Subaltern and Dalit-Bahujan Organisation in South Asia: The Historical Roots

Abstract

This article analyses the history of Marathi-speaking India after 1600 in order to understand why Dalit and Bahujan movements first arose in this region before spreading across South Asia. It argues that this was an explicable consequence of a tradition of social action long extant at the village and supra-village levels—that self-organisation had been yoked to hegemonic power, but not thereby erased. I then invoke Antonio Gramsci’s concept of subalterns as subordinated fractions of a larger whole to analyse this phenomenon. Finally, I trace the breaks and continuities that enabled the leadership of Jyotirao Phule and B.R. Ambedkar.

Keywords:

• Archive creation
• Bahujan
• colonial rule
• Dalits
• Gramsci
• social power
• subalterns

Acknowledgements

I thank this journal’s anonymous reviewers for their comments. The paper has also been improved by a critical, engaged and perceptive reading by Dilip Menon. The usual disclaimer holds.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Suhas Palshikar, ‘Politics in Maharashtra: Arrival of the “Bahujan” Idiom’, Indian Journal of Political Science 55, no. 3 (1994): 271–84, offered an early analysis. For the first use of ‘Dalit’, see Christian L. Novetzke, ‘Savitribai Phule: The Firebrand Intellectual Who Powerfully Used the Term “Dalit” in Her Poetry’, Scroll.in (October 2021), accessed May 7, 2022, https://scroll.in/article/1007802/savitribai-phule-the-firebrand-intellectual-who-powerfully-used-the-term-dalit-in-her-poetry.

2. Christophe Jaffrelot noted this chronological and geographic expansion 20 years ago and sought a historical understanding of it. That was not, however, his major focus. Furthermore, inadequacies in his historical knowledge and analytic frame prevented him from reaching any sound explanation: Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003): 144–213.

3. The term ‘fragment’ echoes Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). I prefer ‘fraction’ as it clearly indicates that I refer to the relation of part and whole without anachronistically invoking the ‘nation’.

4. Vasant Moon, Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography, trans. (from Marathi) Gail Omvedt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019); Omprakash Valmiki, Jūṭhan, repr. (Delhi: Radhakrishna, 2003); and Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, From a Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual: My Memoirs (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2019).

5. Sumit Guha, History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019).

6. See Prachi Deshpande, ‘Scripting the History of Language: Modi in the Colonial Archive’, in New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices, ed. Partha Chatterjee et al. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014): 62–86; see also Prachi Deshpande’s forthcoming Scripts of Power: Writing and Language Histories in Western India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2022).

7. D.B. Parasnis et al., ed., Selections from the Satara Raja’s and Peishwa Diaries, comp. G.C. Vad (Poona: Deccan Vernacular Translation Society, 1902–11), 8 Parts (henceforth, SSRPD).

8. See S.P. Desai, Mahārāsṭretiịl Daptarkhāne (Mumbai: Government of Maharashtra, 1978), for a description of the archive system.

9. Dramatic back stories were recorded to explain unusual property transfers: see, for example, the dark reason for the creation of an extra village watchman office: Sumit Guha, ‘Giving a Life, Winning a Patrimony’, NotEvenPast.org, October 22, 2014, accessed 7 May, 2022, https://notevenpast.org/giving-a-life-winning-a-patrimony/.

10. R.V. Oturkar, Peśvekālīna Sāmājik va Ārthik Patravyavahār (Pune: Bharat Itihas Samshodhak Mandal, 1950).

11. Oturkar, Patravyavahār, 93–94.

12. G.S. Sardesai, Handbook to the Records in the Alienation Office, Poona (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1933).

13. J.A. Buttigieg, ‘Sulla Categoria Gramsciana di “Subalterno”’, in Gramsci da un Secolo all’Altro, ed. Giorgio Baratta and Guido Liguori (Rome: Editori Riuniti for the International Gramsci Society, 1999): 27–38; 33–34.

14. Guido Liguori, ‘Tre Accezioni di “Subalterno” in Gramsci’, Critica Marxista, no. 6 (2011), pp. 33–42; 34.

15. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, ed. V. Gerratana, 5th ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), Vol. I: 299–302; Vol. III: 2287–88.

16. Liguori, ‘Tre Accezioni’, 38.

17. Antonio Gramsci, Pensare la Democrazia: Antologia dai ‘Quaderni dal Carcere’, ed. M. Montanari (Turin: Einaudi, 1997): 121–22.

18. Richard Jenkins, Report on the Territories of the Rajah of Nagpore (Calcutta: Government Gazette Press, 1827): 54.

19. I am aware that this is a comparative statement. Some of the evidence from other regions on which I base myself is presented in Sumit Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2013): 45–91.

20. Aspects of this idea were presented in Andre Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Swarājya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). However, Wink explained them in terms of civilisational values rather than socio-economic structures.

21. Watandār: in the Marathi-speaking world, it meant ‘holder of a patrimony’, whether of land or service. It was thus a foreign name but applied to a unique indigenous practice.

22. A full description of all the balutedars and their work is in Thomas Coats, ‘Account of the Present State of the Township of Lony’, Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay 3 (1823): 186–87. Thomas Coats was a British surgeon-vaccinator who lived in Pune for many years.

23. SSRPD, Part I, 183–84.

24. A.R. Kulkarni, Maharashtra in the Age of Shivaji, 2nd rev. ed. (Pune: Prabha Prakashan, 2002): 24–55, provides the best overview available in English. I omit from this article any discussion of baluta, a system of annual fees connected with watan. For the exclusion of Dalit castes from the village site, see Coats, ‘Lony’, 188–89. ‘Mahar’ is the name of the Dalit caste found throughout the Marathi-speaking lands.

25. S.N. Banhatti, ed., Ājñāpatra (The Edict), repr. (Nagpur: Suvichar Prakashan Mandal, 1986): 92–93.

26. Letter of 1775 CE from Madhavrao Ballal to Mudhoji Naik Nimbalkar, Pune Archives, Sanika Rumal no. 11, bundle 3, doc. 5668.

27. See N.G. Chapekar, ed., Peśvāicyā Sāvlīt (Under the Peshwa’s Protection) (Pune: Bharat Itihasa Samshodhak Mandal, 1937): 101–04, for examples.

28. SSRPD, Part VII, Vol. II, 132–36.

29. Oturkar, Peśvekālīna, 102–03.

30. Anuradha Kulkarni and Ajeet M. Patwardhan, ed., Śivacaritra Sāhitya (Documents for the Biography of Shivaji), Vol. 16 (Pune: Bharata Itihasa Samshodhan Mandal, 2015): 89–91.

31. Cited in A.R. Kulkarni, ‘The Mahar Watan: A Historical Perspective’, in Explorations in the Deccan History (Delhi: Pragati Publications, 2006): 133–48; 146.

32. SSRPD, Vol. 1, 136–39.

33. Oturkar, Peśvekālīna, 38.

34. SSRPD, Part I, 199.

35. SSRPD, Part III, Vol. 1, 351–52.

36. Gramsci, Quaderni, Vol. 3, 2284.

37. Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 89–90

38. Sandip Tikhe, ‘Peśvekālīn Huzūrpāgā: Vyavasthāpan va Praśāsan’ (unpublished M. Phil Thesis, Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapith, 2016): 63.

39. K.V. Purandare, ed., Purandare Daptar, Part I (Pune: Bharat Itihas Samshodhak Mandal, 1929): 12–13.

40. A. Mackintosh, ‘History of the Ramoossies’, Madras Journal of Literature and Science, no. 6 (January 1835): 8–9.

41. V.G. Khobrekar and S.S. Shinde, ed., Kolhāpūr Daptāratīl Aitihāsik Vece: Khanḍ I. Kokancya Itihāsāci Sādhane (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1971): 80–81.

42. The whole episode is narrated in Alexander Mackintosh, ‘History’, Madras Journal, no. 8 (July 1835): 219–21.

43. Elphinstone, Report, 42.

44. Government of Bombay, Source Material for a History of the Freedom Movement in India, Vol. I, 1818–1885 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1957): 51–73, 177–346.

45. Valentine Blacker, Memoir of the Operations of the British Army in India during the Mahratta War of 1817, 1818, and 1819 (London: Black, Kingsbury, Parbury & Allen, 1821): 179–83, Appendix.

46. Shraddha Kumbhojkar, ‘Contesting Power, Contesting Memories: The History of the Koregaon Memorial’, Economic & Political Weekly 47, no. 42 (October 20, 2012): 103–07. An attempt to disrupt the 200th anniversary meeting led to clashes and was followed by a successful state-wide protest ‘bandh’ (meaning a strike accompanied by the closure of all businesses and highways) on January 3, 2018.

47. This entire paragraph is paraphrased from the classic early biography by C.B. Khairmode, Ḍa. Bhīmrāo Āmbeḍkar Caritra, Vol. 1, repr. 7th ed. (Pune: Sugava Prakashan, 2013): 18–19.

48. Khairmode, Bhīmrāo Āmbeḍkar, Vol. 1, 21–27; Dhananjay Keer, Ḍa. Bābasāheb Āmbeḍkar, repr. (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2000): 11–14.

49. The petition is printed in Gail Omvedt, Building the Ambedkar Revolution: Sambhaji Tukaram Gaikwad and the Kokan Dalits (Mumbai: Bhashya Prakashan, 2011): 57–75.

50. Keer, Āmbeḍkar, 180–240. Ambedkar was also instrumental in having a new Mahar Regiment of the Indian Army created in 1942.

51. Guha, Beyond Caste, 181–93.

52. Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Cultures of Rule, Communities of Resistance’, [1989] in At the Edges of Empire: Essays in the Social and Intellectual History of India, repr. (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2014): 77–111: 86.

53. J.H.E. Tupper, Assistant Collector, to W. Doderet, Collector, Ahmedabad, August 12, 1904, in Government of Bombay (Confl.) Proceedings, Vol. 7193 (March 1905), no. 6, ‘Village Police’, British Library, London.

54. Jyotirao Govind Phule, ‘English introduction to Gulāmgirī’, 127, reprinted in Mahātma Phule Samagra Vāngmaya (Collected Works of Mahatma Phule), ed. D. Keer and S.G. Malshe (Mumbai: Government of Maharashtra, 1991).

55. Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985): 116–17.

56. Phule, Samagra Vāngmaya, 611. Many documents in English and Marathi relating to the school’s working are printed in Appendix 1 of this book.

57. O’Hanlon, Caste, 117–32, 137–38; and Dhananjay Keer, Mahatma Jotirao Phule: Āmcyā Samājkrantīce Janak, repr. (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2000).

58. The first major English monograph was Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India: 1873 to 1930 (Bombay: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1973). It was followed by O’Hanlon, Caste. A number of articles by Eleanor Zelliot from that period are now collected in From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement, 2nd rev. ed. (Delhi: Manohar, 1998).

59. John Gallagher et al., ed., Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics, 1870–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

60. Gramsci, Quaderni, Vol. I, 303.

61. Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, 3–4.