97 years on, Mahad satyagraha remains a crucial reminder of caste inequality — and our thirst to fight it
On March 20, 1927, hundreds walked behind Dr Ambedkar to the Chavdar Tank. Once there, he scooped some water into his cupped hands and drank.
In the summer of 1924, Dr BR Ambedkar received an unusual request. A young man in his 20s, RB More, approached the scholar recently returning from the United States to preside over a conference in Mahad in coastal Maharashtra. A busy market town, Mahad was at the crossroads of regional trade in British India and often frequented by merchants and labourers from across India. Yet, business was conducted using the rigid rules of caste, for instance, Dalit artisans and businessmen were often denied water from the local facility, and even places to sit. Members of the Mahar community, to which More and Ambedkar belonged, opened a tea shop because upper-caste shopkeepers refused to serve them.
Dr Ambedkar was intrigued. The young scholar had just started the Bahishkrit Hitkarini Sabha and wrote editorials in its mouthpiece, Bahishkrit Bharat, talking about the rights of the depressed classes to public property and a humane life. Backing him were a string of recent resolutions passed in the Bombay legislative council (sponsored by progressive activist SK Bole) that recommended that “the untouchable classes be allowed to use all public water sources, wells and dharamshalas, which are built and maintained out of public funds or administered by bodies appointed by the government or created by statute, as well as public schools, courts, offices and dispensaries”. First passed in 1923 and implemented only patchily, the law received teeth in 1926 when the Bombay legislative council added a provision that municipalities depriving depressed classes of access to public amenities would suffer the loss of government funds, wrote Anand Teltumbde in Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt.
Dr Ambedkar saw in Mahad a chance to take a counter stand (the Mahad municipality had thrown open its main facility, the Chavdar Tank, to Dalits but any access was impossible due to the hostility of upper-caste locals), but wasn’t sure of the organising capacity. A few years elapsed before he could be convinced to travel to Konkan. Ambedkar’s biographer Dhananjay Keer writes about how locals mobilised people for close to two months, and that boys as young as 15 and men as old as 70 plodded distances of over 100km to come to the conference, which eventually had 10,000 attendees.
The air was imbued with the possibility of impending social change even as tensions were mounting across Maharashtra due to Dalits pushing for basic human dignity. “The Bole resolution inspired many progressive elements in Maharashtra to carry out anti-caste reforms. A successful attempt took place at Goregaon, a prominent marketplace in Mangaon taluka of the Kolaba district. A noted working class leader, NM Joshi, belonged to this village. He influenced many Kayastha and Brahman people into progressive thinking. These upper caste people took the lead in calling the untouchables in the village to explain the Bole resolution and asked them to make use of the public tank and the well in the village…It infuriated the touchables people who collectively attacked them. The police just came and went away. All the victims…went to Mumbai and informed the Mumbai Mahar Sewa Sangh about this incident. The Sangha organised meetings all over Mumbai to condemn the incident” wrote Teltumbde.
Against this tense backdrop, Dr Ambedkar rose to speak at Mahad, around 4pm on March 19, 1927, and made three key points. One, he underlined the perfect reasonability of the demand the Dalits were making for public spaces, reminding locals that on March 19 the previous year, local Dalits had been attacked by caste Hindus for drawing water from the Chavdar Tank.
“If we had not been hindered on 19th March, it would have been proved that the caste Hindus acknowledge our right to draw water from the lake, and we should have had no need to begin our present undertaking. Unfortunately, we were thus hindered, and we have been obliged to call this meeting today. This lake at Mahad is public property. The caste Hindus of Mahad are so reasonable that they not only draw water from the lake themselves but freely permit people of any religion to draw water from it, and accordingly people of other religions such as Islam do make use of this permission. Nor do the caste Hindus prevent members of species considered lower than humans, such as birds and beasts, from drinking at the lake. Moreover, they freely permit beasts kept by untouchables to drink at the lake…One cannot help asking the question, why do they forbid us alone?” he asked.
Two, he deconstructed the layers of prohibition that ringfenced Dalit life at the time as instrumental to the caste order — that the prohibition was not only the means but also the end goal of the caste system.
“Just as the crown on a man's head shows he is a king, and the bow in his hand shows him to be a Kshatriya, the class to which none of the prohibitions applies is considered the highest of all and the one to which they all apply is reckoned the lowest in rank. The strenuous efforts made to maintain the prohibitions are for the reason that, if they are relaxed, the inequality settled by religion will break down and equality will take its place,” he said in Marathi, translated later by his Marathi biographer CB Khairmode.
And three, Dr Ambedkar underlined that the denial of water from the public tank, and the consequent battle to gain access to the lake, was not just about the resource, but also about human dignity because denial itself was a dehumanising act.
“The caste Hindus of Mahad prevent the untouchables from drinking the water of the Chavdar Lake not because they suppose that the touch of the untouchables will pollute the water or that it will evaporate and vanish. Their reason for preventing the untouchables from drinking it is that they do not wish to acknowledge by such permission that castes declared inferior by sacred tradition are in fact their equals,” he said.
This struggle, Dr Ambedkar correctly surmised, was unprecedented and without parallel in the history of India because, at its core, it was a battle for the simplest of tasks — equality.
“It is not as if drinking the water of the Chavdar Lake will make us immortal, We have survived well enough all these days without drinking it. We are not going to the Chavdar Lake merely to drink its water. We are going to the lake to assert that we too are human beings like others. It must be clear that this meeting has been called to set up the norm of equality,” he said.
The next morning at 9am, the march began as hundreds of men, women and children walked behind Dr Ambedkar past the main marketplace of Mahad into the tank. Once there, he cupped his hands and picked up a fistful of water. The barriers had been broken, and even though orthodox sections hit back hours later, attacking the conference and injuring around 20 people seriously, according to Keer’s book, there was no going back.
Mahad satyagraha continues to occupy pride of place in the annals of anti-caste struggles in India because it was among the first concerted actions against insidious caste-based impositions that degraded the lives of Dalit people and established Dr Ambedkar’s imaginative yet powerful vocabulary of resistance against this grain of dehumanisation. At the same time, it continues to remind people that caste, and its consequent bias, is pervasive, whether it be in overt displays of untouchability and grisly atrocities or hate crimes, or more insidious practices of selective hiring, hostility towards inter-caste unions, or bile directed at reservation.
At a time when polarising battles over affirmative action or meat consumption dominate the public discourse, it is instructive to remember what Dr Ambedkar said about prohibition, and what Mahad teaches about inequality, purity and pollution and exclusionary tendencies. So just like interview calls and job appointments can be influenced by caste preferences (as proven through research by Dr Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell), so can food choices, and the desire to build exclusive dietary preference enclaves. The lasting legacy of the struggle to attain access to the most basic of all amenities — water — is the lesson that caste is everywhere.
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