The dalit in India - caste and social class

Social Research, Spring, 2003 by Sagarika Ghose

So sang Kabir, the fifteenth-century Bhakti saint (Hess, 1983: 25). Yet the Bhakti movements were unable to change the workings of the caste system, primarily because these saints formed a sort of mystic fringe, spiritually intense alternatives to the main body of orthodoxy that, although popular and doctrinally seductive, were no threat to a 3,000-year-old faith.

However, the Bhakti movements, the impact of Western ideas during the colonial encounter, social reform movements of the nineteenth century, the Gandhian movement, and finally the dramatic dalit movement led by B. R. Ambedkar have combined to create a significant tradition of anticaste reformism not only among educated elites but also among today's newly articulate voters.

In the nineteenth century, social reform emanated from the soul searching that had become part of the educated upper-caste elites once they came into contact with Western ideas of liberalism and rationality (Raychaudhuri, 1999: 60). There were campaigns to secure the rights of the widow, ban sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husband's funeral pyres), and reject caste.

The emergence of Gandhi and Ambedkar--mutually opposed to each other, yet highly significant in their own way to the cause of the dalits--grew from the context created by these nineteenth-century movements as well as the deeper traditions of anticaste protests created by Buddhism, Jainism, and the Bhakti cults. The movement to abolish caste prejudices owed its modern liberal humanist form to Jotirao Govindrao Phule in Maharashtra and later to the campaigns of E. V. Ramaswami Naicker in Madras state.

Jotirao Phule (1827-90) developed powerful arguments against the caste system and the Brahmin and also used Christian missionary arguments to "reject the fictitious world of Hindu religion" (O'Hanlon, 1985: 105). His Satyashodhak Samaj or "Truth-Seeking Society" gave voice in 1873 to the radical idea that brahmins had used religious authority and administrative power acquired under colonial rule to oppress other sections of society. Although "moderate and "respectable" reformers were reluctant to accept such wholesale condemnation of brahmins (O'Hanlon, 1985: 255) and the Satyashodhak Samaj remained virtually limited to the state of Maharashtra, the influence of its ideas can be traced to the anticaste ideologies that emerged subsequently.

The work of Christian missionaries also functioned as a fundamental challenge to traditional caste-based practices. From O'Hanlon's thesis on the radicalizing influence of Christianity on Phule's thoughts, it would be accurate to say that caste, as a conceptual category, was seriously challenged only after the arrival of the Christian missionaries, who initiated the radical idea of extending education to the dalits. The first special schools for Untouchables were opened in the 1840s, encouraged not only by the missionaries but also by the British administration. From these schools came the first generation of dalit activists, writers, and politicians. A dalit writer recently wrote that as far as the dalits are concerned, "the British arrived too late and left too early," a reference to the fact that had it not been for the British colonial administration, dalits would have never gained the right to attend school. (14)