or the Hindu
Mahasabha or to react individually against Ambedkar’s overwhelming
dominance in the movement. Nevertheless, the Mahar-based Dalit
movement had its liberatory implications for other Dalit castes as well, and
one of the most popular musical tributes to Ambedkar is a 1950s song of
the Matang communist worker, Annabhau Sathe. While his party leaders of
the time were finding it difficult to combine themes of ‘caste’ and ‘class’
struggles, this first great Dalit novelist, a people’s poet who died penniless,
whose family remains landless, could do so:
Take a hammer to change the world
 Bhimrao went saying!
Why is the elephant sitting
in the mud of slavery?
Shake your body and come out,
take a leap to the forefront!
The rich have exploited us,
the priests have tortured us,
As if stones had eaten jewels
and thieves had become great.
They decided we were low and impure
and kept us slaves for thousands of years,
They heaped insults on our lives,
they created these walls.
Sitting on the chariot of unity
let us go forward
To win a united Maharashtra
and hold to the name of Bhim!

• CLASS/CASTE CONTRADICTIONS AND THE SEARCH FOR ALLIANCE

By 1937–38 a combined struggle against class (economic) and caste
(social) exploitation was being organized under Ambedkar’s leadership. At
a ‘Railway Untouchable Workers’ Conference’ of the ILP on 12–13
February he articulated this as the necessity of fighting ‘the two enemies of
Brahmanism and Capitalism’. Noting that this was the first time
untouchable workers were meeting as workers and not simply as
untouchables, he justified the earlier stress on social grievances by noting,
‘Whatever other people may say, they are grievances under the load of
which our very manhood is crushed out.’ He then went on to describe
graphically the specific economic grievances, the relegation of untouchable
workers to lower and more exploitative jobs. The necessity of an anti-
Congress political stance was stressed and the ILP was presented as the
party to fight on all these contradictions.55
Still, combining the fight against caste and economic exploitation was
more difficult for Kunbi and other Shudra caste workers and peasants than
for Dalits. While they were also exploited (even as a ‘caste’ or jati) and
socially denigrated, their middle position in the system weakened their
opposition to hierarchy; the fact that a few of them were landlords or rich
farmers made it possible to appeal to caste sentiment against Dalits, to
identify the whole group as sharing dominance. Ambedkar himself was
primarily a leader of Dalits, however much he may have aspired to be
something more; social prejudice, the reluctance of caste Hindus to accept
someone lower in the hierarchy than themselves in a leadership position,
made it very difficult, if not impossible, for Ambedkar to be a ‘national
leader’ or ‘class leader’.56
Uniting caste Hindus and Dalit workers and peasants thus required a
search for allies. The period of the late 1930s and early 1940s was marked
by such a search, in which Ambedkar focused on two categories of people:
radical independent peasant activists and non-Brahman leaders. He made
temporary alliances with the communists (and later was to see socialists as
more solid allies, once they had left the Congress) and was ready to make
such alliances in the future. But he disagreed on some basic issues of
communist theory and strategy, and he never saw the Brahman-dominated
main political trends (including communism) as more than temporary,
‘tactical allies’. His ‘strategic allies’ he sought in the peasant movement and
the non-Brahman movement.
Ambedkar’s general tendency to identify with the non-Brahman
movement has already been noted in chapter 5. There was never a real
possibility of his joining the Bombay Presidency Non-Brahman Party
(though he worked with leaders like S.K. Bole), but once the party was
formally dissolved in the 1930s he lamented its loss. An article in Janata,
on ‘some non-Brahman leaders’ joining the Congress, began with the praise
of Phule and Shahu Maharaj, and went on,
The movement of the non-Brahmans brought a great whirlwind to this
country. This non-Brahman movement threw light on how the ignorant
and suppressed majority of non-Brahmans were rendered helpless
through the repression of the so-called ‘pandarpesha’ high-caste
community in the social, economic, religious and political arenas. As
long as these two great charismatic leaders were alive this movement did
invaluable work for the awakening of the bahujan samaj. As a result the
pandarpesha class began to stamp this awakened community as casteist.
 This self-interested class which gets its own bread buttered by singing the
hymns of nationalism began to call others selfish and anti-nationalist.
The article went on to stress the mass upsurge of the period and argued that
‘these staunch leaders of peasants and workers [the non-Brahmans] have
made themselves available to the bourgeois Congress at a time of the full
crisis of this toiling class.’57
Ambedkar noted later that he had tried constantly to dissuade non-
Brahmans from entering the Congress, but ‘they wouldn’t listen’.58 In 1942,
just before he himself wound up the ILP he commented in a meeting of
Konkan Dalits and caste Hindu peasants living in Bombay,
I am anxious that the Depressed Class movement should make a common
front with the working classes of other communities. With that object in
view I clung to the Non-Brahman Party for ten full years in the hope that
sooner or later it would rise to the full height of its great mission of
struggling for the freedom of the toiling masses of the great non-
Brahman community. That party had in it the germ of the great principle
of democracy. Its leaders unfortunately did not realize their duties and
responsibilities and allowed the party to be smashed to bits under the
double influence of Government and Congress patronage. Even now I
would welcome if they did something in the matter. I do not at all insist
that the non-Brahman labouring masses should join our party. Let them
have their own party if they so desire; but we can certainly make a
common front against the Brahmans, the capitalists, the landlords and
other exploiting classes. By breaking up the party the non-Brahmans
have committed a political suicide.59
Thus, after the mid-1930s there were no independent non-Brahman
leaders in Maharashtra with whom Ambedkar could form an alliance. He
attempted to do so with Periyar; when the great Tamil non-Brahman leader
came to Bombay in January 1940, a discussion was reported in which an
‘anti-Congress united front’ to also include the Muslims was projected.60
This had little outcome; the Tamil movement by itself was too far away and
too weak at that time to provide a concrete base for a strong alliance.
Along with the crisis-ridden non-Brahman movement, Ambedkar showed
interest (during the 1937–40 period) in the rising peasant movement in
India. Following the organizing of the anti-khot struggle, Janata began
carrying reports of the activities of the Kisan Sabha. These included
accounts of the ‘All-India Debt Release Day’ to be celebrated on 27 March,
and of the AIKS conference at Comilla in May 1938. The reports praised
the militant and independent tendencies shown by the Kisan Sabha and its
leader Swami Sahajanand, congratulating it for ‘leaving the path of
Gandhism’. They argued for an independent organization, refuting the
claims that the Kisan Sabha should be based on non-violence and justifying
its adoption of the red flag as the symbol of the unity of all the oppressed
and exploited classes in the world. An editorial on this issue concluded that
the differences between the ILP and Swamiji were only on the point of his
illusions about the Congress: Swamiji was calling for an independent
organization of the peasants for an economic fight against the landlords, but
‘we see as equally necessary the peasants’ independent political power’.61
Janata also carried reports on Kisan Sabha organizing in Gujarat by
Indulal Yagnik and Pangarkar,62 and a front page article on a satyagraha of
3,000 tenants in UP claiming their right to cut down trees on ‘forest
lands’.63 But the focus of attention was the powerful Bihar peasant
movement. There was, strikingly, no information on the equally active
coastal Andhra movement (though, ironically, this was led by the non-
Brahman Ranga while the Bihar leader was a Brahman)! Perhaps the
Bombay-based Ambedkarites lacked information about Andhra, but
perhaps also the reason was that Ranga and his followers at this time were
solidly aligned with the Congress, while Swami Sahajanand and his Bihar
associates were both militant and independent.
It is also significant that Ambedkar chose to attempt a dialogue with the
Swami in spite of the fact that just prior to this Jagjivan Ram had formed a
‘Bihar State Agricultural Labourers’ League’, charging that the Bihar Kisan
Sabha was representing the interests of upper caste tenants who oppressed
Dalit labourers. There is no direct evidence that Ambedkar knew about this
attempt of Jagjivan Ram, but he did know of Ram’s activities in organizing
the ‘All-India Depressed Classes League’ (‘Harijan League’) which was
also formed in 1936 as a means of drawing Dalits into the Congress.64 He
ignored Ram’s letters on this issue, as he ignored the Andhra peasant leader
who had written a book entitled ‘Harijan Nayak’.
At the end of December 1938 a dramatic personal encounter of
Ambedkar and Swami Sahajanand finally took place. It focused on just one
issue: attitudes towards the Congress. Ambedkar did not raise at this time
the question of how the Bihar Kisan Sabha was talking of caste, whether or
not it was dealing with vethbegar, whether the upper caste Bhumihars and
the ‘backward caste’ Kurmis and Yadavas were oppressing Dalit labourers,
though he was obviously quite aware of these issues. Nor did he bother to
ask what a Brahman like Swamiji was doing leading non-Brahman
peasants. Instead, he focused on the political issue.
In response to Ambedkar’s call for political independence, the Swami
argued that while peasants needed their independent class organization, they
should join the Congress as a ‘broad anti-imperialist organizations’ with
‘traditions of struggle against Imperialism which could be claimed by no
other political party’; further, no other political organization was known all
over the country. This was the line of the entire left at the time. Ambedkar
rejected it:
The Congress is not engaged in an anti-imperialist struggle. It is using the
constitutional machinery to advance the interests of the capitalists and
other vested interests; it is engaged in bolstering them up by sacrificing
the interests of workers and peasants.
Swamiji’s response was that the leadership could be changed; Ambedkar
retorted that this was impossible. He concluded by declaring his readiness
to join the Congress if it led any really anti-imperialist struggle, challenging
it to launch a struggle against the ‘Federation’ proposal of the Government
of India Act of 1935, and saying that he would give in writing ‘that the
Independent Labour Party and I as its spokesman will join the Indian
National Congress in any struggle that it may start to fight the
Federation.’65
On this the dialogue broke down, as, in contrast to Ambedkar, Swami
Sahajanand continued to have faith in the usefulness of working with the
Congress; indeed it was the line pushed by the entire Marxist left. But the
attempt revealed the core of Ambedkar’s politics. While he was at this time
rejecting the ideology of ‘Hinduism’ as a whole, he was clearly not
rejecting ‘Hindus’ as a whole; he was identifying the ideological and
political enemy as ‘Brahmanism’ and was striving to bring non-Brahmans,
peasants and workers as social groups into a united political front that could
maintain its independence from the Indian National Congress. The failure
of such a front to emerge in the radical 1930s was the main cause for the
inability of the ILP itself to continue as a militant party representing the
interests of workers and peasants against both economic and caste
oppression. And this failure was due in no small part to the policy of the
Marxist left, socialists and communists alike, of working within the
Congress.

• CONTRADICTIONS: CLASS/CASTE AND IMPERIALISM

To all the upper caste left nationalists of the pre-independence period the
‘main enemy’ was imperialism. Ambedkar did not agree. Though he
asserted his anti-imperialism again and again, and though he consistently
argued that Dalits needed national independence in order to have a chance
at political power, for him the main enemy was not the British but the
internal class/caste exploiter. He was very frank about this position and its
strategic requirements. In his speech at the Sinnar (Nasik district)
conference of watandar Mahars in 1941, he declared that he had never
organized an anti-British struggle because
The Depressed Classes, surrounded by enemies on all sides, could not
afford to fight on all fronts at once. I therefore decided to fight the two
thousand year-old tyranny and oppression of the caste Hindus and secure
social equality of the Depressed Classes before everything else.66
Ambedkar went on to say with pride that it was in fact the Mahar regiments
who had brought British rule into India; by defeating the Peshwas, ‘the
Mahars won Maharashtra for the British’. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s
the Dalit movement had held public meetings at the memorial in Koregaon
in Poona district memorializing the British army soldiers killed in defeating
the last Peshwa army in 1818: they included some 22 Mahars, about 10
Kunbis and a few Muslims; even today this memorial can be seen in
calender art.
The implications are clear. For dalits and other low castes, and for large
sections of toiling peasants and workers, the ‘main enemy’ was not
imperialism but rather (in the language of the communists) ‘feudalism’ or
(in the language of the non-Brahman movement) the ‘Peshwai’. But
‘imperialism’ and ‘feudalism’ are indissolubly connected: the dominance of
upper caste and landlord/capitalist interests in the Congress led to a
slowdown in a decisive fight against British imperialism. This was shown
time and again during the colonial period, and by the end of 1938
Ambedkar himself began to point this out. In his debate with Swami
Sahajanand he had accused the Congress not only of representing capitalist
and landlord interests, but also of not leading any true anti-imperialist
struggle, and he had cited the example of ‘Federation’, that is the
compromise of the Congress with princely states. This was a new note in
Ambedkar’s public stance, and from 1939–41 the anti-imperialist aspect of
ILP ideology came to be stressed more and more.
This was first expressed in the opposition to Federation. Six months after
his discussion with Swami Sahajanand, he addressed the annual function of
the Gokhale Institute for Politics and Economics on 29 June 1939.
Published in full form as ‘Federation versus Freedom’, this long and studied
tract gave an exhaustive account of the proposed constitutional structure,
concluding that it would be disastrous for the people of India because it
accepted the permanent sovereignty of princes who entered the proposed
Federation. It described the new constitution as the result of popular
struggles, but argued that it left ‘British India’ helpless before the autocrats
of the princely states:
British India … can never get responsibility at the Centre unless the
Princes come into the scheme. That means that British India has lost the
right to claim Responsible Government for itself in its own name and
independently of the Princes …. Of the two parts of this Federation,
British India is the progressive part and the States form the unprogressive
part. That the progressive part should be tied up to the chariot of the
unprogressive and its path and destiny should be made dependant upon
the unprogressive part constitutes the most tragic side of this
Federation.67
He added bitterly, ‘For this tragedy you have to blame your own national
leaders’. And, describing the Federation as satisfying the interests of the
princes, the Muslims and the Hindu Mahasabha and posing a menance to
freedom and the interests of the poor, he concluded with a denunciation of
Gandhi:
What shall I say about the Congress? What was its point of view? I am
sure I am not exaggerating or misrepresenting facts when I say that the
Congress point of view at the Round Table Conference was that Congress
was the only party in India and that nobody else counted and that the
 British should settle with the Congress only. This was the burden of Mr.
Gandhi’s song at the Round Table Conference. He was so busy in
establishing his own claim to recognition by the British as the dictator of
India that he forgot altogether that the important question was not with
whom the settlement should be made but what were to be the terms of the
settlement …. To my mind, there is no doubt that this Gandhi age is the
dark age of India. It is an age in which people instead of looking for their
ideals in the future are returning to antiquity.68
In truth, from 1930 onwards, the Congress and its Gandhian leadership
did little to oppose the appeasement of the princes embodied in the
Government of India Act of 1935. Neither the leftists in the Congress
(Nehru and those who were later to organize as Congress socialists) nor the
communists outside could do much in this direction. It is true that the
leftists took the lead in the Indian State Peoples’ Congress which was
formed in 1927, with people like E.M.S. Namboodiripad (representing
Cochin) and Achutrao Patwardhan (Jamkhed) being on its executive by the
mid-1930s.69 But the conservatives, with Gandhi’s firm backing,
maintained a policy of non-interference with the Indian states,
compromising the burgeoning state people’s movement when they did enter
it in 1938–39.70
Copland, who has emphasized both the overall policy of non-interference
and the 1938–39 compromise, argues that the latter was made because the
‘High Command’ was powerless before the princes’ autocracy and their
alliance with the British (in 1939 Lord Linlithgow had decided to commit
troops and police from British India to stiffen the ‘weakened’ rulers) but he
also notes that they feared the ‘communal element’.71 This referred partly to
the danger of Hindu–Muslim tensions increasing in states like Hyderabad,
where Hindu subjects faced a Muslim ruler and where the state peoples’
movement was dominated by the Hindu-nationalist Arya Samajists. But
more frequently the situation was like that in Mysore, where non-Brahman
and Dalit subjects faced a Brahman-dominated administration. Something
of this issue was apparently involved in Rajkot, which Gandhi had made a
personal prestige issue and which was taken charge of by Vallabhbhai Patel:
non-Brahman Girasyars and Bhaiyats and Dalits with Ambedkar’s support
were demanding seats on the reforms committee. Efforts of the Congress
Gandhians to deal with this resulted in what Copland calls the ‘Rajkot
debacle’. While much of this remains an untold story it seems that here also
the compromising position of Gandhi in the face of Brahman dominance
was crippling the anti-imperialist struggle.72 Ambedkar’s problem in this
situation was that he had no way without a strong party or alliance to put in
practice any of his views about opposing the Federation proposals; at best
he could make brief forays to protect dalit interests, as he did in the case of
Rajkot.
Besides Federation issues, by 1940–42 Ambedkar was coming into
conflict with the British government on a number of issues. The major one
was British intransigence on the issue of Mahar watans: Ambedkar wanted
them made regular landholdings, to be assessed at the normal rate, with
Mahar village servants to be paid directly for their labour. The government
refused on the grounds that the latter would be too expensive; at the same
time it went on raising the ‘special’ levy on the watan lands. When a new
bill was brought to increase this levy he reacted with fury. The Mahar
watan campaign had been building up tempo since 1938–39, with
conferences and meetings that drew in Mahars from Marathwada in the
Nizam state also. Now in a ‘Mahar–Mang–Vethiya’ conference attended by
15,000 Dalits at Sinnar in August 1941, Ambedkar stated that while he had
previously never joined hands with the Congress, now
I shall direct attacks a hundredfold more bitter, more virulent, more
deadly against the British than I have ever done against the Hindus if my
loyalty is going to be exploited for crushing my own people and taking
away from them the last dry bone from which they draw their barest
sustenance.
He threatened a determined struggle, ‘relying on our own strength’ and
using any means necessary to resist the ‘looting’ of the British
government.73
Ambedkar was also angered by the British refusal to include any
Depressed Classes representative in the reconstituted Viceroy’s Council; a
strongly worded protest telegram on this had preceded by a few days the
threats of action made at the Sinnar conference.74 The connection between
these events is clear: Ambedkar had met the Bombay governor in early July
and he evidently had had expectations of being given a post in the Viceroy’s
Council. Further the large and militant meeting at Sinnar in August
followed an earlier one (also protesting coercion in collecting the levy and
threatening a strike, but in somewhat milder terms.)75 Ambedkar was
getting angrier and threatening ever stronger action but at the same time
maintaining his government links (for example his place on the Indian
Defence Council) and continuing to ask Mahars to volunteer for the army.76
The climax came on 14 April 1942 on the grand jayanti celebration of his
fiftieth birthday. Appearing at such an occasion for the first time, Ambedkar
warned the British again that the Depressed Classes would fight if not given
adequate representation and that their interests were being sacrificed and
betrayed in the Cripps Mission. Next time, he told the audience,
You will have to be ready for action, I don’t care what action,
constitutional or unconstitutional, violent or nonviolent, peaceful or
disturbing …. You may be faced with a constituent assembly again. Your
place, then, will not be inside the constituent assembly. You will not find
any place there. Your legitimate place will be in your own headquarters,
manufacturing bombs. Yes, bombs. Make no mistake about it. We can
handle hand grenades better than many other people ….
And he warned the Congress,
You are fighting for Swaraj. I am ready to join you. And I may assure you
that I can fight better than you. I make only one condition. Tell me what
share I am to have in the Swaraj. If you don’t want to tell me that and you
want to make up with the British behind my back, hell on both of you.77

• THE SCHEDULED CASTE FEDERATION AND THE RETREAT FROM

RADICALISM
But the Congress did not formulate any new policy regarding the Dalits,
and Ambedkar did not join it. Neither did the Dalits take to making bombs
in their headquarters. Nor did the Mahar watandars have to carry out any
decisive struggle. Instead Ambedkar was appointed ‘Labour Member’ for
the Government of India in early July, thereby joining the Executive
Council, and on 18–20 July an All-India Depressed Classes Political
Conference, again held at Nagpur, brought the ILP to an end and constituted
the Scheduled Caste Federation (known in Marathi as the Dalit Federation)
before a mass of 70,000, of which one-third were women, with
representatives from Bengal, Bombay, Punjab, UP, Central Provinces-Berar,
Madras and Hyderabad.78
Following this Ambedkar denounced the proposed Quit India movement,
arguing that ‘with an aggressive Japan standing at the gate of India’ mass
civil disobedience would be playing into the hands of the enemy, while
resistance to fascist aggression was ‘the patriotic duty of all Indians no
matter to what political parties they belong.’79 With communists and Dalits,
from different ideological stances but using similar arguments, out of the
anti-imperialist struggle, the Quit India movement took place either under
the leadership of the Congress socialists or with spontaneous (local, non-
Brahman as in the case of the famous Satara ‘parallel government’)
leadership and was, in India as a whole, fairly easily suppressed by the
British and hijacked afterwards by the conservative Congress leadership.80
The Scheduled Caste Federation was a step backwards from the 1930s
radicalism. Its very formation meant giving up the effort to form a broad
radical party of Dalit and caste Hindu workers and peasants for the different
goal of uniting Dalits on an all-India level. There were two new specific
resolutions, one demanding ‘separate village settlements’ of entirely
Scheduled Caste villages ‘away from and independent of Hindu villages’,
and the other renewing the demand for separate electorates on the grounds
that in any joint electorate even with reserved seats Dalits would be
overwhelmed by caste Hindu voters. These resolutions indicated a
reinvigorated distrust of ‘caste Hindus’ as such and a laying aside of efforts
to form a political alliance with them. Aside from this, the Scheduled Caste
Federation maintained most of the other specific thrusts of the earlier ILP
programme, regarding alliances and peasant and worker demands, and
Ambedkar continued as Labour Minister to put a radical programme before
the working class. But there was no action linked to these. As Zelliot has
put it,
The actual function of the political party under Ambedkar’s leadership
from independence until 1956 was to see that the special treatment
provisions were properly used, that the discrimination and injustice still
practiced was brought to public attention, and that the seats reserved for
Scheduled Castes in legislatures were filled by men under obligation to
speak for Scheduled Caste interests.81
In other words, turning away from the effort to form a broad political
party with a vision of revolutionary social transformation built around a
class–caste alliance of Dalits and Shudra workers and peasants, the
Scheduled Caste Federation and Ambedkar functioned from 1942 to 1956
as the political representative of Dalits, as a special interest group within a
statist–capitalist democratic structure.
Ambedkar, again, was clear about this. In a 1943 talk on ‘Ranade,
Gandhi and Jinnah’, clearly preoccupied with the question of leadership and
political strategy, he mentioned as the last point in the ‘political philosophy
of Ranade’ that
In political negotiation the rule must be what is possible. That does not
mean that we should be content with what is offered. No. It means that
you must not refuse what is offered when you know that your sanctions
are inadequate to compel your opponent to concede more.82
And in the preface, speaking of those who criticized his scathing attacks on
Gandhi and Jinnah, he made an obvious reference to the political process of
the time: ‘If I am against them it is because I want a settlement. I want a
settlement of some sort, and I am not prepared to wait for an ideal
settlement.’83
Ambedkar’s policy of the period was based on the assessment that
independence was near and that power was going into the hands of Indians
in any case; there was no longer time left for the visions of a socialist future
and no organized force to ally with the Dalits in fighting for it. The task for
Ambedkar in the existing situation was to ensure that the Dalits got the best
possible share in independence that was coming to India; there was really
nothing else to be done.
Proposed alliances with non-Brahmans or peasant leaders, which might
have provided a mass base for a broad anti-Congress united front which
could organize to build a different kind of society, had failed. That with the
communists had never even been hoped for. There was no alternative
political centre, and any role that Ambedkar could have played in forming
one was crippled by the lack of allies. He really had no choice but to use the
social force which he commanded, that of the Dalits, to fight as best he
could for the interests he had from the beginning taken as his primary
commitment. And so came the end of the years of radicalism.

NOTES
1. ‘Annihilation of Caste’ was first published in 1936 and is reprinted in Dr Babasaheb
Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Volume I (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra
Education Department, 1979), pp. 23–90. The second edition contains Ambedkar’s
account of his conflict with the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal, Gandhi’s defense of Hinduism
in response to the booklet, and Ambedkar’s reply’ the gulf between them is stark.
2. Speech at Vinchur, reported in Times of India, 21 November 1934, in Source Material on
Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and the Movement of Untouchables, Volume I (Bombay:
Government of Maharashtra, 1982), p. 123.
3. Eleanor Zelliot, Dr. Ambedkar and the Mahar Movement (University of Pennsylvania.
Ph.D. dissertation, 1969), p. 243.
4. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan India Ltd., 1983), p. 346.
5. Ian Copland. ‘Congress Paternalism: The “High Command” and the Struggle for
Freedom in Princely India, 1920–1949’, in Jim Masselos (ed.), Struggling and Ruling:
The Indian National Congress (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1987), p.
127.
6. See Janata, 6 February 1937 for a full list of candidates, plus four from other parties
who were supported. The ILP apparently won all the reserved seats in Marathi-
speaking areas and in addition three general seats in the Konkan. The Congress swept
Gujarat and North Karnatak, but the showing of the ILP and a few non-Brahmans
represented a considerable opposition force in western Maharashtra. The ILP thus
became the largest opposition party in the assembly.
7. Sarkar, Modern India, p. 349.
8. Independent Labour Party: Its Foundation and Its Aims (Reprinted from the Times of
India, 15 August 1936), ILP Publication No. 1 of 1937, p. 3.
9. Ibid., p. 6–7.
10. Janata, 1 May 1937.
11. Ibid., 6 March 1937.
12. Ibid., 18 May 1937.
13. Ibid., 8 April 1937.
14. Ibid., in an article entitled ‘The Tyranny of the Khot Landlords of the Konkan’, 29 May
1937.
15. Bahishkrut Bharat, 16 August 1929, reprinted in Ratnakar Ganvir, ed. ‘Bahishkrut
Bharatatil Dr Ambedkarance Sphut Lekh (Jalgaon: Ratnamitra Prakashan, 1981), pp.
210–13.
16. Cited Neil Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule: Agriculture and Agrarian
Society in the Bombay Presidency, 1850–1935 (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1985), p.
 273.
17. Ibid., pp. 273–74
18. Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in
Western India, 1850–1935 (Poona: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976), pp.
194–95.
19. Bombay Chronicle, 22 December 1934, in Sources, Volume I, pp. 124–26. N.N. Patil
appears in later Chari meetings and delegations to the Chief Minister but apparently
did not work beyond this area; see Janata, 30 October 1937.
20. Ambedkar, in Writings and Speeches, Volume II, p. 101, mentions this.
21. Bahishkrut Bharat, 16 August 1929.
22. The three caste Hindu ILP winning candidates, Chitre, Parulekar and Chitnis, were all
CKPs who had apparently been associated with N.M. Joshi’s labour work. Parulekar
was later to join the CPI and become famous with his wife, Godutai, for working
among tribals in Thane district. Chitnis is referred to as ‘Surba Chipnis’ and ‘Surba
Tipnis’ in various sources; cf Janata, 7 October 1937; 15 January 1938, and Bombay
Chronicle 12 December 1934 (in Sources, Volume I, pp. 124ff).
23. Janata, 18 September 1937.
24. Ibid., 19 February 1937.
25. Ibid., 29 October 1937.
26. Ibid., 1 January 1938.
27. Ibid., 8 January 1938.
28. Ibid., 15 January 1938.
29. M.A. Rasul, A History of the All India Kisan Sabha (Calcutta: National Book Agency,
1974), pp. 9–11.
30. Janata, 15 January 1938.
31. Reported in Bombay Chronicle, 6 February 1940, cited in Sources, Volume I, p. 211.
The activist was the MLA Chitnis/Tipnis. Other agitations reported in Janata in 1938
included meetings at Konkanwadi (14 May) and Devarukh where a militant crowd of
caste Hindus, Dalits and Muslims protested (28 May).
32. Janata, 27 August 1938.
33. The most detailed coverage is given by Y.D. Phadke, ‘The Independent Labour Party
and the One-Day General Strike of 7th November, 1938’, Paper for the Seminar on the
Dalit Movement in Maharashtra, Shivaji University, Kolhapur, 9–11 January 1988.
34. This is documented in Prem Sagar Gupta, A Short History of the All-India Trade Union
Congress (1920–1947) (New Delhi: AITUC Publ., 1980), pp. 196–316. The Nagpur
unity session was also reported in Janata, 23 April 1938.
35. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 361, 362; Y.D.
Phadke, ‘The Independent Labour Party and the One-Day General Strike of 7
November 1938’, Paper for seminar on ‘Dalit Movement in Maharashtra’, Shivaji
University, 9–11 Feburary 1989.
36. Cited in Writings and Speeches, Volume II, pp. 208, 222, 231, 232.
37. Phadke ‘One-Day General Strike’.
38. Bhimrao Dhondiba Kardak, Ambedkari Jalse: Swarup va Karya (Bombay: Abhinav
Prakashan, 1978).
39. Phadke, ‘One-Day General Strike’, pp. 6–7.
40. Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, pp. 264, 361, n. 89.
41. Cited in Phadke, ‘One-Day General Strike’, p. 8.
42. Dhananjay Keer, Dr Ambedkar: Life and Mission, (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1962),
p. 477; Zelliot, Ambedkar and the Mahar Movement, p. 257.
43. Janata, 7 May 1938.
44. Ibid.
45. Undated letter written from the boat on the way to the Second Round Table
Conference, published in Ganjare, Bhashane, Volume VI, pp. 14–15. Ambedkar
rejected Moonje’s efforts to pose the Samta Sainik Dal as a ‘Hindu’ force ready to
combat Muslims.
46. Janata, 16 March 1940.
47. Bombay Chronicle, 29 April 1942; cited Sources, Volume I, 251. ‘You have been
celebrating my birthday for some 15 years past’, said Ambedkar at the time. ‘I have
never attended them. I have always been opposed to them. You have celebrated my
golden jubilee now; let that be the last. Over-regard to leaders saps self-confidence of
the masses …. One of the great reasons for the downfall of Hindu society and the
perpetuation of its degraded position is the injunction of Krishna that whenever in
difficulties they should look out for his avatar to redeem them …. I don’t want you to
follow such a ruinous teaching. I don’t want you to be dependent on any single
personality for your salvation. Your salvation must lie in your own hands, through
your own efforts.’
48. See, for instance, Janata, 27 March 1937; 16 and 30 March 1940.
49. Many of these are collected in Kardak, Ambedkari Jalse.
50. From Janata, 27 August 1938.
51. By Kamalsingh Baliram Ramteke, Janata, 21 June 1941.
52. Janata, 20 October 1937.
53. Janata, 23 November 1940; an earlier Bhil conference was held by him in Chilisgaon,
 ibid., 24 February 1940.
54. Ibid., 23 November 1940; an earlier Bhil conference was held by him at Bhalisgaon,
ibid., 24 February 1940.
55. Janata, 12 February 1938 and Times of India, 14 February 1938; in Sources, Volume I,
pp. 165.66.
56. In his 1939 talk on ‘Federation versus Freedom’ he says, ‘Fortunately for me I am not
one of your national leaders. The utmost rank to which I have risen is that of a leader
of the Untouchables. I find even that rank has been denied to me. Thakkar Bapa …
very recently said that I was only the leader of the Mahars. He would not even allow
me the leadership of the Untouchables of the Bombay Presidency’ (Writings and
Speeches. Volume I, p. 346). Caste Hindu prejudice was a real factor for Ambedkar,
just as white racism has made it impossible for a Black to be a ‘general’ leader in the
US. There are some reasons to hope that the situation is changing, if we look at the
recent roles of Jesse Jackson and Kanshi Ram; but it was certainly not possible for
Ambedkar by himself to be a ‘national’ or a ‘class’ leader in the 1930s.
57. Janata, 9 October 1937.
58. Ibid., 23 January 1949.
59. Bombay Sentinel, 14 July 1942, in Sources, Volume I pp. 252–53.
60. Bombay Chronicle, 9 January 1940, in Sources, Volume I, pp. 208–10.
61. Janata, 2 April 1938, 28 May 1938.
62. Ibid., 2 July 1938, 23 July 1938; a report of 24 February 1940 described a march of
15,000 peasants at Borsad with the red flag under Yagnik’s leadership as a ‘golden
day’ in the Gujarat peasant struggle.
63. Ibid., 10 July 1938.
64. See the letter of Jagjivan Ram to Ambedkar on 8 March 1937 cited in Sources, Volume
I, pp. 166–67.
65. Bombay Chronicle. 27 December 1938 and Times of India, 27 December 1938, cited
Sources, Volume I, pp. 181–84.
66. Bombay Chronicle, 19 August 1941, in Sources, Volume I, pp. 233–35.
67. ‘Federation versus Freedom’ in Writings and Speeches, Volume I, pp. 345–46.
68. Ibid., pp. 350–52.
69. Copland, ‘Congress Paternalism’, pp. 126–27.
70. Ibid., pp. 120–28.
71. Ibid., pp. 130–32.
72. See Sources, Volume I, pp. 191–97 for newspaper accounts of Ambedkar’s
involvement with Rajkot.
73. Bombay Chronicle, 19 August 1941, in Sources, Volume I, p. 234; Janata, 23 August
1941.
74. Bombay Chronicle, 1 August 1941 and Free Press Journal, 1 August, 1941, in Sources,
Volume I, pp. 232–33.
75. See reports cited in Sources, Volume I, pp. 228–33.
76. Times of India, 26 September 1938, in Sources, Volume I, p. 237. In any case
Ambedkar viewed Mahar military service as an important road of advance.
77. Bombay Sentinel, 28 April 1942, Sources, Volume I, pp. 248–49.
78. Eleanor Zelliot, ‘Learning the Use of Political Means: The Mahars of Maharashtra’, in
Rajni Kothari (ed.), Caste in Modern Indian Politics (Poona: Orient Longman, 1970),
pp. 52–53.
79. Bombay Chronicle, 23 July 1942, in Sources, Volume I, pp. 255–56.
80. See Gail Omvedt, ‘The Satara Prati Sarkar’, and the introduction in Gyan Pandey (ed.),
The Indian Nation in 1942 (Calcutta: Centre for Study in Social Sciences, 1988).
81. Zelliot, Ambedkar and the Mahar Movement, p. 55.
82. ‘Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah’. in Writings and Speeches, Volume I, p. 229.
83. Preface to ‘Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah’, p. 208.
 CHAPTER 7

‘Ambedkarism’: The Theory of

Dalit Liberation

‘Ambedkarism’ is today a living force in India, much as Marxism is: it

defines the ideology of the Dalit movement and, to a large extent, an even
broader anti-caste movement. Yet, just as ‘Marxism’ as a trend in the
working class movement has to be distinguished from the actual theorizing
of Karl Marx, so the urge to abolish the social and economic exploitation
involved in caste and capitalism (which is the main significance of
‘Ambedkarism’ as a general movement ideology) must be distinguished
from the complex grappling of an individual activist– theoretician with the
interpretation of Indian reality.
Ambedkar’s thought was not always consistent and it did not (and the
same of course can be said for Marx) fully resolve the problems he grappled
with. But some themes stand out:
First, an uncompromising dedication to the needs of his people, the
Dalits (as he said once in response to a legislative council claim that he
should think as ‘part of a whole’—‘I am not a part of a whole; I am a part
apart’) which required the total annihilation of the caste system and the
Brahmanic superiority it embodied:
Second, an almost equally strong dedication to the reality of India—
but an India whose historical–cultural interpretation he sought to wrest
from the imposition of a ‘Hindu’ identity to understand it in its massive,
popular reality;
Third, a conviction that the eradication of caste required a repudiation
of ‘Hinduism’ as a religion, and adoption of an alternative religion,
which he found in Buddhism, a choice which he saw as not only
necessary for the masses of Dalits who followed him but for the masses
 in India generally;
Fourth, a broad economic radicalism interpreted as ‘socialism’ (‘state
socialism’ in some versions; ‘democratic socialism’ in others) mixed
with and growing out of his democratic liberalism and liberal dedication
to individual rights;
Fifth, a fierce rationalism which burned through his attacks on Hindu
superstitions to interpret even the Buddhism he came to in rationalistic,
‘liberation theology’ forms;
And finally, a political orientation which linked a firmly autonomous
Dalit movement with a constantly attempted alliance of the socially and
economically exploited (Dalits and Shudras, ‘workers’ and ‘peasants’ in
class terms) projected as an alternative political front to the Congress
party he saw as the unique platform of ‘Brahmanism’ and ‘capitalism’.
However, Ambedkar, like Marx, did not spend the major part of his
active life in research and writing, with political activism as a sideline;
rather, the demands of leadership absorbed the major part of his time. The
1930s being a period of intense turmoil there was little space for writing.
Though many of his crucial ideas were formed during the 1930s, almost all
of his writing came in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was spending most of
his time in Delhi, as Labour Minister and the general political spokesman
for the untouchables. During the 1930s he not only adopted but sought to
give a political embodiment to a general left ideology combined with the
theme of caste annihilation. Yet the decade came to an end with the failure
of a left alternative to the bourgeois–Brahman Congress, and the 1940s
were very different, an era of Congress hegemony was firmly established in
the national movement at the same time as the traumatic transition to
independence in a period of global upheavals overshadowed everything
else. The particular characteristics of this latter epoch have to be understood
as a background to Ambedkar’s strategy and analysis.

• THE CONTEXT OF STRATEGY AND THEORY

The 1940s were a period of brutal confrontation with the most reactionary
social power known in the world up to that time, fascism; and they ended
with the unleashing of atomic energies in the burning of two Japanese
cities, forecasting the technological furies that would overshadow human
development for decades. For many throughout the world, the peace that
followed was a period of hope, with the emergence of newly liberated
nations throughout Asia and Africa, and the achievement of socialism by
many peoples of the world. That Stalin represented not only ‘socialist’
development but a brutal tyranny; that socialism came to vast areas not by
working class revolt but with the march of the Red Army; that traditional
(and sometimes new) elites remained firmly in control of independent Third
World nations, all were debatable points that bothered very few in countries
like India at the time. The final phases of the independence struggle
represented for many an upsurge of hope and a direction towards a popular,
socialistic independence.
Yet within India itself the period held a great deal of internal malaise.
Several major characteristics defined it, and represented the context in
which Ambedkar sought to win some share in liberation for the untouchable
masses of India.
1. The hegemony of Marxism on the left: in India as in most of the world
the liberation of exploited and oppressed groups was to be seen as being
realized through socialism, defined in terms of collective ownership of the
means of production and working class share in power as exercized through
a party acting in its name. Yet this hegemony contrasted with an extreme
immaturity and weakness of the communist movement in India, which
could not exert any decisive influence on events. As in most other Third
World countries, therefore, the hegemony of ‘Marxism’ evoked a situation
in which ‘collective ownership’ was defined in terms of state ownership; the
dominant nationalist party replaced the working class party with claims to
represent the oppressed masses; and ‘socialism’ came to mean public
control and planning of an industrialization conceived on the model of
western capitalism.
2. Hindu–Muslim communalism was the overriding political reality by
the 1940s. The constitution of the ‘Muslim community’ and the ‘Hindu
community’ as dominant social realities was correlated with the explicit or
implict acceptance of ‘Hinduism’ as the central religious–cultural identity
of ‘India’. The ideological approach of the Congress progressives was
either to argue, with Gandhi, for a reformed Hinduism in which the two
communities lived in harmony (i.e., interpreting the ‘nation’ as a federation
of religious communities) or, with Nehru, for a secularism that exalted
modernity and defined the ‘nation’, along with ‘class’, as transcending what
were really feudal and backward religious and cultural identities. The
communists essentially followed the Nehru line, with an even stronger
emphasis on class. Both accepted the realities of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’
identities, of course—thereby eclipsing issues of caste and linguistic/tribal
nationalities. Both gave scope for Hindu nationalism because they did not
confront the very basis of the ‘Hindu’ identity attributed to Indian tradition.
3. The events of independence and partition brought a near-complete
marginalization of Gandhi and Gandhism. With all the rhetoric of
‘panchayat raj’ and khadi, it was ‘Nehruism’ that gained hegemony
ideologically. This approach advocated a broad Third World alliance and
made ‘socialism’ and a heavy-industry oriented development—dominated
by planning and controlled by the public sector—the themes of power. But
with all its reason-ableness and ‘secular’ focus in contrast to Gandhi’s
‘peasant backwardness’, Nehruism, whose main tendency was to override,
or at best to ignore, issues of caste and local identities, allowed even more
for Brahman dominance. To a very large degree, even while representation
in the political sphere broadened, the ‘public sector’ was to be a high-caste
preserve.
In this context, the Dalit movement under Ambedkar’s leadership could
only be a passive observer of most major events, at best exerting its minor
influence to achieve some gains and concessions. The failure of Marxism in
India to open itself to fertilization of theory and practice by the anti-caste
movements, and the failure of Gandhism to go beyond a spiritualistic and
Hinduistic interpretation of a decentralized and village-based development
left the anti-caste movement in a vacuum. By the 1940s, it could effectively
operate only as a pressure group.

• CASTE, CLASS AND MECHANICAL MARXISM

Ambedkar had said, in his 1938 speech to the peasants marching to
Bombay, that he felt the ‘communist philosophy’ to be ‘closer than any
other’ (though significantly qualifying this ‘in regard to the class struggle of
toilers’). It is undeniable that his ‘class–caste’ paradigm was basically
formed during the 1930s in the course of his confrontation with Marxism,
as it was presented to him in India, thus exerted an important and
continuing influence not only over his economic theory but also over his
interpretation of caste in society.
We have noted that during the 1920s Ambedkar had dismissed
communism by saying that he agreed with the ‘ends’ of socialism but
disagreed with the ‘means’ of violence. This theme was resurrected towards
the end of his life as a major point of defense of Buddhism against
Marxism. During the radical years of the 1930s, however, there was no such
rejection of Marxism on the grounds of violence. The thrust of Ambedkar’s
attack was against the religiously-inspired ‘non-violence’ of Gandhism. In
fact the main point of his critique of violence was always that communist-
led strikes and actions were often ‘adventurous’, that they needlessly
harmed the weakest sections of the working class (Dalits) and sacrificed
people’s lives in campaigns that tried to be militant for the sake of
militancy. In other words, it upheld non-violence more as a strategy than as
a principle, and it specifically rejected Gandhian non-violence-as-religious-
principle. The critique as such, then, is not a major point separating
Ambedkar from ‘the communist philosophy’, though when it was linked to
the denial of the leading role of the proletariat it did become so.
In fact, aside from adding ‘caste’ to ‘class’ and ‘Brahmanism’ to
‘capitalism’ there were surprising similarities between the basic
assumptions of Ambedkar and the leftists. In a situation in which
communists and socialists alike took no official note of caste in the pre-
independence period and simply assumed that radicalism required an
explanation of all social problems in terms of their ‘class’ content,
Ambedkar of course strongly insisted on the addition of ‘caste’ and
‘Brahmanism’ as crucial social realities. Yet in doing so, he like most of his
later followers accepted some crucial assumptions of the ‘class’ framework.
A serious critical article on Marxism appeared in a 1936 issue of Janata
and was reprinted in 1938 as a front page article entitled ‘The Illusion of the
Communists and the Duty of the Untouchable Class’. In taking the relations
of production as the basis of the ‘economic interpretation of history’, the
article made a clever twist or reversal in the often-used architectural
analogy of ‘base and superstructure’:
But the base is not the building. On the basis of the economic relations a
 building is erected of religious, social and political institutions. This
building has just as much truth (reality) as the base. If we want to change
the base, then first the building that has been constructed on it has to be
knocked down. In the same way, if we want to change the economic
relations of society, then first the existing social, political and other
institutions will have to be destroyed.1
The article went on to make other important reversals. To build the
strength of the working class, the mental hold of religious slavery would
have to be destroyed; the pre-condition of a united working class struggle
was the eradication of caste and untouchability. Similarly, destruction of
casteism could be taken as the main task of the ‘democratic’ stage of a two-
stage revolution: it would not be fully anti-capitalist because capitalism
would not be opposed to the eradication of caste as such (freeing potential
workers from caste restrictions would increase the reserve army of labour)
and, at the same time, socialists should welcome the effort at uniting the
working class. (Thus there was some unity of interests between workers and
the ‘radical bourgeoisie’ in the ‘democratic’ stage). The removal of
untouchability and caste discrimination is thus the first stage in the struggle
for the Indian revolution, and it is impossible for socialists to bypass it.
However, expressing great disillusionment with the Congress socialists and
Nehru, the article concluded that untouchables would have to pool all their
strength into the fight against untouchability, without expecting much
socialist help.
The positions taking here represented a reaction to and a sharing of the
assumptions of a mechanical, economistic form of Marxism. Only ‘class’
exploitation was seen as having a material base and as being part of the
relations or production; caste and all other ‘non-class’ types of oppression
(women’s oppression, national oppression, etc.) were seen as primarily
socio-religious, in the realm of consciousness and not material life.
Ambedkar accepted this framework and simply reversed it to assert the
causal importance of social–religious–political factors; he took a
mechanical architectural analogy and turned it around to give primacy to
the ‘superstructure’. The logic of the process exemplifies the way in which
a mechanical materialism fosters idealism. If caste oppression/exploitation
was central (and Ambedkar and all Dalits and low caste activists could not
but help understanding it as central) then the basic logic led them to argue
that this could only mean that social–religious factors, factors of
‘consciousness’, were important and even primary. In other words, there
was no theoretical trend that sought to analyze a material base for caste as
Phule had done at a primary level half a century before.
Just as clearly we can see in the argument the results of the often-heard
cliche that an anti-caste struggle is a part of the democratic revolution, not
of socialist revolution. For communists this could not but mean (at some
basic emotional level) that the issue was of secondary importance.
Ambedkar of course saw it differently. In effect he was motivated to say: all
right, if this is ‘only’ the democratic revolution this is what we have to be
concerned about here and now; you far-sighted revolutionary leaders go
ahead and worry about the socialist revolution, we have to get on with the
immediate task (which you are not helping with in any case): it’s all the
more urgent to concentrate on this since no one else is around to do it. we
will fight for the democratic revolution. This logic was what undoubtedly
moved Ambedkar, after the ‘years of radicalism’ won no decisive gains, to
put his efforts during the 1940s into building the Scheduled Caste
Federation as a strong pressure group within a democratic framework, with
an indefinite postponement of a broad revolutionary struggle.
Ambedkar’s acceptance of many of the basic assumptions of a
mechanical Marxism remained throughout his life and can be seen in his
final writings on Buddha and Marx. Its most important aspect is the
identification of economic exploitation with private property. Ambedkar’s
note took it as established that a great many errors in Marx’s original
analysis (including the concept of the inevitability of socialism, the
vanguardship of the working class) made it invalid, but concluded,
What remains of Karl Marx is a residue of fire, small but very important
…
(i) the function of philosophy is to reconstruct the world and not to waste
its time in explaining the origins of the world,
(ii) there is a conflict of interest between class and class,
(iii) private ownership of property brings power to one class and sorrow
to another through exploitation,
(iv) it is necessary for the good of society that the sorrow be removed by
the abolition of private property.2
Ambedkar went on in this article to argue that Buddhism, in the Sangha,
abolished private property more thoroughly and without bloodshed and was
therefore superior to Marxism, but that is beside the point. The point is that
here he accepted the definition of class and exploitation as being a result of
private property. This was the common theme of the Marxism of his time. It
led to defining ‘socialism’ in terms of ‘nationalism’ in which collective
ownership of the means of production (or the abolition of private property)
could be achieved through state control; and it continued to accept the idea
that modern factory production, i.e., industrialization, constituted the
economic basis of socialism. Thus, Ambedkar could term his own version
of socialism as ‘state socialism’ and call for ‘nationalization of land’, or
public control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy much as the
Nehru socialists did without much concern for the structures of domination
and exploitation embodied in state-owned properties.
Taking standard left economic assumptions for granted had two
consequences for Ambedkar and the Dalit movement: First, it led to
attempts to formulate a historical theory of caste and social struggle in India
that functioned primarily at the ‘superstructural’ level, stressing factors of
political conflict and ideology apart from those of economic development.
Second, it effectively suppressed any dialogue with alternative economic
models and ignored the degree to which a state-controlled heavy industry
would be effectively a Brahman and high caste-controlled economy.
But was there any real alternative before Ambedkar at the time? His
‘state socialism’ was, after all, part of a very broad consensus that saw
development in terms of industrialization and nationhood in terms of a
centralized, strong, unitary state; Liberal capitalists shared this as much as
socialists, and though they disagreed about whether private or state control
would be most effective, all ‘developmental economists’ by the late 1940s
and early 1950s accepted some major role for the state. Today this
developmental model has come into question at many levels, from the
environmental movement with its rejection of Nehru’s big dams as ‘modern
temples’ to the farmers’ movement and women’s movement, all putting
forward calls for some kind of ‘alternative development’. But in
Ambedkar’s time decentralized socialism did not appear as a politically
viable alternative. In India, a decentralized, village-based form of
development was connected with the Gandhian tradition; to Ambedkar and
militant Dalits or non-Brahmans this did not simply promote a village
society and development along the lines of Indian tradition, it promoted
Ram-raj; it was not simply critical of modern science and technology, it was
soaked in Hindu religious themes, including the belief in chaturvarnya, the
moralistic acceptance of brahmachari and a claimed principled belief in
non-violence. These were not acceptable to Ambedkar nor could they meet
the needs of low castes aspiring to liberation. The fact that no other
tradition of an alternative decentralized socialism existed in India helped to
push Ambedkar towards a bureaucratized state socialism, with all the
dilemmas of Brahmanic statism that this involved.

• THE ECONOMICS OF A FLEXIBLE SOCIALISM

Ambedkar’s two major writings on economic issues appeared in the early
1920s, and while they bear the mark of a generally neoclassic economic
theory, they also show both his general identification with the working
classes and a harsh critique of imperialism.
‘The Problem of the Rupee’, though dealing with the general history of
the state and currency in British India, was published in 1923 in the very
specific context of a struggle between nationalists and the British
government over the exchange rate. Following the war, the government had
maintained a high official exchange rate of 2 shillings (2s.) to the rupee,
which was opposed fiercely by Indian businessmen with the backing of the
Congress. They attacked it as overvalued, an ‘enormous wrong and
legalized plunder of Indian resources’ which aided the British bureaucracy
(whose salaries and pensions became more valuable in terms of the sterling)
and British exporters to India at the expense of Indian producers and
exporters. They agitated for a low exchange rate of ls.4d. The government
appointed a royal commission; Ambedkar testified before it, broadly
supporting devaluation but at a compromise ratio (1s.6d.) which he argued
would maintain the interests of the ‘business classes’ as well as the ‘earning
classes’ who would suffer from the price rise brought about by
devaluation.3
The book itself was a scathingly critical analysis of British currency
policy over the years. Read in the context of current debates on economic
policy,4 it shows Ambedkar as a moderate supporter of devaluation and an
economist who assumed that within an open economy India could well
compete at the global level (he notes that Indian exports and manufactures
gained at the expense of the British during the period of the low rupee).5
Yet there are qualifications: the concern for balancing capitalist and labour
interests, the argument that Indian growth and exports were actually at the
cost of falling real wages of the working class, and a tone of hostility both
to businessmen and commodity-producing peasants. His conclusion perhaps
gives his perspective: with a high ratio, ‘the burden … imposed upon the
active and working element of a society would be intolerable’ but a too-low
ratio would put the burden on wage earners.
I myself would choose 1s.6d. as the ratio at which we should stabilize …
(1) it will conserve the position of the investing and earning classes; (2) it
does not jeopardize our trade and prosperity by putting any extra burden
on the business class; and (3) being the most recent in point of time it is
likely to give greater justice to the greater number of monetary contracts
most of which must be recent in time.6
And in fact it was the 1s.6d. ratio which the British government accepted.
The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India, published in 1925,
also condemns British imperialism in its description of the way in which
British fiscal politics had impoverished India. Ambedkar attacked the
irrationality of British taxation methods, charging that ‘While the land tax
prevented the prosperity of agricultural industry the customs taxes
hampered the manufactures of the country. There were internal customs and
external customs, and both were equally injurious to trade and industry’7
and that basic taxes like the salt tax and the form of the land tax itself lay
most heavily on the poor. It was clear, he noted, that the British government
was running India in the interest of British manufacturers.
Both this critique and the discussion in The Problem of the Rupee were
well within the framework of standard economics: that is, Ambedkar did
not see the ‘development’ of a backward excolony as a problem, once the
artificial barriers imposed by the colonial state were removed; many aspects
of colonial rule were described as progressive (primarily those having to do
with establishing the infrastructure for growth) and the primary barriers to
progress were seen as more social than economic. The British government,
Ambedkar noted, not only exploited economically but it could not act
against social evils:
 It could not sympathize with the living forces operating in the Indian
society, was not charged with its wants, its pains, its cravings and its
desires, was inimical to its aspirations, did not advance Education,
disfavoured Swadeshi and snapped at anything that smacked of
nationalism … the Government of India dared not abolish the caste
system, prescribe monogamy, alter the laws of succession, legalize
intermarriage or venture to tax the tea planters. Progress involves
interference with the existing code of social life and interference is likely
to cause resistance ….8
Ambedkar went on to aruge that it would be social more than economic
causes that led to nationalist revolt:
It is foolish to suppose that a people will indefinitely favour a
bureaucracy because it has improved their roads, constructed canals on
more scientific principles, effected their transportation by rail, carried
their letters by penny post, flashed their messages by lightning, improved
their currency, regulated their weights and measures,corrected their
notions of geography, astronomy and medicine and stopped their internal
quarrels. Any people, however patient, will sooner or later demand a
government that will be more than a mere engine of efficiency.9
This period, in other words, sees Ambedkar as a general supporter of a
capitalist organization of the economy, assuming its inevitability and
capability of providing growth and being amenable to a balancing of
interests. In this model, the role of the state was to provide infrastructure
and generally handle currency and exchange so as not to discriminate
against any of the major business or agricultural classes of the country.
Though he referred to Keynes, the period is clearly as much pre-Keynes and
pre-‘development’ as pre-Marx. That capitalist economies could come into
major crisis; that specific state-guided development and even state
enterprise was necessary to lift Third World countries out of their poverty
was not part of economic discourse at this time.
Then came the late 1920s and the 1930s, the depression, the new
momentous force for change represented by the Russian revolution, the
upsurge of the working class in India itself and Ambedkar’s own theoretical
and practical confrontation with Marxism. Not only did socialism, defined
in terms of state ownership of the means of production, begin to appear as a
viable reality for working class emancipation; it also began to seem to be
the best route to development for an economically backward ex-colony.
Even standard ‘developmental economics’ by the post-war period began to
assume the necessity of a major role of the state. In the context of all of
these developments, Ambedkar became a socialist, but not a socialist who
had time to work out his economic theory. There were, in fact, no economic
writings after the 1920s.
By the middle of the 1930s, he swung into an economic radicalism that
included the main themes of his time: the exploitation of capitalists and
landlords, the need for state control. His economic thrust underwent a major
change. This could be seen especially in regard to agriculture. His early
writings had expressed support for small peasant property as the alternative
to landlordism (in fact arguing that in terms of available capital equipment,
farms were if anything too large); by the time of the Scheduled Caste
Federation election manifestos he was arguing that for enhanced production
agriculture had to be mechanised. This meant that large farms would
replace small ones, and this could be most effectively done through
cooperative or collective farms.10 The notion of state-guided development,
oriented to industrialization, was taking precedence.
The climatic statement of this economic radicalism came in States and
Minorities, written as a submission to the Constituent Assembly in 1948,
and expressed in the form of proposed constitutional clauses. As a
statement of a general economic and social programme, this is a somewhat
eccentric form. In fact, only two years before Ambedkar had rejected the
idea of a constituent assembly, in language that made it clear he did not see
the constitution as a means for either establishing socialism or liberating the
scheduled castes. He had said,
I must state that I am wholly opposed to the proposals of a Constituent
Assembly. It is absolutely superfluous … there are hardly any big and
purely constitutional questions about which there can be said to be much
dispute among Indians. It is agreed that the future Indian Constitution
should be federal. It is also more or less settled what subjects should go
to the Centre and what to the Provinces. There is no quarrel over the
division of Revenues between the Centre and the Provinces, none on
Franchise, and none on the relation of the Judiciary to the Legislative and
the Executive …. The only function which could be left to a Constituent
Assembly is to find a solution of the Communal Problem.11
Yet, two years later he was submitting a memorandum that sought to make
the constitution a means for the establishment of socialism!
The economic section of States and Minorities calls for ‘state socialism’,
including for the nationalization not only of basic industries but also of land
and its working in collective farms, with peasants treated as tenants of the
state. Arguing in terms of both developmental needs and protection of
working class rights, Ambedkar wrote, ‘State Socialism is essential for the
rapid industrialization of India. Private enterprise cannot do it, and if it did
it it would produce those inequalities of wealth which private capitalism has
produced in Europe.’12 He described pithily the effects of poverty as
making ‘Fundamental Rights’ meaningless, and talks of capitalist tyranny:
Constitutional Lawyers … argue that where the State refrains from
intervention in private affairs—economic and social—the residue is
liberty. What is necessary is to make the residue as large as possible and
State intervention as small as possible …. [But] to whom and for whom
is the liberty? Obviously this liberty is liberty to the landlords to increase
rents, for capitalists to increase hours of work and reduce rates of wages.
It must be so. It cannot be otherwise. For in an economic system
employing armies of workers, producing goods en masse at regular
intervals some one must make rules so that workers will work and the
wheels of industry run on. If the State does not do so the private
employers will …. In other words, what is called liberty from the control
of the State is another name for the dictatorship of the private
employer.13
Clearly Ambedkar, like all socialists and nationalists of his time, was
conceiving ‘socialism’ as a regimented industrialized economy.
Thus the basic proposals of ‘state socialism’ called for state ownership
and management of ‘key’ industries and state ownership of ‘basic’
industries; a monopoly of insurance; and agriculture declared as a state
industry, with the state to acquire (with compensation) rights in land, divide
the land into farms of ‘standard size’ and let them out for cultivation to the
residents of the village ‘as tenants’ to cultivate as a collective farm, in
accordance with rules and directives issued by Government, with the
produce to be distributed in shares among the tenants. It was added,
(ii) The land shall be let out to villagers without distinction of caste or
creed and in such manner that there will be no landlord, no tenant,
 and no landless labourer;
(iii) It shall be the obligation of the state to finance the cultivation of the
collective farm by the supply of water, draft animals, implements,
manure, seeds, etc.
The state would then levy charges for land revenue, to pay the
compensation charges, and pay for the capital goods supplied.14 Clause (iii)
could be interpreted to argue that the state would provide the necessary
inputs according to the wishes of the farming community, or simply provide
financing for inputs that may be procured locally; but still there seems to be
an assumption (as with private ‘industrial–chemical agriculture’) that inputs
for state agriculture would come primarily from outside the village. Here is
an assumption, not only that the state is benign but that agricultural
production (like industrial production) can very well be managed and
directed from above. The fervor to abolish the inequalities of social
relations of ownership is clear (though even here, in allowing
compensation, Ambedkar is not going as far as the left radicals), but neither
the problems of economic exploitation involved in state management nor
those of the process of production in agriculture have been given any
thought.
Following this, a completely separate section on the protection of
scheduled castes as minorities describes their oppression by caste Hindus
and argues strongly not only for a series of safeguards but also for separate
electorates and separate village settlements, which the state is to set up by
giving Dalits forest lands or wastelands. In regard to this, Ambedkar argues
that the roots of discrimination lie in the village system itself:
So long as the present arrangement continues it is impossible for the
Untouchables either to free themselves from the yoke of the Hindus or to
get rid of their Untouchability. It is the close knit association of the
Untouchables with the Hindus living in the same village which mark
them out as Untouchables …. It is the system of the village plus the
Ghetto which perpetuates Untouchability and the Untouchables therefore
demand that the nexus should be broken and the Untouchables who are
as a matter of fact socially separate should be made separate
geographically and territorially also and be settled into separate villages
exclusively of Untouchables.15
While this passage is followed by a description of the dependence of Dalit
labourers on caste Hindu peasants for wages, it makes no reference to a
solution in terms of giving Dalits a share in the land in the same village (in
fact the first paragraph rules this out by describing untouchability as a
reality even beyond economic oppression), while the section on the
‘nationalization of land’ makes no mention of whether the nationalized
villages of untouchables are to be separate. It is as if these are two parallel
solutions to the problems of Dalits, one economic, one social, lines which
never meet.
States and Minorities is in many ways a puzzling though remarkable
book. At one level it shows the heights of radicalism Ambedkar reached in
terms of both economic and caste issues, with his calls for ‘state socialism’
on one hand and the path of protective measures, separate electorates and
separate villages for Dalits on the other. Yet it also shows the disjuncture
between these—as if the programme for liberation was itself paralleling the
mechanical Marxist posture of ‘class’ and ‘caste’ as separate phenomena
operating on different levels of social reality.
Not only is there no linkage between the economic section and the
scheduled castes-as-minorities section of the book, there is also no linkage
to strategy. Ambedkar discussed the fallacies of leaving the construction of
socialism to ‘the whims of a parliamentary majority’, giving this as the
justification for the necessity of writing the clauses into the constitution
itself. But both in regard to state socialism and to the strong concessions to
scheduled castes, was there any possible basis for thinking that the
tremendous influence of landlords, capitalists and upper caste Hindus would
admit such a constitution?
Ambedkar was after all a political realist. States and Minorities was, it
must be concluded, not intended as a serious political document outlining a
programme but as a manifesto designed to be extreme and provocative, not
so much to achieve the implementation of the points it set forth as to draw
attention to its author. Its focus was social equality, not a plan for
organizing the economic production of a society. Whether or not he thought
it was ‘superfluous’, a constituent assembly was being called; Ambedkar
had not been included though he wanted to be, if only to ensure the
continued provision of safeguards for the Dalits. States and Minorities was
designed to achieve this goal mainly, and secondarily to throw some ideas
for the future of India before the public. It was a radical, idealistic
manifesto aimed at some very partial but highly political goals.
In the end, what is striking about Ambedkar’s economic radicalism is the
extent to which it was interpreted in terms of the rationalistic ‘modernism’
of his time: it included a belief in the necessity of industrialization, and the
guiding role of the state as inherently progressive if it could be shielded
from the vagaries of often manipulated political majorities. By the time
States and Minorities was written, Ambedkar was intensely pessimistic
about these ‘political majorities’; there was no organizing on general
economic issues, and the non-Brahman or Shudra worker–peasant masses
seemed ready to identify as ‘Hindus’ in opposition to the Muslims and
sometimes to the Dalits. State protection for Dalits had always been seen as
essential, even in his periods of greater faith in the majority; and now in an
atmosphere in which India under Nehru appeared set to adopt planning and
a ‘socialist pattern of society’ Ambedkar’s main thrust was to look to this
state-guided development as a solution.
On the whole, his socialism had grown out of his interpretation of
democracy rather than, as with Marxism a belief in the revolutionary
destiny and world-creating powers of the proletariat. Thus, while he shared
the belief of both liberals and Marxists of his time in the progressive forces
of industrialism, science and ‘modernity’, he distinguished his views from
communism both in terms of the means necessary to achieve them and in
terms of stressing democracy over the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. In a
sense, ‘state socialism’ was aptly named in contrast to ‘proletarian
socialism’; it retained the belief in the state as a necessary phenomenon in
even a socialist society and sought a share in power of workers and Dalits
without seeing this as creating any unique kind of state. From an orthodox
Marxist point of view, this could justify a rejection of Ambedkar as
essentially ‘petty bourgeois’, identifying the idealism (return to religion)
and reformism presumed to be implicit in his theory with a kind of
backward ‘peasantist’ consciousness; this has invariably been the response
of even the most favourable left assessments.17 But this is not a very helpful
classification and implies assumptions about the meaning of ‘proletarian’,
peasant’, etc., which do not stand the test of time very well.
In fact, the development of ‘Ambedkarism’ in India can be seen as the
particular expression of a world-wide ‘democratic revolution’,16 indeed
perhaps the most consistent one possible in Indian conditions (certainly
more consistent than a ‘proletarian socialism’ which ignored cultural–caste
issues and accepted identities such as ‘Harijan’ and Hindu), one which had
grown out of the experiences and situations of the most oppressed sections
of the people. ‘Democratic revolution’ in this sense almost invariably leads
towards some kind of socialism, and this in fact was how Ambedkar saw it.
As he wrote towards the end of States and Minorities,
The soul of Democracy is the doctrine of one man, one value.
Unfortunately, Democracy has attempted to give effect to this doctrine
only so far as the political structure is concerned by adopting the rule of
one man, one vote …. It has left the economic structure to take the shape
given by those who are in a position to mould it. This has happened
because Constitutional Lawyers … never realized that it was equally
essential to prescribe the shape and form of the economic structure of
society, if Democracy is to live up to its principle of one man, one value.
Time has come to take a bold step and define both the economic structure
as well as the political structure of society by the Law of the Constitution
….18
Ambedkar’s specific recommendations for ‘prescribing the economic
structure of society’ was state ownership of basic industries and collective
farms; this would be questioned by many today along with his faith in a
centralized, industrial factory-based economy. But that the market by itself
cannot guarantee equality, that the state must play a defining and guiding
role—or rather that the members of society must act collectively through
the state to regulate, limit and at points supercede the market—is a thesis
that few (at least in the Third World) would question. This flexible
‘socialism’, coupled with political democracy and non-violent mass
struggle, makes Ambedkar’s economics still relevant today.

• THE CULTURAL REVOLUTIONARY THEORY OF INDIAN HISTORY

Issues of interpretation of India’s culture and history preoccupied
Ambedkar’s research and non-political writing. The fact is that all through
the 1940s, in the face of political–economic tumult and frustrations,
Ambedkar focused his intellectual effort not into the economic problems of
India’s future but into the political questions of its present (such as Pakistan
and partition) and into the cultural interpretation of its past. The great
questions of identity concerned him, questions that arose immediately on
the Dalits’ assertion of autonomy from ‘Hinduism’ and the dominant
cultural–national framework of his time. For the rejection of the Hindu
nationalism, which was beginning to acquire a cultural hegemony in India,
led to the necessity of answering the following questions:
Who were Dalits if they were not ‘Hindus’?
What was their place in Indian society and history?
Who were the other caste groups, Shudras and Brahmans in particular?
What were the driving forces of Indian history?
What would be the driving forces to constitute a future Indian society in a
democratic and equalitarian fashion?
These were the questions that drove Ambedkar to the reconstruction of
India’s caste and religious history. He was not doing this in a vacuum, for in
his time, besides the incorporative Hinduistic tendency, there were existing
answers within the Dalit movement itself, deriving partially from Phule and
expressed most vociferously in the 1920s by E.V. Ramasami (Periyar) of
Tamil Nadu.
Phule, during the nineteenth century, influenced on the one hand by the
European-originated ‘Aryan theory of race’ and on the other by the theistic
doctrines of the ‘Rights of Man’, had formulated some very strong answers:
Dalits, along with the Shudras, were part of an original ‘non-Aryan’
community conquered by invading Aryans from whom derived the
Brahmans; their unique feature was that they had been the bravest warriors
in defense of the subjugated peasant community and so were the ones most
discriminated against by the arrogant conquerors. Violence and ideology
were the driving forces of history; ‘Hinduism’ was nothing but the religious
deception of Bhats to maintain their hold on the masses; peasants were
exploited by Brahmans through the state machinery (consolidation of
violence) and religious trickery. A future Indian society would be
constructed not from the false ‘nationalism’ of a Brahmanic elite but from
the energy of the Shudra–Atishudra masses, and its construction should
begin from the villages (Phule’s writings also included important sections
on the development of agriculture and what environmentalists today would
call ‘watershed development’).19 A necessary feature was the replacement
of Hindu superstition by a universalistic, equalitarian (including the
important stress on women’s rights) and rationalistic religion which Phule
called the ‘sarvajanik satya dharma’ or ‘true religion of the community’.
By Ambedkar’s time, with the impact of socialism and the limitations of
the new framework of ‘class–caste’, these themes were expressed mainly in
the ‘adi’ ideologies which continued to stress Dalits as original inhabitants
and Brahmans as Aryan conquerors, continued to insist on religious reform
and a radical rejection of ‘Hinduism’, but left aside most of the economic
element, the overall interweaving of violence/conquest and exploitation—
and thus very often came down to general racial themes which either posed
‘caste’ against ‘class’ or simply left ‘class’ issues aside.
Ambedkar himself took up some of these themes, rejected others, and
wove a new whole in his interpretation of Indian history, directed to a large
degree to the association of Dalits with Buddhism.
But Ambedkar was also a man of his time, influenced by the general
assumptions of liberalism, socialism and industrialism. In many ways, the
assumptions of mechanical materialism handicapped his efforts at giving a
historical interpretation of caste. In his early period he had dealt with
economic theory only (though in his very rational way) in terms of issues of
financial and monetary policy, leaving aside the analysis of exploitation,
capital accumulation and changing forms of production. Later, though
influenced by economic radicalism and the belief in the necessity of the
state for development, the impact of mechanical Marxism meant that
economic exploitation was interpreted in a way divorced from the social
(caste) structure. For Ambedkar (as for Marx and for Phule) social
processes involved contradiction, violence and exploitation; but Ambedkar
saw these almost entirely in terms of political and group conflict, without
looking at changing economic structures that underlay or influenced these.
This left his interpretation of ancient Indian history incomplete in crucial
ways.
Above and beyond this was his overriding rationalism. This was clearly a
crucial part of his very identity, ranging from the hopes he placed in
industrialism to his insistence on wearing modern dress, with the greatest
critique of Gandhi expressed in his condemnation of his backwardness: ‘the
Gandhian age is a dark age’. Here there were important shades of difference
with Phule at many levels: where Phule had excorciated Hinduism
primarily for its exploitation and oppressiveness (while also seeing it as
irrational), Ambedkar attacked it even more strongly for its irrationality and
superstition; where Phule (and other low caste reformers of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, such as Narayana Guru of Kerala) had still felt the
need to incorporate a god in his ‘religion’, Ambedkar could feel
comfortable only with a religion that effectively sidelined god and was
itself reinterpreted in a rationalized way. Both stressed the need for religion
as a code of morality for an equalitarian society; both attacked Hinduism as
a systematization of superstition, hierarchy and exploitation, but Ambedkar
used, throughout his works, the discourse of ‘reason’, of
rationality/irrationality, whereas Phule was likely to stress benevolence and
compassion as the most important moral value.
In their historical interpretations, similarly, Phule was likely to stress the
sheer violence and brutality of conquest, while Ambedkar wrote in terms of
calculations and conspiracies. In a sense, their historical interpretations
themselves worked at different levels: Phule’s was more in the nature of a
re-mythologizing, building on and creating new symbols important to the
Shudra–peasant community and using the Brahmanic myths and historical
figures such as Shivaji from this point of view. Ambedkar, in contrast, was
defining himself as a scholar, arguing history, contesting historical
interpretations, concerned for the logic and proof of his arguments. In spite
of obvious empirical gaps, for instance not dealing with the Indus Valley
civilization, his work remains a more enduring part of historical discourse
in India, able to contest the Hindu nationalist interpretation on the grounds
of historical validity as well as ideological morality.

• ‘HINDU INDIA’ AND ‘BUDDHIST INDIA’

With Phule and then Ambedkar’s writings on Indian history begins the
construction of an ‘Indian nation’ or ‘Indian people’ not dominated by elite
reinterpretations. One of the most recent influential analyses of nationalism,
Benedict Anderson’s The Imagined Community20 focuses on the degree to
which in modern nationalism, the nation as community itself is a
constructed phenomenon. In truth, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries the high-caste elites of India had been constructing or ‘imagining’
it as a Hindu community, incorporating some of the language of democracy
but most often using a Romantic imagery stressing a community of blood
and race, ‘Hindus’ as a ‘people’ inhabiting the subcontinent, assaulted by
outside forces defined as ‘Muslim’, British or whatever, dominated their
discourse.21 While the Congress and left secularists wanted to assert
another ‘unity of India’ inclusive of Muslim and other religious traditions,
and Gandhians wanted to reinterpret ‘Hinduism’ to allow for a significant
reformism, both accepted the elements of the framework. In particular they
took for granted the identification of the majority of people as ‘Hindus’ and
the identification of the ancient Indian tradition as basically a Hindu one.
This was expressed in the common framework of both British and
nationalist historical writing, which spoke of ‘ancient, medieval, and
modern’ India essentially as ‘Hindu, Muslim and British’ (for the
nationalists, then, modern) India.
The Phule/Ambedkar/Periyar tradition represents the effort to construct
an alternative identity of the people, based on non-north Indian and low-
caste perspectives, critical not only of the oppressiveness of the dominant
Hindu caste society but also of its claims to antiquity and to being the major
Indian tradition. Much more than the ‘Hinduistic’ perspective it took its
stand from a firm rationalism and equalitarianism; the freedom from the
needs of the elite to justify, in part if not in toto, the dominant caste
framework of pre-capitalist society, allowed a much greater expression of
democratic values. Thus the tradition appears—with its concern for
abolition of caste, for the equality of women, for the economic welfare of
peasants and workers, for a rational and scientific society—as the most
consistent expression of its time of a broad democratic revolution. The fact
that Ambedkar focused his intellectual energies on the task of developing
this tradition rather than, say, on the problems of economic liberation of the
Dalits might lead to charges of ‘idealism’—were it not for the fact that the
failure of any other major social–political force to really confront the
underpinnings of Hindu nationalism (today expressed so forcefully in the
rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and all its kin) made this an urgent
need for Dalits and other oppressed.
Ambedkar’s basic perspective begins with a firm rejection of the
degenerate ‘racial’ form which Phule’s ‘non-Aryan theory’ had taken by his
time:
As a matter of fact the Caste system came into being long after the
 different races of India had co-mingled in blood and culture. To hold that
distinctions of Caste are really distinctions of race and to treat different
Castes as though they were so many different races is a gross perversion
of facts. What racial affinity is there between the Brahman of the Punjab
and the Brahman of Madras? What racial affinity is there between the
untouchables of Bengal and the untouchables of Madras? What racial
difference is there between the Brahman of the Punjab and the Chamar of
the Punjab? …. The Brahman of the Punjab is racially the same stock as
the Chamar of the Punjab, and the Brahman of Madras is the same race
as the Pariah of Madras. Caste system does not demarcate racial division.
Caste system is a social division of people of the same race.22
This statement in The Annihilation of Caste is as clear as could be made and
should stand against all attempts today to use Ambedkar’s name as a
justification for a racial theory of caste differences.23 With this, also, though
less drastically, Ambedkar’s emphasis shifted from Phule’s emphasis on
conquest, war and violence as factors in history to one in which the main
historical development was interpreted in terms of conflict between social
systems representing different religious–cultural values, a conflict carried
on in terms of both force and violence as well as political manoeuvring and
creations of systems of ideological deception.
Ambedkar’s extensive writing was published only partially during his
lifetime with The Untouchables (1948) and Who were the Shudras? (1955).
Both were books with a fairly limited purpose, with a broader,
comprehensive theory being formulated in the background, to be published
only as incomplete manuscripts after his death. Who were the Shudras? Is in
part a refutation of a racial interpretation; it argues that the ‘Shudras’ were
originally a section of Aryans in competition with Brahmans and
downgraded in the course of intense factional and political struggle; only
later (and it is added as almost an afterthought) were masses of non-Aryans
absorbed into the now inferior ‘Shudra’ category. It is in the introduction
that Ambedkar identifies himself as a ‘non-Brahman scholar’. The
Untouchables does not even bother to discuss the racial theory; it argues for
a late origin of untouchability, after the major structures of the caste system
were formed, when conquered tribals or ‘Broken Men’ were forced to settle
in villages; it also, strikingly, associates the untouchables with Buddhism
and their strong degradation with the competition of Brahmanism and
Buddhism.
These books were tips of an iceberg that embodied a much more
comprehensive theory that Ambedkar was working on up to the time of his
death, which he outlined as ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Indian
History’. In this work, the particular interpretations of the social origins of
Shudras and the untouchables was put in a much broader, more
fundamentally conceived historical context in which the conflict between
Buddhism and Brahmanism is represented as a civilizational clash in the
process of social evolution in India.
Ambedkar’s thesis is posed most sharply (though without identifying its
proponents by name) to the ‘nationalist’ school which was in reality a
Hindu nationalist school. His argument was essentially that no united
ancient ‘Hindu India’ had ever existed; instead there were ‘three Indias’
preceding the Muslim period. These were:
1. ‘Brahmanism’, describing the Aryan society of the Vedic period and in
reality a barbarian phase;
2. ‘Buddhism’, with the Magadha–Mauryan empires embodying a
‘Buddhist revolution’, the rise of civilization and the assertion of basic
forms of human equality;
3. ‘Hinduism’, or a ‘Hindu counter-revolution’ marked with Pushyamitra
Sunga’s rise to power in north India and associated with Manu, the
triumph of caste, and the subordination of women and Shudras.24
Ambedkar’s phases represent vastly different social systems, with
fundamentally different principles of organizing human life; their conflict
was both at the level of a clash of values and of armies. As he argues, ‘it is
clear that the Muslim invasions are not the only invasions …. If Hindu
India was invaded by the Muslim invaders, so was Buddhist India invaded
by Brahmanic invaders.’25 There was a racial–ethnic element in all of this
in which Ambedkar identifies his heroes to some extent with non-Aryans,
for instance arguing that the Mauryan empire was that of the Nagas,26 but it
is underplayed. As he was always concerned to argue, the clash was not a
racial one but rather ‘social’, involving the efforts of a particularly defined
social group, the Brahmans, to establish and maintain their superiority.
This is a fundamentally different perspective on ancient India not only
from the theorizing of established ‘nationalist’ historians and political
leaders but also from the rather mechanical arguments of leftists, all of
which tended to see Indian civilization as a basically ‘Hindu’ one
originating in the Vedic period and preceeding in an unfolding fashion after
that. S.A. Dange’s crude application of the ‘five-stage theory of history’ to
India begins with an idealization of Vedic Aryan society as ‘primitive
communism’; even the southern communist leader E.M.S. Namboodiripad
treats caste and the village defined by it as a stable structure inherent in
Indian society.27 In contrast, Ambedkar’s theory stresses the contradictions
and exploitation inherent in caste and the revolutionary ‘breaks’ in the
formation of the system. It denies the ancient character of the ‘Hindu’
religion; and it also denies, in effect, the inevitably of its hegemony, the
irrevocable and essential character of its association with ‘India’. In
‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution’, the victory of ‘Hinduism’ was not, in
contrast to Phule and other ‘non-Aryan interpretations’, a once-and-for-all
result of an Aryan conquest; it came after a period of social developments
and group clashes and after an important ‘break’, even breakthrough into
civilization, represented by Buddhism, culminating in the Mauryan empire.
In spite of its incompleteness, this approach is methodologically helpful for
an on-going analysis of the development of Indian society. It also strikes a
theme radically different from his political writings of the 1940s which
accepted a ‘Hindu’ identity.

• A RATIONAL AND SOCIAL RELIGION

In very many ways, the mass conversion to Buddhism in 1956 was the
logical result of this historical–social interpretation: it was Ambedkar’s
effort to put into practice the assertion of a unique identity of Dalits, and to
project it as a possibility for all of India. If his cultural interpretation had
seemed at odds with his political writings which accepted the reality of the
division of India into ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’, now with the conversion to
Buddhism he attempted to put his contestation of Hinduism on a material or
real footing. Buddhism itself was given a ‘liberation theology’
interpretation, as dhamma or social morality and not dharma or religious
ethics. Ambedkar’s constant comparisons of Buddhism and communism
were not simply ways of being ‘anti-communist’; the assertion of a socialist
content to Buddhism was a kind of insistence on the transformation of
existing Buddhism also.
The conversion was the major, massive event of the last stage of
Ambedkar’s life, overshadowing the transformation of the Scheduled Caste
Federation into the Republican Party, overshadowing the alliance of the
Samyukta Maharashtra movement as part of a broad left anti-Congress
front. These were political and economic thrusts due to which the Dalits
were uniting in a broad left movement towards economic emancipation; but
the conversion to Buddhism was seen, by Ambedkar and by large numbers
of those who took part, as a social rebirth, a gaining of a new identity, a way
in which the Dalits were leading, not simply joining, a movement for the
recreation of India.
An editorial in his weekly announced its change of name to Prabuddha
Bharat and interpreted the process of development of the Dalit movement
through the names of its organs; from Mook Nayak (‘Voice of the Silent’) to
Bahishkrut Bharat (‘Boycotted India’)—both stressing helplessness and
suppression—to Samata (‘Equality’) to Janata (‘The People’), the main
journal throughout the 1930s and 1940s, finally to a name that in part
identified it with Buddhism but on the other hand simply meant
‘Enlightened India’.28
Conversion was not an individual act; hundreds of thousands of Dalits
joined him in massive open grounds at Nagpur, and as the conversion swept
the Mahar community throughout Maharashtra it included the practical
consequence of social rebellion, refusing to ‘do the work of a Hindu’, that
is, to carry away dead cattle or perform any of the other of their ordained
caste duties. Such refusals, in individual villages, had brought reprisals and
atrocities from the 1930s onwards, and they were to be a continuing source
of tension in villages throughout the state. Yet the implementation in
practice of a non-Hindu identity, socially conceived, was a massive
achievement and in many areas it did get the support of caste Hindu
peasants, influenced by radical movements and the Satyashodhak tradition.
The inherent problems in simply a ‘religious’ solution remained; Dalits
embracing Buddhism could get caught up in other forms of superstition;
very often Ambedkar’s very rationalism (in contrast to Phule, the disdain
for the idea of reinterpreting existing mass religious traditions) seem simply
to have left ground for re-entry of superstitions centred around Ambedkar
himself, ‘the king of Dalits’. Nevertheless it produced powerful and
positive results. With the conversion to Buddhism Ambedkar achieved what
Phule and Periyar, for all their resistance to Hinduism, had failed to
achieve: making a conscious non-Hindu identity a collective material and
radicalizing force in India.

• THE STRATEGY OF FIGHTING BRAHMANISM AND CAPITALISM

More than any of the other ‘social movements’ in India, arguably more
even than the working class movement (to the extent we can distinguish
that from its communist self-claimed vanguard), the Dalit movement has
had a political thrust: insistence on a share in power as a precondition for
Dalit liberation, interpretation of reservations in terms not simply of
economic gain but of access to power, rejection of the politics of patronage
all have been major themes up to today and we can see their full expression
in Ambedkar: ‘we must become a ruling community’, was only one of his
never-to-be-forgotten slogans.
The political level is one of state power and of the parties that contest for
state power; this, not scholarly research even of a radical type, was the
milieu in which Ambedkar moved and lived. He was above all a man of
strategy, of practical politics, even with his most radical public statements.
Thus, even more than the economic goals he placed before the Dalit
movement, taking precedence for much of the time over his long-term
concerns with cultural–historical reinterpretation, the questions of the
strategy and political forms in which Dalits might mobilize for change was
central to him and to the legacy he left for the movement.
The core of Ambedkar’s political strategy remained constant:
‘Brahmanism’ and ‘capitalism’ were the main enemies (and ‘Brahmanism’
was basically a synonym for ‘Hinduism’, as nearly all his writings made
clear). Dalits, as the super-oppressed and exploited, must maintain their
autonomy, but they also needed an alliance with Shudras or ‘non-
Brahmans’ as a group, and a broad worker–peasant mobilization that would
be the basis for a political alternative to the Congress, which Ambedkar–
like Phule, Periyar, all the social revolutionaries of India—saw as inevitably
dominated by upper castes and exploiting classes.
All of these points remain controversial today, of course, and we can only
briefly deal with them here. The acceptance and analysis of ‘Brahmanism’
as linked with ‘capitalism’ in defining the nature of the Indian state and
social system, for instance, is a question of the basic theorization of caste
and economic exploitation. The assertion of the need for and possibility of
an alliance between the Dalits and Shudras (and not simply as a Dalit–
worker alliance, a concept which would assume that the working class had
left its caste identities behind), also remains controversial. It is related to the
analysis of caste and capitalism, since the possibility of the alliance rests in
the identification of ‘Shudras’ as a caste-exploited toiling section. In spite
of their controversial theoretical character, however, an increasingly large
section of progressive forces in India have accepted, at least to some
degree, these points—in part because a vigorous Dalit movement continues
to insist on them.
Just as controversial, however, is the assessment of the Congress Party. In
fact, while Ambedkar’s characterization of it as ‘bourgeois–Brahman’ was
very close to that of the communists in their early period, it is at odds with
the mainstream of left analysis (expressed most eloquently today in the
writings of historians Bipan Chandra and Shashi Joshi29) which has
depicted the Congress as an ‘anti-imperialist united front’. This was, for
example, the argument used by Swami Sahajanand in his meeting with
Ambedkar in 1938.
Ambedkar’s rejection of this position was not based on any ‘proletarian
essentialism’ which felt that a non-communist or non-working class
nationalism had to be inevitably ‘bourgeois’. He argued in terms of the
caste character and actions of the Congress leadership (asserting that if it
were to be genuinely anti-imperialist he would join it), and there were
certainly solid reasons in his time to see its high-caste leadership as much
too solidly entrenched and organized to be open to change by the forces he
represented. Further, every ‘radical’ force working with this ‘united front’
appeared to get absorbed by its more reactionary, and ‘Hinduistic’ logic;
social reformers were enticed by the Gandhian setting of caste-reformism in
the language of Ram-raj, communists adopted the expedient habit of
leaving aside all discussion on the issue of caste/cultural change and simply
accepting identities such as ‘Harijan’ and ‘Hindu’. There was every reason
to think that only within the framework of an alternative political centre
could working class and anti-caste forces be unified into being a broad force
for cultural as well as economic change.
There was also no reason to assume that the Congress itself as a party
should monopolize the essence of an ‘anti-imperialist united front’: from
the beginning the Congress had included very moderate and compromising
‘anti-imperialists’ while many militant and radical fighters against the
British operated outside of it. By Ambedkar’s day also, though the
Congress was absorbing more of these political forces in practice,
stigmatizing its opponents as ‘pro-British’ and borrowing the language of
the left to characterize both itself and its opponents, there continued to be
important political forces outside it which were by no means in the hands of
the British. A genuine ‘anti-imperialist united front’ would have to
comprise, through some form or another, as many of these forces as
possible, and not just remain limited to one party. The problem with the
most forceful argument today for the ‘anti-imperialist united front’
character of the Congress, that of the Chandra–Joshi school, is a logical
inconsistency: its basic argument is that rather than building a separate and
thus inherently sectarian/diversionary Communist Party fighting against the
Congress, the communists should have worked as part of a ‘left bloc’ along
with Nehru and others within the Congress itself. But if activists could be
‘communists’ without being identified with a particular party, surely they
could also be ‘anti-imperialists’ without being part of the Congress or any
other political party. They could also, from outside, have as crucial a chance
to influence its politics as from inside. A ‘left bloc’ could operate to
comprise both groups within and without the Congress fold, according to
the needs of the time. This was the question not of the effect of having
different political formations, but of the effect of their modes of relationship
with one another.
Ambedkar rejected the ‘left bloc’ forming within Congress during the
1930s under Nehru’s leadership just as strongly as he rejected Gandhism.
He accused Indian socialists of being unfaithful to their ideals due to their
upper caste base, and he warned that no socialist movement in India could
ignore this issue. The fact was that the Nehruvite left was even more
reluctant to give attention to caste than Gandhi was, the masses of youth
who thronged Congress campaigns at the time were still very largely high
caste, and the notion of Dalit or low caste empowerment, which was so
central to their movements for liberation, did not even have a hearing. The
neglect of caste issues for the overriding commitment to ‘class’ was the
crucial point in which Ambedkar distinguished himself from the socialist
political trend. In other respects, he saw the socialists, and particularly the
Lohiaite socialists who took the issue of caste seriously as his firmest allies.
To characterize the Congress as ‘Brahman’ and ‘bourgeois’ did not mean
that it was incapable of undergoing any change or admitting any low caste
people to leadership positions; but rather that its structures of dominance,
both organizationally and ideologically, were such as to draw its members
into a Brahmanic–Hindu framework of interpreting the ‘Indian’ nation and
into incorporation within a capitalist system. It may be argued that
Ambedkar’s understanding of this—particularly of the ‘bourgeois’
character of the Congress, rather of the statist ‘Nehru model’ of
development which it came to accept—was inadequate. The
characterization itself, however, and Ambedkar’s argument for an
alternative political force can be said to have stood the test of time.

• DILEMMAS OF THE ALLIANCE

Thus Ambedkar’s political career was devoted to finding forms through
which Dalits could exert themselves in an autonomous fashion and at the
same time build an enduring alliance with non-Brahmans, Shudras, workers
and peasants. The problem was that by the 1940s and 1950s, this strategy
was becoming more and more difficult to implement.
The alliance attempts went through major phases. The Independent
Labour Party, his first political party, put this directly into practice during
the radical 1930s, as a worker and peasant party with a red flag and Dalit
leadership. But, while it won some major successes (both electorally and in
terms of leadership in mass movements) in the Marathi-speaking districts, it
could not make an impact at the all-India level. And while different forms
of ‘peasant–worker’ or peasant-based parties were coming up in parts of
India, usually with specific ethnic identities, the failure of any national (left)
political force to promote an alternative to the Congress, the fact that both
socialist and communist trends were working within the Congress, left these
attempts isolated.
Under the pressure of events, Ambedkar wound up the Independent
Labour Party and formed the Scheduled Caste Federation in 1942. This
sought to represent Dalits only but on an all-India scale, and had
programmes which focused on Dalit autonomy in the absence of alliances,
i.e., separate village settlements and separate electorates. It expressed a
general disillusionment with the ability of even poor Shudra peasants to
shake themselves out of the ‘Hindu fold’ and the discrimination against
untouchables that this embodied: the long period during which even radical
peasant organizing had not touched on caste issues, the failed dialogue with
peasant leaders and the non-Brahman parties, was apparently having its
effect. Ambedkar continued to see Shudras as oppressed by the caste
system, but he was discouraged by their apparent unwillingness to shake off
Hindu illusions: as he wrote in one of his unpublished manuscripts.
It is obvious that these three classes [untouchables, Shudras and tribals]
are naturally allies. There is every ground for them to combine for the
destruction of the Hindu social order. But they have not … the result is
that there is nobody to join the untouchable in his struggle. He is
completely isolated. Not only is he isolated, he is opposed by the very
classes who ought to be his natural allies.30
Behind this was also the reality of the overriding political importance of
the ‘Hindu-Muslim’ question, which meant seeing the large body of non-
Brahmans as essentially ‘Hindus’. Along with leaders and activists
throughout the country, Ambedkar was being forced to take the major
identities of ‘Hindu community’ and the ‘Muslim community’ as the
overriding reality beyond either class or regional identities.
A pessimism about a ‘peasant’ alliance accompanied that about the
‘Shudra’ alliance. The turn to a traditional left type of economic radicalism,
in fact, was also making the prospects of forming a peasant alliance more
difficult. As we have seen, Ambedkar had never hesitated to support
peasant movements (in spite of the tensions and contradictions between
mainly labourer Dalits and caste Hindu peasants) and in his early days he
had argued for an economy of peasant small property, expressing fears
about the upper caste control that large centralized properties would bring.
Thus he supported not only anti-rent campaigns against landlords, but also
anti-revenue, i.e., anti-state campaigns. So did the early communist
movement; in fact the earliest statements of programmes saw anti-revenue
as the central form of peasant struggles in ryotwari areas, comparable to
anti-rent struggles in zamindari areas.
After this, however, the communists switched to discussing only anti-
money-lender struggles, leaving out the question of the state as a direct
exploiter, an extractor of economic surplus; and Ambedkar more or less
followed them. Collective farms, i.e., state management, which he proposed
as ‘nationalization of land’, came to be the main radical programme for
agriculture. The earlier support for small peasant holdings was gone. Both
proposals for collective farms and ‘separate village settlements’ assumed
that within a primarily small holding if inequalitarian peasant community it
would be impossible for the Dalits and other sections of the landless could
fight for and win access to land and other resources. In effect they assumed
that there was no overriding common interest that could unite the Dalits
(primarily labourers but also small peasants) with a large section of Shudra
caste peasants.
But collectives could not be a solution that laid a basis for such an
alliance. Peasants with small holdings tend to resist collectivization and top-
down cooperative farms; whether one sees this as a ‘petty-bourgeois’
holding on to small property or as a toiling people’s resistance to an
oppressive statism. Today, decades of experience of collectivization and
nationalism, as well as some of the oppressive aspects of even
‘cooperatives’ when they are accompanied by pressures on peasants, the
promotion of mechanized and high-energy using chemical agriculture, and
the forced purchases of peasant products at low prices, are all leading to a
search for different kinds of rural restructuring. Decentralization and
community control of natural resources, the combination of small
individual holdings and collectively-managed ‘common property
resources’, the balance of needs for equity within the village and that of a
strengthening of village autonomy and access to resources against the
central state, are all becoming major themes of ‘alternative development’
models. But none of this thinking and experience was available during
Ambedkar’s time. It was quite natural for him, representing the most
‘proletarianized’ section of the villages, to place his hopes in collective (or
statist) forms in agriculture as well as industry. But, in a long transition in
which traditional feudal landlords were gradually being overridden and
peasant farmers were coming to confront the ‘developmentalist’ state, in
which landlords extracting rent were being replaced by the state extracting
grain levies and money-lenders were being replaced by state agencies as the
main source of peasant debt, this meant that it was increasingly difficult to
have an alliance with the peasantry.
A ‘Dalit–Muslim’ alliance has been another theme of movements
claiming to fight Brahmanism and capitalism. As will be seen in Chapters 9
and 10, it was strongly supported by sections of the Indian Dalits,
particularly in Hyderabad and Bengal. In contrast to the issues of ‘Shudras’
and ‘peasants’, however, it has to be stressed that Ambedkar never took this
up as a strategic alliance. He had his periods of discussion with Jinnah, and
even joined him in 1939 in celebrating Congress resignations from the
provincial ministries. He wrote in detail on the question of Pakistan as well
as on linguistic states, setting out the justifications first for forms of federal
autonomy that would have given Muslims sufficiently controlled territories
to maintain a broadly united India, then for the existence of a Muslim state
itself. But this did not mean, like some Dalit spokesmen today, that he had
any great personal attraction for Islam and its presumed militancy, or that he
saw a Dalit–Muslim alliance as a core of his strategy.
Nor did he see ‘oppressed nationalities’ as potential allies; the concept
was not even within his framework of thinking. His writings on the issue of
linguistic states and on Maharashtra as a linguistic state reveal a strong
emotional resistance to ‘linguistic nationalism’; they endorse the often-
expressed fears that linguistic states would generally mean an increased
dominance of large ‘peasant jatis’, and they argue for the formation of
smaller states but more on grounds of administrative rationalism, calling for
the break-up of large states into smaller common-language states, i.e., four
Maharashtras, three states in each Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh and
so on. Ambedkar’s conviction of the overriding caste reality of India was so
strong that he did not see separate linguistically-based cultures as a major
reality, and he (perhaps understandably) lacked the particular Marxist
linkage of language and nationality.
Thus, in a period during which the major social and political forces that
might have made a broad liberatory movement possible were becoming
separated from one another, with some of their dynamic elements simply
absorbed into the Congress; when Gandhians and the leftists alike were
being marginalized, when neither ‘Shudras’ nor ‘peasants’ nor ‘minorities’
nor ‘oppressed nationalities’ appeared as viable allies for building a united
movement or coalition with the Dalits, much of the Scheduled Caste
Federation organizing was on a pressure group basis. The significant period
of the 1940s and 1950s thus appears as a basic defeat of Ambedkar’s major
project, that of creating a revolutionary and equalitarian mass political
platform.

• THE REBIRTH OF THE RADICAL UNITED FRONT

However both Ambedkar’s practical political enthusiasm and the enduring
character of his efforts for a non-Congress Dalit–worker–peasant alliance
went into another phase at the end of his life, a rebirth that came with the
movement for a united Maharashtra state (the Samyukta Maharashtra
movement). Strikingly here the issues of nationality or ‘sub-nationality’
(linguistic nationality), caste and economic exploitation were combined.
Ambedkar had been, as noted, extremely ambivalent on the issue of
states reorganization, generally opposing language as a basis for state
formation, calling for smaller states. His theorizing on ‘nation-formation’
did not give scope for seeing language as uniquely a national feature; he
generally shared the centralizing tendencies of industrially-oriented
modernists and with the majority of India’s political elite he accepted
partition as a necessity for disengaging from a Muslim minority whose
demands for autonomy would have made a strong central state
impossible.31
Once the call of politics came, though, he was unambiguous: the demand
for a united Maharashtra was to be supported, in spite of fears of Maratha
caste domination. Part of this was perhaps a strong Marathi identity; his
criticisms of the Maharashtrian Brahman Congress leaders that they wanted
a ‘rajya of bhats’ was accompanied by the charge that a bilingual Bombay
state would mean a subordination of Marathi-speakers:
Just as bhatjis built Maharwadas to provide village workers for free in
India, so our Gujarati shetjis have in an aggressive way established a
bilingual state that would be useful for them and turned all of
Maharashtra into a Maharwada for Gujarat.32
Even more, he was enthusiastic about the movement because of its
potential for a powerful anti-Congress front. Spokesmen of the Scheduled
Caste Federation took the lead in arguing for a massive oppositional unity,
this time including the communists, and for militant struggle to achieve a
united Maharashtra.33 It was the period during which the Federation was
being transformed into a new party, the Republican Party of India, which
was now aimed at becoming a party of all the exploited and oppressed and
not merely of Dalits. The Federation’s executive resolution to establish the
party was put in the specific context that the time had now come to establish
one united front to oppose the Congress in the forthcoming general
elections.34 Y.D. Phadke’s study of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement
also argues that Ambedkar made three conditions for the Republican Party’s
alliance with the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, that the Samiti would take
up the issues of the rural poor and that it would not just be a one-time adhoc
alliance but would be made permanent as a broad, left movement.35
In fact this very brief period saw a return to the radical politics of the
1930s. The Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti represented a coming together of
socialists, communists, Dalits, a new upsurge of a left–Dalit struggle and
the first united left political front in Maharashtra after independence. It
brought forward leaders and themes, including those rooted in satyashodhak
traditions, that had been part of the broad democratic movement throughout
the colonial period in Maharashtra; at the popular level the upsurge of
‘communist tamashas’ such as the one led by the Dalit communist poet
Annabhau Sathe could unite themes of caste and class oppression.
Furthermore, it was relatively successful. What could not be achieved
prior to independence, a decisive defeat of the Congress in Maharashtra,
was done by the Samiti, with many Dalits elected on its tickets. The samiti
itself disappeared and Congress dominance returned, but some alliance
campaigns remained, focused on the rural poor; most notably Dadasaheb
Gaikwad of the Republican Party and radical left peasant leaders such as
Nana Patil (hero of the ‘parallel government’ in Satara and a new member
of the Communist Party) joined to lead large satyagrahas for Dalit, tribal
and other landless to get forest land for cultivation, first in 1956 and then in
1965, the most massive struggles in India on land and peasant issues before
the re-emergence of radicalism during the 1960s. Thus, the formation of a
party in which Dalits would lead all exploited sections, and the formation of
a united left front were, along with the conversion to Buddhism, major
events just before Ambedkar’s death.
 NOTES
1. Janata, 25 June 1938. This may have been written by Ambedkar himself or by A.V.
Chitre (information from Y.D. Phadke); at any rate it can be taken as representing
Ambedkar’s views.
2. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Volume III (Bombay: Government of
Maharashtra Education Department, 1987), p. 444.
3. B.R. Ambedkar, ‘The Problem of the Rupee’, in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and
Speeches, Volume VI (Bombay; Government of Maharashtra, 1989), pp. 680–81; see
also Rajat K. Ray, Industrialization in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979),
pp. 245–47 for a description of the controversy.
4. See Narendra Jadhav, Dr. Ambedkar: Economic Thought and Philosophy, (Pune:
Sugawa Prakashan, 1993).
5. See B.R. Ambedkar ‘The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India’, in Writings
and Speeches, Volume 6, pp. 425–30.
6. Ambedkar, ‘The Problem of the Rupee’, p. 681.
7. Ambedkar, ‘The Evolution of Provincial Finance’, p. 75.
8. Ibid., p. 233.
9. Ibid., p. 234.
10. Election Manifesto of the Scheduled Caste Federation (n.d., probably 1951), Vasant
Moon’s Collection.
12. B.R. Ambedkar, ‘The Communal Deadlock’, in Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings
and Speeches, Volume I (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra Education
Department. 1979), pp. 355–80.
12. B.R. Ambedkar, ‘States and Minorities: What are Their Rights and How to Secure
Them in the Constitution of Free India’, (first published 1947) in Writings and
Speeches, Volume I, p. 408.
13. Ibid., p. 410.
14. Ibid., pp. 396–97.
15. Ibid., p. 425.
16. For the most recent leftist interpretation see Thomas Mathew, Ambedkar: Reform or
Revolution (New Delhi: Segment Books, 1991), esp. pp. 134–43. Mathew very
cautiously refrains from making his critique of Ambedkar directly.
17. For the main contemporary analysis, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1989); for a discussion that is used
 for analysis of India see the writings of Thomas Blum Hansen, especially Politics and
Ideology in Developing Societies: An Exploratory Essay (Copenhagen, 1991).
18. Ambedkar, ‘States and Minorities’, p. 412.
19. See Bharat Patankar, Jotiba Phule ani Sanskrutik Sangarsh (in Marathi) (Bombay:
Lokwangmay, 1991).
20. Benedict Anderson, The Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origins and Spread
of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983).
21. See Hansen, Politics and Ideology.
22. ‘Annihilation of Caste’, in Writings and Speeches, Volume I, p. 49.
23. For example, Dalit Voice which takes the ‘racial’ line of interpretation has never dealt
with these writings.
24. Writings and Speeches, Volume III, pp. 419–20.
25. Ibid., Buddhists today, in response to Ayodhya claims, are seeking the Buddhist stupas
and caves underlying ‘Hindu’ ones in India. The ‘Pandava caves’ near Nasik in
Maharashtra could be cited as an example: their main figures are Buddhist ones from
the Satavahana period. The current struggle (1992) over ‘liberating’ the Bodh Gaya
centre for Hindu control also exemplifies the issue.
26. Ibid., p. 273.
27. S.A. Dange, India: From Primitive Communism to Slavery (New Delhi: Peoples
Publishing House, 1972). This is savagely critiqued by D.D. Kosambi, ‘Marxism and
Ancient Indian Culture’, in A.J. Syed (ed.), D.D. Kosambi on History and Society
(University of Bombay, Department of History Publications, 1985); and E.M.S.
Namboodiripad, Kerala:Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Calcutta: National Book
Agency. 1968).
28. Prabuddha Bharat, 4 February 1956.
29. Shashi Joshi, The Struggle for Hegemony in India, 1920–1948: The Colonial State, the
Left and the National Movement, Volume 1: 1920–1934 (New Delhi: Sage, 1992).
Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, K.N. Panikkar and Sucheta
Mahajan, India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: Penguin Books,
1989).
30. ‘The Untouchables: Children of India’s Ghetto,’ in Writings and Speeches, Volume V
(Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1989), pp. 115–16.
31. See Pakistan or the Problem of Partition and Asim Roy, ‘The High Politics of India’s
Partition’.
32. Janata, 15 October 1956; also 5 November 1956.
33. Janata, 17 December 1955.
34. Janata, 6 October 1956.
35. Y.D. Phadke, Politics and Language (Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House, 1979), pp.
60–61, 241–42.
 CHAPTER 8

Mysore, 1930–56: The Politics of Ram-

Raj

In contrast to the dramatic events in the Marathi and Telugu-speaking areas,

Mysore state (indeed all the Kannada-speaking districts), represented a kind
of backwater in the last decades of colonial rule. There was neither an
Ambedkarite (as in Maharashtra) nor a Marxist (as in Andhra) challenge to
Congress hegemony among the Dalits, or among the masses in general.
Nevertheless, perhaps even because of this lack of a clear political
challenge, the Mysore case allows us to discern some major themes of the
bourgeois–Brahman incorporation of Dalits in modern India.
Gandhi, as has been noted, described Mysore state as a model of ‘Ram-
Raj’ and indeed the Kannada-speaking districts provided fertile ground for
‘Harijan’ activity after 1930. Nevertheless. ‘Gandhism’ was only one of the
ideological components that guided state politics, another being state-
directed modernization: Although Gandhi himself had condemned
industrial civilization as ‘satanic’, the state was in the forefront of efforts to
sponsor industrialization. Economic planning and other versions of ‘state
capitalism’ were taken up quite early, and an application of the ‘Bombay
Plan’ to Mysore in the 1940s summed up this experience: ‘In fact, the era of
experimentation is past; the principle of State ownership and management
had been firmly established and is bound to play a decisive role in the post-
war industrialization of the state’.1
A third component was non-Brahmanism, which in its Mysore
incarnation lacked the revolutionary social ideology of pioneers such as
Phule and Periyar and took instead the shape of a caste movement, with the
politics of reservation as a focus and with the ultimate result of constituting
various sections of non-Brahmans as interest groups fighting for their share
of the pie. It was easy enough for Dalits to be inserted in this process as a
very unprivileged interest group but one that was still given access to some
meager share of wealth and status, enough to keep it quiet and enough, also,
to arouse resentment among other poor sections. In this way Mysore did
become a model ‘Ram-Raj’ but one with a modern Ram, a flourish of
technology, and an effort to assimilate and ignore Shambuk rather than
openly punish him for demanding equality.
The patterns of politics in Mysore were set from the decade of the 1930s,
and they lasted until the late 1970s. It is sometimes argued that the regime
of Devraj Urs (1972–80) represented a break with the patterns of Kannada
politics because of his populism and building of a kind of alliance with
minority small castes (including Dalits and ‘other backward castes’ against
the peasant-based Vokkaligas and Lingayats who had dominated politics till
then.2 However, Congress politics in Karnataka had some element of
populism from the beginning, and a building of a base among the scheduled
castes, minorities and high castes to confront a political ‘opposition’ basing
itself among the middle peasant castes was a strategy which began during
the 1930s and solidified with Indira Gandhi’s leadership during the late
1960s. Urs represented only the specific Karnataka version of this.
The real break with this incorporative model in Karnataka came, we
would argue, not with Urs nor any ruling party politics, but with the
emergence of a new Dalit movement during the 1970s represented mainly
by the Dalit Sangarsh Samiti, a new opposition farmers’ movement, the
Rayat Sangh and a women’s movement. By the end of the 1970s a tentative
alliance had emerged. These movements based themselves not on
Gandhism, caste competition ‘non-Brahmanism’ or statist modernization,
but on ideological trends which were weak though still evident during the
period of this study. These were Marxism, which had only a limited spread
in the Bangalore working class and a small presence in the Bombay
Karnataka and coastal districts during the 1950s; Ambedkarism, which had
been centred mainly in the Kolar gold mines; and Lohiaite socialism, which
emerged during the 1950s as a distinctive effort to take up the problem of
caste from within the socialist tradition, making its impact in Karnataka
with a peasant movement in Shimoga district.
This chapter, therefore, will focus on the role of Gandhism during the
1930s and then examine the process of non-Brahman politics to see how
these came together to set the dominant pattern of incorporation of Dalits in
Karnataka state. A final section will look at the significance of ‘Lohiaism’
as a new ideological trend in anti-caste politics.

• GANDHISM IN KARNATAKA: MORAL UPLIFT

AND LEGAL REFORM

‘Originally they were called Holeyas and Madigas. That name was changed
and they were styled as Panchamas and then as Depressed Classes. Only a
few years back they were called Adikarnatakas, and now they are known as
Harijans’. So remarked one Muttaswamy Gowda in a debate in the Mysore
legislative council in 1935, and the remark aptly captures the way in which
the Gandhian ‘Harijan’ identity rapidly gained hegemony.
The ‘Harijan movement’ took shape immediately after the Poona Pact,
and became a major national campaign from 1932 to 1936.3 The movement
had basically three strands. The first was ‘moral and spiritual uplift’
(including some attention to educational and minimal material living
conditions) through the Harijan Sevak Sangh. The second was legal reform,
which, during the mid–1930s, focused on efforts at legislation, undertaken
in alliance not only with liberals but also some prominent conservatives and
Hindu Mahasabhites, aimed at opening up at least some temples to the
untouchables. The third strand, less noted in the literature, was the
encouragement of ‘nationalist’ anti-Ambedkarite Dalit organizations, most
notably the All-India Depressed Classes League (or Akhil-Bharatiya Dalit
Jati Sangh) founded in Kanpur on 16–17 March 1935, and the Bihar Khet
Mazdoor Sabha, founded in 1937, both under the leadership of Jagjivan
Ram and aimed, respectively, against Ambedkar on the one hand and the
Kisan Sabha on the other.4 Strikingly, these latter organizations did not
come to Karnataka, obviously because here the Gandhian–Congress
leadership had no radical Ambedkarite or kisan movement with which to
contend.
The Harijan Sevak Sangh emerged directly out of the Poona Pact. A
quickly called meeting of caste Hindu representatives in Bombay on 25
September 1932 presided over by Madan Mohan Malaviya called on caste
Hindus to ‘secure by legitimate and peaceful means an early removal of the
social disabilities of untouchability, including temple entry’. On 30
September a public meeting resolved to set up an ‘All-India Untouchability
League’ charged with opening public wells, dharmshalas, roads, schools,
crematoriams and burning ghats as well as ‘public temples’. The League
was set up with a constitution adopted at Delhi on 26 October. Then after
one of his flashes of inspiration, Gandhi resolved to change the name to
‘Harijan Sevak Sangh’.5
Ambedkar opposed the League/Sangh on two points: first, he insisted that
the goal of any organization working on the problems of the Dalits should
not simply be the ‘removal of untouchability’ but the eradication of
chaturvarnya, the caste system itself. Second, leadership should be in the
hands of untouchables. These demands were unacceptable to Gandhi, for
whom the primary purpose of the Sangh was not to be an organization of
Dalits for emancipation but a body for the reform of Hinduism. With these
differences the split between Ambedkar and Gandhi crystallized, and the
Gandhians in the Congress went ahead with their ‘Harijan programme’.6
Gandhi’s nation-wide ‘Harijan tour’ (7 November 1933–2 August 1934)7
gave birth to widespread activity in the Kannada-speaking district.
According to one account
Karnataka was in the forefront of the Harijan movement. Branches of this
Sangh were soon started in Bijapur, Belgaum, Karwar, Mangalore, Coorg
and Bellary, with Hubli as the headquarters. When Gandhiji toured
Karnataka in connection with the movement, he met a great enthusiasm
everywhere.8
The British had a somewhat more jaundiced viewpoint and reported that
when Gandhi visited Mysore in 1934 crowds gathered only out of curiosity:
‘there is very little enthusiasm over the Harijan movement’.9 Nevertheless,
numerous branches were founded in the state also. There it came under the
lead of Gopalaswamy Iyer and another prominent Gandhian, Tagadur
Ramachandra Rao.
A ‘Mysore Report’ given by T. Ramachandra in Gandhi’s weekly
Harijan gives a picture of its typical activities:
Religious: 123 Harijan bhajans were conducted by the workers of the
League. In the village of Kengeri Harijan bhajans were also attended by
the local caste Hindu youth who partook in prayer and prasad. After the
bhajans, talks were given on moral and spiritual uplift.
 Temperance and Sanitation: With the kind cooperation of the
Bangalore Temperance Federation and the Mysore State Red Cross
society, who supplied us with charts, lantern slides and literature, 49
lectures were delivered to the Harijan slum quarters in Bangalore city,
five in Mysore city and 43 in rural parts.
In the village of Tagadur, the workers of the Khadi Centre and the
Satyagraha Ashram organized the sweeping of the village and Harijan
quarters, in which work the Sannyasis of Ramakrishna Math, Mysore,
took part. The workers are daily visiting the Harijan quarters and
educating children in the Ashram school.
General: On the motion of Mr. P. Subbarama Chetty, MLC, the
chairman of the Provincial Board Working Committee, the Bangalore
City Municipal Council have promised Rs 2000 in this year’s budget to
give lighting and sanitary conveniences in the city slums inhabited by the
Harijans. Similar appeals have been made to other municipalities in the
state.
A largely attended meeting of Harijans and caste Hindus was held in
Chintamani during the month. It was addressed by the presidents of the
Kolar and Bangalore districts and important office-bearers of the League.
A local centre was formed for intensive Harijan work.
Mr. G. Gopalaswamy Iyer has been provided with one second class
pass over the Mysore State railways for doing Harijan work …
Notice of resolutions and interpellations have been sent by the
members of the Representative Assembly requesting the government to
introduce legislation throwing open public tanks, wells, roads and
resthouses to all castes and communities, with a penalty clause for
anyone obstructing the use thereof. Another resolution asks the
government to appoint a whole-time officer and a separate staff and
allotment of funds to look after the interests of the Harijans.
A Harijan Sevak Sangh has been formed in Bangalore Cantonment. In
Davanagere a Harijan Sahaja Sangh has been formed and they are
conducting a school for the Harijan children.
Medical Relief: 950 Harijans were treated during the month in the
Deena Seva Ayurvedic dispensary, which is given a grant of Rs. 30 per
month by the League. The Assistant to the doctor pays regular evening
visits to the Harijan quarters throughout the city, addressing people on
 health and sanitation … (Harijan, 9 September 1993).
The thrust is clear. On one hand, bhajans, harikathas and exhortations
against drinking alcohol, meat-eating, animal sacrifice, extravagant
expenditure, the whole realm of a Sanskritizing moral uplift. An important
part of this was the adoption of the campaign against the Basavi form of
‘prostitution’, as ‘caste Hindu ladies’ visited Harijan quarters in Bangalore
and Mysore to lecture on the issue and two big village conferences were
held in April–June 1936 in which the ‘Harijans’ resolved to give up the
custom and appealed to the government to make it a penal offence.10 In
such activities Gandhian dedication joined hands with other middle-class
‘moral uplift’ efforts (the Temperance League, the Red Cross). On the other
hand, there was lobbying with the state to provide some minimal social
services. Education was an important focus, and by 1940, 14 day schools
and 17 night schools, with a total strength of 666 pupils, were conducted by
the Harijan Sevak Sangh.11
Legal reform was also an important effort. The Poona Pact provoked a
vigorous attempt at the national level to do something about temple-entry,
at a time when militants such as Ambedkar were losing interest in it. The
model was provided by a bill proposed by C.S. Ranga Iyer in the Central
Legislative Council, backed by prominent liberals and Mahasabhaites. In
Mysore the Anti-Untouchability League under the leadership of T.
Ramachandra drafted a bill in March 1933, arguing for the respectable
antecedents of the legislation, providing for temples to be thrown open on a
non-compulsory basis to Dalits.12
Appeals for this legislation included pious sentiments about the uplift of
the Depressed Classes, the exhortations of Swami Vivekananda to the
Mysore ruler, and the Maharaja’s own exhortation that ‘sincere workers
should act to link the government to the people’ and ‘interpret the one to the
other’ and that ‘the long silence of the Depressed and the humble will be
broken and the full responsibilities for their well-being shouldered by the
educated and well-to-do classes.’13 Murugesaram Pillai, the most radical
Dalit spokesman of the time, injected a warning note: if temples were not
thrown open, ‘the Hindus in Mysore will be totally alienating the
sympathies of 10 lakhs of people who might have to break away from the
Hindu fold and get converted to another religion.’14
All of this was to no avail. The government simply declared that it could
not take any action regarding temple entry. No legislation was passed. In
1936 the Dalits were invited for the first time by the maharaja to take part in
the Dussera darbar; in 1938 an order was given for the entry of
untouchables to the Jain temple of Shravanabellagola at Bellur, and
withdrawn after vigorous protest by the Jains. And this was the sum total of
administrative action by the state on religious rights of the Dalits during the
1930s.
Very little was done by the Gandhians, also, for the land rights which
were emphasized in the Dalits’ own initiatives and in their appeals in the
assembly. The only exception was a ‘conference of workers in the Harijan
cause’ organized on 16 June 1935 in Mysore and presided over by
Jawaharlal Nehru: resolutions appealed to the government to give land for
agricultural colonies in the Irwin Canal area, sites for houses, provision of
drinking water facilities, increased grants for hostels, scholarships and other
school fees, and preferential appointments in government service.15 But
there was little else besides appeal to the government. A similar stress on
welfare services could be seen in the Deena Seva Sangh, led by L.N. Gutil
Sundaresam, which emphasized in non-caste terms the ‘moral and material
uplift of the masses’, working among slum dwellers, cotton mill workers
and scavengers, starting morning and evening schools, providing medical
services and employing four full-time workers to toil the state.16
The dominant Gandhian–Brahmanic reform effort was thus focused on
religiously-defined moral upliftment coupled with appeals to a paternalistic
state. Gandhians never targeted the system as ‘exploitative’ and never spoke
against caste as a system or campaigned against traditional caste duties
within the jajmani system; the entire mobilizing effort of the Harijan Sevak
Sangh and similar bodies was from the top down, mobilizing the middle
classes and upper castes to act ‘for’ the downtrodden and conspicuously
avoiding scope for the Dalits to organize themselves.
In spite of these limitations, the Gandhian efforts were, until perhaps the
1970s, practically the only forum where some kind of philosophy of
equalitarianism and social mobility could reach any significant number of
rural Dalits. Thus, for example, Edward Harper reports for the Malnad area
of Shimoga district in the late 1960s,
Discontent among Holerus is sometimes fostered by Government
officials or Congress party workers who hold ‘Harijan uplift’ meetings in
 which speakers promulgate a philosophy of equalitarianism, exhorting
untouchables to assert their newly acquired legal rights, to improve
themselves by acquiring land, to refuse to become indentured, to hold
their heads high, and to bathe more frequently.17
Harper also reports the negative response to these appeals by many Dalits,
who were sceptical about the possibility of acquiring land and the
difficulties of breaking with bonded labour. He thus describes a minimal
improvement in the position of the Dalits, coupled with a strong underlying
‘hostility’ towards the entire system which (at the time he was writing) had
little scope for open expression.18
Thus the ‘alienation’ threatened by Murugesaram Pillai could never
really be organized, and Mysore Gandhism did in many ways function to
hold the Dalits within the statist economic system and within the Hindu
religion, primarily by making it almost impossible for a radical Dalit
leadership to emerge. But that alienation was there, that considerable
bitterness existed even during the 1930s, can be seen in a report by a
Maharashtrian Mahar who visited Bangalore with a group of engineering
students in 1937. He described impressive educational and employment
achievements, including four hostels for untouchable students, two special
colonies, two medical clinics, free education for untouchables from primary
school to the time of gaining employment, and a good number of Dalits in
high-level employment. After seeing this he was reluctant to ask students of
the Harijan Sevak Sangh hostels what their views were on Ambedkar,
assuming their expressed ‘love for the Maharaja’ would be carried over to a
warmth for the Hindu religion itself. But the militancy of the response
surprised him:
When Ambedkar said two years ago that we can’t get any rights in
Hinduism and got support from all parts of India, what was the reaction
of your people and other Hindus in the state? ‘We not only agreed with
conversion, but at that time we all decided to become Muslims. Though
other Hindus fear Untouchables’ conversion, still they don’t have the
strength to prevent it. Mysore officials themselves don’t agree that
temples should be open to untouchables. Then what need do we have for
a religion that has no humanity? Humanity is more important than wealth
or authority. So it seems that not only in Maharashtra but in the most
progressive Hindu state in India, you can find Ambedkar’s followers!19
• DALITS, NON-BRAHMANS AND THE POLITICS OF RESERVATIONS
While in Mysore Gandhism provided both an incorporate ideology and an
institutional mechanism whereby reformist Brahmans could build a kind of
alliance with Dalits, the non-Brahman movement, centred not on radicalism
but on the all-pervasive politics of reservations, provided an equally
important context for assimilation.
Though the reservations policy in Karnataka has one of the longest
histories in India,20 at its inception and for a long time afterward it was
oriented to general ‘non-Brahman’ (or ‘backward caste’) concessions
without special provision for the Dalits. The Miller Committee of 1919 had
recommended only general provisions for non-Brahmans (within 7 years
they were to get 50 per cent of higher level appointments and two-thirds of
lower level ones) and this became the basis for a subsequent government
order. There were no special provisions for the Dalits and would not be
until they were given political reservations in 1940. This contrasted with the
rapidity with which the Dalits made and won special claims in other parts of
India, and reflected their politically weak position. But the general
reservation policy during the 1920s and 1930s led to a situation in which
the ‘non-Brahmans’ became a loose and contenious alliance of different
caste groups and communities, engaged in political opposition to the
dominant Brahmans but quarreling about each other’s share of the general
allotment. Tensions developed between Hindu non-Brahmans and Muslims;
there were continual murmurings that Lingayats and Vokkaligas were
getting the dominant share; and there were even gloomy predictions from
higher non-Brahman spokesmen that ‘if special preference were given to
the Depressed Classes then there would be only two dominant groups in the
civil services—the Brahmans and the DCs!’21
Natraj calls this ‘the first public admission on the part of caste Hindus of
a fear of Harijan domination—a cry that is heard all too frequently today’.22
The whole situation existing during the 1930s suggests to him a kind of
‘deja vu in reverse’ in which most politics becomes focused on
maneuvering for a share of the pie with the argument that one’s own
caste/community is really the most backward and oppressed while others
are using the general policy of reverse discrimination to move ahead. This
saw the stamping of the Dalit as a kind of ‘sarkari brahman’ even while
they were in the worst position:
The most pathetic and distressing was the position of the Depressed
Classes. They had few spokesmen. Few, if any among them, made it to
the top in the civil services. I cannot think of a single Harijan member of
the council. Naturally their solitary spokesman, Murugesan Pillai,
expressed the fear that by being clubbed with the non-Brahman group all
smaller communities would be swamped. On many occasions we see him
debating whether to continue as part of the uneasy non-Brahman
alliance.23
But the ‘pathetic and depressing’ aspect of the position of the Dalits
during the 1930s was not so much in being at the bottom of the social-
economic ladder; that was true throughout India and in many material ways
their condition in Mysore was better (it certainly impressed Dalits from
Maharashtra). Rather it was the general fearfulness, passivity and patronage
orientation of their leadership.
Here there was some contrast with developments among non-Brahmans
during the 1930s, especially the major Vokkaliga and Lingayat groups. The
rural links that were being developed from 1930 onwards by elite urban
non-Brahmans gave them the self-confidence to allow space for a more
general nationalist participation—and this moved the rural masses more
than patronage and reservation benefits. The Praja Paksh and the Praja
Mitra Mandal had merged in 1935 to form the People’s Federation; the
series of conferences on peasant issues planned by the Federation was given
up under pressure from the authoritarian state, but the direction was evident.
The Federation won most of the seats in the 1937 election, but it was clear
both that the future lay with the rising tide of nationalism and that the large
non-Brahman peasant communities no longer needed the crutch of support
from a princely state.
An upsurge in state people’s movements was going on at the time,
unleashed by the Haripura Congress resolution in February 1938 and
generally coinciding with an all-India worker and peasant radicalism.24 The
Mysore Congress, now dominated by non-Brahmans, held its first session
as an independent body on 11 April 1938. This was followed by the
‘Vidurasurathan incident’ in which 32 people, mainly peasants, were killed
in police firing over a flag-raising dispute. Though the Gandhians sought a
compromise, a militant second session of the Mysore Congress attended by
30,000 people at Viduras resolved to hold a 1938 ‘September satyagraha’.25
Gandhi sought a compromise in Mysore on the grounds that it was one of
the cases where the state peoples’ movements was taking on a ‘communal’
complexion. Thus his secretary Mahadev Desai, who came to Mysore,
charged in his report that the Mysore Congress was ‘not representative’
because of little Brahman involvement and Muslim opposition.26 In fact
there was a general process in many states in which a majority community
on joining the Congress was taking the national movement in hand and
using it to challenge the role of outsiders/high castes/religious minorities
who had dominated the states’ administrations. The situation in Mysore was
actually far more benign than in places like Hyderabad where the
dominance of the Arya Samaj bad severe Hindu–Muslim tension, and one
may wonder whether in fact the Gandhians feared most the potential anti-
caste, anti-Brahman aspect of radical movements. In any event, the Mysore
non-Brahman leaders let themselves be argued into a compromise, and
politics in the state settled back into its placid processes of negotiation.
Dalits, however, remained aloof from even this much struggle. The
testimony of the Adi-Karnatak Abhirridhi Sangham and the Adi-Jambara
Abhiriddhi Sangam of Bangalore (basically Murugesaram Pillai’s
organizations) before the Srinivasa Iyengar committee on constitutional
reforms in 1938 was that
When Responsible Government is introduced, it will naturally lead to the
predominance of certain communities not sympathetically disposed
towards the aspirations of the Adi-Karnatakas, and therefore there is
every likelihood of their position not being in any way improved under a
scheme of Responsible Government—with power in the hands of
communities by whom they had been kept down in the past.27
This represented a clinging to a beneficent autocracy that contrasted with
Ambedkar’s militant nationalist opposition to the princely states. It also
represented a tendency to accept an alliance with Brahmans and other
‘minority’ castes out of fear of domination by the large peasant-based non-
Brahman castes; this was also in contrast to Ambedkar’s continuing efforts
to build a Dalit–Shudra alliance against Brahmanism.
The Dalit position taken here was an outcome of a situation in which
sections of a Brahman elite had worked for over a decade to build up some
base in a ‘Harijan’ constituency, while non-Brahmans had mainly focused
on reservation-oriented interest group politics. Dalits were partly rewarded
for their loyalty when the Government of Mysore Act of 1940 reserved 67
of 310 seats for minorities and of these 30 for the Depressed Classes; the
position was thus set for the post-independence situation in which Dalits
would be constitutionally and legally guaranteed a share as ‘scheduled
castes’. But the failure to evolve a political vision of liberation, or to
organize an autonomous Dalit movement, or become participants in any
vigorous movement against the system is stark.There was no Dalit
liberation movement in Mysore state, only processes of incorporation
accompanied by unresolved problems of social and economic exploitation
and the underlying hostility that continued to be generated by them.

• LOHIAITE SOCIALISM: PEASANTS AND

ANTI-CASTE MOVEMENTS
Marxism and Ambedkarism, as we have seen, never had much force in
Karnataka before the recent decades. During the 1950s, though, we see the
entry of another ideological trend, that of Lohiaite socialism, which in
crucial ways was a break both with Gandhian reformism and the
mechanical Marxist focus on ‘class’ which until then had affected all
sections of socialists in India.
Member of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Socialist Party, Dr. Ram Manohar
Lohia had resigned from the CSP in 1939 along with others in protest over
communist domination, and had been one of the militant underground
leaders in the 1942 movement. After independence he broke with the
Congress to help form the Socialist Party (SP). In 1952 the SP merged with
the Kisan Mazdur Praja Paksh (a party with its biggest base in Andhra,
drawing on the Ranga non-communist rural organizing tradition, though
Acharya Kripalani was its nationally known leader). This culminated in the
Praja Socialist Party (PSP), and in 1955 Lohia and other ‘left wing
militants’ broke from the PSP to revive the Socialist Party, which had its
greatest national base in the south. Although the Socialist Party (later the
Samyukta Socialist Party) remained small and electorally unsuccessful, it is
credited by political scientist Rajni Kothari with being ‘the most dynamic
among the non-Congress parties’.28 This was partly due to its strategy,
initiated by Lohia, of an anti-Congress ‘Grand Alliance’, and partly due to
its innovative policy on caste, class and gender issues.
Lohia saw caste as a crucial aspect of domination and exploitation in
India, and projected an alliance of ‘Shudras, Harijans, Muslims, Adivasis
and women’ as central to a revolutionary movement. He stressed the need
to build up the leadership of these sections:
With faith in the great crucible of the human race and equal faith in the
vigour of all the Indian people, let the high-caste choose to mingle
tradition with mass. Simultaneously a great burden rests on the youth of
the low castes. Not the aping of the high-caste in all its traditions and
manners, not dislike of manual labour, not individual self-advancement,
not bitter jealousy, but the staffing of the nation’s leadership as though it
were some sacral work should now be the supreme concern of women,
Sudras, Harijans, Muslims and Adivasis.29
The caste system was blamed for excluding 80 per cent of the country’s
population from public life, causing the enslavement of the country, and
maintaining low productivity in both agriculture and industry: Its
destruction was the ‘supreme need of public life’. And the programme of
the Socialist Party and related organizations included demands for 60 per
cent reservations (preference in politics, government service, military, trade
and industry); purifying religion of the taints of caste; promotion of
intermarriage as a long-term solution and common dining as an immediate
programme of integration; and a consciousness-raising call for studies,
debates and seminars on the issue of caste.30
Much of this was drawn from the decades-long struggle of Dalits and
non-Brahmans. But Lohia’s attention to women’s oppression went beyond
that of Ambedkar (and in this he is perhaps comparable to Phule) and
included an open attitude on sexuality that represented a break with Hindu
pativrata puritanism. In a 1953 essay on ‘the two segregations of caste and
sex’ as the primary factor in the degeneration of India, he argued,
India is perverted today; with all their talk of sex purity, the people are by
and large dirty in their ideas of marriage and sex … Celibacy is generally
a prison-house … It is time that young men and women revolted against
such puerilities. They should remember that there are only two
unpardonable crimes in the code of sex conduct: rape and the telling of
 lies or breach of promise. There is also a third offense of causing pain or
hurt to another, which they should avoid as far as possible.31
Lohia insisted that a women’s movement should focus on the needs of the
80 per cent low-caste toiling women—needs in which such minimal
facilities as drinking water were more important than legal reform: This
attitude on issues of sexuality and marriage, which are central to the right to
live a life not subordinated to that of husband/father/son, gave Lohia a
unique position in the India of his time.32
Lohia is criticized by the Marxist left for neglecting ‘class struggle’, for
not linking his anti-caste programme to one of ending economic
exploitation, and for having a generally ‘reformist’ perspective: ‘He does
not advocate a revolution—peaceful or otherwise— involving the
overthrow and destruction of the existing order. He aims at its reform …
without endangering its foundation’, writes one critic.33 Later, in the
‘Marxist-Lohiaite’ debates that were to take place in the context of
Karnataka’s Dalit Sangarsh Samiti, Marxists accused the Lohiaites of
ignoring the immediate exploiters of Dalit agricultural labourers in their
policy of trying to have a ‘Dalit–Sudra alliance’ that included the dominant
castes. It was also argued that the Lohiaites tended to fall into reformist
illusions regarding electoral politics when those close to them came into
power in Karnataka.34
To a large degree these accusations seem unfair. Lohia was redressing the
Marxist neglect of caste by attempting to give a specific programme on
caste issues, and by seeing the caste system (and gender relations) as a
specific structure of oppression in Indian society. Lohia himself was
perfectly aware that sections of ‘shudras’ were often the most brutal direct
oppressors of the Dalits. At times he argued that such castes as the Nairs,
Mudaliars (Vellalas), Reddis, Marathas, Lingayats and Vokkaligas were not
actually ‘shudras’ but ‘for all practical purposes equal to the Kshatriya–
Vaishya of the North’.35 He also argued for dealing with local exploiters
even when they were part of a broader alliance of the oppressed:
The inequalities of exploitation are grossest in those lands where poverty
is great …. There is little clamour or organization against the massive
exploitation in local communities, against oppressive tyrannies of a local
order arising out of mutual relationships among the local powerful and
locally depressed. Such relationship as exists between the rack-renter and
 the shop-keeper, the moneylender and the artisan, the landowner and the
agricultural labourer, the consumers and the government together with
the stockists, the police must be fully and publicly exposed.
Organizations must be formed and campaigns conducted with a view to
reforming these relationships. More often than not, the exploited and
exploiter in such relationships constitute the depressed part of humanity:
they are both poor in the background of international or Euro-American
living standards. Some have mistakenly thought that they should not raise
local disputes for fear that these might divide the masses. The way to
raise these vast masses consisting also of the petty exploiter to decent
living standards is to bring local relationships into the open and to
campaign and organize vigorously against local tyrannies and
exploitation.35
This was a clear enough position and not so different from the classical
Marxist argument for a ‘united front’ against a main enemy or Ambedkar’s
arguments for unity of workers, peasants, Dalits and Shudras against a
‘Brahman-bourgeois’ Congress. More to the point, the main thrust of
Lohia’s economic orientation was different in crucial ways from the
traditional Marxist (and Ambedkarite!) position, drawing more on Gandhi,
oriented to political decentralization, rejecting large-scale production and
heavy industry, perceiving state bureaucracies as well as private capital as
exploitative36 Lohia argued, for perhaps the first time in India, that the
conflict between the private sector and the public sector coincided with that
between the ‘bureaucratic high-caste’ and the ‘trading high-caste’, i.e.,
between Brahmans and Vaishyas, and was thus only illusory and superficial;
instead, a ‘total rebellion is the only way out’.37
At certain points Lohia urged that the anti-caste cause be taken up
through ‘class organizations’, with the Kisan Panchayat in particular
playing a major role, arguing that the subordination of the peasant mass
organization to the upper-caste party leadership blocked this.38 In fact the
major entry of ‘Lohiaism’ into Karnataka socio-political life seems to have
taken place in the context of what some have called one of the few real
peasant movements in recent decades, the ‘Kadoga satyagraha’ in Shimoga
district.39
Shimoga, next to north and south Kanara, had one of the highest
concentrations of big landholdings in Karnataka, and with leadership from
socialists and some Congressmen a tenants’ organization had been formed
in the Malnad area in 1946 with a demand for ‘two-thirds’ share to the
tenant. In 1948 a separate and somewhat more radical association was
formed in Sagar taluk based on the backward caste Dewar tenants, and its
struggle reached a climax in 1950–51 centring on Kadogu village. The
movement won no dramatic victories (and also neglected the Scheduled
Castes and agricultural wage issues), but the provision of vethbegar by
backward caste tenants was halted, landlord-tenant relations were
formalized, and by 1974 with the populist measures of Devraj Urs tenants
did gain some access to land.40 This struggle took place under the
leadership of the Socialist Party; Lohia himself visited the district in 1950
and later wrote praising the courage and common sense of the poor peasant
men and women in the struggle.41
‘Lohiaism’ did, then, have militancy. Nevertheless there were some clear
ways in which his theoretical and practical positions could be called
‘reformist’. In crucial ways he lacked the sharpness and revolutionary
attitudes of both the Ambedkarites and the Marxists. With regard to caste
and Hindu religion, his liberal attitude towards Hinduism reflected the
‘Sanskritizing’ north Indian traditions of protest rather than the militant
anti-Hindu stance of such southern leaders as Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar.
Symbolic was his call for temple-entry long after militant Dalits had
rejected it. Lohia’s eloquence on cultural issues often simply sought the
liberal strand within Brahmanic–Hindu tradition, for instance in contrasting
the orthodox ‘Vaisishtha’ tendency with the liberal ‘Valmiki’ tendency, in
playing up Draupadi in contrast to Sita as the ideal Hindu woman but
without dealing with the oppression suffered by either. Lohia’s approach
was based on the faith that ‘Hinduism’ could be purged of caste hierarchy
and Brahmanism. In remaining within this framework, without a sharp
critique of the limits of religious reform and in the context of focusing on
reservations as a general anti-caste programme, it can be argued that the
result was a general preservation of the caste equation, only in the more
‘modern’ form in which castes are transformed into interest groups and vote
banks.
Similarly, Lohia lacked the Marxist sharpness on the issue of economic
exploitation, the analysis of capital accumulation and the relations of
production. He never stressed the linkage of caste and exploitation as such;
he wrote instead of ‘spiritual and moral decline’, ‘repression’ and
‘segregation’. This meant visualizing caste at an idealistic level, as a
superstructural feature—which is how most Lohiaites in India continue to
argue the issue. Similarly, whatever his innovative economic programme,
the vision of decentralized village-oriented development was never
translated into a path of struggle to achieve this; Lohia remained limited to
parliamentary politics. And at this level, his antagonism to the Nehru model
of heavy industrialization and planning got translated into a blanket ‘anti-
Congressism’ centred around bringing all the opposition together in a
‘Grand Alliance’. This theme has remained in the opposition to this day and
by including such communal and Brahmanic forces as the Jan
Sangh/Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh/ Bharatiya Janata Party tradition it
simply substitutes an unprincipled unity that makes more difficult the
building of a true opposition growing on the basis of an alternative vision.
Lohiaism, then, did not come into Karnataka as an ideology of full-scale
Dalit liberation but rather as a reformist trend which was in some ways
compatible with the liberal co-optation patterns that had been established in
the ‘Ram-raj’ atmosphere of the state. Nevertheless, Ambedkar considered
the socialist tradition that Lohia represented closer than almost any other
political force, and it is arguable that many of Lohia’s limitations were
those of his time, when an anti-statist decentralized political economy had
little material base to build itself as a force.

NOTES
1. Bjorne Hettne, The Political Economy of Indirect Rule: Mysore, 1881–1947 (New Delhi:
Ambika Publications, 1978), p. 302.
2. See M.N. Srinivas and M.N. Panini, ‘Politics and Society in Karnataka’, Economic and
Political Weekly, 14 January 1984; Lalitha Nataraj and V.K. Nataraj, ‘Limits of
Populism: Devraj Urs and Karnataka Politics’, Economic and Political Weekly, 11
September 1982; and James Manor, ‘Pragmatic Progressives in Regional Politics: The
Case of Devraj Urs’, Economic and Political Weekly, Annual Number, February 1980.
3. A.C. Pradhan, The Emergence of the Depressed Classes (Delhi: Bookland International,
1986), p. 250.
4. On Jagjivan Ram’s life see Prabhakar Maxwe, Shri Jagjivanram: Vyakti and Vichar
 (‘Jagjivan Ram: Person and Thought’) (Mumbai: Somayya Publications, n.d.).
5. Pradhan, Emergence, p. 240.
6. Ibid., see also Source Material on Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar and the Movement of
Untouchables, Volume I (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1982), pp. 101–08,
120–23.
7. Pradhan, Emergence, p. 243.
8. G.S. Malappa, History of the Freedom Movement in Karnataka, Volume II (Mysore:
Government of Mysore. 1966).
9. Cited in Hettne. Political Economy, p. 187.
10. Harijan, 6 July 1936.
11. Ibid., 4 January 1936.
12. See reports in Harijan, 13 May 1933 and Proceedings of the Mysore Representative
Assembly, June 1933.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., October 1933, p. 261.
15. Harijan, 6 July 1935.
16. Ibid., 16 November 1935.
17. Edward Harper, ‘Social Consequences of an Unsuccessful Low Caste Movement’, in
James Silverberg (ed.), Social Mobility in the Caste System in India (The Hague:
Mouton, 1968), p. 56.
18. Ibid., pp. 50, 57.
19. T.B. Bhosle, ‘Ambedkar’s Disciples in Mysore State’, Janata, 11 December 1937.
20. See the papers given at the Seminar on Reservations, Karnataka Study Forum, 1982.
21. Cited in V.K. Nataraj, ‘The Politics of Reservations’, paper presented at Seminar on
Reservations, Karnataka Study Forum, Mysore, 8–9 August 1982, pp. 4–5.
22. Ibid., p. 5.
23. Ibid., p. 9.
24. Ian Copland, ‘Congress Paternalism: The “High Command” and the Struggle for
Freedom in Princely India 1920–1949’, in Jim Masselos (ed.), Struggling and Ruling:
The Indian National Congress (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1987). pp.
121–40.
25. Hettne, Political Economy, pp. 196–98.
26. Copland, ‘Congress Paternalism’, pp. 130–31; Hettne, Politial Economy, p. 198.
27. Cited in Hettne, p. 110.
28. Rajni Kothari, Politics in India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1970), pp. 187, 318.
29. Ram Manohar Lohia, The Caste System (Hyderabad: Ram Manohar Lohia Samata
 Vidyalaya Nyas, 1979), p. 105.
30. Ibid., pp. 113–14, 122–23.
31. Ibid., pp. 7–8.
32. It would be interesting to investigate if there was any influence on Lohia of the Oudh
Kisan Sabha led by Baba Ramachandra, which had by the mid-1930s (under the
leadership of Ramachandra and his wife Jaggi) developed some fairly radical positions
on women’s issues, including calls for equality in the family and assertion of the
legitimacy of all unions between men and women (which among the lower castes were
frequently formed in violation of Brahmanic norms). See Kumar Kapil in Kum Kum
Sangaria and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women (New Delhi: Kali for Women
Press, 1988).
33. Ajit Roy, ‘Caste and Class: An Interlinked View’, Economic and Political Weekly,
Annual Number, February 1979, p. 306.
34. Discussions with V. Laxminarayana, K. Shrikant and Dalit Sangarsh Samiti activists;
any reading of the Marxist literature on the Kannada struggles during this period will
make the point obvious.
35. Lohia, Caste System, p. 143.
36. Ibid., pp. 24–25.
37. Ibid., p. 112.
38. Ibid., pp. 10–16.
39. Srinivas and Panini, ‘Politics and Society in Karnataka,’ p. 69.
40. M.V. Nadkarni, Farmers’ Movements in India (Ahmedabad: Allied Publishers, 1987),
pp. 19–22.
41. Lohia, Caste System, p. 12.
 CHAPTER 9

Andhra and Hyderabad, 1930–46:

Foundations of Turmoil

By the 1930s and 1940s, in spite of internal regional peculiarities, the

Telugu-speaking areas can be analyzed as a unit. Developments in one
region had their impact on another and many leaders exerted influence at
the level of the linguistic region. A dynamism was driving the whole area
forward.
Some all-India developments were finding a centre here. In the
background of a strong peasant movement and developing resistance to the
Nizam’s autocracy, the radicalization of politics throughout the country
took on a revolutionary thrust in Andhra. A Communist Party unit was set
up here and it acquired a strong base among all sections of exploited rural
toilers and went on to lead the largest peasant revolt in Indian history. At
the same time, the communalization of Indian politics was seen in the
hegemony of Hindu fundamentalism within the Congress-led nationalist
movement in Hyderabad, polarized against Muslim fundamentalism which
was providing the main base for the regime. Both the Telengana peasant
revolt and Hyderabad Hindu–Muslim tension climaxed in the tumultuous
events of the transition to independence. Finally, in spite of all this, the
establishment of Congress hegemony became nearly complete: what is
remarkable in its triumph over the communists is not the brutal suppression
of the Telengana revolt but the fact that subsequently it was able to erode
the party’s greatest mass base in India,1 while the ruthless takeover of
‘Azad Hyderabad’ coupled with a policy of some concessions to Muslims
within the framework of a ‘Hinduistic’ Congress effectively kept Hindu–
Muslim tension in the region at a low level after independence.
What role did the Dalits and the caste issue play in all of this? As we
have seen, a vigorous autonomous Dalit movement had emerged in both
coastal Andhra and Hyderabad during the 1920s. Dalits constituted an
economically and socially radical and anti-fundamentalist force which
resisted absorption into either a strong ‘Hindu’ or a strong ‘Muslim’
identification, agitating for rights to land and fair wages and, as such,
feudalism and for combining the fight against social and economic
oppression. Yet during the 1930s and 1940s we find them being pulled in
various directions by the major forces in Telugu politics, either into the
communist movement or into a pro-Hindu Congress or pro-Muslim politics
of patronage, without being able to affect events very much. By the 1940s
the ‘Adi-Andhra’ movement in the coastal districts had disappeared, its
leading activists absorbed as either Congress or communist ‘Harijans’. In
Hyderabad, crucial sections of the factionalized, vociferous Dalit petty-
bourgeoisie were pulled into pro-Hindu or pro-Muslim/pro-Nizam
positions, overwhelmed by the promises of patronage on the one hand or
the tides of nationalism on the other, each representing a social power base
and accompanied with convincing ideological rhetoric. The sections who
aligned themselves with Ambedkar tried to constitute a ‘third force’ but
were unable to do so effectively; in Hyderabad during the 1940s both the
rationalistic thrust and organizational incapacity of Ambedkar’s all-India
leadership becomes clear.
In the end, an Ambedkarite ‘Dalit movement’ had little impact. The
common erosion of both Dalit and left politics in post-independence
Andhra remains a crucial puzzle in the analysis of contemporary India,
while the events of the last decade of colonial rule—the rising peasant
movement of the 1930s, Telugu nationalism, the joining of the two in the
Hyderabad armed revolt and its subsequent suppression—are central events
of the transition to independence. This chapter will examine the background
of these events from the perspective of the Dalit movement.

• COASTAL ANDHRA: PEASANTS AND COMMUNISTS

During the late 1920s a strong peasant movement arose in the coastal
Andhra districts which by the 1930s became the centre of the region’s
politics. This region of Madras Presidency saw a tumultuous combination
of a strong market-oriented peasant cultivation and the highest prevalence
of the zamindari system in the face of the buffetings of the Depression and
the apparent prosperity of the war years.2 In caste terms the peasant
movement was based primarily on the Kammas, who found themselves
politically confronting a Brahman-controlled Congress and the landlords
(often Velamas and Reddys) dominating the Justice Party. Some of the
Kammas associated themselves with N.G. Ranga and later struggled for
dominance in the Congress, while the more radical youth led in the
formation of a Communist Party unit. Both sections fought it out in the late
1930s for control of the peasant movement, and competed to win over and
organize agricultural labourers and Dalits.
The organized peasant movement dated from 1923 when Ranga, a
Kamma of Guntur district, returned from England and formed a local Ryots
Association after the 1920–21 upsurge in the region. The organization
marked time during the dull decade of the 1920s, but in 1928—the same
year as Bardoli put the cause of anti-revenue movements on the political
map— the Andhra Provincial Ryots Association was founded at Guntur. It
had a moderate programme of rural reconstruction, scientific agriculture,
cooperation and organization on immediate economic issues.3 But within a
year a vigorous agitation against the government’s proposed increase in
revenue rates gave it a radical impetus, and by the second conference at
Vijayawada, Ranga was putting forward the slogan of ‘kisan raj’ or ‘ryot
raj’ (‘peasant rule’). From 1930 demands were made for moratoriums on
debt and rent arrears. About the same time a Zamindari Ryots Association
(of tenants) formed in 1926 was taken over by new leadership associated
with Ranga, and took a radical turn including a big struggle against the
huge Venkatagiri Zamindari in Nellore district in 1931. The demand for
abolition of zamindari began to be voiced.4
Ranga was jailed during these agitations, and after his release in 1934–35
began to move into the Congress, with the organizing of both peasants and
Dalits. He founded the Peasants’ Institute for training cadres at Nidubrolur
in his home district of Guntur and began to tour the district with the slogan
of ‘kisan raj’.5 During the same period a ‘Harijan Seva Dal’ was formed
with the active support of his wife and both toured in Guntur and Krishna
districts, launching a temple entry campaign in the village of Govada.
Associated in this ‘Harijan’ work were other notable social reformers such
as Unnava Lakshminarayan, author of Mallepalle and Guduru Ramchandra
Rao, the Krishna district reformer who had inaugurated the first Adi-Andhra
conference in 1917. The general secretary of the Andhra branch of the
Harijan Sevak Sangh, M. Bapineedu, was also a colleague of Ranga.6
Along with this Ranga began pushing for an all-India peasant
organization. This was at first opposed by the Bihar movement,7 but it
gained the support of the Congress Socialist Party, which was formed in
January 1936 at Meerut by a group of young Congress leftists who, like
Ranga, were concerned to carve out for themselves a unique identity and
base within the Congress fold. Thus, an ‘All-India Kisan Congress’, with
Ranga and Jayaprakash Narayan as joint convenors, and Swami Sahajanand
presiding, was formed during the 1936 Lucknow session of the Indian
National Congress. It had two main points of action: a demand for abolition
of all systems of landlordism, and a demand for abolition of land revenue
(to be placed by a graded income tax). A process of distancing from the
Congress began with a change of name to ‘All-India Kisan Sabha’ and
though the second session in Maharashtra in December 1936, with Ranga
presiding, again coincided with the INC session, it was the last one to do
so.8
When CPI organizing was initiated in Andhra in 1934 a struggle for
dominance began in the Kisan Sabha and the Congress Socialist Party. The
period between 1938 and 1942 saw intense factionalism among communists
and non-communists in the Kisan Sabha. Ranga, a leader of the anti-
communist faction, was a focus of this and in the fourth session of the
Sabha at Gyay in 1939 his presidential address was not accepted, while a
strong political resolution ‘reflected the left ideology of the time’ in
stressing agrarian revolution as central, the worker–peasant alliance, and the
unity of the people against imperialism through the Congress.9 Ranga
describes fighting communist opposition to get the goal of fighting
imperialist domination declared to be ‘a democratic state of the Indian
people leading ultimately to the realization of Kisan-Mazdur Raj’.10 Intense
factional struggles were going on in the Andhra Ryots Association also, and
the communists succeeded in winning over a large percentage of the cadre
coming out of Ranga’s Peasant Institute.11
Yet, until Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 led the
Indian communists to offer support to the British regime in ‘people’s war’
against fascism, there was little programmatic difference between the
communists and their ‘Ranga-ite’ or socialist rivals. Much of what went on
seems a war of slogans: Ranga initially talked of ‘kisan raj’, the
communists pushed ‘mazdur raj’ and in response Ranga adopted ‘kisan–
mazdur raj’. But if the communists were making this a point of difference it
was a bit puzzling, since Lenin himself had declared the Russian revolution
to be the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’.
While claiming to possess a ‘scientific’ ideology, the CPI appeared to suffer
from good deal of ideological confusion as it stubbornly resisted bringing
the peasantry into the slogan.
What ‘mazdur raj’ or the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in fact signified
was a communist determination to keep control of mass organizations. The
consequences of this were decisive when in 1942 a Central Kisan Council
meeting attacked the biggest mass independence struggle, the Quit India
movement, as ‘acts of mob violence … sabotage, destruction etc.’ which
‘create conditions of anarchy and disruption which are being taken
advantage of by the fifth column agents for their nefarious ends’ and
appealed to kisans and the people to turn aside from ‘the path of sabotage
and terrorist and destructive activities’.12 Within a year not only had Ranga
quit the Kisan Sabha but such other major independent peasant leaders as
Indulal Yagnik and Swami Sahajanand had also become inactive. Hard
mass organizing work won the communists control of the Sabha in Andhra
and many other areas nationally, and in coastal Andhra they used the
opportunity provided by the lifting of the British repressive machinery from
1943–44 to broaden their base impressively.
The Andhra communists were unique in India in being drawn from the
main non-Brahman castes. Of their regional leadership, P. Sundarayya, Ravi
Narayan Reddy and Badam Yella Reddy were all Reddis (the latter two
from Hyderabad state), while B. Basavapunniah, C. Rajeshwar Rao, C.
Vasudev Rao and N. Prasad Rao were Kammas. (This Kamma–Reddi
dominance lasted well into the post-independence period and included D.V.
Rao, T. Nagi Reddy, Chandra Pully Reddy and Kondapalli Sitaramayya.)
This origin has been criticized as leading to a ‘kulak’-oriented party with a
tendency to compromise with rich peasant interests. A typical
characterization is that by Dhanagare:
The rich Kamma kulaks formed the class base of the Andhra Communist
 Party and provided the party with funds and workers …. The leading
Communists of the Andhra delta and Telegana were well-to-do peasants
and came either from the Kamma or the Reddy caste of peasant
proprietors. It was therefore to the interests of the rich peasants who
dominated the party that all other subordinate agrarian classes, such as
the small holders (middle peasants) and tenants and sharecroppers (poor
peasants), quite as much as the landless labourers, formed an alliance and
launched a combined offensive against the handful of rich absentee
landlords ….13
Although Dhanagare goes on to note that ‘the power and dominance (of the
big landlords) could not be threatened otherwise’, this criticism is an
example of an analysis whose most extreme form can be seen in the left
critics of the Telengana movement such as Barry Pavier and Jacques
Pouchedass who see the entire pre-independence peasant movement, with
all its communist leadership, as sacrificing the interests of the rural poor to
those of ‘dominant caste rich peasants’.14
The approach raises many questions. First, it is unclear whether ‘agrarian
classes’ can be so clearly demarcated; doing so has been most often a
matter of dogma rather than empirical analysis. Second, characterizing
caste-groups such as the Kammas and Reddis as ‘peasant proprietors’ also
reflects a questionable absorption of caste into class; both groups included a
large range, from poor peasants (and even labourers in the case of some of
the coastal Kammas)15 to landlords; most of the communist leaders did in
fact come technically from landlord and not even ‘rich peasant’ families. If
this class/caste origin conditioned their approach (which it undoubtedly
did), even more severe questions could be raised about the Brahman origins
of Indian communists in other states—and it leaves the question of how
they could, if they did, continue to dominate a movement even when it
recruited so many of a lower class/caste origin.16
More important is the question of whose interests were objectively
served at the time. While it was certainly in the interests of the rich peasants
to form an ‘alliance of all agrarian classes’, it was equally in the interests of
the landless and poor peasants. In fact, the ‘kulak’-dominated leadership of
the Andhra peasant movement did more to organize agricultural labourers
than anywhere else in the country. With the foundation of the Agricultural
Labour Union in coastal Andhra it grew to a membership of 60,000 in
1945–46 compared to figures of 5,000 to 15,000 in other regions.17 Local
wage struggles began to be organized and many of these were quite
militant. A study focusing on the east Godavari area shows a very militant
line in the 1938–39 period, climaxing in a 15-day strike of 10,000 labourers
in 13 villages, met by heavy state repression and the jailing and killing of
leaders. It was partly because of this that after the revival of the union in
1943 a strike for wages focused against the single biggest landlord in the
village.18 Hargopal, reporting on the study, considers this a retreat from
militancy, but it is equally arguable that the more moderate movement of
the later period was more effective in meeting the interests of the
labourers.19 There certainly were limitations in agricultural labourer
organizing and perhaps even more in confronting the problems they faced
as members of ‘untouchable’ castes, but it is hard to argue that these were
due mainly to an alliance strategy.
There was also no clear difference between the communists (whether
from ‘kulaks’ or of other castes) and the non-communists on this issue.
While Ranga is characterized as a typical ‘rich peasant’ leader (and later in
life he turned to the pro-capitalist Swatantra party), still his efforts to draw
agricultural labourers and Dalits into an alliance during the 1930s and
1940s were not so different from those of the communists. As he wrote,
The Peasants’ Institute has been advocating, from its very inception, a
harmonious comradeship between the peasants and workers on the land,
based upon a mutually settled relationship between the prices of
agricultural products and wages, both to be made dependent on decent
and rising living standards of both peasants and workers. The Andhra
Kisans have long ago realised the need for a common front to be put up
by both the landed and landless kisans.20
Even stronger language about the need for an alliance was used by the
Bihar leader Swami Sahajanand in 1938:
Of late, some people have begun a tirade against the Kisan Sabha in the
name of agricultural labourers. According to them, kisans are exploiters.
Their object is not so much to serve them as to flirt with zamindars who
are the common enemy of both kisans and khet mazdurs. They should
realize that the service of the khet mazdurs and friendship with the
zamindars are contradictory …. The khet mazdurs are after all landless
kisans. Those who had lands yesterday have none today, and those who
 have them today will lose them tomorrow, and thus, while possessed of
lands, they are kisans, and deprived of them we call them khet mazdurs.
But this process is progressively going on and there can be no strict line
of demarcation between these two sections of kisans. Those who seek to
draw one are the common enemies of both.21
This hard-hitting speech referred not to Trotskyites or other ‘left’ critics but
to the Congress-sponsored activities of Jagjivan Ram. During the 1930s
Ranga, Sahajanand, the communists—and Ambedkar—all called for an
alliance between peasants and agricultural labourers. Arguments that this
was mistaken or represent simply ‘rich peasant’ interests have the flavour of
the academy about them.
Yet there is an interesting difference between the way Ranga and
Sahajanand articulated the issue: while Sahajanand insisted on ‘no strict
line of demarcation’ and distinguished his groups solely in terms of
landholding, Ranga spoke of two clearly distinct sections which had
common interests in the framework of a commercialized economy. The
‘Bihar tradition’ of rural organizing, up to the present, has been for radicals
to include agricultural labourers along with the peasants in ‘kisan sabhas’ or
‘kisan samitis’ and speak of them as ‘landless peasants’; while the ‘Andhra
tradition’ was either to form separate agricultural labourer organizations or
to speak clearly of ‘kisan–mazdur’ and ‘ryot–coolie sangams’. This
difference, it can be argued, reflected differences in commercialization and
differing caste links with agrarian structure in the two regions. In Bihar
there seems to have been more caste overlap, whereas in coastal Andhra the
line between ‘peasant’ and ‘agricultural labourer’ coincided with the caste
difference between the Kammas and the Madigas and Malas. Dalit
militancy was intensifying the militancy of agricultural labourers, including
the resistance to any form of bondage; Ranga, for instance, noted in one of
his studies that
In spite of such abnormal rise in their wages fewer and fewer Panchamas
are anxious to become annual servants because their standard of comfort
and their idea of self-respect have changed for the better in the last 50
years …. It is curious how these Panchamas prefer to live an independent
day-labourer’s life to that of an annual servant.22
However, none of the main ‘peasant organizers’, including the
communists, theoretically recognized this role of caste. The issues of
demands for wasteland (forest lands, government-owned lands, perambok
lands in Andhra) were never given a special place in Kisan Sabha
programmes, nor did the communists recognize the way in which vethbegar
was articulated in terms of caste and represented the traditional feudal form
of caste exploitation of labour. Yet both issues were coming up everywhere
in the Dalit movement, and both issues were to become central in the
Telengana revolt. The problem was that, regardless of how much they
recognized the importance of or took up issues of ‘social oppression’, the
left failed to deal with the economic articulation of caste.

• DALITS IN COASTAL ANDHRA

Following two conferences in 1930, ‘Adi-Andhra’ organizing had come to a
standstill for five years. The next initiative was that of the Gandhians:
Congress ‘Harijan’ organizing began with the formation of the Andhra
branch of the Harijan Seva Sangh at Vijayawada in November 1932. Two
caste Hindu reformers, K. Nageswara Rao of Krishna district and M.
Bapineedu, were its president and general secretary respectively. Two
Dalits, Vemula Kurmayya (Krishna district) and Narlachetty Devendrudu
(West Godavari) were joint secretaries. Both had been active during the
1920s; Devendrudu had been chairman of the reception committee of the
third Adi-Andhra conference and was later nominated to the Madras
legislative council, while Kurmayya was chairman of the reception
committee for the eighth conference at Vijayawada.23
Then Ambedkar’s announcement of conversion from Hinduism in 1935
sparked another round of activity. Younger Dalits became energized, such
as Eali Vedappalli (1911–71) of East Godavari, who organized a round of
Adi-Andhra conferences in that district, and Geddada Brahmaiah (1912–50)
who became secretary of an Adi-Andhra Sangham in 1935, organized a
number of district conferences between 1938–1940 and edited an Adi-
Andhra Patrika.24 Another publication, Jayabheri, was started by the well-
known writer Kusumu Dharmanna (1898–1948) of Rajamundry. This
became a sort of mouthpiece for the Ambedkarite group. Dharmanna also
presided over many Adi-Andhra conferences in his district, and had made
use of the Dalit overseas connections, travelling to Rangoon to collect
money for his weekly. He later became inclined towards Islam and
established connections with B.S. Venkatrao in Hyderabad. He was known
as a powerful poet, writer and speaker, with one of his poems,
‘Nalladorathanamu’ (‘brown bureaucracy’) becoming famous as a Dalit
reply to a popular song, ‘We don’t want to be ruled by white people’;
Dharmanna asserted, ‘We don’t want a country ruled by black lords’.25
State level ‘Adi-Andhra’ organizing was resumed. In 1935 the tenth
conference was organized at Rajamundry, inaugurated by M.C. Rajah and
with one of the older generation leaders, Kusuma Venkatramaiah (who had
earlier been associated with the Ramachandra Rao sevashram) presiding.
This was evidently anti-Ambedkarite in tone and very little of any
consequence came from it. The eleventh conference was held in 1936 and
then the twelfth and final conference at Tallaveru in East Godavari in 1938
saw a confrontation between the young radicals and the more established
organizers. The organizers, in a period of reformist stress on temple-entry,
wanted a resolution for this, but the youth, led by Pamu Ramamurthy of
East Godavari district, opposed it as a concession to Hinduism.
Bhagyareddy, the invitee president of the conference, supported this
opposition in one of his last public acts. The final resolutions included
demands for reserved seats for untouchables from the panchayat level to the
legislative councils; enforcing sanctions against those opposing the
presence of untouchable children in schools; job reservations; formation of
labour cooperatives and credit banks, and the demand for forest/ wastelands
for Dalits. No mention was made of the agricultural wage issues coming up
at the time.26
But this was the last of the ‘Adi-Andhra’ conferences. The largest section
of Dalit leadership was getting absorbed into the Congress with its ‘Harijan’
terminology and its reiteration of a Hindu identity. The few who opposed
this strongly such as Kusuma Dharmanna were discredited by their pro-
Muslim stance. In many ways this reformist ‘Hinduization’ can be traced to
the writings of Boyi Bhimanna, the young Dalit writer of East Godavari
district who was described by some of the Congress Dalits as ‘our guiding
spirit’.27
Bhimanna’s first published writings, around 1936, described the inhuman
conditions of village life, ‘highlighting the need for establishing a socialistic
pattern of society’. Then Paaleru (‘A Farm Boy’) published in 1940,
showed Dalit village struggles and sufferings at the hands of a landlord and
unenlightened father; the way out is depicted as town-based education and
service in the bureaucracy. Kooli Raju, written in 1941 and published in
1947, described the agricultural labourer movement in the villages, but had
its resolution when a Dalit woman is elected as government head. Finally,
Raaga Vasishtam (1940), described the marriage of Vasishta and Arundhati,
emphasizing a ‘strong casteless Hindu nation’ and arguing that ‘Harijans
are Aryans’.28 These writings depict the rural base of caste–class conflicts,
but they show a Hindu incorporationism and a middle-class reformist
solution. This also seems to have been accompanied by an anti-Muslim
orientation.29
On the other hand, the militancy of lower-class Dalits was increasingly
being expressed in communist agricultural labour organizing, in active
struggles so patently lacking in the resolutions of the Adi-Andhra
conferences. Many young Dalits joined the movement from the early 1940s,
including Guntar Bapaiah, Prasad Rao, M. Sriramalu (all of Krishna
district), Konar Rangarao, R.A. Kottaya, Kandhi Kaithaya Nagabhushama
(of East Godavari), K. Mohan Rao (East Godavari) and M.
Svarnavamanaya.30 Guntur Bapaiah became general secretary of the
Agricultural Labourer Union (ALU) and K. Suryaprakash Rao became its
president from 1941 to 1943. Even then the strong anti-Ambedkar stance of
the communists aroused tensions. Suryaprakash Rao, for example, reports
that his final alienation from the party came in 1944 when a resolution of
the ALU described the Muslim League as a ‘political party’ but called the
Scheduled Caste Federation a ‘communal organization’. He opposed this
and circulated a dissenting note emphasizing the economic and social
degradation of Dalits and the need for unity of the toiling masses, arguing
finally that social upliftment was even more important than economic
upliftment. He finally left the organization.31
Although the communists initiated some anti-untouchability measures
they provided no ideological alternative to the Congress in terms of
absorbing Dalits into a Hinduistic reformism. Their universal acceptance of
the term ‘Harijan’, in the face of the strong opposition to it not only from
Ambedkar but also from organized Dalits everywhere, shows this. At an
organizational level there was an unwillingness to accept any kind of Dalit
autonomy; and at the level of culture and identity there was an inability to
provide an alternative to the Brahmanic Hindu interpretation of Indian
history.
Both Congress and communist opposition helped to create an anti-
Ambedkarite atmosphere in the Andhra coastal districts. Ambedkar’s
preoccupation with Maharashtra organizing before 1942 and then his
involvement in Delhi also meant that little effort was made, in spite of the
promise of radicalism shown in Andhra. After a visit to the Krishna district
on 30 September 1944, a branch of the Scheduled Caste Federation was
formed under one Buldas Swamy, but it did not gain any strength. A local
organizer, Ekambaran of Gudivada in Krishna district, recalls that
Ambedkar’s meetings put a major emphasis on self-respect, but that
activities of the Federation were limited to fighting atrocities and
celebrating Ambedkar jayanti.32 In that period of turmoil, with an aroused
mass of Dalits, this could not compete with the hard organizing and the real
economic issues being taken up by the communists or the patronage and co-
optation offered by the Congress. The independent Dalit movement of
coastal Andhra faded away after the late 1940s.

• HYDERABAD STATE: YEARS OF GROWING TENSION

The years after 1930 in Hyderabad state saw growing radicalism, partly
diverted into Hindu–Muslim tension and partly expressed in a communist
domination of the Andhra Mahasabha and intensive rural organizing. These
two factors, along with the growing influence of Ambedkar, provided the
context for Dalit organizing during the period.
Growing Hindu–Muslim tension was embodied in the dominance of the
Arya Samaj over nationalist Hindus, and in the rise of the Majlis-i-Ittehad-
ul Mussalman politicizing commoner Muslims against the more integrative
but aristocratic ‘mulki’ Deccani ideology. With state support for full-time
paid propagandists, the Majlis began a conversion campaign which focused
to a large extent on the vulnerable untouchables. Along with the state’s
patronage and a mild amount of anti-vethbegar legislation, it provided a
basis for Dalit attraction to a Muslim alliance.33 The Arya Samaj responded
with attempts to reconvert, and communal clashes began to occur.
In 1938–39 a major satyagraha campaign in Hyderabad was part of the
rising national militancy, but took on a dangerous communal character.
After 6,000 satyagrahis had been arrested, Gandhi himself called on the
Hyderabad State Congress to call off the campaign. But the damage had
been done; as Leonard notes, ‘the 1938 satyagraha both demonstrated and
solidified existing political divisions; it dealt a death blow to an indigenous,
all-inclusive mulki movement.’34 Anti-imperialism in Hyderabad, in other
words, was being expressed as anti-Muslim. The Nizam regime announced
constitutional reforms in July 1939 but there were no strong group of
moderates to respond to a compromise.
While the Arya Samaj was rising within the Congress fold, communists
were gaining dominance over the strongest of the linguistic–cultural
organizations, the Andhra Mahasabha. Communist organizing in the state
had begun only in 1938 when the newly formed unit of the CPI got in touch
with members of progressive groups in Hyderabad, ranging from members
of the Mahasabha and Maharashtra Parishad to the ‘Comrades’ Association’
among progressive Muslims. In 1939 these groups converged into the
Nizam State Communist Committee. The Andhra Mahasabha became the
centre of activity, and communists found a base in the rural areas of
Telengana where commercial agriculture was beginning to provide scope
for a newly assertive peasantry.
Early campaigns focused on vethbegar; D.V. Rao, the leader of Nalgonda
district (to become the most militant base of the Telengana revolt), noted
that there had been spontaneous rebellions against the all-pervasive practice
even before the 1930s, while the laws passed against it by the Nizam
regime provided a new scope for organizing. The Mahasabha took up the
campaign and in 15–20 villages throughout the district vethbegar imposed
by officials came to a stop.35 Opposition to land revenue was also taken up;
interestingly, while landlords were in the forefront Rao claims that
labourers were often the most militant, having an interest in it because they
were themselves small landholders.36 By and large, though, it seems that
Dalits remained peripheral to much of Andhra Mahasabha organizing:
However, as one study shows for a village in Bhongir taluk (a central area
of Nalgonda), in cases where activists deliberately appealed to the Dalits
there was relatively more participation.37
The growing radicalism was seen when the 1940 session of the Andhra
Mahasabha voted to boycott the constitutional reforms and demanded full
responsible government as well as the abolition of vethbegar, rack-renting,
eviction of tenants, jagirdari and the tax on tapping of toddy trees and a
reduction of taxes and rent. At the eighth conference in 1941 Ravi Narayan
Reddy and Badam Yella Reddy, both active in the communist group, were
elected president and vice-president of the Mahasabha. By the 1944
Bhongir session it was claimed that the organization had 100,000 members,
and when over 8,000 were mobilized to attend the conference there was
little the pro-Congress ‘Gandhian’ right wing could do but walk out. The
communists had the organization as well as the rural districts of Telengana
to themselves.
The communists in both Telengana and coastal Andhra have been
criticized for their lack of political education, for their ‘failure to create an
alternative ideological hegemony.’38 There were in fact popular plays such
as Ma Bhoomi and a library movement that included translations of Lenin,
Stalin and Gorky as well as Mallepalle.39 But the use of Mallepalle and the
fact that Ravi Narayan Reddy headed the Hyderabad branch of the Harijan
Sevak Sangh indicates that communist appeals to Dalits did not transcend a
caste Hindu ‘progressiveness’. Similarly, the militancy of communists
against the feudal autocracy only masked the fact that the ‘bourgeois’
Congress was itself ready to move against it; its ability to do so, following
independence, was undoubtedly a major factor in sapping communist
strength. In other words the communists seemed to embody popular
militancy more than direct it. As D.V. Rao’s description of the process
indicates,
Ever since we started in 1941 … we were in the thick of the movement
and had no time for education. Whatever programme we made was based
on our experiences. We were operating in a fast-changing situation,
running after the people. It was just physically impossible to have a
proper educational plan.40
Dalits and women,41 both major participants in the massive mobilizing that
took place, were in many ways the major sufferers from this lack of
education and creative ideology.
In Hyderabad city itself the communist leadership remained in the hands
of progressive Muslims and high caste Hindus from the mixed Deccan
cultural tradition of the city. At least a couple of these tried to maintain
contacts with Dalits. Raj Bahadur Gaur, the CPI leader, wrote a letter to the
Deccan Chronicle in 1945 supporting the SCF demand for separate village
settlements, though opposing separate electorates.42 Similarly, Dr.
Jaisooriya, a later leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Front (formed by the
communists during their banned period to fight the 1952 elections) wrote in
an article in 1945 that 15 years before he had formulated the economic and
political programme for the Depressed Classes which Subbiah, the pro-
Ambedkarite Dalit activist, was attempting to follow.43 But there is no
evidence that these initiatives had any support from the overall party group,
and Gaur makes no mention of Dalits as a factor in his later recollections on
the Telengana period—just as Venkatswamy’s Dalit history ignores the
communists.44
In the meantime, the Ambedkar’s impact was being felt. Hyderabad’s
proximity to Bombay Presidency was a factor here. In a trip to Ellora in
December 1934, for instance, Ambedkar and his colleagues found Muslim
authorities refusing to give them water at Daulatabad.45 During the early
1940s conferences on the Mahar watan issue were organized in border
villages to attract Marathwada Dalits, most notably at Talavade of Sholapur
district.46 In December 1938 an ‘Aurangabad District Dalit Conference’
was held at Makranpur near Chalisgaon. Speaking at it, Ambedkar
unleashed a heavy critique of Hyderabad state and its policies. Resolutions
asked for inam (watan) lands to be given to Dalits, implementation of the
laws abolishing vethbegar, and facilities for education.47 Gradually, then,
Hyderabad state Mahars were being drawn into the orbit of Ambedkar’s
organizing.

• DALIT ORGANIZING IN HYDERABAD

Dalit activities in Hyderabad began to gain in momentum, if not depth, than
before the radical 1930s. A host of young educated Malas, a few Madigas
and some Marathi-speaking Mahar and Chambhar youth in Marathwada
stood behind new leaders.
Most prominent among these, dominating the scene for two decades and
sometimes known as the ‘Hyderabadi Ambedkar’, was B.S. Venkatrao (ca.
1890–1953), originally Bathula Ashaiah. Returning to Hyderabad in 1922
after working in the engineering department in Poona, he managed to parley
a position as overseer in the public works department into a small personal
fortune. He was described as a powerful and magnetic speaker, dominating
the movement through his personality as well as financial sponsorship.
Venkatswamy gives him a more favourable verdict than any other leader of
the period:
He sacrificed his all in the cause of the community and died a pauper. He
was generous without calculations. He had a lovable individuality and a
dynamic personality …. Who ever dreamt that Ashaiah, a bonny boy of
Bangaru Basthi, would be the future ‘Hope’ of the community and that
his juvenile corpulent body would be the dynamic personality to capture
the hearts of the downtrodden, who spontaneously conferred on him the
popular title of ‘Rao Saheb’48
Slightly younger than Venkatrao was J. Subbiah who was to head the
SCF and become ‘Ambedkar’s man’ in Hyderabad. But Subbiah was the
most unpopular of the group, described by Venkatswamy as dictatorial and
opportunistic, wining and dining people like P.N. Rajbhoj (a ‘whiskey and
ice-cream’ culture) to maintain his position as head of the SCF: ‘By his
deadly smiles, cruel kindness, obsequious courtesy and self-seeking and
odious activities, through his faked-up organization, he earned the
malediction of his community’.49 Shyam Sunder (1908–73), on the other
hand, the most openly pro-Muslim of the group, was praised by
Venkatswamy: born in Aurangabad, he evidently sought to exemplify the
syncretic aristocratic Hyderabadi culture, and though ‘considered a
nightmare by his Hindu opponents, he truly carved a soft corner in the
hearts of the Depressed Classes by his organizing ability, lofty thoughts,
magnificent courage, inexorable strength, polished manners and delicious
humor’.50
Ambedkar’s Depressed Classes Conference of 1930 and the events
surrounding the Poona Pact made little impact on Dalits in Hyderabad; the
Congress initiative with the Harijan Sevak Sangh was also of little
consequence, though Thakkar Bapu visited Hyderabad in January 1933 to
launch the state branch. Then came Ambedkar’s decision to convert,
described as a ‘veritable bombshell’ in stimulating massive discussions on
conversion throughout the country. In the already conversion-tense
atmosphere of Hyderabad it galvanized the Dalit community. Venkatrao,
Arigay Ramaswamy and the entire youth group attended a Maharashtra
Untouchable Youth Conference in January 1936 in Poona. Impressed by the
‘fire-eating speeches of the Maharashtra leaders’, they organized a Youth
League of Ambedkarites with Venkatrao as president and Venkatswami, one
of the educated youth, as secretary. Its aims were to organize youth; to
support Ambedkar in leading untouchables out of the Hindu fold; to
enlighten people on the evils of Hinduism; to oppose conversion at present
but search for a new democratic religion; and to organize a vigorous
campaign on socioeconomic disabilities. Bhagyareddy Varma supported the
effort but without active participation.51
Now disputes focused on pro-Muslim versus ‘Ambedkarite’ responses to
the declaration of leaving Hinduism. Quite expectedly Muslims used
Ambedkar’s announcement to step up pressure for conversion to Islam.
Several Dalits became active, including Kusuma Dharmanna in the coastal
regions and Peesari Veerani, a Hyderabad Mala who had confronted Gandhi
himself in a 1935 visit and now became a propagandist for Islam under the
name of P.V. Sardar Ali.52 After the intensified Hindu–Muslim conflicts of
the 1938–39 satyagraha, Venkatrao himself began to lean in a pro-Muslim
direction. In 1938 he took the initiative of forming a Hyderabad State
Depressed Classes Association (DCA), known in Urdu as ‘Pashta Qaum’.
In contrast to the Youth League this was politically oriented to the Nizam’s
regime, and in May 1939 sent a memorandum to the Nizam’s Executive
Council demanding separate electorates.53
Then the announcement of constitutional reforms in July polarized Dalit
opinion. Initially most of the young radicals were associated with the DCA,
including Subbiah, Venkatswamy and others. But resistance to Venkatrao’s
line developed and an open fight between Subbiah and Venkatrao in January
1940, in which Subbiah slapped Venkatrao, split the organization. Charging
that Venkatrao was aiding Kusuma Dharmanna in propagating Islam, the
youth group then joined Arigay Ramaswamy in reviving the Hyderabad
State Adi-Hindu Mahasabha. Only Shyam Sunder, then president of a
DCA-linked Student’s Union, stayed with Venkatrao.
The split lasted until 1942 when all factions went to Nagpur to attend the
founding meeting of the Scheduled Caste Federation on 18–20 July 1942.
They appealed to Ambedkar, who counselled compromise. When
Venkatrao, who up to that time had been described in glowing terms in
Janata,54 refused to come around, Ambedkar advised the others to organize
as the Scheduled Caste Federation but without official affiliation to the all-
India body. On their return, a general body meeting of the Adi-Hindu
Mahasabha voted the change of name to the Scheduled Caste Federation,
denounced the conversion to Islam, and adopted the Nagpur resolutions.
Subbiah was chosen as president, Venkatswamy as general secretary.55 Now
the DCA and SCF were contesting for hegemony in the Dalit community of
Hyderabad state.
Some rural influence of both sections is discernible from the beginning,
though documentation remains incomplete. For example, Sukam Achalu in
Nalgonda and Butti Rajaram in Karimnagar apparently did some rural
organizing for the SCF, to the point that when Achalu was denied an SCF
ticket for the 1952 elections and stood instead on behalf of the People’s
Democratic Front, he was elected with the highest majority in India.56 Butti
Rajaram was said to be a cousin of a member of the Hyderabad group, Prem
Kumar, and was a constable who became a fruit contractor and built a good
base for the SCF in Karimnagar district.57
The leaders in Hyderabad were Mala, but it is striking that Venkatrao’s
DCA, rather than the pro-Ambedkarite SCF, seemed to be more influential
in the Marathwada region. Most educated, young Marathi-speaking Dalits
were with the DCA, including Sopanrao Dhanve (of Latur), Ganpatrao
Waghmare (a Chambhar of Parbhani), Govindrao Gaikwad (of
Aurangabad), Hanmanthrao More (Nanded) and Madhavrao Nirlikar
(Parbhani).58 Both the DCA and SCF were using Ambedkar’s name in the
Marathwada region, but the DCA’s pro-Muslim orientation and propaganda
gained sustenance from the fact that the Nizam was actually implementing
some reforms, including granting wastelands to Dalits, while the
communists were absent from the area and the Congressites (organized in
the Maharashtra Parishad) were doing nothing to take up the economic or
social issues of rural Dalits but were instead emerging as a ‘Hinduistic’
organization based almost exclusively among the middle-caste peasantry
and upper castes. The land given to Dalits by the Nizam, in fact, became a
major source of conflict in Marathwada after the Congress takeover, when
caste Hindu ‘Congress leaders’ sought to snatch it back and Dalits who
resisted were made objects of attack.
Hyderabad Dalits now became a bit vocal on economic issues. The
various organizations all included the issue of vethbegar in their
programmes; Tamil ‘Adi-Dravidians’ in Hyderabad city began to organize
on the issue of employment; while at least one Mala, Pittela
Laxminarayana, a mechanic in the Lallaguda Railway workshop, became an
activist in the labour union.59 A 1945 booklet by P. Venkatswamy, The
Voice of the Downtrodden, expressed the mood in its conclusion:
Our vital interests are one with the downtrodden masses of India,
irrespective of caste and creed …. In the countries where political
democracy is established it has not enabled the masses to free themselves
from exploitation, unemployment, hunger and slavery. Political
democracy is incomplete without economic democracy …. Just as the
British Indian masses will never escape from the indigenous system of
exploitation we also have to remain as the bondslaves of the capitalists
and landlords of the State …. Formal changes in political institutions will
do no good to the starving masses unless far-reaching and collosal
changes are incorporated in the economic structure of society.60

NOTES
1. In terms of popular votes for assembly seats in Andhra, the communists won 22.0 per
cent of the vote in 1951–52, 29.6 per cent in 1954–57, and then there was a steady
decline to 19.53 per cent in 1962, 15.30 per cent for the two parties in 1967 (CPI, 7.52
per cent and CPM 7.78 per cent), 9.16 per cent in 1972 (CPI, 5.98 per cent, and CPM
3.18 per cent) and 4.8 per cent in 1978 (CPI, 2.4 per cent and CPM 2.4 per cent). The
various socialist parties sank even more, from 18.32 per cent in 1951–52 to 0.43 per
cent in 1972. The decline of the communist electoral hold in Andhra contrasts with its
steady growth in the states of West Bengal and Kerala. See Tables I and II in G. Ram
Reddy and B.A.V. Sharma (eds.), State Government and Politics: Andhra Pradesh
(New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1979). Of course, the rise of a lower caste and Dalit-
based Naxalite movement in Andhra during the 1980s contrasts with this previous
electoral decline.
2. For an overview see Christopher John Baker, The Politics of South India, 1920–1937
(New Delhi: Vikas, 1976); and Carolyn M. Elliot, ‘Caste and Faction among the
Dominant Caste: The Reddis and Kammas of Andhra’, in Rajni Kothari (ed.), Caste in
Indian Politics (New Delhi: Orient Longman Ltd., 1970). It can be noted that Elliot’s
analysis includes ‘Kapus’ along with ‘Reddis’; recently they have sharply begun to
 differentiate themselves as a ‘backward’ caste, engaging in protest and rioting against
the ‘dominant’ Kammas.
3. N.G. Ranga, Revolutionary Peasants (New Delhi: Amrit Book Co., 1949), p. 61.
4. Baker, South India, pp. 131–37, 200–11; Ranga, Revolutionary Peasants, p. 63.
5. Baker, South India, pp. 261–65; Ranga, Revolutionary Peasants, p. 75.
6. N.G. Ranga, ‘Reminiscences on Harijan Welfare’, Andhra Pradesh State Harijan
Conference Souvenir (Hyderabad, 1976, pp. 23–26.
7. Ranga, Revolutionary Peasants, p. 69; Ranga also claims that the communists and
socialists were opposing it but he could convince the CSP to cooperate.
8. M.A. Rasul, A History of the All-India Kisan Sabha (Calcutta: National Book Agency,
1974), pp. 3–11.
9. Rasul, Kisan Sabha, p. 51.
10. Ibid., p. 55; Ranga, Revolutionary Peasants, p. 71.
11. Ranga, Revolutionary Peasants, p. 76, estimating that ‘nearly 30 per cent of our own
graduates and 90 per cent of the erstwhile CSP Andhra youth’ were won over by the
Communists.’
12. Rasul, Kisan Sabha, p. 89.
13. D.N. Dhanagare, ‘Social Origins of the Telengana Insurrection (1946–1951)’,
Contributions to Indian Sociology, 8, 1974, pp. 117, 127.
14. Barry Pavier, ‘The Telengana Armed Struggle’, Economic and Political Weekly, August
1974 and The Telengana Movement, 1944–51 (Delhi: Vikas, 1981), reviewed by D.N.
Dhanagare, Economic and Political Weekly, 18 December 1982, and reply by Pavier,
‘Once More on Telengana’, Economic and Political Weekly, 5 March 1983; and
Jacques Pouchedass, ‘Peasant Classes in Twentieth Century Agrarian Movements in
India’, in Eric Hobsbawm (ed.), Peasants in History: Essays in Honour of Daniel
Thorner (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980).
15. N.G. Ranga, Economic Organisation of Indian Villages, Volume II (Bombay:
Taraporevala and Sons, 1929) gives a survey of three villages in the dry areas of
Guntur district which showed 200 Kammas (both men and women) supplementing
their livelihood by working as day labourers, and 60 Kammas employed as annual
servants.
16. Akhil Gupta, ‘Revolution in Telengana, 1946–1951 (Part One and Two)’, South Asia
Bulletin, 4, 1–2, spring-fall 1984.
17. P. Sundarayya, Telengana People’s Struggle and Its Lessons (Calcutta, Dessay Chabha
for the CPM, 1972), p. 145, gives a figure of 175,000 members of the Andhra
Provincial Kisan Sabha for the same year.
18. G. Hargopal, Caste–Class Dimensions of Dalit Consciousness: The Case of Delta
Andhra’, Paper presented at the TDSS Seminar on State-Specific Caste–Class
Situation, Lonavala, 27–29 December 1987; citing a study by G. Parthasarathy and
K.V. Ramana, ‘Peasant Organisations in Razole’, pp. 5–7.
19. Ibid., Many social scientists today argue for an association of ‘militancy’ and
‘violence’ with a poor-peasant low-caste base and moderation with a middle caste-
middle peasant base. (See for instance David Hardiman, ‘Politicization and Agitation
Among Dominant Peasants in Early Twentieth Century India’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 28 Febraury 1976). There are some at least methodological questions about
this assumption. It often confuses ‘violence’ with ‘militancy’ and classifies under
‘violence’ everything from physical attacks on ‘class enemies’ to looting of grain and
destruction of property. More important, it begs the question of strategy—as if the
rural poor do not also need strategic thinking and very often act in terms of it (i.e., on
those occasions when the rural poor refrain from violence or militancy, they tend to be
seen as caught in the grip of ‘tradition’ and not as taking ‘strategic’ action).
20. Ranga, Revolutionary Peasants, p. 89.
21. In Rasul, Kisan Sabha, p. 29. The CPI-led Kisan Sabha position, as articulated in 1953,
was ‘While thus intensifying the organizational work of the Kisan Sabha itself, the
Sabha has to pay its utmost attention to help in the formation of independent
agricultural labourer organizations wherever these organizations are necessary for the
protection and safeguarding of the interests of agricultural labourers and other rural
labourers. In those places where these organizations do not exist, the agricultural and
rural labourers should be drawn into the Kisan Sabha itself …. Whether the
agricultural labourers are drawn into the Kisan Sabha itself, or helped to form their
own independent organization, the Kisan Sabha has to make it one of its foremost
tasks to take upon itself the defence of the interests of these sections of the rural poor.
For, it is only by uniting the entire rural populace in a strong, well-knit united front
that the Kisan Sabha can secure its basic objects of abolition of landlordism without
compensation and the free distribution of landlord’s land among agricultural labourers
and poor peasants’ (Ibid., p. 318).
22. Ranga, Economic Organization of Indian Villages, p. 170. In contrast it seems that
Kammas were willing to become annual servants for other Kamma households; here
the ‘patronage’ quality of the relationship was clearly different.
23. M.B. Gautam, ‘The Untouchables’ Movement in Andhra Pradesh’, Harijan Conference
Souvenir (Hyderabad, 10–12 April 1976), pp. 71–72; Boyi Bhimanna, interview, 23
June 1988.
24. Gautam, ‘The Untouchables’ Movement’, pp. 70–71; B.J. Raju, ‘The Champions of the
Downtrodden in Andhra Pradesh’, Ibid., pp. 99–101.
25. Ibid., pp. 99–100; Boyi Bhimanna, interview, P.R. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for
Emancipation (Secunderabad: Universal Art Printers, 1955), Volume I, pp. 178, 200.
26. Gautam, ‘The Untouchables’ Movement’, p. 71.
27. Jagambar Jaganathan, interview, 24 June 1988; Boyi Bhimanna, interview.
28. Report on the Published Works of Boyi Bhimanna (pamphlet, n.d.), pp. 2–6.
29. Boyi Bhimanna, interview.
30. Ekambaran and K. Suryaprakash Rao, interviews taken by Surendra Jondhale, 16 June
1989.
31. Ibid.
32. Interview by Surendra Jondhale with Ekambaran, 3 August 1990.
33. Gupta, ‘Revolution in Telengana’, Part I, p. 10; see also Karen Leonard, ‘Aspects of the
Nationalist Movement in the Princely States of India’, The Quarterly Review of
Historical Studies, XXI, 1981–82 and ‘Hyderabad: The Mulki–non-Mulki Conflict’, in
Robin Jeffry (ed.), People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the
Indian Princely States (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978).
34. Leonard, ‘The Mulki–non-Mulki Conflict’, p. 95.
35. D.V. Rao, interview with Peter Custers.
36. Ibid.
37. K. Srinivasalu, ‘Telengana Peasant Movement and Changes in the Agrarian Structure:
A Case Study of Nalgonda District’, Ph.D. dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
School of Social Sciences, 1988, p. 105.
38. Gupta, ‘Revolution in Telengana’, Part I, pp. 13–15.
39. This is stressed by Srinivasalu, ‘Telengana Peasant Movement’, p. 287ff.; on Andhra
see Hargopal, ‘Caste–Class Dimensions of Dalit Consciousness’, pp. 6–7.
40. D.V. Rao, interview.
41. For an important study of women’s involvement stressing their own perception of the
experience see Stree Shakti Sanghatana, ‘We Were Making History’: Women in the
Telengana Movement (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1989).
42. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation Volume I, p. 286.
43. Ibid., Volume II, p. 551.
44. Raj Bahadur Gour, ‘Hyderabad People’s Revolt Against Nizam’s Autocracy’, in Gear,
et al., Glorious Telengana Armed Struggle (New Delhi: New Age Printing Press,
1973) mentions Subbiah only once and then in passing, p. 86.
45. See reports in Janata, 1 March 1941 and 8 March 1941.
46. S.S. Narvade, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar ani Hyderabad Sansthan (Marathi) (Pune:
Sugawa Prakashan, 1988), p. 23.
47. Reported in Bombay Secret Abstract for 14 January 1939, in Sources, Volume 1, p.
185.
48. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation, Volume II, p. 658; see also interview, J.
Jaganathan, 24 June 1988.
49. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation, Volume II, p. 661.
50. Ibid., Volume II, p. 654.
51. Ibid., Volume I, pp. 80–101.
52. Ibid., Volume I, p. 64, 130.
53. Ibid., Volume I, pp. 184–97.
54. Janata, 24 April 1937.
55. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation, Volume I, p. 250.
56. Ibid., II, p. 644.
57. Ibid., II, p. 522; Venkatswamy’s work generally has an anti-Ambedkar and anti-SCF
tone and so may not cover its activities fully.
58. Ibid., I, p. 263.
59. Ibid., II, p. 450.
60. Ibid., II, pp. 336–37.
 CHAPTER 10

Hyderabad and Andhra, 1946–56:

Revolution, Repression and Recuperation

• DALIT AND COMMUNIST LEADERS, 1946–52

The feudal autocracy of Hyderabad faced the imminent prospect of British
withdrawal with the unrealistic hope of proclaiming itself an independent
nation. It sought to lay the ground for this by declaring elections for
December 1946 under a system that gave 50 per cent Hindu/Muslim
representation based on ‘interest groups’ rather than territorial
constituencies. There was increasing polarization and at points near-chaos
in the state, with the growing fundamentalist power of the Razakars coming
to replace the state itself and the communists taking advantage of this to
build up rural centres of near-autonomous power, particularly in Nalgonda
and Warangal districts. In this uncertain context, Dalits themselves were
hopelessly divided and confused.
There were by this time six identifiable Dalit organizations. The biggest
groups were still the SCF led by Subbiah and the DCA led by Venkatrao.
The DCA accepted the reforms, the SCF along with the Congress and the
communists rejected them. Besides these, objecting to the ‘domineering’
tendencies of both Subbiah and Venkatrao, P. Venkatswamy and Shyam
Sunder came together in an Independent Scheduled Caste Federation which
proposed a ‘conditional acceptance’ of the reform. In addition, the Adi-
Hindu Social Service League, a pale remnant of Bhagyareddy’s
organization run by his son Gautam, also rejected the reforms, as did the
Dalits grouped around Arigay Ramaswamy and working in the Congress,
while an Arundatiya Matunga Mahasabha, based on the Madigas, pushed
for separate electorates and a conditional acceptance.1 In the actual
elections Venkataro and Shyam Sunder were both elected, while five people
from a list submitted by Venkatrao were later made nominated members.
More confusion followed. In February 1947 the British announced the
transfer of power, with the princely states given the option of joining the
newly independent states of India or Pakistan or remaining independent. On
11 June 1947, Hyderabad issued a declaration of independence. This set off
increased factionalism and ferment among both Dalits and communists, at
the local as well as national scale.
Ambedkar’s reaction was immediate: he denounced the Hyderabad
declaration and a concurrent announcement by Travancore state as creating
‘a new problem which may turn out to be worse than the Hindu–Muslim
problem as it is sure to result in the further Balkanisation of India.’2 But
there was divided opinion on this issue within the SCF leadership in the
country.
Ambedkar himself, throughout the 1940s, had been concerned about
finding a solution to the ‘communal’ problem by assuring Muslims of
sufficient representation through separate electorates.3 At points a political
alliance was made, for example in joining Jinnah and the Muslim League to
celebrate 1 October 1940 as ‘Deliverance Day’ because Congress ministries
resigned.4 But the final declaration of independence and partition led him to
decisively throw his lot with the Congress. This was based on his
preference for a strong and centralized state and conviction that the extreme
‘federation’ required to keep the Muslims within the same country would be
harmful for Independent India.5 By 1947 he was reportedly making a
decision to negotiate with the Congress.6 The opposite line was taken by
other national leaders, in particular J.N. Mandal of Bengal and Shivraj of
Madras. Shivraj perhaps was influenced by the Tamil tradition of a claim to
autonomy (in a period during which the Dravidian movement was emerging
to demand ‘Dravidastan’ along with ‘Hindustan’ and ‘Pakistan’ and the
Muslims were showing signs of recognizing this claim).7 Mandal was
working in the context of West Bengal where a Dalit–Muslim alliance
offered a base for a non-Congress political force. The fact that in October
1946 the Muslim League had given one of their allotted quota of seats to
Mandal was taken as a proof of goodwill and used by the pro-Muslim Dalits
of Hyderabad to show the advantages of such an alliance.8
Thus in Hyderabad Venkatrao and Shyam Sunder crystallized their pro-
Muslim position. At a June conference in Salour, Aurangabad, they called
on Dalits to ‘declare an open revolt against caste Hindus’ and to ‘strengthen
the hands of the Muslims of Hyderabad for maintaining political power.’9
Subbiah himself showed tendencies to compromise with a pro-
independence position but after Ambedkar’s strong statement of June, he
kept silent.10
The stance of the DCA leaders was bringing them closer not simply to
the regime but to the militant and semi-fascistic power represented by the
Razakars, the private armed force organized by the Nanded lawyer, Qasim
Razvi. When Hyderabad independence day celebrations were held, these
included a public meeting near the residence of Venkatrao in which Razvi
and other Muslim leaders were speakers along with Shyam Sunder, while
Razakars in white uniforms and armed with spears guarded the crowd. Few
Dalits were present at the meeting, according to Venkatswamy, and many of
those that were, especially the women, were sullen and abusive.11 However,
lack of mass support did not prevent the two leaders from making strong
statements. Speaking from the platform of the Ittehad and appealing to the
‘Deccani’ tradition, Shyam Sunder claimed,
Here in Hyderabad we are all living under a benign ruler who is not a
foreigner but is one among us. We have our own culture, heritage and
tradition. We have been living in this land of Deccan … and as the
political consciousness increased and as our community reacted to the
increasing economic standard it began to assert itself in the body politic
…. We would rather fight with the Government and gain our concessions
and legitimate rights than to play into the hands of the caste Hindus to be
a pawn in the political chess …. It is a well-known fact that the Muslims
do not treat the Depressed Classes in the way in which the Hindus are
doing. As they believe in equality and justice both by religion and faith,
naturally the Depressed Classes feel more at home with them than with
the chauvinistic, class conscious and highly individualistic Hindus.12
And Venkatrao:
I am certain that the Depressed Classes, Muslims, Christians and the vast
bulk of Hindus … will rally around the throne of Hyderabad and prove
before the world that Hyderabadis are prepared to lay down even their
lives to maintain their independence and their own cosmopolitan
Hyderabad culture and expression of lasting harmony between the
 different races and creeds who have flourished here happily for ages
together.13
In contrast in Ambedkar’s denunciation of the tyranny of the Nizam, of
Razakar atrocities and of forcible conversions to Islam was a clarion call for
freedom:
The Scheduled Castes of Hyderabad should under no circumstances side
with the Nizam and the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen. Whatever the tyranny and
oppression which the Hindus practice upon us, it must not warp our
vision and swerve us from our duty. The Scheduled Castes need freedom,
and their whole movement has been one of freedom. That being so, they
cannot support the Nizam.14
He then called on Dalits both in Hyderabad and Pakistan to migrate to
India.
However, Ambedkarites in Hyderabad state were too weak
organizationally and politically to articulate their position, let alone
implement it. Venkatrao and Shyam Sunder were using the opportunities
facing them to make mass contacts, often provocative: on 6 June 1948, for
instance, Shyam Sunder organized a ‘separate electorate day’ in which
activists sent to the rural districts told the landless Dalits that land would be
distributed to them by state officials.15 Venkatrao in turn was accused of
touring Bidar district and inciting Dalits there to ‘loot, kill and forcibly
occupy the lands of Brahmans, Lingayats and Banias.16 During the same
period Venkatrao, who had been given a position as minister of education in
the regime of ‘Azad Hyderabad’, was using it to maximize his base and the
government cooperated with him to the extent of approving his amendment
to a proposed education bill for Dalits to create a ‘one-crore fund’.17 All
this time the Ambedkarites and the pro-Congress Dalits in Hyderabad city
were barred to their homes by fear of Razakar tyranny on the streets.
But if the Dalit leadership was divided and confused, this was equally
true of the local and national communist leadership, whatever their claims
to a ‘scientific’ Marxism–Leninism. The Andhra CPI compromised with
pro-Muslim elements by declaring the Ittehad to be a ‘people’s
organization’ and offering it 50 per cent of the seats in a proposed
constituent assembly.18 The Hyderabad city committee even supported the
demand for ‘Azad Hyderabad’ and while they were overruled by the
Andhra state committee, they succeeded in having the ban on communists
temporarily removed in May 1948.19 This of course was after a period
during which the all-India communist leaders had been treating the Muslim
League and the Congress on par as representing anti-imperialist forecs
among Muslims and Hindus respectively.
The twists and turns in the all-India leadership must have been extremely
misleading to the Andhra communists. There was a tendency to assess the
transition to independence in terms of abstractions and a kind of
revolutionary romanticism. if Ambedkar showed a negative pragmatic
realism in treating independence as inevitable and focusing his political
efforts on making concrete gains for Dalits within the bourgeois regime-to-
come, communists took to the opposite extreme. In the 1948 second party
congress, P.C. Joshi’s ‘reformist’ leadership was replaced by B.T. Ranadive,
who gave a call for an all-out insurrection on the thesis that there was now
an ‘intertwining of the two stages of revolution’ with the national
bourgeoisie and rich peasants going over to the side of the ruling class.
Turmoil on an international scale and the rising tempo of liberation
movements in China and southeast Asia may have fostered this mood of
revolutionary optimism, but the forced uprisings ordered throughout India
by Ranadive had disastrous results, with innumerable communists jailed or
killed and with complete chaos overtaking the party and its organizations.
From May 1948 the Andhra communist leadership began putting forward a
‘Maoist’ line of united front, two-stage revolution and national liberation
struggle, but this also took on rather fantastic overtones when Telengana
was characterized as the ‘Yenan of India’, a base for launching an assault on
power in the entire country, and it was held that
Armed guerrilla resistance had to be developed in several parts of the
country and these areas were to be converted into liberated areas with
their own armed forces and state apparatus; later, towns were to be
liberated by the armed forces from the liberated areas.20
Telengana was already a myth-in-the-making; its prestige made C.
Rajeshwar Rao the party secretary-general in May-June 1950. He continued
as such only till May 1951 as the ‘right’ party group of S.A. Dange, Ajoy
Ghosh and S.V. Ghate began organizing against him and by May 1951 Ajoy
Ghosh had replaced him and the central committee had decided to officially
call off the Telengana struggle.21 In the four climatic years of the transition
to independence there were thus three changes of CPI leadership and
accompanying reversals of political line, and it was only a visit to Moscow
and the intervention of Stalin himself that could create a consensus in the
party that the path of the Indian revolution would be ‘neither the Russian
path nor the Chinese path’. Even this document, however, still did not
recognize that conditions in India during the 1940s were radically different
from those existing either in Russia in 1917 or in China during the 1920s
and 1930s.
In a sense, then, as far as a politically and organizationally effective all—
India guidance was concerned, both the Dalits and the communists in
Andhra were on their own.

• THE TELENGANA PEASANT REVOLT

While confusion in the all-India leadership may have left the Andhra
communists at sea, local administrative confusion made the Telengana
revolt possible. In a situation described as that of ‘political instability and
near anarchy’,22 Hyderabad in 1948 saw the Razakars gaining 100,000
members by August and the Nizam regime left without the will or capacity
to control them. Venkatswamy wrote,
Day by day the normal life of the State was deteriorating. The Razakars
were playing havoc everywhere: loot, plunder, arson and maltreatment of
women was the order of the day. The tales of their ravages and cruelties
were pouring into the city from hundreds of villages all over the state.
People were fleeing in every direction, shelterless and helpless.23
But this signalled the final crisis of the regime, and the ‘near anarchy’ gave
the communists opportunity to seize power in the Telugu-speaking rural
areas. There was a semi-spontaneous party-led insurrection in most parts of
Nalgonda, Warangal and Khamman districts; a parallel administration
(described as a ‘gram raj’ in the vernacular and as ‘village soviets’ by the
communists) was set up in nearly 4,000 villages. This was backed up by a
thin line of armed forces: by April 1948 the party could organize six ‘area
squads’ of 20 fighters each and 50–60 ‘village squads’; by the end of
August it was claimed that about 10,000 peasants, students and party
workers were actively participating in village squads and some 2,000 in
mobile guerrilla units. Acquiring arms remained a major problem.24
 In the ‘agrarian revolution’ that was central to this, the thrust was
directed against the biggest landlords, while the party sought also to
represent the interests of the poor and landless. One million acres of land
were said to have been seized and redistributed. The first land to be taken,
and nearly one-tenth the total, was government-held forest and wasteland.
After this, surplus lands were seized, in a process in which the ceiling
allowed by the party was first fixed at 500 acres dry land and 50 acres wet
land; a lower ceiling was enforced against pro-Nizam landlords.25 Later,
though mainly in Nalgonda district, the land ceiling was lowered to 200 dry
and 20 wet, and then to 100 dry and 10 wet.26
Such relatively high land ceilings and the continual process of
compromise evoked the left criticism that the party was representing a ‘rich
peasant’ interest. But, given the strategic needs of seizing power, in a
situation in which the party had been working in most of the villages for
only around five years, it is hard to know how some such broad alliance
could have been avoided. There is no evidence to show that a firm ‘poor
peasant’ policy could have won enough mass and militant support to sustain
a movement that attacked not only landlords and the Nizam regime but
village leaders as well, and would have to defend itself against an well
armed and trained professional army.
Some of the dilemmas inherent in rousing the poor and landless,
especially Dalits, for land struggles in the period of the Telengana revolt are
brought out in a recent dissertation by K. Srinivasalu. This examines the
actual process of land control and struggle in three villages in various taluks
of Nalgonda district, the strongest centre of revolt, in an effort to provide
‘documentation from below’ of the struggle and to analyze the ‘interface of
caste and class’.27 As the only study investigating actual socio-economic
conditions and processes of organizing at the ground level, it is an
important mirror to the proliferating macro studies and contentious
generalizations about the Telengana revolt.
Srinivasalu discusses several important points. While there was
enthusiastic response everywhere to the call to occupy common lands and
wastelands, the response to the challenge of occupying surplus land of
landlords was ‘lackadaisical’, in spite of the notoriety of these landlords.28
Srinivasalu explains this by noting that because the common lands were
considered to belong ‘to all’ they were open to redistribution, while Dalits
and other landless were reluctant to challenge the ‘ownership’ claims of the
rich. An additional factor may well have been that, as in so many other
cases of efforts to give ‘land to the landless’, the surplus lands of big
landlords are rarely vacant but given out to tenants who in many cases are
middle-caste peasants; for the Dalit landless to claim such lands would
provoke a larger-scale conflict. Confronting a numerically tiny landlord
minority or a distant state is a different matter from confronting a large
peasant caste-community itself rooted in the land and including many
poor.29 Dalits were understandably apprehensive about the situation. All
admit that after the revolt the only distributed lands that could actually be
kept were the government forest and wastelands, though in some cases
landlords sold much of their surplus acreage, mostly to non-Brahman
communist sympathizers, though in a few cases to Dalits.30
Interpreting the ‘anti-feudal’ character of the Telengana revolt purely in
terms of land, its seizure and occupation, would be a mistake, though a
natural one if property ownership is considered the sole basis of
exploitation. Instead Srinivasalu’s analysis (and much of the description of
the struggles that actually went on in Telengana supports it) focuses on two
other factors, which he calls gadi (the political power of the landlords) and
vethi (vethbegar). Describing the latter as a ‘universal and allpervasive
mode of exploitation’ in the region, Srinivasalu calls it a deformed version
of the jajmani system and notes that it symbolized feudal subordination for
all groups. The opposition to it could thus unite peasant cultivators, artisans
and other village servants and Dalits.31
Another important issue was agricultural wages. Wage increases were
demanded from fairly early, but no struggles were reported on the issue.
Communist-dominated village committees, however, fixed higher wages,
and following the Indian army repression (apparently when the landlords
attempted to reimpose the older, lower wages) there was a wave of
agricultural labourers’ strikes in 1949, including workers in 150 villages in
Warangal district; in some cases women led these strikes.32
But the actual role of Dalits in the struggle appears to have been a
subordinate one. Claims that ‘most of the recruits in the dalams came from
the untouchable castes (Malas and Madigas) and from among the tribals’33
are unsubstantiated, except for the obvious fact that once the communists
were driven into the forests the tribals were the main group they worked
among. Leaders such as D.V. Rao and Sundarayya depict the participation
of Dalits as much more passive, arguing mainly that the Nizam’s agents and
landlords failed to split the people on the caste question and ‘win over the
Harijans’; in nearly all the villages the Dalits were on the side of the
communists.34 There is also, notably, no depiction of a Dalit woman (while
there are other poor and low-caste women) in the searching account of
women in the Telengana revolt carried out by the Stree Shakti Sanghatana
of Hyderabad.35 In fact it seems that the communists very rarely took up the
social issues of untouchability. D.V. Rao’s statement, ‘When we were
working in the villages caste tensions did not arise. Caste differences were
limited to the house, except for untouchables’36 is typical. The communists
aimed at ‘unity’ (which they thought could be achieved with the acceptance
of the social constraints of the old order) and within this framework sought
to deal only with some of the economic problems of the poorest sections of
the society.
Thus claims of Marxist academics that Dalits constituted the ‘main force’
of the dalams or of the revolt in general (Dhanagare) of that ‘the party was
being continuously driven to the Left by poor peasants and agricultural
labourers’ (Pavier)37 seem more examples of romanticism. It may be
possible that if the party had from the very beginning vigorously pushed
agricultural labourer issues or taken up anti-untouchability with fervor, it
could have won a sustained and militant response. But even this is
questionable given the objective conditions of the Telengana region. In
coastal Andhra, with a background of a half-century of commercial
agriculture, spontaneous resistance by Malas and Madigas had wiped out
much of traditional caste-forms of bondage and replaced ‘bonded labour’
by wage-paid daily labour even before the communists entered. In the much
more backward areas of Telengana, dominated by an unrelieved feudal
aristocracy, there is little evidence of such a strong resistance. It would have
been difficult for the CPI to leap over decades of history in the course of a
few years of revolt.
In any event, the unity created and the fervor of large sections of the
population was not enough to withstand the entry of the Indian army. On 13
September 1948 the army swept in. There was little effective resistance to
the often brutal repression that followed. According to Sundarayya’s
account, in over 2,000 villages of Nalgonda, Warangal, Karimnagar,
Khammam and Hyderabad, 300,000 were tortured and 50,000 were arrested
and kept in detention camps. Some 10,000 were said to be in camps even
till July 1950. About 2,000 were killed and 5,000 imprisoned for years.38
The Telengana revolt unleashed a debate within the communist
leadership about whether to call off the struggle or not. Although the
‘Andhra thesis’ seems to have presented it as the beginning of a ‘liberation
war’, Sundarayya, arguing the CPI(M) line, claims that it should have been
carried on as simply a ‘peasants’ partisan struggle’ to defend gains won.
But by the time these arguments were being made, the communists had
simply been forced into the forests and hills by the overwhelming military
strength, leaving the majority of peasants defenceless. Gupta’s comment is
telling:
The dominant reason why the movement ‘failed’ was that it was
successfully suppressed. We have seen how the peasant army managed
only limited success against the Nizam’s troops. In front of the Indian
forces they were pathetically overmatched. Faced with almost certain
extermination in the plains, the Communist cadres ran into the forests.
But they were even less prepared to fight a secret, guerrilla war than a
conventional one.39
It was not only a question of the Indian regime’s military strength; it was
also that a discredited feudal regime was now replaced by one that could
claim to be the democratic ‘anti-imperialist front’ of the Indian people. This
had been the communist line for over a decade. Now that the Congress
whom they had depicted as an essential ally at the national level was taking
over, they could not easily convince people who were not experiencing
direct repression that it had suddenly become an enemy force, particularly
when it was displacing feudal gangsters and looters. In most of Hyderabad
state the army was greeted as a liberator, certainly in Marathwada, also in
parts of Telengana.40 That its takeover included direct army atrocities
against many of the poor and support for return of the worst landlord
oppressors, as well as direct Hindu reprisals in many areas against Muslims
and Dalits who were presumed to be ‘pro-Razakar’ did not immediately
change the power equation. Communists, unable to fight any longer on an
armed level, did have to fight in some way to defend the gains made. But
large sections of the exploited, including Dalits, who may well have had
reservations about the democratic role of the Indian state, were in no
position to express them and faced a situation of repression.

• DALIT REORGANIZING, 1948–56

While the communists were attempting to survive repression in Telengana
and Dalits in Marathwada were confronting reprisals from caste Hindu
Congressmen, the factionalised Dalit leadership of Hyderabad city went
through a period of intense reorganization. Following the ‘Police Action’, in
fact, many ran for shelter to the Congress or its associated organizations.
Venkatrao was arrested. Shyam Sunder, the most militant and fiery of the
pro-Nizam spokesmen, was out of the scene for some years, sent on a
mission to Europe to represent Hyderabad’s right to independence before
the U.N. When he returned, at the time of the 1952 elections, with his usual
verve he put up the board of the old Depressed Classes Association and
announced his candidacy.41 But by that time the DCA had gone out of
existence. A large section of its membership simply fled into the Congress
fold, joining a newly formed Dalit Jatiya Sangh, allied with one Dharam
Prakash who was the leader of a group that had split from Jagjivan Ram’s
Depressed Classes League (‘Dalit Jatiya Sangh’ was the normal Hindi
translation for the league) and was under the patronage of the Hyderabad
Congress. M.B. Gautam was its general secretary and Mudiguna Laxmaiah,
a rich Madiga shoe factory owner who had previously led the Arundatiya
Matunga Mahasabha, was its president. Some of their political opponents
later protested against the ‘ex-Razakars’ in this group.42
Others, including Arigay Ramaswamy, formed a Hyderabad State
Depressed Classes League. This picked up some of the old activists, such as
K.R. Veeraswamy, a post-graduate from Madras University and a Mala who
had been in the SCF, and Sampath Babiah, a Mala who had been president
of the DCA for some time and was said to have been a Razakar chief. J.
Sarvesh, a Tamil Dalit who had been general secretary of a ‘state
unemployed union’ went on to become the organizing secretary of the
League.43 By the time of the 1952 elections, both of these sections had
joined the Congress itself.
The SCF did not fare too well. There was a split in protest against
Subbiah’s ‘dictatorial methods’, with young activists such as P.V. Manohar
and Vemula Yadgir Rao leaving to form a ‘United Scheduled Caste
Federation’ (USCF).
During the 1952 elections the USCF allied with the socialists, apparently
without much success, and the SCF established an alliance with the front
organization of the banned communists, the Progressive Democratic Front
(PDF). This was in spite of the Ambedkar’s expressed policy at that time of
not allying with communists; it proved to be beneficial. In fact the election
results clearly showed that, whatever their mistakes and vacillations, their
militant struggles had won the communists a popular base. They contested a
total of 108 seats in the assembly elections, winning 36 of 51 in coastal
Andhra, 36 of 45 in Telengana (all of these in the central districts of the
revolt and 5 of 12 in Rayalseema. At least two of the winners were second-
rank Dalit activist who had formerly been with the SCF. In addition 10
socialists allied with the PDF won seats, while the SCF itself won five
assembly seats (two in Marathwada and three in Telengana) and one Lok
Sabha seat with the help of the PDF.
But the leadership crisis in the Hyderabad SCF erupted after the
elections. Complaints against Subbiah’s arrogance, corruption and
ineffectiveness had simmered for long, and in January 1951 a delegation of
his opponents presented a memorandum to Ambedkar during the latter’s
visit to Hyderabad as a state guest. Following the mediocre performance of
the SCF in the 1952 elections and concrete evidence that Subbiah was
acting against directives, the all-India SCF finally took action and a 26
March 1953 meeting at Delhi, presided over by Ambedkar, dissolved the
Hyderabad unit.44 However, while the crisis showed itself in the Hyderabad
organization, in many ways its roots were in the national-level failure to
organizationally build SCF units, inherent in SCF from the beginning.
The general complaint against Dr. Ambedkar was that since he got into
the cabinet, he completely lost contact with the Depressed Classes
masses. Whatever information he got about their deplorable plight was
only through prejudiced channels. Moreover, he was so busy with his
portfolio that he practically found no time to think of the amelioration of
the condition of our brethren. 45
So Venkatswamy expressed the complaints of the people of Hyderabad.
Similarly, from coastal Andhra, Suryaprakash Rao argues that ‘Ambedkar
got the wrong contacts in Andhra Pradesh … he visited there very late; he
had no information about the ideas/ideology prevalent there.’46
Ambedkar himself, in building up the SCF during the late 1940s, had
frequently argued that ‘I have only to give a call and people will mobilize.’
But such organizational methods proved inadequate outside of Maharashtra.
The SCF functioned in practice as a federation of organizations already
built up, and in most cases Ambedkar could only choose local lieutenants
and put complete trust in them to build up the organization; when these
proved incompetent or corrupt, the organization suffered.
Though the SCF was organizationally weak in Hyderabad, there was
tremendous pressure to take some kind of action after 1948–50. After the
Police Action, a severe repression had been unleashed on Dalits and
Muslims by the victorious ‘Congressites’ caste Hindus. Venkatswamy
reports,
The political bungling of the power-intoxicated Razakar leaders resulted
in the massacre of hundreds of Muslims and Depressed Classes. The
districts of Parbhani, Nanded, Aurangabad and Bidar were the worst
affected where much innocent blood was shed.47
Janata, which up to the point of the Police Action and been describing
‘Razakar atrocities’, now began to focus on the retribution by the ‘state
Congress goondas’, the pulling down of Dalit houses, violence against men,
women and children. A report by B.S. More claimed that only the rich had
fled, and on returning looked for scapegoats, picking on the poor Mahars,
Mangs and Chambhars rather than the well-off who had actually given
money to the Razakars. In this sensitive situation, with the majority of
people in Marathwada ‘uneducated and under the tyranny of tradition’,
Congress ‘Harijan’ propagandists were urging Dalits to engage in temple
entry programmes, with the result that they were only getting beaten up by
caste Hindus ‘and then the State Congress says this is only because of their
previous Razakar connections!’48 Tarring all with the Razakar brush was a
useful tactic in a low-key rural class–caste warfare.
A key element in this was land—land promised to the Dalits by the
Nizam government, apparently seized by them in many cases in the chaos
of the period, taken back by the victorious returning Congress caste Hindus.
And in this context the new Congress government made its politics clear
when it started snatching back some of the common lands given to Dalits,
on the excuse that they were cultivating it instead of planting trees on it as
they were supposed to.
Following the 1952 elections, the SCF, led by the two MLAs from
Marathwada, Shamrao Jadhav and Madhavrao Nirlekar, organized
resistance to these evictions. While directed against the Congress-ruled
Hyderabad state, this was also an assertion of organizational strength vis-a-
vis the caste Hindus. Nearly 1,500 satyagrahis were arrested in the struggle,
‘the first of its kind in Hyderabad state’, according to Venkatswamy.49 With
the leadership of P.N. Rajbhoj and the local Marathwada activists, it was
carried on until 16 November 1953 when the Hyderabad government
agreed to restore the lands.50

• DALITS AND COMMUNISTS IN ANDHRA

In spite of being the centre of communist rural revolt and a fairly significant
Dalit movement, the turbulent 1940s ended in Andhra with the
establishment of hegemony by the ‘bourgeois–Brahman’ Congress. How do
we assess this period?
The failure of the Dalit movement to go forward was inherent in the
transition from the ILP to the SCF. During the 1930s Ambedkar had been
on the leading edge of an all-India left wave, taking the initiative not only in
regard to the problems of untouchables but in creating a worker–peasant
based political alternative to the Congress, carrying a red flag and
organizing militant struggles on social and economic issues. The failure of
this effort, to a large degree due to the lack of response by broader left
forces, led to a step backward represented by the SCF. This meant focusing
on winning concessions for Dalits while independence was taken for
granted; going to the ‘national’ level and thereby relying on a series of local
‘lieutenants’ rather than trying to build an ideologically unified
organization; substituting the organizing of Scheduled Castes as such for
efforts to form a broad alliance of Dalits and non-Brahmans, workers and
peasants; and substituting a programme of the resettlement of Dalits away
from villages dominated by caste Hindus (the ‘separate village settlements’
demand) for a strategy of changing the rural socio-economic structure.
Thus, at a time when Dalits in Hyderabad were going through their
greatest political traumas and were being pulled to the left, there was little
national direction. The separate village settlement programme had little real
meaning in Andhra, where the major practical economic issues were
opposing vethbegar, obtaining government forest and wastelands, and
winning higher wages as agricultural labourers or workers. These were
issues taken up by Ambedkar and the ILP in Maharashtra; in Andhra and
Hyderabad they appeared in most Dalit programmes, but by the 1940s it
was the communists who were spearheading whatever organizing occurred
on these issues.
Conversely, communist inadequacies on caste issues, described in
chapter 5, also existed in Andhra. Communists did get involved in ‘anti-
untouchability’ campaigns; they did take up the interwoven socio-economic
exploitation of Dalits; Hyderabad party leaders did attempt to build bridges
with the Dalit leadership in the city. But none of this was done as a part of
party policy or theorized as a crucial aspect of the Indian revolution. As far
as an understanding of ‘social issues’ was concerned, D.V. Rao’s statement
that caste issues were not important ‘except in the household, except for
untouchables’ must surely stand with the recent comment by
Namboodiripad as a revelation of communist blindness to the problem: that
the ‘Harijan issue’ was a ‘mundane’ diversion from nationalist organization.
However, all said and done, achievements of the communists in
Telengana in a very short period of less than a decade have to be
recognized. These achievements stand out most clearly when a comparison
is made between Telengana and Marathwada. The communists may not
have done much about getting ‘surplus lands’ for Dalits, but if the estimate
of winning 100,000 acres of forest and common lands for cultivation by
Dalits and the landless is correct, it was a very impressive gain.
Equally important is the fact that this was done in the context of building
and maintaining unity between Dalits and the caste Hindu rural poor. In
Marathwada the opposite happened. Dalits had long demanded land, but
this was given by the Nizam regime at a time when the Gandhian and Arya
Samajist Maharashtra Parishad was doing little to organize rural economic
struggles. The result was that Dalits responded to pro-Muslim leaders like
Shyam Sunder and Venkatrao. This, then, identified them with the hated
Razakars, an identification heightened by the fact that some of them
apparently did grab the land of caste Hindus who had fled repression. After
the Police Action, caste Hindus unleashed reprisals against the Dalits and
the state used the occasion to reappropriate much of the land that the
Nizam’s regime had given, something it did not dare to do in Telengana
regarding government land. The SCF-organized satyagraha got much of this
restored, but the result of the whole process was a widening gap between
caste Hindus and Dalits, in which caste Hindu power-holders could
legitimize their repression by depicting Dalits as anti-national. This ‘Dalit–
bahujan’ split and the intensification of a fundamentalist Hindu cultural
identification among the caste Hindus made Marathwada different not
simply from Telengana but from western Maharashtra and Vidarbha, where
the Satyashodhak movement had rooted a more democratic leadership
among the non-Brahman masses. The consequences lasted well into the
post-independence decades in Maharashtra where Marathwada became a
scene for anti-Dalit rioting and, in the context of the Dalit struggle for
common lands, provided the main rural base for caste tension and a
growing Shiv Sena influence in the late 1980s.51
At the same time, ironically, Dalits and communists both failed at the
level of cultural interpretation and identity formation, a crucial part of
creating an ‘alternative political hegemony’. The communists had a very
intensive cultural programme as part of the Telengana movement, including
using traditional forms such as burra katha and low-caste and Dalit
performers, but it seems that the content of these remained the
preoccupation of traditional Marxism, with little effort to engage even
Telugu history and culture. In their turn the radical Dalits in Hyderabad
spent their time emphasizing a ‘non-Hindu, non-Aryan’ identity on an
abstract level; and while Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism was
accompanied by his own prolific reading and writing on ancient Indian
history, this also used a rationalistic and abstract interpretation that
contrasted with the way Phule had earlier used such important peasant
symbols and myths as Bali Raja in his interpretation of history. Buddhism,
in other words, held an appeal for educated Dalit radicals, but little
resonance among the Dalit masses. And this ‘non-government’ of
communists and Dalits with the vernacular tradition was happening at a
time when Hindu fundamentalists, represented in Andhra primarily by the
Arya Samaj, were reinterpreting tradition from a Brahman, absorptive point
of view, using Dalit writers and Dalit ‘pandits’ to instill a sense of
participation in a Hindu identity through such figures as Vasishtha and
Arundatiya.
The co-optive power of the Congress could win some impressive
victories. This worked at many levels: in the extension of influence through
the machinery created by the ‘Harijan Sevak Sangh’ and ‘Depressed
Classes League’, including the absorption of their key personnel into the
ministries; in limited anti-feudal reforms such as the Jagir Abolition Act of
1949 and the Hyderabad Tenancy and Lands Act of 1950; in the
continuation of the various programmes for untouchable education begun
under the British regime; in acceding to (under pressure of the peasant
struggle in Telengana and the SCF satyagraha in Marathwada) the granting
of forestlands/wastelands to Dalits; in the fact that Andhra had the first ex-
untouchable chief minister in independent India, chosen after a stand-off
between the two powerful contestants.52
Writing about a later period, Hargopal described the particular
effectiveness of the Congress policy towards Dalits:
As a part of the new strategy in the late sixties and early seventies Mrs.
Gandhi resorted to target group approach. The ‘harijans’ were identified
as a specific group …. The strategy not only envisaged new specific
schemes for the harijans but the entire mass media was pressed into
service for the purpose of propaganda. The land reforms, distribution of
pattas and house sites, S.C. component programme with subsidy and so
on ‘trickled down’ to some harijan families here and there. It is not that
their conditions [were] qualitatively altered nor their social relations
transformed. The electoral rhetoric and massive propaganda resulted in
two significant consequences: one, harijans became conscious of their
conditions and their identification with Mrs. Gandhi gave them a new
sense of social consciousness resulting in greater assertion for dignity
and self-respect; two, the special focus on a particular section annoyed a
large section of non-harijan agricultural labourers coming from the other
backward groups and alienated them from the Congress party and their
harijan brethren.53
In reality, the whole strategy had its roots in the pre-independence Dalit
movement and the Gandhian-influenced process of developing a response to
it. The movement identified Dalits as a specially oppressed and exploited
section and succeeded in establishing the legitimacy of their claims to
justice; Gandhi transformed them into ‘harijans’ and the bureaucratic
process of dependency-creating patronage made them into a ‘target group’.
In the absence of an equivalently powerful strategy from the
revolutionaries, this was sufficient for their political incorporation.
Dalits within the Congress found they could do little: ‘we were almost
slaves of Congress’,54 says one ex-MLA and nationalist activist; they
recognized that it was only the SCF that was organizing struggles for the
Dalits. But the main movements fighting against mass enslavement in
Andhra had remained so isolated from one another that their mutual
historical accounts (whether communist assessments of the Telengana
struggle and early peasant organizing, or Dalit reports of Hyderabad state
organizing) do not even recognize the existence of the other struggle as a
part of an overall fight. This helped to make it possible for the slavery
imposed on Dalits and other exploited classes and castes to be reconstructed
rather than abolished after the end of colonial rule.

NOTES
1. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation Volume II, (Secunderabad: Universal Art
Printers, 1965), pp. 359–60; Jaganathan, interview.
2. Bombay Chronicle, 18 June 1947, in Sources, Volume I, p. 341.
3. See for example B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Communal Deadlock and a Way to Solve It’, Address
delivered at the session of the All-India Scheduled Caste Federation, Bombay, 6 May
1945, reproduced in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Volume I
(Bombay: Government of Maharashtra Education Department, 1979).
4. See Times of India, 6 January 1940 and Bombay Chronicle, 11 January 1940, both in
Sources, Volume I, 207–10, and Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation,
Volume II, pp. 175–80.
5. Pakistan and Partition of India, reprinted in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and
Speeches, Volume 8 (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1990).
6. Free Press Journal, 10 April 1947 in Sources, Volume I, p. 336.
7. See, e.g., Anita Diehl, Periyar E.V. Ramaswami (Bombay: B.I. Publications, 1978), pp.
26–65.
8. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation, Volume II, pp. 350–51.
9. Ibid., pp. 386–87.
10. Ibid., pp. 391ff.
11. Ibid., pp. 406–7.
12. Ibid., pp. 420–21.
13. Ibid., p. 422.
14. Ibid., p. 427; see also The National Standard, 28 November 1947; in Sources, Volume
I, pp. 348–50.
15. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation, Volume II, pp. 488–92.
16. Ibid., p. 455.
17. Ibid., pp. 378–82. Ambedkarites later fought to get the use of much of the actual
funding for Milind College, the first college of the People’s Education Society in
Aurangabad, which brought them into conflict with Telugu speakers.
18. See Sundarayya, Telengana People’s Struggle and its Lessons (Calcutta: 1972), p. 27.
19. D.N. Dhanagare, ‘Social Origins of the Telengana Insurrection (1946–1951)’,
Contributions to Indian Sociology, 8, 1974, p. 124; D.V. Rao, interview.
20. Cited in Mohan Ram, ‘The Telengana Peasant Armed Struggle’, Economic and
Political Weekly, 9 June 1973, p. 1026.
21. Akhil Gupta ‘Revolution in Telengana, 1946–51’, South Asia Bulletin, 4 (1–2), Spring-
fall 1948, part I, p. 21.
22. Dhanagare, ‘Social Origins’, pp. 122–23.
23. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation, Volume II, p. 454. For Janata reports of
atrocities against Dalits in Marathwada by Razakars see issues of 24 January and 22
May 1948.
24. Gupta, ‘Revolution in Telengana’, part I, p. 16; Dhanagare, ‘Social Origins’, pp. 123–
24; Sundarayya, Telengana People’s Struggle, pp. 60, 65, 91–93.
25. D.V. Rao, interview.
26. Gupta, Revolution in Telengana, part I, p. 17, part II, p. 22; Sundarayya, Telengana
People’s Struggle and Dhanagare, ‘Social Origins’.
27. K. Srinivasalu, ‘Telengana Peasant Movement and Changes in the Agrarian Structure:
A Case Study of Nalgonda District’, Ph. D. dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
School of Social Sciences, 1988, pp. 36–37, 39–40.
28. Ibid., pp. 247, 249.
29. Ibid., Such conflicts are not infrequent in land struggles.
30. Ibid., pp. 247ff.
31. Ibid., pp. 39, 95, 101. See also I. Thirumali, ‘Dora and Gadi: Manifestation of Landlord
Domination in Telengana’, Economic and Political Weekly, 29 February 1992.
32. Sundarayya, Telengana People’s Struggle, pp. 243, 259.
33. Dhanagare, ‘Social Origins’, p. 128.
34. Interviews, D.V.Rao, Chandra Pulla Reddy.
35. Stree Shakti Sanghatana, ‘We Were Making History’: Women in the Telengana Struggle
(New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1989).
36. D.V. Rao, interview.
37. Pavier, ‘The Telengana Armed Struggle’, Economic and Political Weekly, 1974,
August, p. 1418.
38. Dhanagare, ‘Social Origins’, pp. 125–26.
39. Gupta, ‘Revolution in Telengana’, Part II.
40. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation, Volume II, p. 363.
41. Ibid., p. 557ff.
42. Ibid., p. 583.
43. Ibid., p. 596.
44. Ibid., pp. 621–24.
45. Ibid., p. 625.
46. Suryaprakash Rao, Interview, 16 June 1989.
47. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation, Volume II, p. 518. Interviews, J.
Jaganathan, B.S. More.
48. B.S. More, Report in Janata, 11 December 1948; see also Janata 9 and 23 October
1948.
49. Venkatswamy, Our Struggle for Emancipation, Volume II, pp. 654–55; B.S. More,
interview.
50. National Standard, 17 November 1953; in Sources, Volume I, pp. 415–16.
51. On the riots over the ‘renaming’ of Marathwada University see the Atyacar Virodhi
Samiti, ‘The Marathwada Riots: A Report’, Economic and Political Weekly, 12 May
1979; Gail Omvedt, ‘Class Struggle or Caste War?’ Frontier, 30 September 1978; S.P.
Punalekar, Caste, Class and Reaction: An Overview of the Marathwada Riots (Surat:
Centre for Social Studies, 1979), though none of these accounts bring out the pre-
independence background.
52. See Pothakuchi Sama Sivarao, ‘Sanjivayya, a New Light of the Modern Age’, Andhra
Pradesh Harijan Souvenir (Hyderabad, 10–12 April 1976), pp. 58–60.
53. Hargopal, ‘Caste-Class Dimensions of Dalit Consciousness: The Case of Delta Andhra,
Paper presented to the TDSS Seminar on Caste–class, Lonavala, December 1987, p.
12.
54. Interview, Jagambar Jaganathan, 24 June 1988.
Conclusion

• DALITS IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

And so came independence, proclaimed in hope but enforced by the Indian
army in Telengana, ‘Congress goondas’ in Marathwada.
Though he called for Dalits to associate themselves with an independent
India, though he himself drafted its Constitution and was a minister in its
first government, Ambedkar looked towards the gaining of independence
with a fair amount of foreboding. In the background of the bloody partition
riots, the assassination of Gandhi, the trauma of the takeover of native states
in which Dalits in Hyderabad had suffered atrocities under vengeful
returning Congressmen after those of the Razakars, he warned the
Constituent Assembly in 1949,
On 26 January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In
politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will
have inequality …. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest
possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up
the structure of political democracy which we have so laboriously built
up.1
This itself was a dramatic contrast to Nehru’s more famous ‘tryst with
destiny’. But within a few years, even more disillusionment had set in, with
Ambedkar himself saying, in a moment of rage regarding atrocities in 1949,
‘I myself will burn the Constitution!’2
Dalit perception of the achievements of independent India thus varied
dramatically from that of the elite, and by the time of the revival of the
movement in the 1970s, his followers were repeating Ambedkar’s threats,
claiming the need to desecrate the national flag, burn the Constitution as
well as the Manusmriti. Their powerful poetry attacked with equal fervor
ancient traditions and ‘modern’ accomplishments; they claimed that they
‘had no country’, that there was no room for the ‘new sun’ that their
movement had brought:
From pitchblack tunnels
they gather ashes
floating on jet-black water
and reconstruct the skeletons
of their ancestors,
singing hymns
of their thoughts
worn of shreds.
There is no entry here
for the new sun.
This is the empire
of ancestor-worship,
of blackened castoffs,
of darkness.3
What provoked this black vision—a pessimism contrasting to the hopes
of the majority, in a country which had won independence as a result of a
long drawn-out struggle and a powerful movement with a significant base
among the worker–peasant masses, led by a government which not only
associated itself with the progressive states of the third World but also
declared itself, first, committed to a ‘socialistic pattern of society’ and then
(in its greatest phase of dictatorial government, to be sure) to be a ‘secular,
socialist republic’? What was it that led Ambedkar himself in the end to be
disillusioned with the promises of progressiveness, declaring Nehru to be
‘just another Brahman’?
The political situation of the Dalit movement has to be clearly
underlined: at the time of independence and after, Dalits had not become, as
their leaders had hoped, powerholders themselves; the movement was not
controlling events, it was suffering a process of co-optation and
incorporation. Repression continued, open and brutal in the villages, suave
and vicious in the institutions where men and women of low castes inched
their way forward, but it was overlaid with co-optation, the winning over of
individuals with a few crumbs and the erosion of movement organizations,
accompanied by the overflowing paternalistic and benign rhetoric of the
party which Ambedkar had described as the ‘party of Brahmans and the
bourgeoisie’.
In fact the most sophisticated traditional ruling class in Asia had
modernized itself sufficiently to beat back all major challenges, whether
from workers, peasants, non-Brahmans, Dalits or peripheral ‘nationalities’.
It had managed to evolve a sophisticated strategy to rule, which included an
ability to characterize the middle-caste peasants as ‘exploiters’ and
‘affluent’ while appealing to the ‘rural poor’, Dalits and the ‘weaker
sections.’ In effect, the political strategies of the Congress, sharpened by
Indira Gandhi in the face of rising mass protest, sought to unite the low
castes with the Brahmans against the Shudra middle castes, and agricultural
labourers with industrialists and the bureaucracy against the mass of the
peasantry. And in this it was successful enough to remain the main
powerholder, able to marginalize a left challenge even when its majorities
sank dangerously low.
What was the nature of the economic strategies and structures of the
system? It described itself as ‘socialistic’; its Marxist opponents debated its
characterization as ‘capitalist’ on ‘semi-feudal’. In fact, India’s
developmental path (known more generally as the ‘Nehru model’) had
elements of all three.
The society as a whole swung into decades of planning, focusing on the
creation of a strong heavy industrial base under the public sector, largely in
the direction of what Ambedkar himself had seen as the desired path of
development. There was no ‘nationalization of land’ or formation of
agricultural collectives, but there was clearly public control of the
‘commanding heights’ of the economy. The Nehru–Mahanalobis planning
model has been compared to that of the Bolsheviks; in fact it was a very
pronounced version of the concern for rapid industrialization and the
reliance on the state that was pervading almost all Third World countries at
the time, after the clear experience of Depression and the achievements of
Keynesianism on one hand and the early successes of the erstwhile Soviet
Union on the other hand had given a good deal of prestige to various forms
of statism. It was no wonder that India swung towards a statist model or that
the Congress could see itself as embodying a ‘peasant revolution’: in the
words of a village Congress activist and former freedom fighter, ‘what is the
difference between you (the Communists) and us? You’re twelve annas,
we’re four annas.’ ‘Four-anna socialism’ suggested the moderation of
India’s public sector-planning effort, which unlike the Bolshevik version
managed to maintain a parliamentary democracy, but the ‘secular and
socialist’ aspect was not simply rhetoric. A strong public sector (two-thirds
of organized sector employment was in the public sector) underlying the
considerable progress of many industries especially in the early decades
helped India claim leadership of the ‘nonaligned’ Third World, while the
injection of a veneer of Gandhism with ‘panchayat raj’ and a khadi-village
industries programme laid the basis for claiming a unique Indian version of
the model.
Yet economic exploitation, impoverishment and misery continued, while
political democracy did not end the domination of an elite. Within three
decades it was clear that a still-surviving caste system was continuing to
structure these. Further, it seemed these structures, of economic
exploitation, social oppression and political subordination, were being
furthered by the very ‘Nehru model’ which had promised to bring
development, prosperity and a more equalitarian society.
‘Land reforms’, argued the left and Dalit radicals, had never taken place
in a thoroughgoing way. In fact land reforms fairly thoroughly ended much
‘feudal’ landlordism in most of the country, but this type of bourgeois land
reform was far different from a radical ‘land to the tiller’ programme. At
most the top Brahman and upper-caste landlords had lost their position;
land had not been given in a massive way to the landless and by and large
caste continued to be heavily correlated with agrarian position, as Table
11.1 indicates. Not all Dalits were landless labourers, but they were more
likely to be poor peasants and landless labourers than non-Dalits. While
many Dalits and Adivasis were small peasants, they had been so even in the
caste-feudal society of the pre-colonial period; there is no evidence that the
reforms of the independent Indian state significantly changed their position.
TABLE 11.1
Caste and Agricultural Occupation
 Statistics on agrarian class relations and land concentration show that
while there was a growing proportion of agricultural labourers in the
workforce, concentration of landholdings and overall landlessness of rural
families remained about the same (Tables 11.2a and 11.2b). Broadly
speaking, while many peasant families were being marginalized and some
were giving up increasingly ‘uneconomic’ small parcels of land, there was
also a process whereby the landless and land-poor were claiming land for
cultivation, most often ‘forest’ or ‘waste’ lands. This in fact was the form
land struggles took throughout the decades of independence, and it did win
some results. Yet, while the agrarian hierarchy may not have intensified
overall, it was a highly stratified one to begin with and the Dalits were at
the bottom of it.
TABLE 11.2a
Distribution of Rural Households by Landholding
TABLE 11.2b
Estimated Operational Farm Holdings and Area Operated

More than that, the agrarian sector as a whole was getting depressed and
marginalized as a result of the processes of economic development. This
was not accidental; developmental planning in the decades of the 1950s and
1960s assumed the necessity of what economists called the ‘transfer of
resources’ from agriculture, of what one of the most important Indian
planners described as ‘incremental primitive socialist accumulation.’4 This
was done through various mechanisms, including financial policies which
set high exchange rates that discriminated against the primary sector in
favour of industry, restrictions on farmers selling their produce, government
monopoly purchases and occasionally levies, import of cheap foodgrains
from abroad, all designed to ensure cheap and abundant food for the cities
and a growing industrial working class.5
The overall result was an unbalanced industrialization which left most of
the rural areas impoverished and created an increasing gap between the
organized sector (approximately 10 per cent of the workforce, according to
government statistics) and the unorganized sector, defined as including
agricultural labourers, cultivators, non-agricultural self-employed and
unorganized wage labourers. In 1968 this small organized sector
represented 23 per cent of GDP; by 1987 its share had risen to a whopping
37.8 per cent.6 Statistics also show that incomes of not only agricultural
labourers but also peasants were significantly below those of organized
sector employees (in 1981 peasants earned, on an average, one-third of that
earned by the organized sector workers, agricultural labourers one-fifth);
they were even lower than those of unorganized sector wage workers (Table
11.3). Further, whereas nearly all economists (including Ambedkar in his
early economic writings) assumed that ‘wage earners’ were the most
impoverished sector of the economy, by the 1980s it was clear that the ‘self-
employed’ as a group were poorer than the wage-earners as a group, even
when the latter included the most impoverished section of agricultural
labourers, and in spite of the vast undercounting of working women,
particularly in agriculture and other ‘self-employed’ categories. (A more
accurate accounting of the number of workers would have seen the
relatively smaller shares of GDP held by ‘self-employed’ workers spread
over an even larger number of workers.) The depression of the entire
agricultural sector is also seen in the fact that in India, as in almost all Third
World countries, agriculture and the primary sector in general claimed an
increasingly smaller share of the GDP while continuing to be the home of a
large and sometimes stagnant share of the workforce (Table 11.4).
The significance of these economic patterns for the Dalits is that they had
a disproportionate share in the most impoverished agricultural sector. As
Table 11.5 makes clear, 76.4 per cent of Dalits (and 87.1 per cent of
Adivasis) were in the agricultural sector in contrast to 61.4 per cent
‘others’. As small peasants and other petty producers they suffered directly
from the general discrimination against the primary sector, and as wage-
earners they suffered indirectly.7
TABLE 11.3
Income of Organized and Unorganized Sector Workers, 1981
TABLE 11.4
Distribution of GDP and Labour Force by Sector

In the non-agricultural sector, the Dalit foothold in an industrial

workforce and their ability to gain some benefits from reservations gave
them a better share. Reservations did help Dalits move ahead in government
jobs, and were crucial to the fact that a small middle class section could pull
itself up and with this, provide some resources and hope to a wider mass.
But they did not seem to significantly shake upper caste control of the
public sector: by the time of the Mandal Commission report, in 1979–80,
the estimated 25 per cent ‘upper castes’ still controlled nearly 70 per cent of
all government jobs and 90 per cent of the most powerful bureaucratic
‘Class I’ positions (Table 11.6).
In the cities, caste continued to be a channel to many industrial jobs (the
traditional discrimination against Dalits in the weaving section of mills was
never fought against nor did it vanish automatically; rather it became
irrelevant as automation became more important), while outside the factor
the social sphere continued to be nearly totally defined in terms of caste
relations. Within the villages, many of the most severe practices of
untouchability were fought or abolished; interdining began to be more
widely practised, and many villages began to allow Dalits to draw water
from the common wells. Yet even where this was true, villages were still
structured in terms of caste-based wards, and even where new villages were
set up (for instance to resettle people displaced by dam or other projects)
the old wards, including the ‘Maharwadas’, were simply duplicated. And
the more severe forms of untouchability retained a wide hold, as a survey of
the Harijan Sevak Sangh in the early 1980s (see Table 11.7) suggests. This
also showed regional variation; it is striking that Andhra, followed by
Maharashtra, shows significantly less prohibition on the use of wells, hotels
and temples. In the one case a strong left movement (though it also has to
be admitted that Kerala, with an even stronger communist presence, shows
a high incidence of caste barriers), in the other the powerful Ambedkar-led
Dalit movement and radical democratic heritage of the non-Brahman
movement, perhaps made some difference. Overall, however, it seems clear
that both stark forms of caste discrimination, particularly against Dalits, as
well as remnants of the balutedari system as a channel to occupational
entry remained potent in rural India.
TABLE 11.6
Representation of Caste Groups in Central Government Services

Nor were their implications always recognized. In 1992 there were

pervasive starvation deaths among weavers in Andhra, the economic cause
being the increasing inability to make a living from their occupation. Yet
few of the left comments on this bothered to question why it was that
weavers, as a community, had managed to have so little recourse to any
work other than the traditional caste occupation, even 46 years after
independence.8 The starvation deaths of a particular caste community in an
environment where other castes were eating adequately were stark evidence
of the walls of the caste system.
TABLE 11.7
Indicators of Untouchability
 Specific structures of economic exploitation and social discrimination
thus seemed to have remained intact, if adjusted and transformed, while
politically, from caste-based ‘vote banks’ to Brahman dominance in the
administration, caste seems to have remained a major determinant of power.
Much of the political history of independent India can be ‘read’ in caste
terms: Brahmanic power at the centre, upper caste non-Brahmans in state
governments; bourgeois–Brahman appeals to low castes (the ‘KHAM’
alliance) when challenged by a middle caste peasant-based political force.
Evaluating this, intellectuals in the Nehru tradition saw the central power as
progressive, regionalism and middle castes, peasants as ‘backward’; Dalits
often saw it in the opposite way but were embittered by the barriers they
came up against on all sides. By the late 1960s as economic disparities and
tensions increased, these new expressions of revolt were bursting out.

• THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

The year 1968 seemed one of transition. Economic tensions in the post-
independence years were at their height with slowdowns of growth,
famines, growing rural tensions and rising strikes and mass protests. Into
the conflagration, with the world itself seemingly caught in Maoist and new
left fervor, the Naxalbari revolt in north Bengal threw its spark. Then came
a massacre of 42 Dalit agricultural labourers in Kilvenmani village of the
major Brahman-dominated, highly inequalitarian Thanjavur district of
Tamil Nadu, where mainly women and children were barricaded into a
blazing hut. ‘Will the Green Revolution turn into a Red one?’ now became
a common query, followed up by ‘will the caste war turn into a class war?’
as similar rural and some urban massacres and rioting of low-caste
challenges spread throughout India in the following years.
The first Dalit response came from Karnataka, where Shyam Sunder, the
fiery pro-Muslim leader of Hyderabad who had settled in Gulbarga after
independence, organized the Bheem Sena. A book written later threw out
the challenge:
They burn … the hundreds of millions of Untouchables (Moot Bharatis)
in India. They burn physically when the caste Hindus burn them, their
families, their homes, their harvests, their honours to perpetuate their
centuries-old stronghold on them. They burn mentally when they think
about their untouchable existence, even today in this enlightened decade
of seventies and in the ‘largest’ democracy in the world.9
Shyam Sunder spread his Bheem Sena throughout many of the cities of
India, fostering a tradition of militancy and a proclamation of a ‘Dalit–
Muslim alliance’.
But it was the coming of the revolt to Bombay, the centre of India’s
capitalism, and its sweeping of the state which had been the strongest centre
of the early Dalit movement and still had the most powerful institutions of
incorporation in the Republican Party factions, which proclaimed it for all
of India. Growing out of the bitterness of Bombay working class life and
the power of its mass mobilization and media access, the Dalit Panthers,
formed in 1972, utilized Naxalite imagery:
the entire state machinery is dominated by feudal interests, the same
hands who for thousands of years under religious sanctions controlled all
the wealth and power, today own most of the agricultural land, industry,
economic resources and all other instruments of power.
So proclaimed their manifesto. Their poetry attacked the illusions of
democracy, proclaimed their oneness with the raw world of streets and
slums, mocked at the traditions of Brahmanism, and called for revolt.
Again, in the words of the manifesto,
We want a complete and total revolutionary change … we do not want a
little place in the Brahman Alley. We want the rule of the whole land ….
Change of heart, liberal education etc. will not end our state of
exploitation. When we gather a revolutionary mass, rouse the people, out
of the struggle of this giant mass will come the tidal wave of
revolution.10
After Maharashtra, there were unfolding waves of struggle, as it became
clear that a new movement upsurge was taking place. In Karnataka, while
the Bheem Sena had not survived, a Dalit Sangarsh Samiti, born out of an
eruption in 1973 of rioting after a Dalit minister described conventional
Kannada literature as bhoosa or cattlefeed, went on to become the
organizationally strongest and longlasting Dalit movement in the country. In
Gujarat, Dalit Panthers were formed after rioting over extending
reservations to ‘backward castes’ focused attacks on Dalits. In many
regions Dalit militancy fed directly into the Naxalite movement, especially
in Bihar and Andhra, where they formed the base of organizations such as
the Indian Peoples’ Front (IPF) and the more underground, armed struggle-
oriented Peoples’ War Group (PWG). But the militancy of a caste-
oppressed section was also not so easily contained even in revolutionary
parties; in Andhra a separate Andhra Dalit Mahasabha was formed in 1984
after a series of village atrocities, and by the late 1980s a number of leading
Dalit cadre had left the PWG and other parties, claiming Brahman
domination and a second-class status for the low castes existed even there.
These organizational events, as well as the continuing village tensions
and ‘atrocities’ were the result of a grassroots upsurge and self-assertion
among young men and women now gaining some education, becoming
aware of the democratic promises of the late twentieth century as well as
their own tradition, no longer willing to accept a subordinated status. They
made the Dalit movement in the 1970s and 1980s one of the most powerful
of India’s ‘new social movements’, and so compelling was its ideological
appeal that the Jharkhand leader of a worker–tribal alliance in central India
(the ‘Jharkhand movement’) used its imagery to describe the very nature of
revolution:
The communists have prepared various blueprints of revolution like
 National Democratic Revolution, Peoples’ Democratic Revolution, New
Democratic Revolution and many other forms using mysterious terms
hardly understood or even remembered by their own followers, not to
speak of the toiling millions at large, while India needs a simple New
Dalit Revolution, a policy of red and green flag combining the struggle
for social emancipation with that against economic exploitation to storm
the citadel of internal colonialism in the country.11

• WHAT PATH TO LIBERATION?

But what exactly was a ‘Dalit revolution’? Ambedkar had argued, in one of
his tracts, Mukti Kon Pathe? (What Path to Liberation?), that a necessary
condition was the overthrow of ‘Hindu’ religious–ideological hegemony.
He had tended to see economic and social oppression as separate structures,
taking up ‘cultural’ (religious, ideological) change as the way to challenge
Hinduism, socialism as the way to overcome economic exploitation. But
always Ambedkar, and all the militant Dalit activists of India, had seen the
necessity of combined struggle, dealing with both social and economic
issues. At times it seemed as if a mechanical stress on economic solutions
was met with an equally mechanical insistence on cultural–religious ones;
indeed the most militant organization of the new movement, the Dalit
Panthers, split on this issue in 1974–75 with one faction associated with
‘Buddhism’ and the other with ‘Marxism’. Yet this was a temporary break;
nearly all came to agree on the need for combining ‘class–caste struggle’,
whatever the interpretations of it, and it became practically enforced upon
the Indian left as a necessary feature by the end of the 1980s. In this sense,
the idea of the Indian revolution as a ‘new Dalit revolution’ or ‘Dalit
democratic revolution’ was becoming a hegemonic one.
This was not the main problem. It was not the combination of economic
and social radicalism that was problematic but, by the end of the 1980s, the
meaning of both. Strikingly, in the crisis of the 1980s, so different from that
of the late 1960s and the 1970s which had seen the Naxalbari revolt and the
raising of the flag of economic radicalism which culminated in the
Emergency, Dalit social radicalism seemed to make more and more sense,
but the economic radicalism which it had adopted from the left had become
increasingly problematic.
The Dalit movement had had its organizational flowering in the era of
Marxism: the 1920s and 1930s not only saw the disillusionment with
capitalism fostered by the depression and the rise of fascism, but a new
hope, represented (whatever its flaws) in concrete form by the erstwhile
Soviet Union. This was not simply that planning and state-led development
were coming to seem (to even more traditional economists) as a prerequisite
for economic progress; even more than this was the powerful promise of the
end of exploitation,emancipation for all, the dream of a society in which
equality could be achieved. These dreams, this goal of both a totalistic and
scientific understanding of oppression as well as the actual achievement of
the social reality of a ‘classless’ society, were concretely embodied in a
particular theory with a particular interpretation of economic exploitation in
terms of ‘class’ and private property and of the road to overcome this
through ‘collective ownership’ institutionalized through the state, guiding
the ‘forces of production’ to a fossil-fuel based steel-centred
industrialization.
I have argued that the overall effect of this on the Dalit movement was, in
the end, rather negative. No Dalit leader, aside from Ambedkar, did his own
thinking on economic issues; and Ambedkar himself had no time for
independent research or support for going against the tide on economic
issues after his plunge into the movement. It meant the overall acceptance
of ‘industrialization’ as the way out of the presumed backwardness of
agrarian life; it meant the identification of ‘socialism’ with statism and
overlooking the degree to which state institutions were the major basis of
upper-caste power in India. It meant also a mechanical separation of
‘economic’ and ‘social’ factors, so that caste, equated with social, came to
be treated in a way removed from the economic sphere and seen as resulting
either from ideological/religious domination (as with Ambedkar’s theory)
or from simple racial conquest (as with many other Dalit leaders).
By the 1980s, the clear crisis of traditional socialist ideology meant not
the ‘end of history’ for all efforts to create an equalitarian society, but the
opening up of the way for alternatives.
In the pre-colonial period, the only significant alternative to Marxism of
one brand or another as a total social ideology was Gandhism. Indeed, it
was the inadequacies of Gandhism that in many ways pushed Dalit and
anti-cast activists into the framework of a mechanical Marxism. Gandhi’s
‘Harijan programme’ offered a challenge to high-caste Hindus wishing to
re-legitimize their tradition, but it could only appear as hypocritical and
repressive to anti-caste militants. Gandhi’s path sought to combine a
village-oriented decentralized vision of development with a reformed Hindu
spirituality. For all its attractiveness, in the 1930s and 1940s there seemed
little technological base to challenge a statist/industrial focus, and
Gandhism did too often devolve into a spiritualism that refused to really
challenge caste domination; this was particularly evident with most of his
major disciples who were high-caste Indians, who inevitably looked at
tradition in a Brahmanic way and behaved with their followers in very
paternalist if not patriarchal ways. Ambedkar’s verdict, that ‘villages are
cesspools’, and ‘the Gandhi age is a dark age’, was not at all unreasonable
in its period.
In this context, Ambedkar’s full scale rejection of Hinduism and
assertion of an alternative identity was explosive and revolutionary.
Marxists have tended to see Ambedkar’s Buddhism as the most ‘reformist’
part of his entire philosophy,12 but it was the conversion announcement of
1936 that galvanized Dalits throughout India and it was the choice of
Buddhism that lay down the challenge for an alternative Indian identity.
Ambedkar attempted, in his writings and research, such as that of
‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution’, to provide a framework for this. But
too little was done in the colonial period. Phule (and in Ambedkar’s time a
few other Dalit ideologues) had taken significant steps towards the
reinterpretation of mythologies and the recreation of identities at a mass
level; but there were still too few educated Dalits to take on the task, and
too few interested activists of higher castes, particularly when those
adopting left ideologies ignored tradition totally, accepting large parts of it
(such as basic ‘harijan’ and ‘Hindu’ identities) while claiming to reject it.
By the 1980s there was a clear crisis of all traditional ideologies. The
general crisis of Marxism and the failures of statist versions of socialism
brought about an entirely new era for democratic and liberatory movements,
one in which ecological and decentralist themes as well as issues of ‘non-
class’ exploitation, revolving around patriarchy, race, ethnicity, caste, had to
be admitted as central. These gave a renewed life to ‘Gandhian’ themes in
India, but the fact was that ecologists were slow to learn the lessons of caste
and tended to uncritically praise pre-colonial Brahmanic traditions and
Hindu ‘spiritualism’ as contrasted with western materialism and dominating
behaviour with nature. Here the Dalit reinterpretation of tradition coupled
with Ambedkarite rationalism, had major themes to offer, and indeed by the
1980s the unraveling of Nehruvian secularism as well as socialism meant
that an engagement with the more rabid upper caste Hindu ‘fundamentalist’
forces had to revolve around the creation of an alternative cultural tradition.
Thus by the 1990s, in a period in which ‘Ambedkarism’ and Dalit themes
were gaining ground everywhere as an alternative ideological framework,
in a period in which the necessity for ‘combining’ economic and social
themes could no longer be denied, the scope for dialogue was growing. The
need was greater than ever. The Dalit movement, nurtured out of centuries
of exploitation and oppression, given a basis in the new forms of surplus
accumulation and new ideological openings of the colonial period, taking
off in the 1920s in a period of intense economic and social change, was
only beginning to enter its maturity. Now, now’, proclaimed the poet who
had unabashedly entitled his first book after Bombay’s redlight district,
‘now we must, like sunflowers, turn our faces to the sun.’.

NOTES
1. Cited in Dhananjay Keer, Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission (Bombay: Popular
Prakashan, 1962).
2. ‘MIC Bharatiya Ghatna Jalin!’ in Bhashane, Volume 6, p. 87.
3. Vilas Rashinekar, ‘No Entry for the New Sun’, in Daugle (ed.), Poisoned Bread:
Translated from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature.
4. See Sukhomoy Chakravarti, Developmental Planning: The Indian Experience (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989) and also the general critique (and admission) of
third world states’ policies of ‘primitive accumulation’ in Challenge to the South:
Report of the South Commission (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
5. The most elaborate discussions of pricing and financial policies involving the ‘transfer
of resources from agriculture’ are by neo-liberal economists; cf. D. Gale Johnson,
‘Agriculture and the Liberalization Process’ in Authur Krause and Kim Kihwan (eds.),
Liberalization in the Process of Economic Development (Berkely: University of
California Press, 1991)..
6. Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy, Basic Statistics on the Indian Economy,
1990, Volume I: All-India (Bombay, 1990), Table 8.7B.
7. The dependence of agricultural labourers’ wages on the general prosperity/profitability
of the agrarian economy is controversial only to a section of the left; generally trade
unionists accept the fact that wages can be fought for only to the level an ‘industry’
can afford to pay; while in agriculture there was an additional factor that the wage-
dependent labour force was pushed up (and thus the bargaining power of workers was
pushed down) by the very fact that people could not survive on small holdings.
8. ‘Starvation Deaths in Andhra Pradesh’, Frontline, 6 December 1991.
9. Shyam Sunder, They Burn (Bangalore, Dalit Sahitya Academy, 1987), pp. 13–14.
10. In Barbara B. Joshi (ed.), Untouchable! Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement
(London: Zed Books, 1986).
11. A.K. Roy, New Dalit Revolution (Patna, 1980).
12. See, for instance, W.N. Kuber, Ambedkar: A Critical Study (New Delhi: People’s
Publishing House, 1991), esp. p. 304.
Index

Acchutanand, 12
Achalu, Sukam, 297
Adi-Andhra, 10, 117–19, 281
Adi-Dravida, 10, 117, 122–23, 230
Adi-Hindu, 10, 122–23, 288–90
Adi-Karnataka, 117, 128, 130;
agrarian classes, 46–47, 55–56, 73–79, 94–95, 164–65, 178–79, 254–55,
327–30
agricultural labourers, 116–17, 157–58, 210, 286–88, 290–91, 311, 330–31
Agris, 195
Aiyar, Gopalswamy, 130, 264
Allchins, 33, 60–61
alternative development, 231, 254–56
Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 9, 12, 18, 82, 107, 111–13, 125, 130, 133, 136,
139, 142, 144–58, 161–62, 166–77, 191–218, 263, 268, 271, 277, 281,
289, 291, 294–95, 296, 304, 306, 315, 317, 324–25, 339, 340; and the
communists, 182–83, 186–87; and Gandhi, 152, 169, 176, 213–14, 218;
and Jinnah, 218, 255; and Marxism, 228–31, 238–40; and the peasant
movement, 155–56; and the working class, 154–55
Anderson, Benedict, 243–44
Andhra Dalit Mahasabha, 337
Andhra Mahasabha, 292–93
Arya Samaj, 91, 270
Aryans, 23, 32, 34–35, 39–40, 62, 158, 161–62, 241
autonomy, 113, 124, 133–35, 147, 154, 158, 161–63, 176
Bagul, Baburao, 15, 88;
Balu, p., 172–73
balutedari, 27, 28–29, 33; see also jajmani system
Banias, 88
Bansode, Kisan Faguji, 109, 110–12, 133, 153, 163
Bardoli campaign, 95–96, 156
Bheem Sena, 336–37
Bhimanna, Boyi, 133–34, 290
Bole, S.K., 148, 195, 208
Brahmaiah, Geddada, 289
Brahmanism, 38, 41, 42, 64, 99, 119, 227, 242, 246, 249–50, 277
Brahmans, 12, 22, 23, 29, 35, 36–37, 40–42, 44, 46–47, 85, 88, 98, 100,
128–29, 135, 148–49, 183–84, 195, 275, 335
Brahmo Samaj, 90–91
British colonialism, 82–88; and Ambedkar’s analysis of, 80–81, 231–34
Buddhism, 31, 38, 41, 63–64, 230, 242, 246–47, 319, 340; conversion to,
247–47
capital accumulation, 17, 82–85, 86, 329–30
capitalism, 17, 39, 207, 249–50, 255
caste, and colonialism, 80–81, 85–86; and landholding, 73–80; and
occupation, 332; and social system in South Asia, 31–36; and threefold
division, 36, 60; history of, 37–47; theories of, 21–27
castes, see jatis
Chamars, 48–49, 122, 127
Chambhars, 48
Chandavarkar, Narayanrao, 143, 144
Chandra, Bipan, 14, 250–51
Charlesworth, Neil, 95–96
Chaudhuri, Jayabai, 109
Chavan, Y.B., 67
Chhatrapati, Shahu, 147
Chikhahamanthaiah, 129
Chitnis, S.G., 196
Chitre, Anandrao, 151, 195–96, 197
class, 24–26, 29–30, 54–58
commercialization of agriculture, 86, 94–95, 108–9, 114, 127, 140–41
communists, 177–78, 180–84, 186–87, 283–88, 290–91, 293–94, 303, 307–
13, 317–19, 332; and Ambedkar, 155, 198
Congress, 14–15, 89–90, 106, 115–16, 172–74, 193–94, 199, 216–17, 224,
 261, 270, 280–81, 298, 326; Ambedkar’s assessment of, 12, 193–94,
210–11, 213, 250–52
Congress socialist Party, 186, 192, 228, 272, 283
Constitution, 285–88, 324–25
Da Silva, Willie, 64
Dalit Movement, 10–13, 30–31, 163–67
Dalit-Muslim alliance, 255, 304–6
Dalit Panthers, 10, 13, 337, 338
Dalit Sangarsh Samiti, 261, 274
Dalit-Shudra alliance, 135, 148–50, 271, 253–54, 274
Dange, S.A., 196, 199, 247, 308
democracy, 239–40
democratic revolution, 13, 16–17, 182, 239–40, 244, 338–39
Depressed Classes Association, 110, 111, 173
Depressed Classes Conference , 107, 167–80
Depressed Classes League, 181, 210, 262–63, 314, 319
Deshmukh, Punjabrao, 113
devadasis, 71–72, 120–21
devaluation, of rupee, 231–32
Devendrudu, Narlachetty 118, 289
Dhanagare, D.N., 285, 312
Dharmanna, Kusuma, 115, 289, 290, 296, 297
Dhasal, Namdev, 9
Dhegade, K.A., 191
ecological theories of caste, 27
Ekambaran, 291
exploitation, 10–11, 14, 24, 28, 48–49, 54–57, 58, 87, 98–99, 134–35, 276,
335, 339
famines, 80, 87
feudalism, 16, 41, 42–45; and caste, 26–27
Fried, Morton, 34
Gadgil, Madhav, 27
Gaikwad, Dadasaheb, 258
Gaikwad, Sayajirao, 144
Gandhi, Indira, 261, 320, 326
Gandhi, M.K., 10, 134, 145, 152, 169–76, 191, 202, 214–15, 260, 263–64,
 340–41
Gandhism, 106, 181, 226–27, 231, 262–68, 327, 340; Ambedkar’s critique
of, 242
Gaur, Raj Bahadur, 294
Gautam, M.B., 314;
Gavai, G.A., 10, 109–11, 112, 133, 144, 147, 153, 173
Guduru, Ramachandrarao, 115, 117–18, 283
Guha, Ramchandra, 27
Guha, Sumit, 94
Gupta, Dipankar, 38
Hargopal, G., 116–17, 286, 320
Harijan, 117, 128–29
Harijan Sevak Sangh, 131, 176, 263–65, 283, 293, 319
Harper, Edward, 267
Hart, George, 35
Hettne, Bjorne, 128–29
Hindu Mahasabha, 106, 110, 111, 140, 143, 173, 213
Hindu-Muslim tension, 106, 120, 127–28, 214, 226, 280–81, 292
Hinduism, 32, 38, 41–42, 106, 152–53, 161, 171, 176, 241–47
hindutva (Hindu fundamentalism), 89–91, 177, 181, 244
Holeyas, 68, 75–87, 127, 157, 262
Independent Labour Party, 107, 155–16, 179, 185, 186, 199, 201–2, 211,
212, 216–17, 252–53
Indus Valley civilization, 32, 33, 37–38
industrialization, 230–31, 239, 242, 339
Islam, and Dalit conversion, 152, 297
Iyer, C.S. Ranga, 265
Jadhav, Daulatrao, 205
Jadhav, Shamrao, 316
Jainism, 38, 50, 63–64
jajmani system, 41, 43, 44–45, 85
jatis, 26–27, 30–33, 38, 40, 44–45, 47, 49, 64; peasant jatis, 65–68; Dalit
jatis, 68–73
Javalkar, Dinkarrao, 179
Jinnah, M.A., 218, 304
Joshi, N.M., 195, 198
Joshi, Shashi, 15, 250
Justice Party, 10, 106, 115, 179
Kadoga satyagraha, 275–76
Kamble, B.C., 170
Kamble, Shivram Janba, 111, 142–43
Kammas, 45, 65–66, 114–15, 117, 282, 288
Kapus, 27, 65–66, 115
Karve, Iravati, 60
Kavade, Revaram, 111
Keer, Dhananjay, 201
Keluskar, Krishnarao, 145
Khairmode, S., 142, 145
Khambe, Raghunath, 197
Khandekar, Hemachandra, 110–11
Kisan Sabha, All-India, 180, 197, 209–10, 283–84
Klass, Morton, 32–33
Kosambi, D.D., 24, 41, 42–43, 63
Kripalani, Acharya, 272
Krishak Praja Party, 192–93
Ksatriya, 23, 40–44
Kunbi-Marathas, 27, 45, 49, 65, 66–67, 69, 78, 98, 140, 148–49, 156, 195–
97, 205, 207
Kurmayya, Vemula, 289
Kurtkoti, Dr. (Shankaracharya), 143, 145
Laclau, Ernesto, 16–17
Land struggles (of Dalits), 113, 132, 157–58, 163, 258, 266, 287, 290, 298,
306–7, 316–19, 328
Laxmaiah, Mudiguna, 314
Laxminarayan, Unnava, 116, 283
Leonard, Karen, 292
Lingayats, 65, 261, 269, 270;
literature, Dalit, 203–5, 293, 319, 325
Lohia, Ram Manohar, 272–77; Lohiaism, 261–62
Ludden, David, 46
Madigas, 48–49, 69–72, 75, 114, 120, 127, 262
Mahad satyagraha, 150–52, 201, 203
Mahar watan, 68–69, 156–57, 215–16
Mahars, 46, 49, 68–72, 97–98, 108–9, 110, 140–43, 149, 152, 156–58, 165,
195–98, 200–2, 204–6
Malas, 49, 68–72, 78, 114, 116, 120–21
Malaviya, M.M., 263
Mali, 98
Mandal, J.N., 305
Mangoo Ram, 12, 179
Mangs, Matangs, 49, 68, 70–71, 98, 206
Manohar, P.V., 314
Manusmruti, 41, 123, 325; burning of, 151, 201
Marx, Karl, 28, 184, 223, 224, 229–30; Marxism, 11, 13–14, 17, 24–27, 28,
38, 54, 82, 135, 162, 177–78, 183–85, 225–30, 242, 339–41
Mies, Maria, 56
Mirazkar, S.S., 197, 200
Mirza, Ismail, 126, 127
Moonje, B.S., 173
Nagarace, Dharmadas, 111
Namashudras, 10, 178
Namboodiripad, E.M.S., 117, 214, 318
Namdagawali, Kalicharan, 109
Naoroji, Dadabhoy, 146
Narayan, Jayaprakash, 283
Narayanswami Guru, 12, 243
nationalism, 14–15, 88–89, 106–7, 169, 200
nationalization of land, 235–38, 254–56
Natraj, V.K., 269
naxalite, 11, 25, 336–37
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 194, 266, 325; Nehruism, Nehru Model, 226, 230–31,
239, 276–77, 326–27, 339
new social movements, 16–17
Newman, Richard, 141
Nirlekar, Madhavrao, 316
non-Aryan theory, 23–24, 97–98, 110, 122–23, 133–35, 163, 166–67, 241
non-Brahman movement, 10, 36, 165–66; in Maharashtra, 106, 147–48,
208–9; in Mysore, 127–28, 261, 26–870; in Tamil Nadu, 12, 115, 209
Non-Brahman Party, 10, 106, 208–9
Panchamas, 117–18, 123, 129–30, 262
Paraiyas, 70
Parulekar, Shamrao, 196, 199
Patel, Vallabhbhai, 156, 192, 214
Patil, N.N., 195
Patil, Nana, 258
Patil, Sharad, 26–27, 29, 38, 63, 65
Patwardhan, Achutrao, 214
Pavier, Barry, 285, 312
peasant smallholdings, 155–56, 254
peasant struggles, 49, 93, 106, 113, 209–10, 254–55; against khoti system,
90, 193, 195–98; in Andhra, 282–88, 293, 309–10; see also Kadoga
satyagraha, Bardoli, Telengana revolt
peasants, 93–96
periyar (E.V. Ramasami), 12, 22, 135, 165, 179, 209, 241, 276
Perlin, Frank, 45
Phadke, Y.D., 257
Phule, Jotirao, 12, 22, 23, 25, 29, 97–100, 135, 139, 149, 158, 163, 165,
166, 229, 241–44, 247, 249, 276, 319
Pillai, Murugesh, 128–29, 131–32, 266–67, 269, 271
pollution, 30, 33–37, 41, 48, 71
Poona Pact, 159, 161, 173, 176, 265
Possehl, Gregory, 33
Rajagopalacharia, 192
Rajah, M.C., 10, 124, 130, 166, 173, 289
Rajaram, Butti, 297
Rajbhoj, P.N., 166, 206, 316
Rajendra Prasad, 192
Rajeshwar Rao, C., 285, 308
Rajputs, 45
Ram, Jagjivan, 10, 181, 210, 263
Ram-Raj, 124, 132–33, 260–61
Ramabai, Pandita, 90, 99
Ramamurthi, Ramu, 289
Ramasami, E.V., see Periyar
Ramaswamy, Arigay, 121–25, 133, 166, 296–97, 314
Ranade, M.G., 11, 90
Ranadive, B.T., 14, 196, 307
Ranga, N.G., 115, 117, 184, 210, 272, 282–83, 286–88
Rao, D.V., 285, 293–94, 311, 318
Razakars, 305–7, 309
Reddis, 45, 115, 274, 282, 285
Reddy, Badam Yella, 283, 285
Reddy, Ravi Narayan, 285, 293
Republican Party, 248, 257, 336;
reservations, 146–47, 169, 173–74, 268–70
Roy, M.N., 185, 194
Sabnis, Shripal, 9
Sahasrabudhi, G.N., 151
Sahajanand, Swamy, 209–11, 250, 258, 283–84, 287
Samyukta Maharashtra, 256–58
Sangam society, 34–36
Sardesai, G.S., 196
Satavahanas, 62–64
Sathe, Annabhau, 206, 257
Satyashodhak Samaj, 11, 94, 98, 112–13, 139, 148, 149;
Savarkar, Veer, 91;
Scheduled Caste Federation, 107, 112, 155, 181, 202, 216–18, 229, 234,
248–49, 253, 256–57, 291, 295, 297–99, 304, 314–16, 317, 320;
secularism, 15, 226, 341;
Self-Respect Movement, 186;
separate electorates, 167–74, 217;
separate village settlements, 217, 317;
Shahu, Maharaj, 41, 111, 147–48;
Sharma, R.S., 41, 42–43;
Shinde, Tarabai, 90;
Shinde, Vitthal Ramji, 110, 143–47;
Shivaji, 49, 65, 70, 91;
Shivraj, 305;
Shivtarkar, S.N., 111, 147, 166, 206
Shudras, 23, 36, 40, 59–60, 67, 88, 92, 135, 148–49, 218, 241, 243, 245–46,
 250, 253, 272–73, 274–75, 326
Singaravelu, 182
Socialist Party, 272; see also Congress Socialist Party
Southworth, Frank, 61–62
Srinivasalu, K., 310–11
Srinivasan, M.N., 168
state people’s movements, 192, 214
state socialism, 230–31, 235–38
statism, 29, 339–41; see also Nehruism
Subbiah, J., 125, 294, 295–98, 304, 315
Sundarayya, P., 285, 311
Sunder, Shyam, 296, 305–6, 313–14, 318, 336
Superstructure, caste as, 25–26, 228–29
Suryaprakash Rao, K., 291, 315
Tagaduru Ramachandra Rao, 264–65
Telengana revolt, 281, 308–13, 318–19
temple entry, 118, 124, 153, 192, 262, 265–66, 283, 335
textile workers, 108, 111, 142, 154–56, 164, 198–200
Thapar, Romila, 41, 61
Thaware, G.M., 110, 111
Tilak, Lokmanya, 80–90, 97, 145, 195, 204
Tipnis, Surendranath, 151
Tipu Sultan, 83–84, 125
trade unions (AITUC), 106, 180–81;
Tyler, Stephen, 34, 36
Unionist Party, 179, 192–93
untouchability, 81, 90, 128, 131, 144–45, 152, 166, 174; 176, 180–81, 183,
237, 263, 265, 318, 333, 335;
untouchables, 41, 45, 47–49, 91, 129, 134–35, 144, 146–49, 153–54; 167–
73, 175, 182–83, 193, 200–1, 203, 237, 253, 263, 267, 311
Urs, Devraj, 261, 276
Varma, Bhagyareddy, 118, 121–25, 133, 153, 289–90
varnashrama dharma, 30, 37
Vedappalli, Eali, 289
Veerani, Peesari, 296
Veeraswamy, K.R., 314
Velamas, 65
Vellalas, 45–46
Venkaiah, Sundru, 115, 118
Venkatramaiah, Kusuma, 115, 289
Venkatrao, B.S., 125, 289, 295–98, 304–7, 313, 318
Venkatswamy, P., 121, 294, 298, 315–16
vethbegar, vetti, 43, 131, 156, 164, 293, 311
Vivekananda, Swami, 92, 126
Vokkaligas, 65, 66, 261, 269, 270, 274
Walangkar, Gopal Baba, 142, 163
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 10, 82–83
Washbrook, David, 87
women, 244, 246; and caste pollution, 35, 37; and colonialism, 85–86; and
the Dalit moyement, 120–21; 202, 216; and nationalism, 186–87; and
social reform, 90–91, 99–100, 115; in Telengana revolt, 295, 311
worker and peasant parties, 185–87
working class, 87–88, 108, 127, 129, 140–42, 154–55, 164–65, 229
Yagnik, Indulal, 196–97, 210, 284
Zelliot, Eleanor, 68, 141, 148, 217