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THE PERSISTENCE OF CASTE

A HISTORICAL OUTLINE

Anand Teltumbde

In their wake, however, the untouchables also articulated their rebellion, not only against Brahmins, but against caste in its entirety. The earliest form of the dalit anti-caste movement was in terms of a rejection of the theory of the so-called ‘superiority of the Aryan race.’ This was expressed by the assertion of dalit aboriginal identity as a highly civilized and peaceful people, once dominant in the country but later subjugated and enslaved through Aryan conquest. This movement took root in several parts of India, mostly independently. There was the Adi Hindu movement in the region now known as the state of Uttar Pradesh, the AD Dharm movement in South India, all making equalitarian tradition. The reverberations were felt even in regions where a movement with an explicit adi prefix had not arisen. In Bombay province, for instance, a pre Ambedkar dalit leader, Kisan Fagoji Bansode (1870-1946), emphasized points very similar to those made by the anti-Aryan movement.

The Emergence of Ambedkar

The most remarkable personage to emerge from this process was Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956), known widely among dalits as Babasaheb, meaning ‘respected father’. He led the dalit rebellion into a formidable movement, steering it through the dominant political contentions between Hindus and Muslims at the close of the colonial period and securing for dalits a political space and several socio-economic rights both under the British and in the Constitution he shaped for independent India.

Born in 1891 into a military family from the untouchable mahar community, he was among the first dalits to receive a university education, after he left for further study abroad on a scholarship from the progressive Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad of Baroda. With doctoral degrees from both Columbia University and the London School of Economics, he also qualifies as a barrister from Gray’s Inn. Following his return to India, he launched, in 1927, a civil rights agitation in the town of Mahad (in what is now Maharashtra), targeting the caste prohibition against untouchables accessing drinking water resources and entering temples. He hoped through this to sensitize Hindu society into initiating long overdue social reform, but the belligerent privileged-caste response disillusioned him, and he soon shifted focus to the political sphere. He was invited, because of his prominence as a dalit leader, to the three Round Table Conferences the British held between 1930 and 1932 on devolving power to Indians. In the course of the 1931 conference, he had an epic confrontation with ‘Mahatma’ Mohandas Gandhi over the issue of separate electorates for untouchables. When Ambedkar eventually won, Gandhi opposed him by threatening to end his life with a fast unto death. A compromise was struck which replaced the plan for separate electorates for untouchables under the Poona Pact of 1932 with a grant of more reserved seats to untouchables in joint electorates, along with a promise of other measures in their favour.

While focusing on the caste problem, Ambedkar rightly realized that the emancipation of the untouchables was entwined with that of the entire class to which they belonged. As such, he tried to build a broad class unity of workers, peasants and untouchables by founding, in 1936, the Independent Labour Party (IPL) to fight the brahmin-bourgeois INC, prominent at that time in the freedom struggle. However, rising sectarian conflict vitiated the political atmosphere in the wake of the British decision to relinquish India. The Cripps Mission formula of March 1942, which completely ignored dalit demands (as no party represented them) but granted most of the demands made by communal parties, Hindu and Muslim, forced Ambedkar to dissolve the class-based ILP and found the caste-based Scheduled Caste Federation. It, however \, did not meet with much success.

After the transfer of power in 1947, Ambedkar became law minister in the all-party government led by the INC and was also elected chairman of the drafting committee for India’s Constitution. The constitution, as it stands after all amendment, ambitiously declares India a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic with liberty, equality and justice as its guiding principles. It bears the distinct imprint of Ambedkar’ ideology, yet many matters dear to his heart could not survive the opposition of the predominantly orthodox Hindu drafting committee. His chief disappointment was over the ultimately rejected Hindu Code Bill, whose radical reforms in favour of Hindu women he vigorously supported. A bitter dispute with the orthodoxy over the Bill’s progressive provisions led him to resign from the cabinet in 1951, and he was in later years to even disown the Constitution he architected. He devoted much of his time thereafter to writing a ‘gospel’ of Buddhism, posthumously published as The Buddha and his Dhamma. In 1956, shortly before his death in the December of that year, he fulfilled a vow made in 1935 to renounce Hinduism, which he did by embracing Buddhism along with nearly four hundred thousand of his followers, making it the largest conversion in history. The anniversary of this event, the Deeksha as it is called, draws hundreds of thousands to its commemoration in the city of Nagpur in Maharashtra every year; the crowd that gather annually to commemorate his death anniversary run into millions.

Ambedkar became the dalit’s greatest icon, symbolizing their identity and aspirations. Innumerable statues of him and memorabilia in the form of Buddhist monuments testify to this fact. It is his example that inspired dalits to take to education. Thanks to the Constitution, with its pioneering provisions in favour of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes, dalits today are represented almost everywhere in Indian public life. Ambedkar always operated on the representational logic that a few advanced elements would lead the entire community forward, and he expected to transform society gradually but steadily. But while it is true that caste in India has indeed changed, the hardship of the dalit multitude are far from over. While the forces of modernity have rendered difficult the open practice of untouchability, it is nonetheless still prevalent in rural India. If notions of superiority/inferiority and discrimination are taken as the essence of caste, it could still be seen as pervading all of Indian society in relation to dalits, even among its most modern sections.

 

The Decline of the Dalit Movement

Ambedkar envisioned being able to unify untouchables with the altered soci-cultural and religious identity Buddhism offered, which he hoped would seed social transformation along the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. In supplementing this transformational project with political struggle, he sought the inclusion of the downtrodden of both caste and class- his Scheduled Castes Federation subsequently evolved into the Republican Party of India (RPI), which aimed at bringing all those of a socialist persuasion under its banner. However, he passes away before he could fully articulate the scale of his vision. Conversions to Buddhism continued after his death but remained confined largely to his own mahar community. The RPI came into existence soon after his death but was also monopolized by the mahars,

Post-Ambedkar dalit leaders proved incapable of a dialectical handling of the contradictions in his legacy and soon fell apart, catching at one or the other strand of his ideology in support of narrow self-interest. In due course, they made an art of feigning to follow Ambedkar while pursuing their own petty concerns. Where Ambedkar had desired to see an emergence of a politics of identity, and it did not attract the average dalit politician, aiming to make a quick buck. The result was that dalit polity and politicians became subsumed as adjuncts of the ruling class practice for which symbols and identities mattered more than the material interests of the people. Nonetheless, the dalit movement did demonstrate its potential strength when, in1964, it launched a countrywide struggle demanding land for the landless. Sensing danger, the Congress (as the INC was more generally known, especially after independence) soon operationalized the age-old ruling-class strategy of co-optation, and paved the way for the perpetual fragmentation of the dalit movement. Today, the movement is characterized by all-round weakening through helpless fragmentation in every sphere.

The first graduating classes of young dalit faced bleak prospects when they began emerging from the country’s universities in the latter half of the 1960s. by then, the dalit movement was already in degeneration, a circumstance reflected in the increasing atrocities on dalits in rural areas. Internationally, the first major crisis of post-World War II capitalism had broken out, unleashing movements for social revolution all over the world. Inspired by the Black Power movement in the United States, dalit youth in Maharashtra gave dalit literature a modern impetus with an outpouring of anger in their writings. This catalyzed, in 1972, into the formation of a militant outfit called the Dalit Panthers in the city of Bombay (now known as Mumbai), emulating the Black Panthers in America. Their radical rhertoric caused panic among their adversaries and admiration amongst dalit youth; their appeal quickly extended to other parts of the country. The group ultimately accomplished little materially, but it held a promise for pro-people dalit politics in future. Sadly, it too proved a flash in the pan and soon went the way of the RPI. Both the RPI and the Dalit Panthers still exist today but in innumerable factions, most of them engaged in a competitive pursuit of favours from the ruling class.

Around the same time, in 1973, under the leadership of Kanshi Ram (1934-2006), a movement seeking to consolidate all dalits, shudras and religious minorities, who together constituted about 85 percent of the population, began organizing the employees belonging to these communities into the Backward and Minority Employees Federation, or BAMCEF. This later changed into the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti (DS4), the Dalit Oppressed Classes’ Resistance Committee, for agitational politics, which then launched itself as a full-fledged political entity, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Cultivating a constituency in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, it achieved spectacular electoral success over the years and, through dexterous negotiation, catapulted itself into the state leadership.